We are looking for an experienced manager to join our team as Service Manager for our Initial Response Service. Our Initial Response Service is a busy and fast paced service providing a social work response to families to ensure children are safeguarded and families are supported in a timely way when needed.
This is a great time to join Plymouth’s Children’s Services leadership team as a Service Manager in our Children, Young People and Families Service. Our ILACS in January 2024 confirmed we are making good progress, with some good practice and some key practice strengths. Our MASH is now operating effectively. Child protection work was found to be timely and appropriate, with a clear understanding of risks for children with timely assessment and support to families which is preventing drift and delay for children in proceedings. Many social workers know their children well and build positive relationships with them. For most children, decision-making for them to come into care is appropriate and in their best interests.
Through our new three-year plan, Heading for Excellence, we are building on these strengths with a programme designed to ensure all children and young people benefit from the right help at the right time, experiencing high quality assessment and planning which improves wider outcomes for them, keeping families together where possible and working closely with partners to keep children and young people safe, improve attendance, educational attainment, health and wellbeing.
You will have experience of ensuring effective management oversight of practice and delivering high quality and timely safeguarding interventions, assessments and support to families, of building strong partnership approaches and using best practice across our priority practice areas of neglect, child sexual abuse, domestic violence and adolescent safeguarding. You will be confident in supporting seamless pathways between early help, targeted services and statutory social work and to ensuring children, young people and families get the right help at the right time.
We are developing a high performing and well supported workforce delivering our trauma informed, restorative and strengths-based practice approach. We are determined that within the next three years we will deliver good and outstanding outcomes for all of the children and young people we are working with.
We are looking for a high performing manager, confident in what ‘good’ looks like and with the behaviours that will support the service to continue to improve and deliver outstanding outcomes to vulnerable children and families. You will have experience of developing high performing teams and be a champion for ensuring children’s voices are at the heart of our practice. In return we provide access to a high-quality leadership development programme and a 'high expectation, high support, high challenge' culture in a service which is ambitious about improving outcomes for children and young people.
If you’d like to know more please email us at abrightfuture@plymouth.gov.uk and we will be in touch.