Senior Practitioner

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Job Description

Organisation: Leicestershire County Council

Work Location: Hinckley Family Hub, Granville Rd, Hinckley, LE10 0PP

Worker Category: Hybrid Worker

Salary: £42,498 - £46,344 per annum (pro-rata for part-time)

Working Hours: 37 hours per week - Monday-Thursday 8.30am-5pm, Friday 8.30am-4.30pm

Contract Type: Permanent

Closing Date: 2nd February 2025

Interview Date(s): 14th February 2025

About the Role

building on strengths and community support to improve daily life, positively impacting upon outcomes for children and young people.

Family Help is a new service that will offer 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 recent government response to this, we have created a new integrated service called Family Help, where both Social Workers and Keyworkers (AQWs) will engage, support and encourage families to make positive changes in their lives.

Family Help will focus on strong and consistent professional relationships, responding more quickly and intensively to families so that they get the right help at the right time. Building on workers' capacity to listen, understand and respond to trauma, and supporting children and families to build strength, resilience, confidence and parenting capacity. By unlocking the potential of family and community networks, we will 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, 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.

Our duties to Children in Need have not changed, but we are looking to improve our approach to achieve improved sustained outcomes and to make sure that we deploy the right staff to offer the right approaches promptly when families need our help.

Come and join us!
We have a Senior Practitioner vacancy in Hinckley, who will support the Team Manager in ensuring that a high-quality Child in Need service is provided for children and their families.

An enhanced DBS check is required for this post.

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

About You

To apply for this post, you must:

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.

• 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 of working in: assess/duty/intake; children in need, child protection, care proceedings, safeguarding, and looked after children work.
• Experience of undertaking Section 47 enquiries.
• Experience of supervising social work students.
• Experience of 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 regular reporting 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 evidence when you have demonstrated them as part of the selection process.

Reasonable adjustments will be considered for applicants with a disability.

Interested in Flexible Working?

We are keen to support employees to balance their working life with other commitments. Therefore, wherever possible, we will consider working arrangements that suit an individual's personal circumstances whilst still meeting the needs of the Council. If you would like to discuss the possible flexible working options that might be applicable to this role, please contact the person named below. This may include requests for term-time working, part-time hours, compressed hours, flexible start and finish times, home/remote working, etc.

Every role within the Council has a defined working style which determines where they can work. The worker category applicable to this post is detailed in the above advert. You can find out more about our worker categories in the Our Working Styles page on our career site.

For more information or an informal discussion, please contact:

Katie Cooper - Team Manager

Telephone: 01163050424

Email: Katie.Cooper@leics.gov.uk

How to Apply

Leicestershire County Council is an inclusive organisation which is on a journey to embed and celebrate equality, diversity and inclusion at every level. We warmly welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds, as having a diverse workforce with different perspectives and ideas is fundamental to our values and enriches the services we offer our communities. We particularly welcome applicants from Ethnically Diverse and LGBTQ+ communities and people with disabilities to create a balanced workforce and one that reflects the communities we serve. Applicants with a disability who meet the criteria listed in the 'About You' section above will be offered an interview under the Disability Confident Employer Scheme.

To apply for this job, please click on the apply button. You will need to upload a supporting statement as part of your application which explains how you meet the criteria listed in the 'About You' section above. For more information, see the How to Apply section on our career site.

We reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive sufficient applications for the role. Therefore, if you are interested, please submit your application as early as possible.

If you have any technical issues when trying to apply for this post or you want to request an application pack in an alternative format, please contact our Employee Service Centre by telephoning 0300 3030222 (select option 2) or raising a ticket via our online portal: https://emss.freshdesk.com/support/home.

By applying for this post, you agree to our Terms and Conditions.

About Us

About Leicestershire County Council

Leicestershire County Council is a Disability Confident, Menopause Friendly, Mindful Employer, Fostering Friendly, Forces Friendly, and Cycle Friendly organisation. In August 2021, we also signed up to the Race at Work Charter. We are strongly committed to promoting equality and opportunity, championing employee wellbeing and investing in staff training and development.

Our aim is to work with communities and partners to deliver public services that make Leicestershire the best possible place to live and work for everyone. Our employees play a key role in supporting this goal and helping us deliver the vital services we provide to the people of Leicestershire.

For further information on what it's like to work for us and the benefits we offer, please refer to the following:

Our Recruitment Process
Our Organisational Values
Our Employee Benefits
Working for Us