Adoption Panel Advisor
| Posting date: | 18 November 2025 |
|---|---|
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 18 December 2025 |
| Location: | leicestershire, LE3 8RS |
| Company: | Leicestershire County Council |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | 6551 |
Summary
Organisation: Leicestershire County Council
Work Location: County Hall, LE3 8RA
Worker Category: Hybrid Worker
Salary: Grade 12 – £43,860 - £47,829 plus market premium (pro rata for part-time)
Working Hours: 37 hours per week
Contract Type: Permanent
Closing Date: 2nd December 2025
Interview Date(s): TBC
About the Role
Leicestershire FAL are looking to recruit an enthusiastic, motivated and experienced social worker to act as Adoption Panel Adviser. You will play a central role in ensuring that the adoption panel operates efficiently, giving written and verbal advice to the adoption service, adoption panel and the agency decision maker (ADM).
You will quality assure all reports for panel, as well as those for plans of adoption, offer skilled and in-depth advice and help drive continuous improvement across Leicestershire’s adoption service.
You will build strong relationships with panel chairs, panel members, the adoption service, medical advisors and senior managers and play a key role as link between these.
You will work alongside a full and well-established central list of independent panel members who work hard to achieve positive outcomes for our children and to ensure the continued high standard of practice and outcomes for Leicestershire’s children. You will be responsible for organising the annual training day for panel members, as well as providing regular information and updates to ensure their knowledge is kept up to date.
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
To apply for this post, you must:
- A recognised social work qualification and current professional registration with Social Work England.
- Significant post-qualifying experience in adoption, fostering or permanence planning, including management experience.
- Comprehensive knowledge of adoption regulations, national minimum standards, safeguarding frameworks and best practice in adoption and the confidence to give written and verbal professional advice on matters relating to these.
- The ability to quality assure large amounts of written information and provide analysis and advice based on this.
- Excellent communication skills (both verbal and written) for a variety of audiences including panel chairs, panel members, the adoption service and senior managers and the ability to offer professional challenge and constructive feedback.
- The ability to work collaboratively with panel chairs, the adoption service and across FAL to drive forward best practice.
- A strong commitment to achieving best outcomes for our children in Leicestershire.
You must also have an understanding of, and commitment to, equality, diversity and inclusion.
In addition, we expect you to share our commitment to our values and will ask you to evidence when you have demonstrated them as part of the interview process.
Reasonable adjustments will be considered for applicants with a disability.
Interested in Flexible Working?
We are keen to support employees to balance their working life with other commitments. Therefore, wherever possible, we will consider working arrangements that suit an individual’s personal circumstances whilst 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:
Harriet Powell (Adoption Panel Advisor) harriet.powell@leics.gov.uk or Michelle Robinson (Service Manager) michelle.robinson@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 as part of your application which explains 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 trying to apply 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