Haringey – priority one, giving children and young people the best start in life

A feature sponsored by London Borough of Haringey

drama students

When we ask our social workers why they chose Haringey, they tell us that they find the breadth and variety of work exciting and challenging. This helps them to develop their practice in ways that they may not experience in other places. But why else are we different from any other boroughs?

We believe we speak in a language that children, families and professionals understand. We are passionate about taking a holistic and preventative approach and we have reorganised our services to keep children right at the centre of what we do so that as soon as they need support, we are there to provide it.

From our MASH (multi-agency safeguarding hub) through to our locality-based early help teams, we create plans that wherever possible keep children within their families and networks but we are not afraid to take the hard decisions if we need to keep children safe.

Our services are flexible and deliver interventions through a focus on direct work with families, making sure that the emphasis is on the family’s strength and using this as a spring board for change. We have developed collaborations between early help teams, children’s centres, schools and other universal settings. We think this is different and takes us back out into the community.

We have recruited more social workers so they can have lower caseloads and more time with children. We have also adopted Signs of Safety, an internationally recognised strengths-based and safety-focused approach to child protection work grounded in partnership and collaboration which we think gets to the heart of family work more quickly.

Families and professionals can contact one number to get high quality and timely access to help from the right team without a run around. We know it’s important that children and families only have to tell their story once.

We understand that the more we support our social workers, the better they are able to look after the children and young people in our borough. All our senior managers are permanent staff who have made this commitment. Ours is a learning environment and we are committed to supervision, support and continuing professional development for all of our employees. For our social workers we are working hard to prepare for the social work accreditation by 2020 to make sure you and the organisation have the right skills for the future.

We want you and your career to progress at Haringey and are looking for the very best people to join our teams and you can expect the best rewards and benefits in return.

You’ll enjoy a salary that is one of the highest offered among the London Boroughs, as well as a recruitment payment for eligible staff of up to £3,000 in your first year. In addition, we thank our amazing staff with a retention payment of up to £3,000 if they meet the eligibility criteria. Plus, we have a relocation package worth up to £7,000.

And don’t forget our generous annual leave entitlement, contributions to your pension and our excellent tube, rail and bus links.

Why not come and meet us and make up your own mind. We are holding a speaker event and recruitment evening on Thursday 24th November 2016 in our offices in Wood Green, London.

You will have the chance to meet me and some of my management team, as well as the staff who provide first class care to the young people of our borough.

Tomorrow’s leaders, artists and innovators are busy growing up here. Our vision it to be a place where children and young people thrive, achieve and have the very best start in life, including world class education. The opportunity to create the kind of Children’s Service that young people need and deserve is very real.

Come and join our journey! View our jobs page here.

Jon Abbey, director of children’s services

Jon Abbey

More from Community Care

Comments are closed.