Best Start in Life Family Hub Practice Manager

South Gloucestershire is committed to giving every child the best start in life. As Best Start in Life Family Hub Practice Manager, you will provide operational leadership for services delivered through Family Hubs, Children's Centres and outreach, helping families access welcoming, practical and coordinated support across their local community. Working with the Early Help Strategic Lead, your team and local partners, you will strengthen early intervention and ensure families receive the right help at the right time. The role combines supportive leadership, partnership working and performance oversight with a clear focus on family wellbeing, safeguarding, home learning and reducing barriers to support. What you will be doing This role provides day-to-day leadership for the local Best Start in Life Family Hub offer. You will manage services for families with children aged 0-5 while contributing to the wider Family Hub offer for children and families aged 0-19, or up to 25 for young people with SEND. A strong focus on quality, staff development and family voice runs throughout the post. Through reflective supervision, effective use of data and close partnership working, you will help the team deliver evidence-based programmes, confident signposting and coordinated Early Help, while supporting parents and carers to shape local services.

• You will lead, supervise and develop Family Hub and administrative staff, supporting confident decision-making, strong practice, wellbeing and performance.
• You will manage hub-based, outreach, group and one-to-one activity, ensuring evidence-based programmes, information and practical family support are delivered consistently.
• You will strengthen partnership delivery, referral pathways and signposting across health, education, welfare, housing, youth, community and voluntary services.
• You will oversee safeguarding, quality, health and safety, performance data, team resources and continuous improvement across the local Family Hub offer.
• You will develop Parent and Carer Panels and other opportunities for families to influence accessible, welcoming and responsive local services., We're a positive, proactive team, with supportive management who listen to ideas, and act on them - fast. Coming out of Covid, we've seen rapidly increasing demand to support children and families with ever more complex needs. We recognised the pressure this was placing on our frontline teams and to ensure we can deliver on our high ambitions for our children and young people, we're making significant new investments in these areas.
• We're expanding our frontline teams. We've created 60 new roles, which will mean consistently lower caseloads for our social workers, so they can deliver genuinely child-centred support.
• We're making it easier for staff to work flexibly, enabling them to work how and where they need to, to do their jobs as well as they can.
• We're strengthening our reward offer to recognise the fantastic job our staff do.
• We're adopting clinical supervision to support staff because we recognise that our work can be tough emotionally. It builds on our training offer, helping staff to develop critical thinking skills and support their work with families.
• We're building early intervention partnership capacity because we know we can achieve better results for families if we get multi-agency working right.
• We're increasing what we spend on evidence-based specialist expertise and capabilities, including specialist trauma support and an in-house psychologist to support families.
• We're introducing new initiatives like the Mockingbird extended family model in fostering, a Caring Dads scheme and a new approach to domestic abuse.
• We're enhancing an already exceptional training and development offer. A new systemic practice academy will drive our focus on relationship based social work.
• Finally, it might be boring, but we're investing in our systems and processes, because we want them to help us, rather than hold us back in our work.
These investments demonstrate our absolute focus on providing an excellent, family-centred service. We keep workloads manageable, we welcome flexible working and we're recognised for the opportunities we provide for career development, training and secondment. It's not the managers who say this - it's our colleagues. Right now, we're looking for talented, ambitious social workers to join us across our adult and children's services. Our commitments to you - Unmatched training, development and secondment opportunities - A proactive team with supportive management - Commitment to excellence - Realistic caseloads - Flexible working opportunities - A comprehensive Assessed and Supported Year in Employment (ASYE) programme South Gloucestershire offers a rich mix of stunning countryside and urban culture. At the same time, due to our being near to the M4, M5 and M32, it's an easy commute from Bristol, Bath, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Somerset and, with the bridge charges recently abolished, south Wales.


• We require you to hold a recognised and relevant professional qualification, such as youth, early years, teaching, social care or a Level 5 management qualification appropriate to the role.
• You will have significant post-qualification experience in children's services, including staff supervision and delivery of support for vulnerable or disadvantaged children and families.
• You will bring strong knowledge of Early Help, safeguarding, Best Start in Life guidance, national issues affecting children and families, and effective approaches to improving outcomes.
• You will be a confident leader and communicator, able to manage performance, team budgets and sensitive issues while building effective relationships with families, staff and partners.
• You will have good IT skills and the ability to use data, reports and specialist systems to support oversight, accountability and service improvement.
  
  At South Gloucestershire Council, we'll support you at every moment.
  
  This is a Limited-Term position, lasting 1 year from your start date.
• Although this post is advertised as full time, we welcome applications from experienced managers seeking part-time, job-share or flexible working arrangements.
• An enhanced DBS check is required, and you will need to travel throughout the authority and surrounding area, with occasional work outside normal office hours.
Interviews are expected to be held on Tuesday 1st September 2026. How a career at South Gloucestershire Council is different
• As part of our benefits package, you will receive generous annual leave (pro rata), employee wellbeing support and you will have access to a range of staff discounts, including eye tests, travel, shopping and leisure activities.
• We recognise that our diverse team of skilled and dedicated people make us a great place to work. We welcome applications from everyone and ensure that individuals are selected, promoted and developed on the basis of their merits and abilities.
• What's special here is the strength of the team ethos. We are a relatively small local authority, so managers know staff well. They can plan their services to ensure teams have manageable caseloads and have effective supervision so feel supported to make decisions which are right for the children and young people they work with.
Our teams at South Gloucestershire Council are making a real difference to the lives of people who live, work and learn here.
• We're building and shaping communities which people are proud of.
• We're providing essential services across our communities to ensure they are safe and well maintained.
• We've achieved a great deal, but we need talented and dedicated people to ensure we continue to make a difference.