Specialist Practitioner

What will you be doing?

The job will involve the following:

• To provide a targeted SEND Specialist Practitioner service to home, setting and school for children, young people and their families.
• To practically support transitions for children into settings or schools, developing practitioner capacity to understand and meet the child’s needs.  
• To facilitate the participation of children in learning and social activities within the settings and schools.
• To help families access services relevant to their circumstances and needs.
• To support the inclusion of children and young people within their mainstream school who are at risk of suspension and permanent exclusion.
• To deliver high quality evidence based training to parents, settings and schools.

About you

You will have a background in a related area such as a nursery worker, teaching assistant or learning support assistant and be able to evidence experience of working in schools, pre-school settings, the home environment, or specialist provision supporting SEND.     

Ideally, you will have knowledge and experience of working with pre-school and/or primary/secondary schools and children with complex and challenging additional needs, who may present with challenging behaviours.  You will need to be able to work both independently and jointly with other professionals as directed, and have the confidence and knowledge to deliver structured packages of support.  This may include modelling strategies to school and setting based colleagues, working with groups or individually with children in settings.   

You could be tasked to work with primary aged pupils who are receiving home tuition due to long-term medical needs alongside a specialist teacher.  You could be part of the team around the Family Support Plan, sharing information with other professionals, in order to ensure positive outcomes for children, young people and families and promote parental understanding of their child’s needs.

You will need to have accurate recording skills to maintain a record of involvement for all supported casework.  

Given the nature of this peripatetic role, you will be required to travel within the county, with an administrative base in Cambridge and the possibility of hybrid working.

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

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