The total compensation package for this position is up to £79,975 per annum
Service Manager – Children Looked After 0-16 – Croydon
Salary: CSRA £71,643 - £78,475
Retention payment: £1,500
36 per week / Monday – Friday
Permanent
Job Purpose
We are seeking a qualified and experienced Service Manager to join our children looked after service. As part of a systemic and trauma informed service you will play a critical role in ensuring children receive the best support to help them achieve their aspirations and have an active voice in everything that we do. You will lead, motivate, manage, supervise and develop practice for children in care fostering a culture of continuous learning and development. The successful candidate should have an experience in legal practice, long term planning for including considerable experience of adoption practice to lead our Court & Early Permanence team. The appointed Service Manager will lead on Permanence practice & Health needs for children in care across all services.
Essential Requirements
Qualified Social Worker, registered with Social Work England
Service Manager experience in managing services for children looked after through to permanence.
Experienced in leading and managing performance of team managers, ensuring the cases are allocated effectively in terms of skills and experience suited to the complexity of the case.
A clear commitment to services working in partnership with families and creating positive change in young people’s lives.
Demonstrable commitment to anti-racist practice.
Demonstrable experience of leading and managing statutory interventions that are relevant to this service area and role (including high risk and high complexity work), and that deliver high quality performance and good outcomes for children and young people.
Able to lead, think, plan and manage strategically and systemically, as well as operationally.
Able to use performance information to drive improvement for children and young people.
Able to produce high quality, analytical and evidence-based reports.
Able to manage, plan and control delegated budgets.
Experience of developing high quality services within a statutory setting, with a particular focus on contextualised safeguarding.
Experience of developing a highly motivated, high achieving and stable work force with a positive, “can-do”, customer-centred culture.
Able to work outside of normal office hours when required and to be part of the senior manager out-of-hours rota.
Home to 94,000 children, Croydon is a truly unique place to practice social work. We are a borough with big ambition, grit, and determination. Children's social care was judged ‘good’ in our last Ofsted inspection.
Our systemic practice framework places emphasis on relationships as key to supporting change for families. We make sense of the world through relationships, focusing on the whole family system and thinking about our own part in that too – what we bring, our own family stories and beliefs, how we use ourselves in the work that we do. Our practice model is all about collaboration - with our families, networks and partners; being open to challenge and ensuring our practitioners are highly trained in a variety of intervention approaches. Our established clinical service will support you to grow your own systemic practice within the service, providing accredited training, co-working and direct work with families.
For an informal chat about working in Croydon, contact Agata Stolowska at agata.stolowska@croydon.gov.uk