Lambeth is looking for a Service Manager (Children Looked After) to help us achieve our vision of making Lambeth one of the best places in the world for children and young people to grow up.
We aim to enable all of our young people to achieve, be healthy, be safe and be resilient. In this role, you will play a key leadership role in the delivery of high-quality social care practice to ensure that these outcomes are realised.
In Lambeth, we have adopted a systemic approach – our “Children at the Heart of Practice” framework. This means that when we work with families, we are committed to starting from a position of strength empowering them to build on what is working well to make the necessary change to improve their quality of life.
We are driven by a focus on relationships, enabling and supporting change for families openly and collaboratively, and promoting children’s development and wellbeing. We are looking for someone who is committed to this approach and who possesses the skills to improve standards of social work practice by embedding values such as those espoused by our Children at the Heart of Practice framework.
In 2022, Ofsted judged our services to be requiring improvement to be good. Since then, we have continued to make progress by building stronger local partnerships, piloting innovation projects, and striving for the highest standards of social work practice.
As Service Manager (Children Looked After) in Lambeth, you will play a key role in leading service-level improvements with a particular focus on care proceedings, permanency and Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children.
You will need to support social workers (and personal advisors) to be the agents of change and to empower and support them to spend their time doing good quality, meaningful social work, coproduced and tailored around the needs and issues of each family they work with.
You will need exceptional interpersonal skills, strong data analysis skills to be able to identify issues and address them within your service and be able to successfully develop working relationships with partners to achieve effective and excellent multi-agency working.
For this role you must have a recognised qualification in Social Work, be registered with the Social Work England (SWE) and have management experience in a Children’s Social Care service.
Located in the heart of South London, Lambeth Borough is a vibrant community. Stretching from the dynamic neighbourhood of Streatham in the South to the iconic landmarks of Waterloo in the North, we are proud to be the 9th largest borough in London. Our diversity is our strength, with more than 130 languages spoken, making Lambeth the home of the Windrush generation, London's largest LGBTQ+ community, and a thriving Portuguese-speaking community.
With exceptional schools, lush green spaces including Brockwell Park, cultural gems like the Black Cultural Archives, and world-renowned institutions such as St Thomas's Hospital, Lambeth offers an enriching and dynamic environment. The Civic Centre is just a short walk from the main underground and train station.
“Lambeth – a borough with social and climate justice at its heart. By harnessing the power and pride of our people and partnerships, we will proactively tackle inequalities so that children and young people can have the best start in life and so everyone can feel safe and thrive in a place of opportunity.”
In Lambeth, we offer our social workers: