Permanency Lead

Salary: ~£400 per day
Hours: 37 hours per week
Contract: 6 months fixed-term contract

The role of the Permanency Lead is to promote and ensure permanency is integral and uncompromising to our work with children and their families.

The overall purpose of the role is to assist in the development of a more integrated service comprising of social work teams, the virtual school, health and other specialist professionals and the fostering and adoption teams, to ensure permanence is central to every child’s care plan, with the aim to achieve the best outcomes possible.

In this role you will have the opportunity to work with professionals of every discipline and will have a remit spanning the assessment, safeguarding and family support, children looked after and the fostering and adoption teams. The role demands close collaboration and good working relationships across these teams to deliver an integrated approach to child care planning.

As the Permanence Lead you will review and develop the permanency process In Slough Children First, and ensure the culture of permanency is fully embedded throughout

The ideal candidate will possess highly developed specialist knowledge of social work practice in Children’s Services and knowledge of fostering and adoption practice, to promote, deliver and embrace the Company’s values– Child focused, Honest and respectful, improving constantly, looking ahead and Delivering together – to your team and peers to help deliver our vision of making our children safe, secure and successful.

For this role you will need to be Social Work England registered.

Main Accountabilities

• Support staff across Slough Children First to provide a high quality service to children and families where permanence is the identified future care plan, or for whom permanence has been achieved.
• Keep high quality and accurate records and prepare high quality written reports to senior management regarding practice findings, the work undertaken to address and the impact of this work, ensuring reports include analysis of data and trends meeting the requirements of departmental policies.
• Attend and participate in team meetings, and other working meetings to promote quality permanency services, lead regular permanency meetings as required and ensure agreed decisions are implemented and completed, following up where necessary.
• Provide a consultation service to other social workers regarding permanence issues.
• Deliver innovative approaches to engaging social workers in shaping and participating in the development of permanency processes, with the aim of raising the overall level of understanding and participation across the service and improving the quality of outcomes for children with a plan for permanence.
• Drive improvement of the quality of Child’s Permanence Report
• Review the permanency panel and model good practice
• Support practitioners with preparing for permanency panel to support good outcomes for children and young people.
• To ensure permanency participation levels and satisfaction data relating to Slough Children First is appropriately captured and used to develop permanency services.
• To advocate and promote for the child’s voice throughout the permanency process.
• To signpost social workers to access information, advice and guidance and to refer children to other organisations to ensure a child’s permanency is not impacted by drift and delay and best possible outcomes achieved.
• Demonstrate respect and concern for children, parents and other carers; and safeguard their dignity and rights.
• Ensure all services are non-discriminatory.
• Comply with all data protection law in the processing of personal and special categories of personal data, in line with Slough Children first’s full privacy statement and service privacy notices.
• Ensure the needs of young people in Slough are met by modelling behaviour which fosters equality of opportunity in service provision.
• Keep abreast of all relevant legislation for the area and ensure all activity is compliant with any changes.
• To remain aware of responsibilities in relation to safeguarding, health and safety and risk assessment and to operate in accordance with systems and processes that ensures compliance with national and local policies and procedures.
• The post holder will have no budget management responsibilities.
• The post holder will have no formal line management responsibilities but will be responsible for making sustainable changes which will mean tasking individuals and teams to complete certain tasks.
• The post holder will have no children or young people directly allocated to them, and will therefore hold no case responsibility, however they will work directly with social workers and the fostering and adoption services in relation to individual children providing direction and management oversight.

Person specification

Education, Training & Experience

• Degree or equivalent in social work (Essential)
• Current Social Work England registration (Essential)
• Knowledge and understanding of permanency policy and processes (Essential)
• Senior level frontline experience within children’s services (Essential)
• Senior level of experience within fostering and adoption services (Essential)
• Knowledge and understanding of legislation, policy and guidance relating to Children and Young People’s service work including (Essential)
• Working Together to Safeguard Children (Essential)
• Experience of working in an environment where attention to detail is very important and being organised is key (Essential)
• Experience of working within a professional team working to tight and demanding statutory deadlines (Essential)
• Experience of developing individual and team performance to ensure good outcomes for children (Essential)
• Liquid Logic (ICS) trained (Desirable)

General & Specific Knowledge

• Ability and proficiency in the use of electronic case file management systems (Essential)
• Excellent verbal communication skills, including the ability to deal with social workers and other professionals in a sensitive and professional manner both over the phone, and face to face (Essential)
• Able to assess a wide variety of information and provide a concise recommendation based on own judgment with a clear rationale for decision making (Essential)
• Ability to prioritise own work and manage conflicting priorities to achieve statutory and required deadlines (Essential)
• Flexible, adaptable and able to work with minimal supervision using own initiative to ensure both self and others are organised (Essential)
• Proven ability to handle sensitive and confidential information appropriately (Essential)
• Excellent information technology skills to include but not limited to: Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook), Agresso (or equivalent) (Essential)
• Clear understanding of and commitment to equality and diversity (Essential)
• Persistence and accuracy for task completion with competing demands (Essential)
• Experience of driving forward practice improvements with evidenced impact of this work (Desirable)
• Coaching, mentoring and training skills (Desirable)

Apply online

If you would like to apply for this post, please use the application form to submit your CV and apply online. Once submitted we will be in touch shortly to discuss your application. if you have any questions, please email recruitment@sloughchildrenfirst.co.uk. The deadline for submitted applications is 5pm on Monday 31 May.

Good luck!