Our Values

It’s great to know that you are interested in working with us at Coventry City Council. As a prospective employee, it is important that everyone who works for us is committed to our One Coventry values and shares our commitment to becoming a more diverse and inclusive organisation. 

Our Values are:

About the team we are recruiting to

In Coventry, we are working hard to build something special. Children and families are at the heart of everything we do, and we believe they deserve the best outcomes.  Children’s Services provides a wide range of statutory and non-statutory duties, from Early Help Services, through to children who are in care.

The service reflects and responds to the changing needs of children and their families.  It works to enable a reflective and flexible approach, with a strong Early Help offer and a real focus on Relationship Based Practice and Signs of Safety, which focuses on intervention and keeping families together. 

Children’s Services is proud of its achievements to date and is continuing to ensure children and families remain at the heart of all it does.  We will provide you with an environment where social work can flourish, with high support, high challenge and manageable caseloads.  Children’s Services is proud of its workforce, who are committed, dedicated, and work to a high standard. We are seeking other like minded practitioners who would like to join us.  We pride ourselves on building relationships with families and partners and hold respectful practice at the centre of all we do.

Coventry City Council is investing strongly in its fostering provision and in recent years has seen a significant growth in the proportion of our children in care who are living with in-house Foster Carers.  The service has a commitment to providing high quality support to carers and ensuring they are assessed in a timely and thorough way.  We work closely with our Foster Carers and with children’s social work teams to ensure that children in care are well cared for and achieve best outcomes, maintain placement stability and move on to permanence in a timely way.

The Connected Persons Team is made up of 2 clusters with practitioners taking a caseload of either supervision and support cases or assessment cases.  The team has responsibility for the assessment and supervision of Connected Persons Foster Carers and the assessment and support of Special Guardians.  
 
The Recruitment and Assessment Team has responsibility for the recruitment and assessment of a range of fostering applicants.  The team includes a recruitment hub that assists in generating enquiries to become a foster carer, follows up on enquiries, and undertakes initial visits prior to applicants progressing to full assessment.  

The Supervision and Support Team is made up of 3 clusters.  Practitioners in these clusters have responsibility for the supervision and support of a range of approved Foster Carers.  They also support the Placement Liaison Officer within the team to identify and arrange placements with internal Foster Carers.

What is the job role?

We are seeking an Independent Chair for our Fostering Panel.  The appointment of an independent person to this role is a statutory requirement of the council's fostering service.

The independent fostering panel chair is responsible for chairing fostering panel meetings, ensuring that recommendations made are in line with the Fostering Regulations and National Minimum Standards 2011.  In order to undertake this, the chair is also required to have thorough preparation for the panel reviewing paperwork.  The chair coordinates questions from the panel and ensures each panel member's view contributes to recommendations made.  The chair reviews the minutes of panel and has a responsibility to feed back to the fostering service. 

The successful candidate will be appointed on a sessional basis with the requirement that they chair around 30 panels per year.  Panels are generally held on a Wednesday between 9.30 and 4.  Fostering Panels continue to be held remotely although panel training days and appraisals will be returning to face to face in 2023.  

This post is exempted under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 and as such appointment to this post will be conditional upon the receipt of a satisfactory response to a check of police records via Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS).
 

Who are we looking for?

For full details on the application process please read the attached document on our jobs page labelled 'Coventry City Council Application Process'

Interview date(s): 25/11/22

About Coventry

Coventry has a proud, innovative, and creative spirit that throughout its history has seen communities come together to tackle problems and bring about real social change.

We are cutting-edge, challenging, youthful, vibrant and diverse.

At Coventry we are committed to excellence in everything we do. With around 4800 staff from a range of different backgrounds, our aim is to recruit and develop talented people who will focus on our customers, take responsibility, work together and find better ways of doing things.

To deliver the best services to our residents, we need the best people working for us to make a difference in our communities.

Coventry City Council