Job at a glance
Social Worker Opportunities in Southampton Southampton City Council, Pathways Through Care Team is a service passionate and striving to achieve the best outcomes for our children we care for. Building relationships that enable our children to feel and know that they are held in mind is important to us. Working closely with partnership agencies to provide high challenge and high support, building strong relationships between practitioners and their families, enabling systemic and reflective work with our children and their networks alongside these strong relationships is also a priority.
After service improvement activity and with meaning and purpose to reduce the caseloads of social workers to enable and provide greater more in-depth support to our children we are now recruiting to more social worker positions than we have ever had before in our service. It is through this recognition and strive to improve quality and enhanced support to our children in care and I equal measure preserve the welfare of our staff that openings have become available.
These positions offer strong developmental opportunities for social workers who thrive on helping children be the best they can be. The vacancies within this part of the service will be your opportunity to build meaningful and influential relationships with the children we care for and help give you the sense of being able to make the difference. Our service offers strong and resilient practitioners the ground in which you are able to implement the real reasons you came into social work.
In June 2023, Ofsted saw strong evidence that: "The experiences and progress of children in care are good. Improvements to the quality of support provided to children in care have accelerated recently. Careful and successful workforce recruitment, a comprehensive strategy to improve children's placement stability and an impressive level of meaningful engagement by senior leaders with children in care all provide a firm foundation for further improvements".
Whilst permanence is at the forefront for all of our Children In Care, there is a robust review mechanism to ensure that we are providing stability to children and always achieving the right permanence for them. Family is important, and alongside ensuring permanence whilst in our care is the ongoing focus for us to ensure that we have the right plan for your children and that we promote identity and sense of belonging wherever possible.
Whilst making strong and memorable relationships, this service also gives creative and restorative practitioners other opportunities to make the difference and to utilise their strong assessment skills in working with birth families to always consider whether the right permanence is in place for our children. There are strong reunification drivers that help support children and young people to recognise their potential and make stronger links with immediate and extended family members as well as significant others in their lives.
Southampton are strongly invested in development of their staff and a proposed service restructure focuses on gradient development with senior social workers in post and assistant team manager posts to enable staff progression should they wish to. The services enjoys a good partnership with our practice development team and our fostering service which allows us to invest in bespoke training packages for our staff to enhance service delivery to our children.
The Service: The two Children In Care Teams supports children and young people who are looked after in foster care, cared for by connected carers or family, and specialist care which includes residential or semi-independent provisions. Within the same service are managers who support Personal Advisors and our care leavers. We share the same office space and the relationship between the two service areas is interactive and enables the journey to independence to be streamlined and young person focused.
Young people ageing towards their 18