We’re looking for experienced and innovative social workers, senior social workers and team managers who have the personal as well as professional attributes to thrive in our highly supportive, team-spirited, well-resourced and family-focused environment.
Wherever you join us, you can work safe in the knowledge that you’re part of a Children’s Services Department judged ‘Good’ by Ofsted for over 10 years.
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When a family needs a child and family assessment, our Assessment and Intervention service responds. This well resourced, low-caseload unit makes robust, high quality assessments that support staff, children and families.
This service has a well regarded, specialist and partnership-focused Pre-birth team that works very closely with colleagues in Health. We also are creating a specialist Extra Familial Harm service, dedicated to responding to the complex needs of vulnerable adolescents, and helping to keep families together.
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Our Safeguarding and Family Support service have fully embraced the systemic approach. They work hand-in-hand with the clinical practitioner service and partner agencies to build families’ resilience, taking away the need for statutory intervention.
Our professionals are supported by a Care Proceedings Case Manager driving improved practice for Public Law Outline cases. The bespoke briefing sessions they run, sharing and developing great practice in the court arena, have been very popular among our wider teams.
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Working tenaciously on behalf of children with a permanence plan of care, our Care Service teams are the driving force behind our goal to be the best corporate parent we can be.
Our teams see the potential in our children and are ambitious for their futures. They are extremely well supported by our virtual school, health partners and our CAMHS Carelink service that provides dedicated assessment and therapeutic support to our children in care.
Our Permanence service has enjoyed a remarkable recent history. We created a dedicated new Access-to-Resource team focusing on securing quality placements for our children and young people, and providing dedicated support to coordinate and enable quality family time between children looked after and their families.
The highly successful Family Group Conference team ensures no stone is left unturned to find families for children who need them.
Our Fostering Service is deeply committed to therapeutic care giving. We’ve been working with the University of East Anglia since 2015 to embed and integrate the Secure Base Model into all areas of our practice. The Foster Carer Recruitment Team recruits and assesses all prospective fostering carers for the borough.
And we are very proud to host Adopt London South, the largest adoption service in London bringing together services from nine boroughs.
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The 16 plus service works with children in care aged 16 and over and all care leavers up to the age of 21, or age of 25 if the young person wishes this, or they are in employment, education or training. Its primary purpose is to help these children achieve excellent outcomes, in line with the Council Strategic Plan for Children in Care and Care Leavers.
The 16 plus Service is leading on the Comissioned 16 plus Contracts and in 2021-22 will be working collaboratively with housing and multi-agency colleagues to ensure all young people have high quality accommodation.
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Quality Assurance covers the essential work of Child Protection conferencing, Independent Reviews of children in our care, safeguarding duties of the Local Authority Designated Officer (LADO), and critical reflection and continual improvement via Performance and Audit. The work under the Principal Social Worker: learning and development, workforce, Assessed and Supported Year in Employment (ASYE) for Newly Qualified Social Workers, and student learning including the Step Up to Social Work Programme.
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The embedded clinical service provides psychological consultation, assessment and treatment in relation to children and families involved with Southwark Children’s Social Care via clinical staff embedded in every social work team. Our team is made up of registered mental health professionals experienced win working with both adults and children.
The service works at three levels within Children’s Social Care – firstly “working via the system” – supporting and working alongside social workers in the teams; secondly ensuring access to clinical assessments and interventions needed to achieve CSC aims; and thirdly being part of intensive multi-modal teams for particular high need groups.
Importantly, we are not a child mental health service – our work is aimed at achieving social care outcomes, such as supporting a family in need to manage without children’s social care, or supporting a family to parent a child safely so that they no longer needed to be subject to a child protection plan, or reducing the risk of re-offending, or supporting placement stability, rather than being aimed at improving child mental health outcomes. As such we work in a variety of ways, including targeting adult mental health problems, if these are key to achieving the social work aims.
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Developing deep relationships with the community, offering Tier 2 targeted interventions and helping families ‘step down’ from statutory social care intervention is a far-reaching series of responsibilities. Hugely respected by our partner agencies, our Family Early Help service is in a unique position to deliver all three.
Our team has a diverse body of work, covering small to large families, single to multiple issues and across age ranges.
Our practitioners work in a holistic way offering bespoke and evidenced-based models of intervention in the community, in the home and in schools.
Everything the team does is underpinned by our whole family model – building on strengths to achieve positive outcomes and sustained change for families.
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Understanding and addressing the complex situations of children and young people who have used serious violence is what our Youth Offending service exists for.
Identified as excellent by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons, the team’s ethos is innovation. Their engagement group is led by a commissioned theatre company, they have a youth mentoring programme and they’ve developed a pioneering approach to serious youth violence based on giving young people space to voice their fears.
Staff work in small practice groups of three to four YOS officers or specialists. Cases are managed through weekly group supervision. The focus is on using systemic family work to deliver individualised programmes of work to achieve second order change.
The service is well supported by specialist staff, an education specialist, dedicated restorative justice team, CAMHS staff, speech and language specialists, substance misuse specialists and a seconded probation officer.
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All of our services in Children’s Social Care are boosted by dedicated business support officers. Everything they do is aimed at reducing precious social work time spent on bureaucracy.
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The All Age Disability Service is passionate about improving the life chances and independence of children and young adults, we provide a comprehensive social care pathway for children and young people with disabilities from childhood into adolescence and into adulthood.
AAD provides a range of services in the borough for children and young people aged 0-25. We also provide support in the form of a ‘care package’ of services for a child or young person, if eligible. The services provided may include activities, short breaks, respite, care arrangements, or a personal budget.
There are 4 social work teams within the All Age Disability Service. Each has a number of social workers and an Assistant Practitioner. The Service also benefits from designated business support. Social workers have manageable caseloads and are expected to undertake assessments, support planning, reviews and safeguarding. We are unique in that we support children and young adults across the legislative frameworks of the Children Act and the Care Act, giving Social Workers a truly generic Social Work portfolio.
The Service is committed to delivering on the Council’s Strategic Priorities to improve life chances, providing a better place for people and in delivering quality services. We value diversity within our team and within our client group and aim to provide an accessible, integrated and efficient service that addressed the Council’s key corporate goals of offering value for money and an accessible needs-led and accountable service.