Quality & Practice Co-ordinator for Inclusion

About the role: As our Best Start Quality & Practice Lead for Inclusion, you will provide leadership in inclusion, quality assurance, workforce development, and service improvement across Best Start Family Hubs and the wider Family Support Service. Working closely with colleagues and partners, you will help embed inclusive, evidence informed approaches that support positive outcomes for children and families. This is not a case holding or line management position. Instead, you will influence through coaching, mentoring, quality assurance, reflective practice, and partnership working. You will:

• Lead inclusion focused quality assurance activities, including observations, audits, practice reviews, and thematic analysis.
• Develop and support high quality inclusive practice across the Family Support Service.
• Coach, mentor, and support practitioners, managers, and SEND Champions.
• Deliver workforce development and training on SEND, inclusion, early identification, and family centred practice.
• Use performance and outcome data to identify trends, inform improvement activity, and measure impact.
• Strengthen family voice and co-production, ensuring lived experience informs service design and delivery.
• Work collaboratively with health services, schools, early years settings, SEND professionals, and voluntary sector partners.
• Support delivery of Hertfordshire's Best Start priorities, improving child development and school readiness outcomes.
  
  Significant experience within Family Support, Early Help, Early Years, Education, Social Care, Family Hubs, or a related field.
• Strong knowledge of SEND, inclusion, child development, and early intervention.
• Experience of quality assurance, practice reviews, auditing, or service improvement.
• Proven ability to coach, mentor, and develop practitioners without direct line management authority.
• Experience using data, outcomes, and evidence to inform decision making and improvement activity.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, and relationship building skills.
• A strong commitment to equity, inclusion, anti-discriminatory practice, and family-centred approaches., Relevant professional qualification in Early Years, Education, Family Support, Social Care, or a related discipline.
• Level 5 qualification (or equivalent experience) appropriate for a practice leadership role.
• Safeguarding training.
• Evidence of continuing professional development in areas such as SEND, Inclusion, Coaching and Mentoring, Quality Assurance, or Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
  
  One YMCA and its subsidiaries, the Early Childhood Partnership (ECP) and Signpost are on an exciting journey to double our impact by 2025. We are over half way through an exciting new strategy launched in the first hour of the new decade, via email where all staff and volunteers were invited to put themselves forward to apply and attend an intensive, three-day Kickstarter Event.
By the end of these three days, there was a brilliantly multi-faceted set of themes and ideas, which formed the starting point for the rest of the Mission 25 process to build on. The aim of Mission 25 is to give every staff member and volunteer the opportunity to play their part in shaping the strategy to do "more and better, together" so that we double our impact by 2025. We deliver a vast array of services across Herts, Beds and Bucks that reach over 135,000 individuals annually. These include:
• Provision of over 700 units of accommodation for homeless people
• Move on accommodation for individuals moving onto independent living
• Housing and practical/emotional support for young asylum seekers
• Community HUBs hosting a range of activities and meeting space hire
• Childcare provision in Hertfordshire
• Family support through a network of children's and family centres covering Hertfordshire and Bedford
• Therapeutic and non-therapeutic support for male and female victims of domestic abuse and their children
• Independent sexual violence services across Bedfordshire, Luton and Hertfordshire
• Domestic abuse perpetrator reform programmes across Bedfordshire
• Youth services offering emotional wellbeing support and youth club opportunities for 11-19 year olds alongside our National Airplay programme funded by the RAF Benevolent Fund
• A community gym where everyone can enjoy the benefits of physical exercise Our values remain at the forefront of how we operate as a charity, and it is important to us that all staff and volunteers can fully buy in to our ethos.