About the team we are recruiting to

Children’s Services is a service area within Coventry City Council that supports children and families across the city. 

The vision and commitment of Children’s Services ensures that a high quality and child centred service is provided, ensuring the right help at the right time and engaging with partners.  

Children’s Services is committed to outcome-driven and impactful interventions and measures success by the outcome for children and families.  

The service reflects and responds to the changing needs of Coventry and its population and understands the need for a reflective and flexible service with a strong Early Help offer to provide early and targeted intervention so that families can access the support they need from a variety of partners and agencies.  

A successful recruitment and retention strategy has resulted in a committed and stable workforce who are dedicated to delivering excellent services to children and young people in Coventry.  

If you are an experienced social worker or looking to return to practice we want to hear from you. It is a great time to join our diverse workforce within Children’s Services, with great opportunities to develop your learning, ongoing training to improve practice, a clear way to progress through our progression pathway, and an engaging team that recognises success and values staff.  

What is the job role?

With new and inspirational leadership in place, we’re changing - to be a better place for social workers to do a better job for children and young people. And, as part of a major investment, it starts with growing our team. We have the following vacancies:

Join us and bring your ideas and suggestions to drive our journey of improvement, and put Coventry on the map for delivering more positive outcomes. Our Looked After Children’s Service is recruiting to a number of team manager positions the growth of our services and the professional development of previous post holders.

Coventry put its children at the heart of everything they do and joining this service will allow you to practice in way that embraces the voices of children and young people and their carers. Coventry have a strong children in care council and as an authority a shared commitment to corporate parenting. Joining us as a Team Manager you’ll lead, manage and motivate a team of social workers and other children’s services staff. 

We will be with you every step of the way, and our generous salary and attractive benefits package and relocation package up to 8k reflect that.

Roles:

Through Care Team Manager

Through Care works with looked-after children and care leavers aged 12-25. The service is co-located with carers advisors, a housing liaison officer and a UASC liaison officer. Through Care is an innovative service involved in national pilots of Lifelong Links, Leaving Well and New Belongings. The service was also shortlisted for the 2019 social workers of the year awards. Coventry is part of the National Leaving Care Benchmarking Forum.

Fostering Support Team Manager

The Fostering Support Team are responsible for the supervision and support of a range of foster carers caring for children with a variety of needs.  This includes foster carers who specialise in out of hours emergency foster carers, parent and child foster carers and Next Steps specialist carers.  The Fostering Service provides a range of support to carers alongside formal supervision.  These include; a number of annual events for foster carers, support to foster carers sons and daughters, buddying and mentoring and support with therapeutic work such as DDP and social pedagogy.  This is an additional position to join an established team with 2 other managers.

Connected Persons Team Manager

The Connected Persons Team are responsible for the assessment and supervision of Connected Persons Foster Carers and the assessment and support of Special Guardians.  This is a service that has grown in both size and quality in recent years and offers both events and a regular support group to those carers it works with.  The team is made up of 2 clusters and the successful candidate will manage one of these alongside a colleague.

As a Team Manager you will be setting direction, implementing quality assurance systems and identifying opportunities for improvement, you’ll use a variety of imaginative solutions and responses to make sure we’re delivering services in the best way possible.

Coventry children are achieving great things, we have record numbers of care leavers at University, as well as many more doing apprenticeships, further training or in employment. Our internal fostering service has grown significantly in the fast 4 years as a result of significant investment in it.  This has resulted in a significant rise in the proportion of Looked After Children placed with local carers alongside a growth in Connected Persons placements.  We want a dynamic leader to drive forward the positive changes that have been made and further strengthen the service.

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?

You will be a qualified social worker who is registered with Social Work England and have considerable experience of working with children and their families in a statutory social care environment. With fantastic leadership skills, you will motivate and support our social workers. Creating an environment for social work practice to flourish.

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

All attachments for the job can be found here

Interview date: 20th May 2020

About Coventry

Coventry is a lively, multicultural city, which embraces old and new. Around the modern city centre there are traces of history everywhere – in the old city walls, the timber-framed buildings and the reconstructed medieval Spon Street. But Coventry has always had an eye on the future, and is now firmly focused on regenerating and re-inventing itself to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. With major developments and new projects taking place right across the city, Coventry City Council is the place to be!

There's a huge buzz about the city – Coventry ranks as the 8th best city to live, work and do business in the UK, and is the UK City of Culture 2021 ! We believe this will help put Coventry on the map for all the right reasons. You can feel the sense of local pride throughout the city as we build towards this momentous year. It also offers a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to those joining us to play their part in it.

We genuinely believe that Coventry City Council is a special place. You will be joining Coventry City Council during an exciting time to become part of a team that contribute to achieving our visions for the city. We have made our council a place where we look after our people, making sure you're happy in your work and given everything you need to succeed. We've created friendly, welcoming workplaces where everyone is working towards the same cause, providing the best possible services for the city of Coventry.

As a council with improvement at its heart, we’re committed to making life better for the people who live and work in Coventry. We’re equally concerned with the quality of life enjoyed by our people, so by joining us, you won’t just be helping the community, you’ll be helping yourself too.

Not only do you get to work alongside great people that are helping to improve services for our community we offer great benefits too! For your valued contribution we will provide a fantastic benefits package including;

• Flexible working arrangements
• Generous annual leave allowance starting at 27 days and rising to 32 days
• Pay progression through multiple increments
• Outstanding local government pension scheme
• Learning & Development with access to certified courses.
• Access to an award winning Occupational Health Team
• Vibrant employee networks 

Coventry City Council