Job title: Family placement officer.
Who's doing it: Mary Wilford.
Where: Wiltshire Council.
Job description: I work on the new bail and remand
fostering service, offering placements to young people on court
bail or remanded to local authority accommodation. I am also part
of the recruitment and training team for foster carers.
Skills/qualifications needed: You have to be a
qualified social worker, used to undertaking different types of
assessments and producing reports to deadline.
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What's good about the job? The ability to develop
a new service such as the bail and remand scheme and see it working
well. Providing training to potential foster carers is also
rewarding.
What's bad about the job? It is always upsetting
when we cannot recruit enough carers for children with complex
behavioural needs.
Pay: £26,625.
Grade: On a parity with standard social worker
grade.
What's the job like? As a recruitment and training
officer in the family placement team I help set a yearly agenda of
what we hope to achieve in terms of recruitment of more carers. We
run the skills to foster courses for applicants and develop our
advertising and information materials. We undertake tasks such as
designing posters for recruiting foster carers and carrying out
initial assessment interviews. As part of the bail and remand
fostering scheme we have three foster carers and my role is to
support them in looking after the young people. I have an important
role to play in aiding communication between the different services
involved with the young person to ensure their needs and those of
the foster carer are met. When situations go wrong in foster
placements you need to be able to think clearly under pressure and
make initial assessments of risk to all parties involved.
