Social Care Practice Development Lead

What will you be doing?

As a Children’s Social Care Practice Development Lead, you will be supporting the professional development and assessment of our newly qualified Social Workers  (NQSWs) as they complete their ASYE (assessed and supported year in employment). Our NQSWs will undertake their ASYE year in a Practice Development Pod, each pod hosts 4 NQSWs and you will be leading a Pod. 

Within the Pod you will be providing day to day line management and support to our NQSWs including directing and guiding their work, demonstrating how to approach areas of work, and building their understanding and confidence in using various approaches, theories,  practice models, tools and applying methodologies. You will meet the NQSWs regularly for both individual case and group reflective and reflexive supervision using various models of reflection. 

You will also support NQSWs to be more self-aware and learn how to prioritise and plan their workload to meet deadlines including Statutory and Court directed timescales, whilst taking care of their wellbeing, which is a central component of our employee performance management and appraisal system, called Our Conversations.  

You will take the lead on quality assurance, monitoring and supporting all aspects of the NQSWs progress, including holding regular Our Conversation meetings with them, providing their ASYE Assessment, undertaking probation reviews, and offering in the flow of work teaching and coaching. You will meet regularly with Team managers to identify suitable work for the NQSWs to undertake, and you will feedback on case progress to support and maintain practice consistency and quality standards in line with Policies, Procedures, our Practice Handbook and Quality Assurance Framework.

You’ll be supported via matrix management arrangements, you’ll receive case specific guidance and direction from the Family Support and Safeguarding Team manager and you will also be a member of the Learning and Development Service, where your line management support will be provided from. 

Both the Family Support and Safeguarding Service and the Learning and Development Service are welcoming and friendly teams, who will provide you with ongoing support and development opportunities.  You will also be working closely with other learning and development colleagues who deliver our Children’s Social Care Academy offer including our ASYE programme and you will share your feedback from your work with NQSWs  and their teams to inform the wider development of the Learning and Development offer.

The work within the Family Support and Safeguarding service can be challenging and is rewarding, its underpinned with a strong ethos of strength based, relational, trauma informed and systemic approaches to improving lives for our children and families. Within this environment our NQSWs will be supported to build their skills and experience with Child in Need, Children in need of Protection, Public Law Outline and care proceedings, focusing on children up to the age of 18.  You will be providing daily support to the NQSWs to build their capability to take on more complex work and to gradually increase the volume of cases they are responsible for in these areas of practice. Recent experience and in depth knowledge of practicing Social Work in a family safeguarding environment is an essential requirement for this role. 

As well ensuring our NQSWs make satisfactory progress with their ASYE and that the scheme is administered in line with our guidelines, this role will also be responsible for ensuring that the NQSW provides relevant practice evidence to demonstrate that they can meet the competence of the Professional Capabilities Framework and Social Work post-qualifying standards: Knowledge and Skills statement and Social Work England Practice Standards. As part of this you will undertake reflective supervision as well as complete two out of the three direct observations of practice for the NQSW. 

The pod arrangement will be piloted for 12 months, following this initial period you will have the opportunity to undertake learning and development work to support the overall Children, Education and Families learning offer. This may include design and delivery of specialist learning interventions, mentoring colleagues, design and production of eLearning and other learning resources, or Commissioning and managing learning delivered by external suppliers. You may also be asked to support with subsequent pods for future cohorts. All these interventions are developed in line with priorities identified by the Children’s Education and Families leadership team and may be in response to quality assurance audits or inspection reports. 

About you

You will be an experienced social worker with recent family safeguarding experience. You will be someone who inspires others, is enthusiastic about ongoing professional development and lifelong learning. You will be comfortable with delivering change and can adapt and work flexibly in an evolving environment. 

You will have a passion and commitment for supporting and developing adult learners as they begin their social work career. You will advocate good practice and allow practitioners to reflect on their practice creating a learning environment which enables them to increase their skills and knowledge as they work with increasingly complex cases.

You will be generous with sharing your knowledge and expertise and will be skilled in breaking down processes and work tasks into smaller components and will be able to explain things clearly and sequentially to support NQSWs to flourish in their roles. 

You will have experience of supporting colleagues to develop in role and you may have gained this as a Social Work Practice Educator (PEPS 2) and/or ASYE assessor  If you don’t already have your PEPS 2 qualification, you will be supported to achieve this as it is an expectation of the role .  You should understand how professional learning occurs in the workplace and the support elements that can sustain this. An understanding of project planning and quality assurance of assessment is also required, along with strong analytical and communication skills, both verbal and written.

You must:

Be a qualified Social Worker with a Social Work England registration.

Be able to  work from a variety of locations and travel countywide independently.

The post holder will be based in our Stanton House office in Huntingdon, and will need to arrange their working week to be alongside the NQSWs who will have Fawcett House as their primary work base and the postholder should expect to be regularly with the NQSWs in Fawcett House. The NQSWs will also be in engaged in visits and community work, which they may need support with and may need be accompanied for. 

At Cambridgeshire County Council, we know that we work better if we can have flexibility in our working arrangements, and we want to help everyone achieve this, so please talk to us about the working pattern that would most suit you to be successful in this role. 

For more information or to chat about this opportunity, please contact Lollita Masuku on 01223 507121 or email lollita.masuku@cambridgeshire.gov.uk

Interviews are planned to take place on 27/03/2025

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. 

https://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/council/jobs-and-careers