Waking Night Therapeutic Child Carer in Welshpool

Amberleigh Care is an employee owned, specialist therapeutic child care and education service. We are not the same as other residential child care settings in that we have a very defined profile of young people – we do one thing – and we are experts in that field. This means that we do not offer emergency placements, we have very carefully matched and long-term stable placements. Our working model informs the way staff and trained and supported and our multidisciplinary teams are diverse in age, gender, experiences and backgrounds. It works – for children, for staff and for placing local authorities.

This role is based in Welshpool, Powys

All applicants should have the right to work in the UK as Amberleigh Care are unable to sponsor any visa applications at this time

The role is part-time, working an average of 35hrs per week on a 4 on, 4 off basis

Responsibilities:

• In essence you will be part of a team of carers (divided into sub teams) and working on a rolling rota to provide ongoing care and support to the young people.
• The Waking Night colleagues are a sub-team that play a vital role in both the safeguarding of the service, providing support to boys overnight (in reality this is quite minimal) and helping to maintain the environment, paperwork and systems. The night team received a handover from day staff when they come on duty and overlap with a handover the following morning.
• In relation to the boys, most of the time the nights are very quiet – there could be a boy waking and needing a drink, a bad dream, sometimes they might have difficulty sleeping and need that adult comfort and reassurance. Occasionally the day staff may be dealing with a behavioural issue as the night staff arrive on site – a fresh face can sometimes be useful.
• Safeguarding and managing boundaries is a key part of the role – but we do this with very open communication and active use of relationships – we have very low levels of incidents, safeguarding referrals or more extreme challenging behaviours.
• The role is varied but involves domestic duties to maintain the environment, can include some advance cooking or baking, archiving and attending to some of our paperwork systems, training and helping to maintain systems that are more easily attended to when the site is quiet.
• As the role is varied, we need a variety of people on the team, people with different skills and talents, but also open to trying new things
• We have our own school on site and our own therapy team and the whole service operates as a ‘therapeutic community’ and so we have a lot of spaces for staff to reflect on their work in teams and together with the boys.
• This is work based on the relationships between everyone – boys, staff, up, down and sideways – we place a lot of support on helping staff develop their own self-awareness in relationship to others.

Requirements:

• We are interested to hear from people with a wider range of experiences and backgrounds.
• We welcome people who are motivated and able to use their initiative – whilst you will be working with at least one colleague (typically), the work tasks are often flexible and so a degree of self-coordination is necessary.
• If you have previous experience of residential childcare, great – we will help you learn about our practice model and approach. This work has some overlaps but is different to the work you have done before.
• If you are considering a new career with us, great – we can provide you with all the training to bring you into this exciting and varied sector and then build a career path from there.
• We require good basic English and IT communication skills – we work in the 21st century and with teenagers, so we don’t need to be experts, but we need to have the basics.
• You need to be over 21 years of age – but there is no upper limit.
• You need to hold a full driving licence (essential)
• A sense of humour, life skills, broad interests, liking young people, resilience, creativity, problem solving etc – the boys need a variety of role models around them.

Reward:

• We offer some of the highest hourly rates of pay in our sector and because of our working model (with Waking Night roles) our staff are not required to ‘sleep in’. We think this is important for work life balance.
• The Directors all work across both sites – so there is very visible, accessible and involved leadership.
• There are very extensive career development opportunities – access to QCF 3 as standard, degree qualifications for those that want this (we know this isn’t everyone’s’ cup of tea) but a very wide range of in house and external training and events.
• As specialist practice settings, we are part of several rich networks that allow our staff to get out and about and visit other services.
• Staff (and boys) have a very big say in the decision making in our service, both day to day and more longer term. One method is our annual employee survey which informs our service plan…. Have a look at what staff told us in 2025 https://www.amberleighcare.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Employee-Survey-Results-Staff-Report-2025.pdf
• We provide all the usual benefits and perks – contributory pension, annual leave that builds with service, employee assistance scheme, loyalty and recruitment bonuses.
• This is a values based service, doing specialist work that really makes successful difference to the lives of the young people.