About the role
In November 2024, the Department for Education published the policy statement ‘Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive: Breaking down the barriers to opportunity’, outlining the vision and core legislative proposals for children's social care. This followed the December 2023 National Framework for Children’s Social Care, which detailed the vision for the system and desired outcomes.
The Families First Partnership programme has been established to support reforms, aiming to take a whole- system approach to rebalancing children’s social care towards early intervention.
Following the launch, we are building additional local capacity to drive forward these changes to ensure that children and families in our local area benefit from earlier help and stronger support. This is an exciting time of change and a unique opportunity to play a key role in shaping one of the most significant national shifts in children’s social care in recent decades.
What will you be doing?
We are seeking an experienced Programme Manager to provide strategic direction and leadership for the programme. In this role, you will be responsible for driving system-wide reform, managing key deliverables and leading the project team.
As the Programme Manager, you will balance risk and resources to maximise benefits and efficiencies. You will work collaboratively with senior stakeholders, staff, and external partners to achieve objectives, ensuring that services are designed and delivered to meet the needs of Cambridgeshire’s residents.
Your ability to navigate complex challenge while delivering change at pace will be key to your success.
About you
To succeed in this role, you will have:
- Significant experience in leading large-scale, complex change and transformation programmes that have delivered measurable outcomes and benefits.
- Strong knowledge and experience in implementing programme management methodologies in a complex environment.
- Exceptional leadership skills, with the ability to inspire and manage teams while driving performance improvement.
- Excellent communication and relationship-building skills, capable of working with senior managers, elected Members, and external partners.
- A strategic approach, with the ability to align programme objectives with the broader corporate vision and values.
We welcome candidates who are passionate about delivering outcome-focused change in public services. While local government experience, and in particular experience of delivering change in services for children and young people, is advantageous, we are open to candidates with experience in other sectors who can bring fresh perspectives to the role.
If you have any questions, please contact Jemma.Roberts@cambridgeshire.gov.uk
Our benefits
We value our colleagues in Cambridgeshire County Council and have developed a number of benefits in addition to the basics like annual leave, sick pay, pension and mileage…
- A comprehensive wellbeing package to cover all aspects of wellbeing, both in and out of work, which can also be accessed by your family
- Buy up to 4 weeks additional annual leave (pro-rata) through our salary sacrifice scheme
- Take your bank holidays flexibly to better suit your personal circumstances
- Make Additional Voluntary Contributions (Shared AVCs) to your pension with tax and National Insurance savings
- Access to development opportunities, apprenticeships and qualified coaches to support your personal and professional growth
- Paid volunteering hours each year so you can make a positive impact on our community during your normal working day
- Access to Peer Support Groups through our IDEAL staff equality, diversity and inclusion network
- Opportunities to nominate and receive Employee Recognition Awards
- An Our Cambs Rewards account, giving you access to in-store and online discounts as well as our Car Lease and Cycle to Work schemes
Take a look at our Employment Benefits Brochure attached to this advert to find out more.
About us
Cambridgeshire is a great place to work and live with a diverse population, an urban centre in Cambridge, historic Isle of Ely, Huntingdon and St Ives as well as more rural landscapes.
Our four values are central to our culture, driving everything we do.
We are proud to serve the diverse communities of Cambridgeshire and want our workforce to be reflective of this diversity, which we firmly believe benefits our colleagues, the organisation and our communities. If you don’t meet every single requirement in the job role but think this could be you, please don’t be put off. We are committed to building a workplace that is compassionate and inclusive as well as diverse, so if you think you could be a good candidate for this role please consider applying and speak to the recruiting manager if you have any questions.
Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, along with our employee network 'IDEAL' and self-organised peer support groups help us to foster an inclusive, supportive and safe working environment where people feel valued, respected, and empowered. We collect relevant diversity data for monitoring as part of the recruitment process to understand the diversity of our applicants and monitor any trends throughout the recruitment processes so that we can take meaningful action.
We are proud to be a Disability Confident Employer. We fully support providing reasonable adjustments throughout our recruitment process, as well as when you join us, and we encourage candidates to contact the Hiring Manager, whose details can be found in the advert, to discuss any adjustment needs. Some examples of adjustments could include additional time to complete an assessment or printing a document on pastel coloured paper with larger font size and line spacing. We would value talking about what might be possible to enable you to join us and thrive, so if there is something that would help you to do your best during your journey with us, please get in touch.
Visit our jobs and careers section to find out more about our wide range of learning and development opportunities; apprenticeships; our wellbeing package; staff benefits; our commitment to equality, diversity and Inclusion.
Attached documents
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