Family Early Help Team Manager

The Role: Family Early Help Team Manager

Job Details:

The Clinical Health Team is a specialist health service for adults with learning disabilities whose health needs cannot be met by mainstream health services. We employ a range of health professionals in order to meet those needs.

The team provides services to those adults with learning disabilities registered with a Sutton GP.

Team Functions

• Promote and govern excellent practice

• Provide high support and high challenge to motivate staff to carry out their roles to the best of their ability and to the standards required of them

• Maintain own continuous professional development and that of the team through appropriate training, learning and research opportunities and in conjunction with the Service Manager

• Promote excellence in practice using research and practice evidence, tested to meet local need, setting an expectation that the Southwark Practice Framework will be applied and developed by practitioners

• Support and assess Newly Qualified Social Workers through their Assessed & Supported Year in Employment (ASYE), apprentices and others participating in work-based routes into social work or early help, taking the role of practice educator where appropriate

Shaping and influencing the practice system

• Positively manage and contribute to service development within the team and across the service, by sharing practice knowledge and expertise, data and research findings, and by monitoring key performance areas for the team

• Build effective partnerships to deliver services flexibly across the organisation (as governed by service need) and within homes, schools or community settings where required.

Purposeful and effective Early Help work

• Ensure purposeful systemically-informed early help practice within Southwark’s practice framework, which empowers families to make and sustain positive changes, with explicit aims to address emerging problems which can predict poor outcomes for children (including school attendance, anti-social behavior, domestic violence, substance misuse, worklessness and mental health issues) and manages risk.
• Ensure professional, respectful and honest relationships with young people and all family members are built and maintained, to develop trust and assist in, safeguarding children and promoting positive and timely outcomes.
• Ensure staff use a flexible, creative, persistent, high challenge/high support approach to engaging families with early help, in order to achieve better outcomes for their children
• Ensure early help practice is informed by local and statutory guidance, best evidence, and research.

Education/ Knowledge/ Qualifications

• Must hold a professional qualification in Social Work, or a related profession working with children young people and families
• Must be able to provide evidence of continuing professional development
• Knowledge of guidance and best practice in work with 0 - 19 year olds and their families in respect of early intervention, youth justice, relevant childcare and education legislation, and the London Child Protection Procedures
• Knowledge and understanding of child development, parenting capacity, environmental factors and risk and protective factors for poor outcomes for children
• Knowledge and understanding of statutory frameworks for education, youth justice and relevant children’s social work
• Knowledge of roles and responsibilities of key children’s and youth justice agencies
• Knowledge and experience of anti-discriminatory and ant- racist practice, integration of council values particularly those relating to racism, inequality and injustice
• Knowledge and understanding of a range of systemic, restorative, and attachment- informed practices and methodologies and commitment to the approaches within the practice framework.

Experience

• Significant experience of complex whole family direct work with children and their families within an early help context, in addition to formulating and implementing effective intervention plans with families
• Experience of professional leadership, holding accountability for the practice and development of others
• Experience of supervising, training and managing staff undertaking whole family work and with families who may be reluctant to engage voluntarily
• Experience of working within a multi-disciplinary and multi-agency context to support vulnerable families