Advanced Practitioners – Children’s Services
Salary: Band 9 (£41,418 - £44,428 per annum) To aid attraction and retention of Advanced Practitioners, Trafford have in place a market factor supplement of £2,400 which is payable monthly and reviewed on an annual basis.
Contract: Permanent
Location: Borough-wide, main office locations Trafford Town Hall or Sale Waterside
Here in Trafford Children’s Services our vision is that our teams are offering the right help at the right time, and that at all levels our interventions make life better for children and families. We are ambitious for our children and for our practitioners - and our core value is ‘would this be good enough for my child’?
We want to have practitioners and managers who are confident and brave in their practice and are supported by strong leaders at all levels. As a relatively small local authority, we pride ourselves on our friendly teams, manageable caseloads, creative approach and colleagues who support each other. We were pleased to see this recognised in the Ofsted report that followed our ILACS inspection in late 2022, which highlighted that “social workers in Trafford are overwhelmingly positive about both the local authority and the support they receive.”
In Trafford our approach is strengths-based, using relational and restorative practice. Our recent Ofsted report noted that our "relational model of social work practice, which is well regarded by the wider workforce, has been successfully implemented.”
We believe that a culture and environment in which our managers and social workers can thrive is an essential element of improving outcomes for children and families. To support this, we have invested in a 3-year programme with relational specialists Strengthening Practice to provide ongoing training and enhance our social workers’ personal development. Our 2023 Ofsted report recognised this, praising a “cultural shift (that) has been underpinned by a strong training offer to support social workers to develop the skills they need to provide a better service to children”.
We are currently recruiting qualified Advanced Practitioners to the following parts of our service and would love to hear from you;
Early Help and First Response – This is an exciting opportunity to be part of a service that brings together and aligns our Early Help services with our Front Door of Social Care. These are non- case holding social work roles that are about reaching out into the community, supporting the Early Help pilots, engaging with the Early Help Panels and reach out of the statutory service to enable the right service at the right time to be accessed as early as possible.
Do you have partnership skills? Can you take advice and guidance to another level by stepping out and showing how to bring a plan together, assess risk, draw partners together and enable effective intervention to happen without coming in to CSC. Are you confident in your knowledge of risk, of thresholds and able to engage others kindly, building relationships in the community and making a difference for schools?
Your knowledge and confidence will be useful in supporting the Front Door, taking referrals and working alongside First Response Advisors and partners to share information, identify risk and strengths and facilitating work transfer to the right place at the right time.
Families First (localities) – This is our dedicated Child in Need Service where you will work on a locality basis with children and families that require a social work assessment. We have developed a specialised service in this area of work to allow us to strengthen our assessment and planning for children in need and their families, raising the status of children in need and ensuring a consistent approach across the borough. It is also important that social workers in this service are able to build relational partnerships that strengthen our work and enable the step down of plans where it is safe to do so and in the families’ timescales.
Roles currently available in the following teams:
· Central (based in Sale)
· South (based in Altrincham)
· North (based in Stretford)
· West (based in Stretford)
Please note all roles are now hybrid meaning a blend of locality-based and home working.
Support and Protect (localities) – As we have created a dedicated Child in Need Service, this has allowed us to create a dedicated service to work with children and families when things are escalated to Child Protection in the Support and Protect Service.
Are you passionate about the longer term and complex work of child protection, clear and child focused plans, formal partnerships and risk management? Perhaps you have smart report writing skills, are you skilled as a witness in court? Or maybe you think you have the resilience, and confidence to learn.
Roles currently available in the following teams:
· South (based in Altrincham)
· North (based in Stretford)
· West (based in Stretford)
Please note all roles are now hybrid meaning a blend of locality-based and home working.
Cared for Children and Care Experienced Young people – We have brought together our Aftercare service and our Permanence service to create a ‘through care’ approach dedicated to children and young people who have a permanence plan, who then make that transition to being a care experienced young person.
In this service you will be supporting our cared for children and enabling our teenagers and care experienced young people to tackle the ups and downs, move on in life and achieve their full potential.
Can you offer the care and support that is essential for a child coming out of care proceedings, needing to have a sense of belonging and stability? Do you have the experience to recognise and work with those who have hidden hurt or trauma, pull partners around the child and carer and make the difference that will provide a network of support and guidance? If so, this service is for you.
Vulnerable adolescents – We need skilled intervention and relational engagement for some of our most vulnerable children and young people. We need practitioners that recognise the harm that happens outside the home, who can support parents and bring a special skill to working with those young people who need but may not want our help.
Working with GMP and other partners, parents and the community, there is important work to be done in this service, which needs a passion for face to face work and a keenness to learn from our specialist service.
Our commitment to you
We know that when you come to work in Trafford, we have a responsibility to provide you with the right tools and support to flourish in your new role.
Induction
We have recently updated our induction programme for new colleagues joining us at all levels. During your first two weeks you will have protected time to get to know your team, our systems and other parts of the service.
Workload
We are absolutely committed to ensuring that your workload is manageable. This isn’t necessarily a specific caseload number, as we all know that numbers don’t necessarily reflect the complexity of the children and families you are working with. But we believe that manageable workloads are critical, and managers will support you and confirm priorities through discussion and supervision. We have performance management reporting of caseloads and therefore at all levels we are responsible for monitoring workloads across the service.
There will be times where there is a level of flexibility required to meet the needs of the service or for individual children you work with, particularly in times of crisis. We will ensure that you are able to take additional hours back quickly to give you balance between your work and home life.
Supervision
One of our practice-led improvements has been to refresh our supervision framework, which has been a really exciting piece of work. We commit to offering monthly formal supervision that is both reflective and supportive and provides you with clear advice, guidance and direction. We also offer peer supervision as part of our refreshed framework, with practitioners involved in deciding the topics of discussion.
ASYE programme
We are committed to supporting our newly qualified social workers through their ASYE – this includes a dedicated mentor, our bespoke training programme to support the move from theory to practice, regular learning sets and regular reflective peer group supervision.
Our new Second Supported Year programme is designed to give ongoing support to your personal development and includes masterclasses, peer group reflective sessions, coaching and one-to-one support.
Our Strengthening Practice programme
In September 2021 we began working with our relational practice partners, Strengthening Practice, who will support us for a minimum of three years to deliver a comprehensive programme of training and reflection. This will play a critical role helping us all to improve our quality of practice via an ongoing series of seminars and discussion-based workshops.
The current phase of the programme is focusing on planning, with discussion-based workshops looking at how to plan effectively, use different tools and make robust plans that are meaningful for children and families.
This is what our social workers have had to say about the programme so far:
• “I thought the training was great. It had tools I’d actually use and the trainer was awesome.”
• “It was amazing to have the time and headspace to reflect and analyse regarding assessments.”
• “The trainer was very approachable and the course made me excited to work with children and families again.”
Opportunities for progression
A number of Trafford social workers have recently had the opportunity to undertake project secondments and DfE pilot work. We’re always on the lookout for new initiatives that will benefit our service and our practitioners, and we will support you to step up and develop your skills in new ways wherever possible.
It is always wonderful to see colleagues progress within the service and we are keen to support our social workers to reach their full career potential here at Trafford.
A note from Pamela Wharton, Director of Early Help and Social Care.
“Thank you for showing your interest in a role here in Trafford. I hope that you find the information we have provided helpful and that you feel that Trafford is somewhere you want to come and work.
“Trafford is a great place to work and we are striving to make it even better. We believe the service structure we now have in place is working well and is enabling children and families to get the right help at the right time. You will find more information about working at Trafford on our microsite, and we hope you will like what you see and hear and will be inspired to join us.
“I look forward to receiving your application. I firmly believe together we can truly make a difference”
For more information on our Children's Services department and working for Trafford Council, please visit: https://tripodmicrosites.com/trafford-council/
To apply for this role, simply click on the apply link below to submit an up to date copy of your CV.
About the benefits
You will be welcomed into a friendly environment where your personal and professional development will be encouraged. You will have the opportunity to work and grow in a people-centred and values based organisation that promotes a positive permission culture. Your opinions matter so you will have the opportunity to shape how we do things here at Trafford.
Trafford recognises the importance of staff wellbeing and offer a number of initiatives for staff including mental health first aiders, staff network groups (LGBT+/Carers/BAME/Disability) and health and wellbeing events.
Our great benefits include:-
Local Government Pension Scheme
Home Technology Scheme
Car Lease Scheme
Cycle to Work scheme
Simply Healthcare
Employee Discount Scheme - 'Perks at Work'
Please visit the link below to view more about our wide range of rewards and benefits: https://www.greater.jobs/content/13073/ ... nefits--1-
To learn more about Trafford as a place to live and work, please visit:
https://greater.jobs/content/10496/welcome-to-trafford
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