Senior Social Workers (SSWs) in Leaving Care have a vital role delivering high quality social work interventions and support to best serve our care leavers. SSWs may hold the most challenging cases whilst supporting Personal Advisor colleagues with areas of complexity. SSWs Under direction from a Team Manager. SSWs will provide vital, holistic, restorative support to care leavers – this could be to do with employment, finance, housing or signposting to services that will help care leavers overcome their personal challenges. We want our care leavers to live independent, happy, fulfilled lives; and SSWs day to day work will be focused on this.
Senior Social Workers in Leaving Care are expected to support their Personal Advisor colleagues by sharing their knowledge and providing insight into what makes our practice great. SSWs will deliver social work interventions and make key decisions that impact care leavers directly and change lives.
To find out more about working in Leaving Care, please contact Deborra John, Service Manager for Leaving Care: deborra.john@newham.gov.uk.
For more information and a full list of duties please download the job description.
We're looking for resilient, experienced Senior Social Workers who are passionate about improving the lives of our care leavers. You are full of energy and enthusiasm, taking a creative but pragmatic approach to practice, setting SMART goals to help create change where it’s needed to achieve positive outcomes for those leaving care. You already embrace our people-focused values and want to be an active part of our ‘Newham Together’ journey – but even more importantly you are committed to improving the odds for young people and dedicated to the wellbeing and development care leavers you will support.
You have at least 3 years’ post qualified experience and an understanding of working effectively with care leavers within a diverse, urban community. You share our ambition and energy in embracing new ways of working. You have high working standards and are conscious of your own professional development and that of those around you, especially less experienced colleagues and Personal Advisors. You are always open to learning and to helping others learn so that children and families can benefit from our best practice.
We’re looking for people 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 leavers.
You will be a qualified social worker who is registered with Social Work England.
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:
