Home Manager in Blandford Forum

The Cambian Group is one of the largest providers of specialist behavioural health services for children and adults in the UK. Our work in the UK embraces many specialist services including children’s specialist education, children’s residential services, adult mental health, acquired brain injury and fostering services.

The Forum School and Residential Home is a 52-week residential and specialist school providing quality therapeutic care and education for young people with Autism, severe learning difficulties and challenging behaviour and complex needs. The children and young people that attend our school range between 7 and 19 years of age.

The Home Manager role is about leading a team to maintain a stable, happy and caring environment that puts the health, safety and welfare of our young people first. To provide appropriate physical and emotional support to young people in residence through the work of a team of care staff within a residential environment. The emphasis is upon effective management of a team, which involves motivating, coaching, managing performance via probation/appraisal and auditing the quality of care. This role is critical in ensuring that ‘The Children’s Home Regulations 2015 and Quality Standards’ are exceeded. It also provides the opportunity to develop and improve practice.

Important qualities of this role include an understanding of what ‘good care’ looks like, being an excellent role model, conducting yourself in a professional manner and being able to relate to staff in a supportive and motivational manner. It is important that you adhere to all policies and procedures.

Key Responsibilities:

• Ensure that all staff for whom you are responsible are putting policy into practice and are either performing to expected standards or that you are/have been actively addressing the issues effectively.
• To ensure that all staff within the team receive supervision and appraisal to the required standard, at the correct time and which is properly recorded. This includes helping to identify young people or team training needs and ensuring those are met.
• Monitor staff absence within the team, ensure that Return to Work interviews are held in all cases and that all absence review meetings required by Company policy take place within the appropriate timeframe according to the standards recommended by our attendance monitoring consultancy.
• To ensure effective communication between senior management and all stakeholders.
• Have primary responsibility for the effective rostering and deployment of staff, ensuring that staff shortfalls are identified and covered across the house/unit or school within budget.
• To be involved in the recruitment and selection process of care staff as required.
• Have responsibility for ensuring effective planning, preparation, supervision and assessment of all routines within the working day curriculum.
• Ensure that correct procedures are followed by all staff to support the young people in their domestic and personal situations, enabling them to do as much for themselves as possible, to promote independence.

Requirements for an Enhanced DBS and reference checking will be undertaken in line with government regulations and safer recruitment best practice. Whilst we endeavour to keep the recruitment process as short as possible due to the nature of these important checks it may extend the processing time. All young people are equally entitled to have their needs met in a fair and balanced way. Cambian Group employees are responsible for promoting equal opportunities for all and for challenging behaviour or practice which discriminates against any young person or colleague on the grounds of race, religion, disability, age, gender, sexual orientation or any other perceived difference.

We will conduct online searches of shortlisted candidates. This check will be part of a safeguarding check, and the search will be purely based on whether an individual is suitable to work with children. As care must be taken to avoid unconscious bias and any risk of discrimination a person who will not be on the appointment panel will conduct the search and will only share information if and when findings are relevant and of concern.