Children and Families Group Manager

Gloucestershire West area - Gloucester and Forest of Dean

An internal career move has created a vacancy in our senior leadership team.

We are looking for a new Group Manager to work with the Assistant Director for Gloucestershire West, alongside another Group Manager.

In this exciting role, you will play a key part in our ambition to provide consistently good and outstanding services to children and families using relational practice, and systemic approaches.

About us:

Right child, right support, right time, every time

We are working together to support families and communities to give every child the best chance of a happy and rewarding life, especially those who need more help. Gloucestershire offers a range of opportunities to develop your career, supported by a phenomenal Social Work Academy offer, a developing systemic practice methodology, an ambitious leadership team and an award-winning workforce.

Gloucestershire Children's Services are improving. Our latest Ofsted inspection (February 2022) identified that:

'Significant progress has been made in many areas of Gloucestershire's children's services significant financial investment and the backing of political leaders, has led to improved services that are now more effective in meeting the needs of children and families'.

We are a local authority adopting, and training all colleagues in, systemic social work practice. We are an authority that takes a relational approach to working with families and focuses on what needs to change in the system around a child and family to enable children to thrive. This is a great opportunity to develop your career within GCC.

About the role:

You will provide oversight of the following:

• leading and embedding systemic practice with children and families
• enabling children to remain with birth families wherever possible
• protecting children who experience, or are at risk of, significant harm
• acting as corporate parent to children unable to remain within birth families
• providing system leadership as a statutory safeguarding partner

Leading your teams in delivering a culture of high-quality practice that achieves good outcomes for vulnerable children and young people, you will establish clear goals and expectations in line with GCC priorities and provide challenging and supportive line management to ensure these are met.

You will:

• line manage team managers with responsibilities for statutory safeguarding work (children in need of help and protection and children in care until permanence is achieved, and children where pre- or care proceedings are in place) and have around 50 staff members under your overall leadership.
• be accountable for the rigorous implementation of the children's services quality assurance framework to monitor and review performance (both compliance and quality), take action to build on strengths and respond to areas for improvement, and support and liaise with the Assistant Director to contribute to their high-level service delivery planning.
• be part of the leadership team looking across the whole service and working with others to develop policies, review and analyse information to learn and embed change, to ultimately ensure that children and families consistently receive a high-quality service.
• be responsible for 2 budgets supporting work with children under s17 and children in care, scrutinising spend, forecasting and effectively managing within budget.