MST Therapist

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Role: MST Therapist

Salary: Up to £38,900 + £1200 p/a on call allowance

Contract/Hours: 37 Hours working mainly Mon – Friday but to include earlies and evenings, Bank holidays and on call weekends.

Location: Northampton, Northamptonshire.

Closing Date: Midnight on Thursday the 17th of July 2025.

Paid annual leave.

Gain professional qualifications and excellent training/development opportunities.

Flexible maternity, adoption, and paternity packages.

Pension with up to 7% employer contribution with included life assurance cover.

Staff discount portal and Blue Light Card eligibility with 15,000 national retailers discounts.

Vulnerable children in the UK need your help. Wherever you work in the Action for Children family, you'll be helping to change the lives of the most vulnerable children in the UK. Last year, we helped more than 670,000 children and families across the UK. From direct work in communities to national campaigning, we are focused on making sure every child has a safe and happy childhood, and the foundations they need to thrive.

Why Action for Children? Working here is more than a job. Everyone in the Action for Children family is passionate about protecting and supporting children. It’s the sense of purpose that drives us every single day. Because we know that, when we work together, we can make a huge difference to bring lasting improvements to vulnerable children's lives.

A Bit about the Service: Action for Children has been a longstanding provider of MST services and in this instance, you will be working within the Northamptonshire based MST service. Multisystemic therapy is a time limited (3-5 month) intensive home and community-based model that targets the proven systemic causes of anti-social behaviour with adolescents. The therapy is delivered through direct work with the youth's primary care givers, schools, and communities to create sustainable change. This role would suit those wanting to work systemically with parents, care givers and schools to impact change upon youth.

A bit about the role: As an MST Therapist, you'll work flexibly around the needs of the family to a clinical model (training will be provided on the MST model). You will engage and motivate care givers into changing their child's behavioural problems and increase their skill and ability to manage future problems. You will assess the families' needs and identify the priorities for you as a therapist to work with them on. Therapists visit families regularly in their home or place of convenience to address and work through issues and work collaboratively with other agencies and professionals to co-design interventions consistent with the MST model.

We are committed to supporting our team of therapists and will offer you continued professional development through both internal and external training. You will also receive full training in the MST model when you join, as well as receive quarterly booster training from an MST expert.

How you’ll help to create brighter futures:

• Being part of a team of three therapists plus a supervisor and carry a caseload of 4-6 families.
• Working intensively with your families as well as attend school meetings and other professional meetings as necessary.
• Working flexibly to best meet the needs of families is an important element of the service.
• Participation in a telephone on-call rota, providing support to families when they are in crisis.
• Being involved in weekly clinical group supervision to discuss your families and to support you in adhering to the MST model.

Let’s talk about you:

• Educated to degree level as a minimum, preferably within a related subject such as Social Work, CBT, Probation Services, Youth Work, nursing, speech and language.
• A professional qualification in a related subject (desirable).
• Experience of working with adults, parents, adolescents, and families in challenging environments.
• Skills in delivering programmes of work to families and adolescents, preferably parenting interventions, and an ability to take clinical direction and feedback from the team supervisor.
• The ability to plan and predict problems and devise evidence-based interventions and evaluate them.
• Strong communication and engagement skills to help care givers to changing their child's behavioral problems.
• Access to transport is essential to travel across the County including remote locations.

Application Process: Please note we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role.

Diversity, equality and inclusion: At Action for Children, we're dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace. We actively encourage applications from Black, Asian & Minority Ethnic and disabled candidates as they are under-represented within Action for Children. We want to take deliberate and purposeful action to ensure equal opportunity to all groups in society and for Action for Children. Male staff are under-represented within our Children Service roles. We would like to encourage more male applicants for our Children Service roles.

If you're excited about this role but your experience doesn't align perfectly with the job description, we'd love you to apply anyway. You might just be the perfect person for this role, or another role within the Action for Children family.