Senior Practitioner – Court Team (within Safeguarding & Care Planning)

Focusing on the child, not forgetting you

Salary: up to £46,062 per annum

In addition, you will receive £2000 annual retention payment, £2000 Golden Hello and other excellent benefits including a lease car

Location: Bromley Civic Centre/flexible working

Looking for your next exciting adventure in social work? Look no further!

Services for children and families in Bromley have made a remarkable leap forward to ‘good’ overall with leadership that has an ‘outstanding’ impact on social work practice, according to Ofsted. We are proud of the findings and letter from Ofsted from our recent Focused Visit on the care and support we offer to our children looked after. You can view the letter from Ofsted here.

Bromley are seeking highly talented and ambitious registered Senior Practitioners to join us on our journey to excellence.

Bromley is committed to making children and young people in the Borough its top priority.

The Safeguarding and Care Planning Service works in partnership with other agencies such as Police, Health and Education, and aims to ensure children grow up with the best life chances and receive safe and consistent care.

Our values and behaviours have a key part to play in how staff carry out the work of the Council and how we engage and build working relationships with key partner agencies. This framework outlines the desired behaviours that align with our established values, to help create a workforce that are able to deliver services that are seen as ‘excellent’ in the eyes of local people. To read more about our REAL Values and Behaviours, please click here: Values and Behaviours.pdf

The Court Team is a specialist team within the Safeguarding Service. The focus of the work is with children at significant risk of harm where intervention of the court is necessary to protect them. Many of these children become looked after by the Local Authority in the interim and subsequently may not be able to return to their parents. They may be permanently cared for elsewhere by living with either extended family, long term foster care or adoption under a Court Order.

The Court Team consists of a Team Manager and 6 Senior Practitioners.

This team works in partnership with the Bromley Children’s Legal Team to ensure that children’s cases that are presented to court are well prepared and timely.

The position requires recent court experience and the ideal candidate would be keen to join a team that specialises in court work within a safeguarding team.

Knowledge/Experience

The Prospective Candidate Needs To

• Be very well organised, have the ability to communicate effectively and articulate evidence in care proceedings.
• Write reports to a high standard, that are concise, evidence based for court and adoption panel (i.e Child Permanency and Adoption Placement Reports)
• Meet court timelines for submission of statements, care plans, and to effectively parallel plan for children considering all relevant options to secure permanent care at the earliest opportunity for the child.
• Undertake assessments (i.e parenting and together and apart assessments), plan appropriate intervention and work creatively with children and families who are in court proceedings
• Have a good understanding of safeguarding thresholds and ability to assess and analysis risks, including good knowledge of child development and attachment theories and permanency needs of children of all ages.
• Be able to effectively undertake direct work with children and have the child at the centre of all care work planning.
• Hold a limited caseload (up to 11 children) to ensure that you implement the highest standards of practice.
• Work in partnership with colleagues across teams and specialisms and partner agencies to ensure that effective and timely assessments are undertaken of children’s developmental needs and the needs of their families. This will include working in partnership with legal representative and Guardians within the court arena.
• Undertake risk analysis/risk assessment based on informed professional judgement and use of primary evidence to evaluate the parenting capacity to make changes and ensure they can care for their children safely or whether alternative plans should be implemented.

You will be joining an ambitious service with strong leadership and clear lines of support. As part of the Bromley Promise there will be a dedicated two-week induction programme upon joining us.

We are confident that with your support, we will continue to provide high quality social care services to our children in Bromley as set out in our improvement and transformation plan. In return we ask that you bring your passion, dedication and skills to us.

The Bromley Promise

• Manageable caseloads for every Social Worker
• Dedicated time for reflective supervision
• Generous Annual Leave Entitlement including an additional three days
• Small Cluster teams with one team manager supervising four Social Workers
• Two-week protected induction programme
• Excellent Learning and development opportunities with bespoke training for every social worker
• Social Workers and team managers have easy and regular access to the leadership team

Applicants must have completed their ASYE.

To view the JD and Person Specification please click here.

To view our Roadmap to Excellence document please click here.

To view our Social Work Practice Standards please click here.

Equal Opportunities Statement

We are committed to achieving equal opportunities in employment and service delivery. We offer a generous package including competitive pay, career average pension scheme, flexible working practices and the Bromley employee benefits scheme; Cycle2Work and a wide range of unique discounts.