Assistant Director for Belonging – Homes for Children, Fostering and Adoption (incl ADM)

About the role

Are you a visionary leader with a passion for improving the lives of children and young people and ensuring they have a sense of belonging in their home and community? This is an exceptional opportunity for a high calibre professional with leadership experience to join our fantastic organisation. All children and young people deserve to live somewhere they feel that they belong, where they are safe and where they are loved. As the Assistant Director for Belonging this will be at the heart of your role ensuring that all children and young people who are no longer able to live with their family live in a residential home, with a foster carer or with adopters ensuring they have a sense of belonging.

As well as overseeing the strategic development, management and delivery of these services you will also bring your social work oversight to the brokerage and placements service, ensuring that homes meet the individual needs of our children and young people. This role is within our stable and experienced senior leadership team and reports to the Director of Social Care. You will be working as part of a big organisation that supports more than 1200 children and young people across a large, diverse county.

You will be responsible for leading and motivating these service areas in delivering a high-quality service to children and young people, prospective foster carers, foster carers, prospective adopters and adopters and their families. Your focus will be on ensuring all children and young people experience positive family life, where they belong and where they are well supported to maximise their life chances; where they can thrive, are safe from any harm or abuse, have access to the best education and training, and feel prepared for adulthood.

You will play a vital role in working with partners such as North and West Northamptonshire Councils to increase service effectiveness so that our sufficiency planning best meets the needs of our children and young people. We are passionate about our ethos and want to recruit someone who will champion equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging, embedding these values across all services and partnerships.

What will you be doing?

• As the Assistant Director, collaboration is key by providing effective, strategic and operational leadership and management across the system to deliver innovative, efficient and impactful services with the highest standard of service delivery.
• You will be social worker qualified with significant, successful management experience at a senior level.
• You will be innovative, have strong financial acumen and experience in managing Children’s Social Care service.
• To provide strategic management oversight on all aspects of the independent fostering agency and voluntary adoption agency in Northamptonshire Children’s Trust providing line management to the Strategic Manager for Adoption and Fostering.
• Attention to the regulatory requirements is essential and the postholder will lead the service area’s preparation and action planning for OFSTED inspections.
• You will ensure that the adoption and fostering services both meet their statutory obligations to children, young people, birth families, foster carers and adopters.
• You will be the agency decision maker (ADM) for adoption, fostering and NCT children’s homes.
• To ensure that sufficiency needs of NCT are met through recruitment of foster carers and adopters as well as retention of existing carers, determining and setting an appropriate strategy for service growth and continuous improvement.
• This will include recruitment of carers and families able to meet the varied and specific needs of cared for children as well as working with the brokerage and placements service to ensure that homes meet the individual needs of our children and young people.
• The post holder is responsible for the work and co-ordination of Responsible Individuals and Registered Managers for Children’s Homes with teams of professional staff ensuring that they are delivering the requirements for high performing children’s homes.
• You will develop and maintain strong relationships with partner agencies to enable a system-wide approach to putting children and young people at the heart of all we do.
• To work strategically with multi-agency partners, elected members and other key stakeholders including voluntary organisations to promote fostering and adoption and other corporate parenting responsibilities and establish and maintain joint working policies and practices to recruit and support foster carers and adoptive families.
• Ensure effective participation and appropriate involvement of cared for children and care experienced young adults in the planning and development of services that meet their needs.
• As a member of the senior leadership team, you will be responsible for the effective leadership and management of NCT services, delivery of improved outcomes and the achievement of value for money.

We reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive sufficient applications for the role. Therefore, if you are interested, we encourage you to submit your application as early as possible.

About you

Having significant experience of leading children’s social work in a large and complex organisation, you will be passionate about improving the outcomes for the children and young people we support. Working in a fast-paced organisation on an improvement journey you will be an expert in change management and have the skills and knowledge to be able to adapt to this and bring colleagues on this exciting journey with you.

Working across the organisation and with partner organisations you will need to have outstanding communication skills and the ability to build strong relationships quickly with both internal and external partners. You must have a comprehensive knowledge of legislation, best practice and continuous professional development in Children’s services and have the drive and vision to embed this into your work within NCT.

Current, up to date understanding of regulatory requirements around assurance activity planned or regularly undertaken by Ofsted or any other regulatory body relating to children's social care, fostering, adoption and children’s homes. You will be an experienced children’s social care senior leader with ambition and drive to make a real difference.

For an informal conversation about the role please email Cornelia.Andrecut@NCTrust.co.uk and she will arrange a convenient time to call you. When applying please ensure your supporting statement covers how you fulfil the essential criteria set out in the person specification as this will be used for shortlisting. You will need to provide a full employment history including any gaps since leaving full time education.

Our benefits

We are committed to continuous improvement, building a skilled, knowledgeable, and flexible workforce alongside promoting innovation and creativity whilst keeping children, young people and families at the heart of all we do. We really value our workforce and offer you a great benefits package including:

• 28 days annual leave, plus 8 Bank Holidays (pro rata for part time) and an additional 5 days, after 5 years
• Local Government Pension Scheme plus immediate life cover (3 times your annual salary from day one) and ill-health pension protection.
• Opportunity to purchase up to 25 days annual leave
• Employee Assistance Programme - We have an employee support programme run by Health Assured, an independent, external organisation. Health Assured is available for you and your immediate family members, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and includes telephone counselling, legal advice, bereavement support and medical information.
• Employee discounts with local and national retailers, days out, finance, health and beauty, travel and eating out plus lots more.
• Flexible and family working arrangements including enhanced maternity benefits
• A permanent, supportive and inclusive management team where you will be empowered to make good professional decisions
• Extensive Learning & Development and career development opportunities
• Subsidised town centre car parking scheme

About us

At Northamptonshire Children’s Trust, children, young people and families are at the heart of all we do – in every decision we make and every action we take. Our mission is driven by the unwavering commitment to achieving the best outcomes for them. The Trust is wholly owned and funded but operationally independent from the Councils.

Our workforce are our most valuable asset and are pivotal to making the services and support we offer to children, young people and families who need us to be the absolute best we can be. We value our colleagues and empower them to be able to do the best job of their lives every single day, working in a culture of support and kindness where achievements are celebrated and creativity is very much welcomed.

At NCT equality, diversity and inclusion are part of us and in everything we do, to enable all colleagues to develop and thrive in our organisation. We are a disability confident employer and have a commitment to care leavers who we guarantee an interview if they meet the essential criteria.

Join our dedicated team and be a part of an organisation where your work makes a real difference.