Head of Service: Children in Care, Care Leavers, Fostering and Adoption

Our Children and Families services and our vision here in Staffordshire is rooted in four core principles that underpin everything we do:

• Families first - network and community always
• Right help, right time - proportionate, timely and co-produced with children and families
• Whole-system responsibility for supporting children and families to be happy, healthy and safe
• Permanence as belonging from day one
To achieve our ambition, we have taken a bold decision to transform our service structure and we're looking for talented, values-driven leaders who can champion these principles, inspire others and help shape the future of Children and Families services in Staffordshire. We want to create a more resilient, child-centred and future-focused system that enables children, young people and families to receive the right help at the right time. Through this redesign, we are strengthening leadership, increasing capacity and creating clearer lines of accountability across our services. These changes will support high-quality practice, stronger partnerships and better outcomes for children and families, while ensuring we are well positioned to respond to national reforms and future challenges.Main Responsibility As Head of Service, you will provide strategic leadership across Children in Care, Care Leavers, Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children (UASC), Fostering and Adoption services. You will ensure children and young people receive high-quality, safe and child-centred support, driving improvement, permanence, placement sufficiency and positive outcomes while fulfilling the council's responsibilities as a corporate parent. You will:
• Lead the strategic and operational delivery of Children in Care, Care Leavers, Fostering, Kinship, Adoption and UASC services, ensuring high-quality, compliant and outcome-focused practice.
• Drive service improvement, transformation and sufficiency planning to ensure children and young people have access to stable, appropriate placements and lifelong support networks.
• Provide strategic leadership for fostering, kinship and adoption services, including recruitment, retention, support and development of carers and adopters.
• Build strong partnerships across Staffordshire County Council, health, education, housing, commissioning, Together4Children and other agencies to improve outcomes for children and care leavers.
• Lead performance management, quality assurance and compliance activity, ensuring learning from audits, inspections, complaints and feedback drives continuous improvement.
• Oversee substantial budgets, resources and transformation programmes while ensuring services remain sustainable, effective and focused on achieving the best outcomes for children and young people., Throughout the recruitment process, you will be assessed against the three key competency areas:
• Children & Families Core Principles
• Leadership
• Technical and Role-Specific Competencies
The process will take the form of in person interview which will include,
• a role specific exercise
• an element involving our Children and Young People and a Foster Carer (to be confirmed on interview invitation)
  
  You will have:
• Degree or equivalent-level qualification.
• Qualified and registered Social Worker.
• Relevant professional or management qualification, or substantial management training and development.
• Substantial post-qualification experience within children's social care, including senior leadership and management responsibilities.
• Significant experience managing and developing teams, with a strong understanding of people management and employment practices.
• Proven experience leading high-performing services and driving service improvement.
• Experience managing investigations, complaints and complex service issues.
  
  The core of who we are as an organisation. Just like we all have personal values that shape our thoughts and behaviour, organisational values drive how we think and act collectively.
Our values were created and shaped by colleague feedback and national best practice and they sit at the heart of People Strategy: We have a real sense of community spirit that brings our people together. This feeling of belonging means we are all connected to what we do and take pride in the difference we make every day for Staffordshire people. We are ambitious and our sights are set firmly on a better future. We look forward and race ahead - that goes for your career too. Our benefits: We recognise that it is our employees that are central to everything we do. We aim to create a supportive working environment where employees can achieve their full potential and achieve a healthy work-life balance. In addition to your salary, as a member of staff, you will have access to Our rewards and benefits - Careers at Staffordshire,
• Salary Grade 15 - £85,531 - £91,782 plus £4,395 car allowance per annum