Vacancies

Head of Service: Children in Care, Care Leavers, Fostering and Adoption

Main Responsibility

As Head of Service, you will provide strategic leadership across Children in Care, Care Leavers, Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children (UASC), Fostering and Adoption services. You will ensure children and young people receive high-quality, safe and child-centred support, driving improvement, permanence, placement sufficiency and positive outcomes while fulfilling the council’s responsibilities as a corporate parent.

You will:

• Lead the strategic and operational delivery of Children in Care, Care Leavers, Fostering, Kinship, Adoption and UASC services, ensuring high-quality, compliant and outcome-focused practice.
• Drive service improvement, transformation and sufficiency planning to ensure children and young people have access to stable, appropriate placements and lifelong support networks.  
• Provide strategic leadership for fostering, kinship and adoption services, including recruitment, retention, support and development of carers and adopters.  
• Build strong partnerships across Staffordshire County Council, health, education, housing, commissioning, Together4Children and other agencies to improve outcomes for children and care leavers.  
• Lead performance management, quality assurance and compliance activity, ensuring learning from audits, inspections, complaints and feedback drives continuous improvement.  
• Oversee substantial budgets, resources and transformation programmes while ensuring services remain sustainable, effective and focused on achieving the best outcomes for children and young people.

The Ideal Candidate

You will have:

• Degree or equivalent-level qualification. 
• Qualified and registered Social Worker. 
• Relevant professional or management qualification, or substantial management training and development. 
• Substantial post-qualification experience within children's social care, including senior leadership and management responsibilities. 
• Significant experience managing and developing teams, with a strong understanding of people management and employment practices. 
• Proven experience leading high-performing services and driving service improvement. 
• Experience managing investigations, complaints and complex service issues.

The assessment process:

Throughout the recruitment process, you will be assessed against the three key competency areas:

• Children & Families Core Principles
• Leadership
• Technical and Role-Specific Competencies

The process will take the form of in person interview which will include,

• a role specific exercise
• an element involving our Children and Young People and a Foster Carer (to be confirmed on interview invitation)

Interviews date to be confirmed 

Don’t feel you meet all the requirements? We value transferable skills, experiences, and qualifications so consider applying anyway or for an informal chat about the role please contact 

Our Recruitment Process: We anonymise applications during shortlisting to ensure only relevant information is considered. Please complete your application fully, especially the supporting statement, to highlight what you’ll bring to the role. 

Please note: The minimum criteria in the ideal candidate section detailed above will be used if you are applying under one of our Interview Guarantee Schemes, detailed below.

About Staffordshire County Council

We are no ordinary county council:

Our Values:

The core of who we are as an organisation. Just like we all have personal values that shape our thoughts and behaviour, organisational values drive how we think and act collectively.

Our values were created and shaped by colleague feedback and national best practice and they sit at the heart of People Strategy:

We have a real sense of community spirit that brings our people together. This feeling of belonging means we are all connected to what we do and take pride in the difference we make every day for Staffordshire people. We are ambitious and our sights are set firmly on a better future.

We look forward and race ahead - that goes for your career too. 

Our benefits:

We recognise that it is our employees that are central to everything we do. We aim to create a supportive working environment where employees can achieve their full potential and achieve a healthy work-life balance. 

In addition to your salary, as a member of staff, you will have access to Our rewards and benefits - Careers at Staffordshire

Our recruitment process:

We are committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people/vulnerable adults and expect all staff and volunteers to share this commitment.

Staffordshire County Council is an equal opportunities organisation and Disability Confident employer. We encourage applications from all background and communities

As part of our commitment as a Disability Confident employer, a Gold Award Armed Forces employer and our commitment to supporting care leavers - we offer a guaranteed interview as long as your application meets the minimum criteria for the post.

As you’ll know safeguarding and promoting the welfare of our children and young people/vulnerable adults is important to us and that’s why this position is subject to a criminal record check from the Disclosure and Barring Service. If applicable you should disclose details of unspent and unfiltered spent reprimands, formal warnings, cautions and convictions in your application form.