This role will be focused on completing SGO and Connected Person Assessments.
This post is based within the SGO Support Team, part of Newham’s Fostering and SGO Service. Our Fostering Recruitment and Special Guardianship Team leads on recruitment of foster carers, connected person and special guardians, quality assurance and supporting Permanency via special guardianship assessment.
Social workers in this team will assess their capacity to care for these children and manage contact whilst balancing competing relationships or identifying potential difficulties in the future; and will ensure DBS and medicals are completed and work closely with the child’s social worker whilst assessing wider familial support. SGO SWs will produce child centred SGO support Plans collaboratively with the child’s social worker. Providing a recommendation about the carer’s capacity is essential in addition to the legal framework required to sustain the placement plus a detailed plan of support.
If you have any questions relating to the role please contact Kuldip.Kaur@newham.gov.uk.
You are a qualified social worker who has completed their ASYE, and are registered with Social Work England.
We are looking for a social worker with experience and skills to undertake effective viability assessments and fuller detailed assessments of proposed connected person carers and special guardians. Experience in this area is essential for this role. As an assessing social Worker, you will also need strong analytical and report writing skills as the role requires reports and assessments for Agency Decision Maker ratification, Fostering Panel and Court.
We’re looking for social workers 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 children, young people and their families.
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:
