Senior Practitioner - Family Help Service

'Right support at the right time’. Working with the whole family to offer practical help, building on strengths and community support to improve daily life, positively impacting upon outcomes for children and young people.

About the Role

Family Help is a service that offers intensive and timely family support for families on the continuum from Targeted Early Help to Child in Need.

Learning from the recommendations in the Independent National Review of Children’s Social Care and the government response to this, we have created an integrated service called Family Help, where both Social Workers and Keyworkers (AQWs) engage, support and encourage families to make positive changes in their lives.

Family Help focuses on strong and consistent professional relationships, responding more quickly and intensively to families so that they get the right help at the right time. It builds on workers’ capacity to listen, understand, and respond to trauma and supports children and families in building strength, resilience, confidence, and parenting capacity. By unlocking the potential of family and community networks, we support more children to stay safely at home and, when this is not possible, to remain with wider family and friends.

By supporting staff through regular reflective supervision and ensuring positive training and career pathways, we hope that staff will embrace this more intensive way of working and remain in post longer, providing our families with the professional consistency they need, want, and deserve.

Come and join us!

We have an exciting opportunity in Blaby, Oadby and Wigston for a Senior Practitioner, who will support the Team Manager in ensuring that a high-quality Child in Need service is provided for children and their families.

A DBS enhanced check for a regulated activity is required for this post.

For information on our approach to the recruitment of ex-offenders, please see our policy statement.

About You

We want a creative and supportive worker who will provide intensive and focused support to families in their homes. Developing effective relationships and using strengths-based and trauma-informed approaches will help to motivate and encourage behaviour change, leading to positive differences in children’s lives.

To apply for this post, you must respond to and provide evidence of the following essential criteria within your personal statement. This should be no more than 1,000 words.

• Degree in Social Work approved by the Social Work England (SWE) or equivalent social work qualification, ie Certificate of Qualification in Social Work or Diploma in Social Work. The worker must also be registered with Social Work England.
• Experienced level 3 social worker in a children’s social work team.
• Experience working in access/duty/intake, children in need, child protection, care proceedings, safeguarding, and looked-after children work.
• Experience of undertaking Section 47 enquiries.
• Experience in supervising social work students.
• Experience in using performance indicators to monitor and improve performance.
• Able to analyse information to reach sound decisions, often under pressure, and take responsibility for their outcome and regularly report to the Team manager.

You must also have an understanding of, and commitment to, equality, diversity and inclusion.

In addition, we also expect you to share our commitment to our values and will ask you to provide evidence when you have demonstrated them as part of the selection process.

Reasonable adjustments will be considered for applicants with a disability.

For more information or an informal discussion, please contact:

Helen Farquharson, Team Manager

Telephone: 0116 305 8264

Email: [email protected]