Contract Type: Permanent
Hours: 37hrs
Salary: H4 £45,648 – £50,749.
Closing date: 21st August at 23:59
Team Manager (Awaken- Wider Exploitation Team)
Blackpool Children’s Services has been on an incredible journey, you could say it’s been a roller coaster! It’s been tough here at times, as we have worked through our OFSTED improvement journey and the intervention from the DFE and such intensive improvement and change has impacted on our workforce.
However, we are now developing a reputation as a good place to practice social work and the DfE’s appointed Commissioner recently recommended removal from DfE intervention. Our latest OFSTED inspection was positive and we are now seeing the positive impact of the hard work undertaken, both for our workforce and for the children and families we serve.
Our services are stable, we have an experienced and committed stable senior leadership team under our new DCS Vicky Gent and are seeing that children and families are now receiving better services.
At the heart of this improvement has been our investment in social work practice and our social workers. Our shared sense of purpose is based upon the Blackpool Families Rock values, culture and practice principals and we are proud this was co-produced with Blackpool’s children, young people, their families and our partnership agencies.
Our teams are small and strengthened by a Supervision Policy which enables a supportive relationship with your manager. We are committed to reducing our caseloads, enabling our social workers to spend time developing trusted relationships with children and their families.
Our staff care about Blackpool’s children and families, and we care about them.
We value that our staff are fully committed and often work above and beyond- we’ve seen that even more during the Pandemic. In return we therefore offer a flexible approach to working including remote and home working and flexibility with working hours to allow you to meet your own family’s needs too.
If you would like to come and join us on the next stage of this journey please get in touch, you will be guaranteed invaluable experience, a manageable caseload, interesting work and good quality management support.
We’re looking for an enthusiastic and experienced candidate to co-lead Blackpool’s renowned Awaken Service. We are looking for a team manager with a proven ability to manage and supervise staff within a multi-agency setting. You will be expected to have excellent communication skills and knowledge or experience with regard to working with children who may be vulnerable to exploitation or affected by exploitation. You’ll be working in a multi-agency setting, helping us to lead the way in responding to all different forms of exploitation; child exploitation, child trafficking, county lines, radicalisation, FGM and missing children and young people.
The scope of work has reduced to focus on all forms of CE creating capacity for a more specialist approach, developing the skills and satisfaction of our workforce. We have a clear commitment to working creatively with our children and young people and as a partnership are committed to achieving better outcomes. Our focus within the improvement journey has been on developing trauma informed staff, developing the ethos of relationship based practice with a more robust approach to enable a strength based model, trusted relationship approach focused on impact and outcomes.
A strengths based and trusting relationship, trauma informed model of work is at the core of the work undertaken by the Awaken team.
A trauma-informed approach includes:
- Recognising the signs/symptoms of trauma;
- Acknowledging the impact of traumatic experiences;
- Actively seeking to avoid re-traumatisation;
- Integrating an understanding of trauma in organisational policy and practice.
The Awaken team utilises an integrated co-located model of joint practice to tackle all forms of child exploitation in Blackpool providing a multi-agency response to the following:
- Child Criminal Exploitation (CCE)
- Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE)
- Modern Slavery/Trafficking
- Missing From Home
In recognising and responding to contextual safeguarding issues, services in Blackpool have re-affirmed their commitment to recognising and responding to child sexual exploitation, child criminal exploitation and the criminalisation of our young people. Through the contextual safeguarding strategy we will achieve:
- Shared understanding of risks;
- Shared workforce development;
- Shared pathways;
- Shared responsibility to use our collective powers and tools to protect our vulnerable young people.
Your responsibilities will involve;
- Supervising the Social Workers and Family Workers on the team and ensuring that operational joint work practices optimise the opportunities to safeguard and support children at risk of all forms of Child Exploitation, Trafficking and Modern Slavery, and Missing from Home.
- Widening the scope of Awaken as above, and including other multi agency partners within the team including police, education, health, licensing and our sexually harmful behaviour project worker
- Co-Lead on the development of our transition offer to for over 18’s and outreach work
- With support from colleagues in Police and Health allocate resources on needs led basis.
- Review and quality assure the work of the Awaken Social Workers and Family Workers and will ensure that Awaken Social Workers, Family Workers and other professionals in the team are supported to fulfil their duties, ensuring children are seen regularly in line with their needs and that organisational timescales are adhered to so as to ensure a robust response.
- Allocate Return Home Interviews to Family Workers, ensure these are completed in 72 hours, quality assure the work and identify themes, patterns and map associations where contextual safeguarding concerns are identified.
- Lead and chair the Daily Exploitation and Missing (DEM) meetings and support other managers across the service with specialist advice and support in the field of Child Exploitation.
- Attend and support Strategy Meetings, MFH intervention meetings, Care planning meeting or other Multi-agency meetings where there are concerns of child exploitation. Providing advice and support to colleagues and partners
- Support Police and other colleagues across the partnership to disrupt and prosecute Child Exploitation at every opportunity. This includes highly confidential briefings for targeted police operations which require careful consideration about recording and timeliness of information sharing.
- Support the Blackburn with Darwen, Blackpool and Lancashire Children Safeguarding Assurance Partnership (CSAP) to train professionals to identify and respond to contextual safeguarding needs to increase awareness, reporting and safeguarding of vulnerable children.
- Use data and qualitative information to problem profile and map the scale of contextual safeguarding needs
- Raising awareness of exploitation across the partnership and within the community
- Be responsible for identifying appropriate referrals to NRM, and progress discussion and referral with police colleagues utilising a child first approach.
What we offer
- Pay: our salary offer is strong and candidates who are recruited from the same or similar role may be eligible for a salary match within the above salary banding
- Genuine flexible working: family-friendly patterns such as flexible start/finish times and state of the art technology support, so you can spend some time working from home.
- Small teams, clear line management and practice development support
- Caseloads: they’re going down, they’re manageable, varied and appropriate to your role.
- Easy and regular access to the senior leadership team & Principal Social Worker
- Social Work England registration fee is paid
- 25 days’ annual leave (rising to 27 after 5 yrs & 31 days after 10 yrs) and the option to buy an additional 10 days on top of that, via salary sacrifice.
- Encouragement to take your TOIL back – we mean it!
- Supervision: our strengthened supervision policy supports you to build a trusting relationship with your manager.
- Leadership is ‘good’ and ‘stable’ – DfE apppinted Independent Commissioner.
- Career development is focused on supporting your development.
- Relocation support up to £8,000
- Blackpool Council Staff benefit scheme: Social Work Benefits and Diversity | Next Step Blackpool
- Employee Assistance Programme, to support you through challenging times e.g. with free counselling, financial or legal advice.
- Mental Health First Aiders that are here for you
- Principal Social Worker Best Practice Awards are our way of saying ‘thank you’ to our amazing and committed staff.
It all adds up to an exciting package.
We’ve strengthened our recruitment process too – You’ll get a quick response to any expression of interest and application. We offer regular virtual interview days and we will keep in contact with you from the day you are offered a role to your first day with us.
For further information and to arrange a discussion about the role, please contact Service Manager Deborah MacQueen, Deborah.Macqueen@blackpool.gov.uk or Head of Service Amanda.lynch@blackpool.gov.uk
Click here to view the Job Description.
We are committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children/vulnerable adults. This post is subject to satisfactory two year reference history, Disclosure & Barring Service (DBS) check, medical clearance, evidence of any essential qualifications and proof of legal working in accordance with the Asylum and Immigration Act 1996.
For further information on the health and wellbeing support on offer during your employment, please see here.
Have you got what it takes to ride the Roller Coaster ride of Social Work in Blackpool? for further information on the career path and development opportunities available at Blackpool please see here.