Senior Practitioner-Family Help Service
| Posting date: | 25 July 2025 |
|---|---|
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 24 August 2025 |
| Location: | Leicester, LE18 4PE |
| Company: | Leicestershire County Council |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | 5790 |
Summary
Organisation: Leicestershire County Council
Work Location: Bassett Street, South Wigston, Leicestershire LE18 4PE
Worker Category: Field-Based Worker
Salary: £42,498 - £46,344 per annum (pro rata for part-time) Pay Award Pending plus market premia of £2,250
Working Hours: 37 hours per week
Contract Type: Permanent
Closing Date: 17th August 2025
Interview Date(s): 27th August 2025
Right support at the right time’. Working with the whole family to offer practical help, building on strengths and community support to improve daily life, positively impacting upon outcomes for children and young people.
About the Role
Family Help is a service that offers intensive and timely family support for families on the continuum from Targeted Early Help to Child in Need.
Learning from the recommendations in the Independent National Review of Children’s Social Care and the government response to this, we have created an integrated service called Family Help, where both Social Workers and Keyworkers (AQWs) engage, support and encourage families to make positive changes in their lives.
Family Help focuses on strong and consistent professional relationships, responding more quickly and intensively to families so that they get the right help at the right time. It builds on workers’ capacity to listen, understand, and respond to trauma and supports children and families in building strength, resilience, confidence, and parenting capacity. By unlocking the potential of family and community networks, we support more children to stay safely at home and, when this is not possible, to remain with wider family and friends.
By supporting staff through regular reflective supervision and ensuring positive training and career pathways, we hope that staff will embrace this more intensive way of working and remain in post longer, providing our families with the professional consistency they need, want, and deserve.
Come and join us!
We have an exciting opportunity in Blaby, Oadby and Wigston for a Senior Practitioner, who will support the Team Manager in ensuring that a high-quality Child in Need service is provided for children and their families.
A DBS enhanced check for a regulated activity is required for this post.
For information on our approach to the recruitment of ex-offenders, please see our policy statement.
About You
We want a creative and supportive worker who will provide intensive and focused support to families in their homes. Developing effective relationships and using strengths-based and trauma-informed approaches will help to motivate and encourage behaviour change, leading to positive differences in children’s lives.
To apply for this post, you must respond to and provide evidence of the following essential criteria within your personal statement. This should be no more than 1,000 words.
- Degree in Social Work approved by the Social Work England (SWE) or equivalent social work qualification, ie Certificate of Qualification in Social Work or Diploma in Social Work. The worker must also be registered with Social Work England.
- Experienced level 3 social worker in a children’s social work team.
- Experience working in access/duty/intake, children in need, child protection, care proceedings, safeguarding, and looked-after children work.
- Experience of undertaking Section 47 enquiries.
- Experience in supervising social work students.
- Experience in using performance indicators to monitor and improve performance.
- Able to analyse information to reach sound decisions, often under pressure, and take responsibility for their outcome and regularly report to the Team manager.
You must also have an understanding of, and commitment to, equality, diversity and inclusion.
In addition, we also expect you to share our commitment to our values and will ask you to provide evidence when you have demonstrated them as part of the selection process.
Reasonable adjustments will be considered for applicants with a disability.
Interested in Flexible Working?
We are keen to support employees in balancing their working lives with other commitments. Therefore, wherever possible, we will consider working arrangements that suit an individual's personal circumstances while still meeting the needs of the Council. If you would like to discuss the possible flexible working options that might be applicable to this role, please contact the person named below. This may include requests for term-time working, part-time hours, compressed hours, flexible start and finish times, home/remote working, etc.
Every role within the Council has a defined working style which determines where they can work. The worker category applicable to this post is detailed in the above advert. You can find out more about our worker categories in the Our Working Styles page on our career site.
For more information or an informal discussion, please contact:
Helen Farquharson, Team Manager
Telephone: 0116 305 8264
Email: helen.farquharson@leics.gov.uk
How to Apply
Leicestershire County Council is an inclusive organisation which is on a journey to embed and celebrate equality, diversity and inclusion at every level. We warmly welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds, as having a diverse workforce with different perspectives and ideas is fundamental to our values and enriches the services we offer our communities. We particularly welcome applicants from Ethnically Diverse and LGBTQ+ communities and people with disabilities to create a balanced workforce and one that reflects the communities we serve. Applicants with a disability who meet the criteria listed in the 'About You' section above will be offered an interview under the Disability Confident Employer Scheme.
To apply for this job, please click on the apply button. You will need to upload a supporting statement explaining how you meet the criteria listed in the 'About You' section above. For more information, see the How to Apply section on our career site.
We reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive sufficient applications for the role. Therefore, if you are interested, please submit your application as early as possible.
If you have any technical issues when applying for this post or you want to request an application pack in an alternative format, please contact our Employee Service Centre by telephoning 0300 3030222 (select option 2) or raising a ticket via our online portal: https://emss.org.uk/support.
By applying for this post, you agree to our Terms and Conditions.
Proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme