Our Emergency Duty Team (EDT) provide an accountable emergency Statutory Social Work service for service users and other professionals across Newham. This may include children, young people and their families/carers, and adults alike.
The Emergency Duty Team work is between 5pm and 9am during weekdays, and 9am until 9am on weekends and Bank Holidays.
Reporting to the EDT Practice Lead, our EDT work collaboratively, maintaining links with developing close working relationships with partner agencies, including emergency services where necessary and appropriate, professionals and vulnerable families to ensure that families in crisis are responded to, based on their needs and level of risk. The role also involves collaborating with the Multiagency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) on a daily basis in order to ensure continuity of support and intervention for families who come to attention out of hours. You will have modern technology to enable efficient mobile working in addition to management support provided by the Practice Lead and a Senior Manager when required.
You will be expected to be an embodiment of the 'Newham Together' practice model, and will work collaboratively with colleagues, partner agencies and other services, sharing our commitment to taking a Restorative approach to achieving positive outcomes for our children and young people.
We are looking for experienced front-door or Emergency Duty Social Workers who have worked within statutory services and are passionate about acting quickly and responsibly to keep children safe. You are highly organised, confident, and able to prioritise effectively, making sound judgements in a variety of challenging situations.
You are full of energy and enthusiasm, taking a creative but pragmatic approach to supporting vulnerable families to achieve positive outcomes. You already embrace our people focused values and want to be active part of our collective ‘Newham Together’ journey. You want to make a difference.
You have high working standards and are conscious of your own professional development, actively seeking avenues of learning and improvement. The embedding of Systemic practice and a Restorative approach are both key to our journey, and we welcome interest from candidates who flourish in, or have training or interest in these methods of practice.
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:
