Childrens Social Worker Team – Children & Families – Stockport – £38

Childrens Social Worker
Team : Children & Families
Location : Stockport
Pay Rate : £38

Stockport Family is looking for experienced and dynamic children’s social workers, who are looking for a role in a relational and systemic local authority, which has recently maintained its rating of Good in its Ofsted inspection of May 2022.

As a local authority, Stockport offers a supportive and vibrant working environment – our teams are dedicated to delivering the very best outcomes for our children and families and we work together with our multi-agency partners in a positive and upbeat way.

We work in a different way to lots of our neighbours – we have a model of working with children and their families from the point of referral through to closure or permanence. This allows our social workers to build long-lasting and strong relationships with children and their families and gives our social workers a real range of working experience – in Stockport, no two days are ever the same! We have lots of support services; an in-house Families First team, an ISW team and an Emotional Health and Wellbeing Team which provide formulations and interventions to our children and young people. We are also a trailblazer participant in the Family Drug and Alcohol Courts in the North West and have a complex safeguarding team which focuses not only on exploitation for young people but also on high risk domestic abuse cases.

The role:
We are keen to recruit agency social workers with experience of statutory social work with children and families. Contracts can be offered in the initial period for up to 6 months, to provide candidates with stability and security in the role.

We want to make sure that we are responsive to our agency workers’ needs. Our model of working from referral to permanence or closure means that we have the ability to cater caseloads to our agency workers’ interests – on the whole, we offer our agency workers a caseload of Child Protection and Child in Need but can discuss allocating court cases or cared for children, where this is in the interests of our agency staff.

We are centrally based in town hall district of Stockport – all of social work teams are co-located with our health, police, Early Help and MASSH colleagues and currently we have some vacancies across our borough. Our average caseload is 20; whilst there are some fluctuations across teams, we are dedicated as an authority to ensuring a manageable caseload for our social workers and we review this regularly.

We ensure a strong induction for our agency workers, with a gradual increase in caseload and complexity of work. Alongside this, we offer high quality reflective supervision on a monthly basis – all of our team leaders are trained in reflective and systemic supervision. There are opportunities for group and reflective supervision delivered by senior practitioners and our workforce development team and there are opportunities to seek specialist advice and consultation from our Aspire service about domestic abuse and complex safeguarding.

Each team has 1 team leader, 2 senior practitioners and 6 social workers. The teams are focussed on small geographical areas across Stockport and have link relationships with local schools, health professionals and borough-wide services through our Team around the School model. Our team leaders and senior practitioners are well-established and know Stockport really well and have really good relationships with our senior management team.

In terms of working patterns, as a local authority, we recognise that flexibility for our workforce is key. Our social workers tell us that they appreciate time spent together as a team but also that they enjoy the option of working from home as well. We have modern technology to support this and we are happy to discuss and consider requests for flexible or reduced hours, to suit individual candidates’ needs.

Office Use : 0009 FBD2 / 1