Senior Practitioner - Family Safeguarding Team

About the role

Are you a experienced Social Worker and ready to take the next step in your career? We’re looking for a Senior Practitioner to join us in our South Cambridgeshire Family Safeguarding Team, based in Trumpington Cambridge.

We manage a varied caseload of Child in Need, Children in need of Protection, Public Law Outline and care proceedings, focusing on children up to the age of 18. You will use a Motivational Interviewing approach where you will act in partnership with children and their families to achieve sustainable change and improved outcomes for children. You will be supported in this by a multi-disciplinary team that includes adult mental health workers, drug and alcohol recovery workers, and adult domestic abuse workers, supported by our practice methods.

The Family Safeguarding South Team is a stable, highly motivated and very supportive team, that is strengths-based underpinned by relationship-based practice with clear aspirations to improve outcomes for children, young people and families in South Cambridgeshire. We would welcome applications from a diverse range of workers to enhance our existing workforce.

The role is hybrid with a mix of office and home working alongside visits.  There is an expectation that our Seniors are in the office at least two days per week and available to be in the office to assist the Team Manager with any additional tasks as they arise.

If this sounds like an environment where you would thrive, we would love to hear from you! For more information, call Nathalie on 01223 475920 or email joinus@cambridgeshire.gov.uk.

Interviews will be held in person w/c 10th June. There will be a written assessment as well as a panel interview

Appointment to this post will be subject to the outcome of an Enhanced Disclosure obtained through the Disclosure and Barring Service. The Council is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and vulnerable adults and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment.

We support flexible working requests from day one of employment and so we are open to discussing different working patterns to help you bring your best self to work.

What will you be doing?

As a Senior Practitioner you will be involved in staff supervisions, mentoring and developing staff, including recruitment and induction support.

There is some management responsibility, along with assisting the team manager with team functioning including the planning, allocation and reviewing of cases.

To continue with your social work practice you will provide leadership in high complex cases which involve risk, complexity and safety of children, young people and families.  You will be required to provide written and verbal reports for a variety of settings, including court, that are concise, informative and based on analysis of complex evidence.

It could be that you also want to be or are a Practice Educator and want to support us as a team develop social work students, which we would fully support.

About you

We're looking for confident and dynamic individuals who enjoy making a difference in their local community, are curious and spot things that others might not see, enjoys building relationships and likes to explore possibilities.

You must:

• Be a qualified Social Worker with a Social Work England registration
• Have the ability to work from a variety of locations and travel countywide independently

For a full list of the requirements of the role, please check out the Job Description & Person Specification.

Our benefits

We value our colleagues in Cambridgeshire County Council and have developed a number of benefits:

• Flexible and creative working arrangements, including 9-day fortnights
• Flexible Bank Holidays
• A comprehensive wellbeing package
• Our Cambs Rewards employee discounts
• A comprehensive pension scheme
• IDEAL staff equality, diversity and inclusion network
• Camweb our staff intranet helping to keep you informed
• An employee recognition scheme
• A generous mileage allowance

For our Senior Practitioners, we offer more specific benefits like:

• Generous annual leave provision (28 days, plus bank holidays)
• A supportive management team that will champion your learning and development
• Employee Assistance Programme – access to free support 24 hours a day
• Scalable retention payments after the first full year of employment, starting at £900 which increases during the first three years of service
• A relocation package of up to £8000 for eligible candidates
• Plus, 6 days of protected time each year to enable our Social Workers to maintain their Continuous Professional Development. 

Please read our benefits brochure attached for more information.

About us

We are proud to serve the diverse communities of Cambridgeshire and want our workforce to be reflective of this diversity, which we firmly believe benefits our colleagues, the organisation and our communities. If you don’t meet every single requirement in the job role but think this could be you, please don’t be put off.   We are committed to building a workplace that is compassionate and inclusive as well as diverse, so if you think you could be a good candidate for this role please consider applying and speak to the recruiting manager if you have any questions.

Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, along with our employee network 'IDEAL' and self-organised peer support groups help us to foster an inclusive, supportive and safe working environment where people feel valued, respected, and empowered.  We collect relevant diversity data for monitoring as part of the recruitment process to understand the diversity of our applicants and monitor any trends throughout the recruitment processes so that we can take meaningful action.

We are proud to be a Disability Confident Employer. We fully support providing reasonable adjustments throughout our recruitment process, as well as when you join us, and we encourage candidates to contact the Hiring Manager, whose details can be found in the advert, to discuss any adjustment needs. Some examples of adjustments could include additional time to complete an assessment or printing a document on pastel coloured paper with larger font size and line spacing. We would value talking about what might be possible to enable you to join us and thrive, so if there is something that would help you to do your best during your journey with us, please get in touch.

Visit our jobs and careers section to find out more about our wide range of learning and development opportunities; apprenticeships; our wellbeing package; staff benefits; our commitment to equality, diversity and Inclusion. 

http://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/council/jobs-and-career

Attached documents

• CSC Senior Practitioner (4).pdf
• CSW Benefits Brochure 2024 (3).pdf