Assistant Service Manager

We are recruiting for the role of Assistant Service Manager in our Public and Private Law team covering the West Yorkshire area from our Leeds office. The West Yorkshire teams are one of our pioneer areas in following this innovative approach to improving family justice and keeping children at the heart of decisions. At Cafcass, we're committed to creating an environment where social workers can achieve exceptional outcomes for children, giving you the chance of a more fulfilling and effective way of working that enables them to do their best work for children and families.

Why should you choose Cafcass? We trust and empower colleagues to work in a hybrid way, providing the resources, equipment, and support, so that individually and collectively, we can be the voice of children and young people when the family court makes critical decisions about their futures. Our colleagues work flexibly across multiple settings — including your designated office (Leeds), home, courts, schools and other appropriate, safe locations, and we ensure you have the technology to do this. Shared learning is very important to us, and we bring our teams together regularly, both remotely and in-person, for team meetings and group supervision, which creates space to connect with peers and managers, reflect on practice, and feel supported. You’ll also have regular 1:1 time with your manager, especially during your induction, and again there will be a balance between doing this remotely and in-person, so you have opportunities to form in-person connections.

We are a diverse, inclusive organisation that is a safe space for colleagues with shared aspects of identity and lived experience, which helps ensure we provide a service that promotes the diversity and uniqueness of children and families from all backgrounds. We especially welcome applications from people from diverse backgrounds as we strive to ensure our workforce reflects the diversity of the children and families we work with. We provide extensive wellbeing support for colleagues, as well as excellent benefits, all of which we hope encourages you to join us.

Being an Assistant Service Manager is very rewarding but as you would expect, challenging too. You will manage a team of Family Court Advisers and have a good understanding of what good looks like in Public and Private law cases. Through your own practice and reflective/case supervision of colleagues, you will consistently reflect and champion the values and core practice of our practice framework, ‘Together with Children and Families’. As an Assistant Service Manager, it is your duty to safeguard and protect the welfare of children, and the support you provide to colleagues to achieve the same standards of safeguarding practice. Providing high-quality reflective case supervision, you will be accountable for your own practice and for the quality and impact of the practice quality standards of the Family Court Advisers you directly manage.

As well as being registered with Social Work England, you’ll be organised, resilient, and have some experience of supervising, coaching, or mentoring social workers. You will promote resilience and wellbeing at work, maintaining morale and be confident in managing employees with a wide range of professional experience. You will be a good communicator both orally and in writing, with emotional intelligence, at all levels and especially when interacting with children.

Next steps / timelines: If and when you are ready to apply, our application process is straightforward and quick to complete. You don’t need to complete your application in a single visit, you can start it and come back and amend your responses/update your CV, just make sure you come back before the closing date to submit. Below we have given you an indication of a timetable we are hoping to work towards, although dates are subject to change.

• Closing date: 18 January 2026
• Initial Interview: 22 & 23 January 2026
• Final Interview: 2 & 4 February 2026

We understand you may benefit from finding out more to help you decide to apply. There is a lot of information available at Cafcass Careers but if there is something else you need to find out more about, you can either contact Narinder Kaur from our HR Resourcing team if your query is to do with the recruitment process or is HR-related, or Nicola Toomes if your questions relate more to the role, providing your contact information and best times/methods to get hold of you. Whilst we will always try and respond as soon as possible, we wouldn’t want you to miss the closing date before we are able to. If this is the case, we recommend you apply and as part of your application you can ask questions and this may allow us to contact you and provide you with the required information that will help you decide if you still wish to be considered.

Please be advised successful applicants will be subject to a range of pre-engagement checks, including a Disclosure and Barring Service check (DBS). In accordance with the DBS code of practice and our own policy, should an individual have a declared criminal offence an individual assessment will be completed. Further information on what the assessment covers can be found by viewing the Cafcass DBS policy.