It’s a great time to join our Leaving Care service, with the dedicated support provided by Newham to care-experienced young people being highlighted following this year’s recent focused visit from Ofsted (January 2024). Ofsted acknowledged that Newham has continued to provide effective Circles of Support for our care-experienced young people since our 2022 ILACS inspection, and is now providing services that encapsulate young people’s holistic needs, taking the necessary steps to support young people towards independence at a pace which is comfortable for them.
Why join us?
Great colleagues, outstanding leadership, diligent partnership work and a stable service.
Ofsted stated that ‘workforce stability has helped ensure that the needs of most care-experienced young people are met’, and praised ‘highly determined and committed staff’ who know their young people well and ‘work diligently with partners.’ The partnership response to sharing information was singled out for particular praise and was described as ‘impressive, pioneering and well-defined.’
Leadership was described as Outstanding in 2022, and there was further commendation for Leaving Care management following January’s focused visit: ‘Leaders and managers at Newham know their service well. Staff enjoy working in Newham and feel well supported by visible and caring managers and senior leaders’.
Care–experienced young people are at the heart of what we do.
Care-experienced young people ‘are actively involved in the improvement of services’ and are represented at boards, meetings and through contact with senior leaders; ‘their voices are listened to and acted on and used to inform decision making for the future.’
Our Circes of Support focus on listening to a young person, and plans for care-experienced young people at Newham are ‘sensitively written, with care-experienced young people incorporating their views and aspirations’. You can find out more about our practice model, Circles of Support, here.
Our new Director of Children's Services Laura Eden is putting tackling disproportionality at the forefront of our work as we look to build a Fairer Newham.
There has been significant investment to help support our care-experienced young people.
This includes The Cove, our dedicated meeting, training, work and leisure space for care-experienced young people. Activities including EET, cooking lessons, financial wellbeing and sexual health – as providing an opportunity to connect with peers and acting as a respite centre catering for essential needs.
We recognise and value your role as a social worker.
We understand that social work can be a challenging yet ultimately very rewarding profession that makes demands of you personally and professionally. In Newham we value your wellbeing and ensure that you have the support needed for a better work/life balance through a remote working offer; a pleasant, modern office space for when you are in the office; a flexible working policy where all requests are considered, and a clinical offer to support you to do your best work. We value career progression and look to develop our own, with 30 qualified social work promotions across Children’s Services in 2023 alone.
Read Ofsted’s letter following the Jan 2024 focused visit to Newham Leaving Care Services here
For an informal discussion please contact Leaving Care Service Manager, Leigh-Anne Elliott: leigh-anne.elliott@newham.gov.uk
We’re looking for qualified social work practitioners who have a genuine interest in a restorative, relationship based practice model drawing on systemic thinking to inform your approach to building effective relationships with care-experienced young people and their communities. You will be a qualified social worker who is registered with Social Work England, with experience working in a statutory leaving care service and a strong working knowledge of all relevant legislation relating to looked after children and care-experienced young people.
Your experience includes working with care-experienced young people within a diverse, urban community – it is essential that you have an understanding of the issues, concerns, and aspirations of care-experienced young people and how as a practitioner you can support them towards living fulfilled, safe and independent lives. A background in either Leaving Care or a Children in Care/LAC service is essential for this post.
We’re a vibrant, dynamic, culturally rich London Borough with a young population and limitless potential. We’re a challenging yet rewarding place for social work practise to flourish and we are steadfastly committed to our workforce being representative of the families that we work with. We are taking coordinated, meaningful and focused action to develop an inclusive culture because we believe this is at the heart of enabling diversity in all respects, including diversity of thought. We are taking positive actions to challenge all forms of discrimination and injustice to help make Newham a fairer and more equitable place for children and families to live, learn and thrive.
We’re building a fairer Newham through investment, co-production and by continuously developing our 'Circles of Support' practice model; centring on systemic and restorative practice and a specialist support offer for our practitioners. Ofsted described Newham as having a positive culture of learning and development and we always try to develop talent in-house. We promoted 30 internal colleagues in 2023 alone, and have put more than 47 practitioners through further education since 2020. We value your development and at Newham career progression is a reality for many of our colleagues.
We understand that social work can be a challenging yet ultimately very rewarding profession that makes demands of you personally and professionally. In Newham we value your wellbeing and we aim to ensure that you have a better work/life balance through a remote working offer when you are not visiting children and families, a modern office space for when you’re on site, a flexible working policy where all requests are considered, and a clinical offer to support you to do your best work.
We’ve been working hard to make Newham a great place to practise social work:
