Why work for us: Employee benefits (southampton.gov.uk)

Senior Social Workers

We know social work is challenging. It requires stamina, resilience, and determination. But it is a career that enriches and transforms the lives of children and families.

Our social workers and family engagement workers need to be surrounded by confident, skilled, senior social workers who promote resilience and support them to provide transformational support to children and families.

We are looking for senior social workers across the service to fulfil this critical role. You may wish to extend or deepen your social work experience without stepping into a management role, or you might be looking for an opportunity to develop your social work career with greater responsibility and accountability.

With significant council investment and a brand-new practice framework that is rooted in systemic and restorative practice, we have launched our redesigned service structure comprehensive service redesign. We are building our services under our 20 permanent Heads of Service and Service Leads, and in partnership with our passionate and dedicated practitioners and managers, many of whom have been supporting Southampton’s most vulnerable children and families for many years.

We are looking for senior social workers to join our safeguarding, Children in Care and Care Leavers, and Children With Disabilities (Jigsaw) teams.

You need to be an experienced social worker with a proven track record of effective practice with children, young people and families with a range of complex needs and challenges. You need to have successfully completed, or be able to demonstrate a commitment to achieving, the Practice Educator Award.

Please note, most of these vacancies attract a market supplement of £2,000 pa

Looked after children and Care Leavers Service

Hours of work: Up to 37 hours per week Working pattern: Full-time or Part-time

Based in Civic Centre

Contact details for informal discussion:

For more information contact Ellie Steel, Service Lead ellie.steel@southampton.gov.uk 07825861932

As a service we care about providing brilliant permanent care for our children in care and care leavers. We want to continually improve and show our children in care and care leavers that we are aspirational for them and what they can achieve in their relationships, communities, education, training, and life’s big adventures. We are looking for senior social workers who can demonstrate genuine care for children, young people and carers and who will provide expert advice and support to social workers and personal Advisors.  

Our senior social workers will help us to continue to build a service where acceptance and lasting, trusting relationships matter more than anything else.

Senior Social Worker Jigsaw (Children with Disabilities Service)

We are very proud of our Children with Disabilities Service (Jigsaw), a specialist integrated service for children with complex disabilities, jointly commissioned by SCC and Southampton City Clinical Commissioning Group. It is located within the SEND service and has excellent connections with all of our partners whose support makes a difference to children with disabilities and their families. The remit of the team has recently been expanded, and additional resources allocated, to meet lower-level disability needs.

Our recent Ofsted found that disabled children receive ‘effective support from social workers in the Jigsaw team who understand their needs well’ and who spend time building relationships with children that help to capture children’s voices through bespoke and effective direct work.’ Inspectors said that assessments are comprehensive and lead to ‘detailed and measurable child in need and child protection plans’ with help that leads to sustained change.  Senior social workers in this service are critical to the further embedding of excellent practice and the building of great partnerships.

Safeguarding Service

Working pattern: Full-time or Part-time

Based in Civic Centre

Contact details for informal discussion:

For more information contact Jacqui Schofield Head of Service Jacqui.schofield@southampton.gov.uk 07795635282

The Safeguarding Service is a vibrant group of locality teams, all based at the Civic Centre, and with a strong, supportive and family culture. It includes a ‘one stop’ Children’s Resource Service. The safeguarding service provides purposeful, brief intervention alongside assessment, and support for children in need, children subject to a child protection plan and those within pre-proceedings and proceedings.

This service models our systemic and restorative practice framework, creating a culture where strong, child-centred practice thrives. We strongly promote relationship-based and solution-focused responses to safeguarding concerns by providing social workers with manageable workloads and high levels of support, including access to clinical guidance.

The service is dynamic and fast paced, ideally suited to practitioners with a broad range of skills and knowledge across the profession.  We promote a learning environment where people are encouraged to progress their passion and interest for interventions with children and their families, along with a real focus on partnership working across the city.  Applications are welcomed from those interested in joining a team and a service who are working towards an innovative provision for the children of Southampton.

As a senior social worker in the Childrens Resource Service you will be providing advice and guidance to partner agencies and members of the public, and advising social workers about the most challenging situations and referrals. You will utilise your highly tuned analytical skills to understand the information gathered to inform the level of intervention that is needed to promote a child’s lived experiences and future life chances.

As a senior social worker in our new Brief Intervention Hub you will work closely with our assessment teams to provide short-term, solution-focused support to children, young people and families. Our vision is to intervene early and skilfully, in partnership with families, to truly understand them and help them to overcome their difficulties.  We are looking for senior social workers who can understand the lives of children and their families and who are skilled at supporting less experiences social workers and mobilising creative packages of support to help families make enduring changes.

As a senior social worker in one of our Social Work with Families Teams you will provide targeted and evidence-based support to children and their families who are in need, subject to child protection plans or who are in proceedings or pre-proceedings.  You will join a dynamic service built on a strong, enabling family culture where practitioners are held and supported to practice at their best. Through small teams and manageable caseloads we want our senior social workers in these teams to have time to think, plan, support less experienced colleagues and spend meaningful time with families that leads to lasting change.

Young People’s Service

Working pattern: Full-time or Part-time

Based in Civic Centre

This new service is at the forefront of national thinking about what works for young people, especially those who are most at risk from contextual safeguarding risks in our communities. It brings together a range of already thriving teams, with strong and well-established local partnerships, to tackle the risks young people face and to safeguard, empower and inspire them to achieve their dreams.

We are proud of our new Risk Outside The Home pathway and that we have been selected as of one of only three local authorities to work with the University of Durham and Carlene Firman  on its implementation.

We are looking for a senior social worker who can demonstrate genuine care for young people and who believes in going the ‘extra mile’ to help them. The service needs social workers and youth workers who understand the importance of both intervening early and reducing risk and our senior social worker is key in modelling this approach.

Contact details for informal discussion:

For more information please contact Tim Nelson Tim.nelson@southampton.gov.uk 07714 440028

You will be a qualified social worker, able to support, lead and guide practitioners, and you will possess unique young person-centred skills and experience. You will be able to maximise partnerships with agencies to secure better outcomes for young people and keep them safe from harm.

Additional information:

• This post requires an Enhanced DBS check.
• For any posts that require a DBS check, if you have lived outside the UK within the last 5 years, you will be required to provide a Certificate of Good Conduct or a police certificate from the country/countries you have resided in. Kindly note that this is at the expense of the candidate, as well as any costs involved for translating into English.
• Please note the salary quoted is based on full time hours (37 hours). 
• 37 Working Hours per week
• Please note all adverts close to applications at 23.55pm on the specified closing date.

The supporting statement section of the application form must be completed, unless there are specific criteria questions for you to evidence against. Applications are shortlisted against the essential and desirable criteria found within the job description for the post. Please refer to the job description when completing your application form and evidence how you meet the required criteria/questions. A CV on its own will not be considered.

Unfortunately we are not able to accept applications that are made through a third party agency. We cannot guarantee that any correspondence sent from third party agencies will be responded to. To ensure your application is received please apply online at www.careers.southampton.gov.uk

Recruitment contact details: 023 8083 4033 or recruitment@southampton.gov.uk

To apply for the position please select the 'Apply for this job' button at the bottom of the page.

We are proud to be #DisabilityConfident and support fair recruitment practices. Find out how you can get involved at gov.uk/disability-confident