Lead Child Protection Practitioner in Ely

Location: Ely with countywide travel expected, CB7 4EX

Are you an experienced Child Protection professional, Team Manager, Child Protection Conference Chair or Senior Practitioner looking to further your career development? Do you want the opportunity to use your expertise to support the development of a new Families First model? Are you passionate about improving outcomes for children, young people and their families? We'd love to hear from you.

As a Lead Child Protection Practitioner (LCPP), you will work collaboratively with managers, social workers, colleagues within the Family Help Service and partner agencies as part of a Multi-Agency Child Protection Team. This is a senior practice leadership role with a focus on strengthening and promoting high-quality child protection practice across the partnership. You will provide professional oversight, scrutiny and challenge to support effective decision-making, consistency of practice and positive outcomes for children. This role carries significant responsibility for safeguarding decision-making and requires sound professional judgement, confidence and substantial safeguarding expertise.

A central aspect of the role is making complex threshold decisions for children suffering or likely to suffer significant harm. You will lead multi-agency decision-making forums, including decisions relating to Section 47 enquiries, determining when multi-agency investigations are required, chairing strategy discussions and child protection conferences, and making recommendations on threshold for Child Protection and Child in Need plans. You will ensure safeguarding processes are robust, supportive, transparent and child-focused, while also supporting frontline practitioners through professional advice, guidance, consultation and mentoring.

While this is not a line management role and does not have direct responsibility for a team, you will be expected to influence practice through your expertise, consultation and professional leadership, supporting practitioners and managers to make safe and effective decisions for children and families. This role commences in a pilot scheme within East Cambridgeshire with a mix of office, based at Noble House in Ely, and home working. Beyond the pilot, more LCPPs will be recruited to various other locations across Cambridgeshire and you will have the opportunity to look at these alternative locations. There is also an expectation to attend conferences and potentially home visits across the county.

Appointment to this post will be subject to the outcome of an Enhanced Disclosure obtained through the Disclosure and Barring Service. The Council is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and vulnerable adults and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment.

We value our colleagues in Cambridgeshire County Council and have developed a number of benefits in addition to the basics like annual leave, sick pay, pension and mileage:

• Wellbeing package to cover all aspects of wellbeing, both in and out of work, which can also be accessed by your family.
• 6 days of protected time each year to support in maintaining your Continuous Professional Development.
• A relocation package (eligibility applies).
• A Refer a Friend Scheme where if you refer another Social Worker to us who is subsequently employed by us as a result of that introduction, we’ll pay you an introduction fee of £350.
• Access to our Cambridgeshire Academy for Reaching Excellence (CARE) who will support your development, enabling you to become the best practitioner you can be.

What will you be doing? The successful candidate will:

• Convene and chair strategy meetings, providing leadership, professional expertise and effective oversight of decision-making.
• Lead complex multi-agency decision-making, including determining when joint investigations with partner agencies, such as the police, are required and identifying when medical examinations should be undertaken.
• Sign off Section 47 enquiries and in some instances, support the Family Help Practitioner to visit families.
• Provide oversight, scrutiny and quality assurance of child protection practice and processes.
• Chair child protection conferences and support the development, review and progression of effective multi‑agency child protection plans.
• Work directly with children, young people and families to ensure their views and experiences inform planning and decision-making.
• Provide professional advice, guidance, consultation, direction and training to teams and managers.
• Support practice development and contribute to continuous service improvement.
• Build and maintain effective relationships with partner agencies to promote strong collaborative safeguarding arrangements.

About you: You must be a qualified Social Worker registered with Social Work England and have significant post-qualification experience within frontline child protection services. You will be an experienced, reflective and highly skilled practitioner with a strong understanding of safeguarding, risk and child protection processes. You will be able to analyse complex information, exercise sound professional judgement and work collaboratively with children, families and partner agencies to achieve positive outcomes.

You will be able to demonstrate:

• Significant experience of identifying and assessing complex needs, balancing and managing risk, and developing effective child protection interventions and plans.
• Strong critical thinking skills and the ability to evaluate and triangulate information from multiple agencies and disciplines to assess the likelihood of significant harm, including in situations involving contextual, cumulative or complex harm and where information may be incomplete or ambiguous.
• Experience of supporting frontline social workers through advice, guidance, mentoring and constructive challenge.
• The ability to influence practice and support professional development through expertise, coaching and partnership working rather than direct line management.
• Experience of leading and chairing multi‑agency meetings where complex safeguarding decisions are required.
• Excellent communication, interpersonal and relationship‑building skills.
• A commitment to continuous learning, service improvement and achieving the best possible outcomes for children and families.
• The ability to work from a variety of locations and travel independently across the county.

For a full list of the requirements of the role, please refer to the Job Description and Person Specification. Please note that we are not accepting applications from candidates living overseas who require sponsorship to move to the UK.

About us: Cambridgeshire is a great place to work and live with a diverse population, an urban centre in Cambridge, historic Isle of Ely, Huntingdon and St Ives as well as more rural landscapes. Our four values are central to our culture, driving everything we do. We are proud to serve the diverse communities of Cambridgeshire and want our workforce to be reflective of this diversity, which we firmly believe benefits our colleagues, the organisation and our communities.

If you don't meet every single requirement in the job role but think this could be you, please don't be put off. We are committed to building a workplace that is compassionate and inclusive as well as diverse, so if you think you could be a good candidate for this role please consider applying and speak to the recruiting manager if you have any questions.

Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, along with our employee network 'IDEAL' and self‑organised peer support groups help us to foster an inclusive, supportive and safe working environment where people feel valued, respected, and empowered. We collect relevant diversity data for monitoring as part of the recruitment process to understand the diversity of our applicants and monitor any trends throughout the recruitment processes so that we can take meaningful action. We are proud to be a Disability Confident Leader. We fully support providing reasonable adjustments throughout our recruitment process, as well as when you join us, and we encourage candidates to contact the Hiring Manager, whose details can be found in the advert, to discuss any adjustment needs.

Through a Guaranteed Interview Scheme, we will offer an interview to all applicants who disclose a disability and meet the essential criteria for a job vacancy. On your application form you can indicate you are disabled. Some examples of reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process could include additional time to complete an assessment or printing a document on pastel coloured paper with larger font size and line spacing. We would value talking about what might be possible to enable you to join us and thrive, so if there is something that would help you to do your best during your journey with us, please get in touch.

Visit our jobs and careers section to find out more about our wide range of learning and development opportunities; apprenticeships; our wellbeing package; staff benefits; our commitment to equality, diversity and Inclusion.