Clinical Lead SLT - Schools Service - Band 8a

Band 8a Clinical Lead Speech and Language Therapist: Schools Service 12 month secondment – maternoty leave cover

Paediatric Community Services- Newham, East London Foundation Trust

Are you an experienced, innovative, creative speech and language therapist? Would you like to bring your skills to help lead our developing Schools Speech and Language Therapy Service and support continuous improvement?

We have an exciting opportunity for a maternity laeve cover 12 month seconment to our Clinical Lead Speech and Language Therapist to lead our large and expanding Schools Service in the London Borough of Newham.

The Schools Service offers specialist assessment and intervention for children and young people aged 0-19 across a range of school settings including primary schools, secondary schools, colleges, resource provisions and special schools. The post includes leadership of the traded services to schools and delivery of our new jointly commissioned schools service model which was implemented in September 2024.

The post-holder will be responsible for the Clinical Leadership of a team of award winning, dedicated speech therapy staff. This will include both the operational management and clinical leadership of the service. There will be opportunity for service improvement and development work within the service and across the partnership with schools and local authority services, including our youth justice projects and work streams within our all age autism strategy., The successful applicant will have relevant experience of working with children and families within schools, working with other professionals and of delivering service change and improvement.

The team is based at the child development centre where staff work closely with multidisciplinary partners as part of a wider AHP clinical leads team supported by the Head of Children’s Therapies.

The post holder will provide operational leadership for a high quality expert specialist speech and language therapy service to children and young people in a range of educational settings including mainstream primary and secondary schools, Resource provision units, special schools, and colleges. This will include managing the different funded service options including the traded service with schools.

The post holder will provide clinical leadership in the speech and language therapy Schools service ensuring effective clinical supervision, pathways of support, and will provide specialist second opinions to more junior colleagues.

The post holder will take a clinical lead on the development of objectives and projects relating to these specialist areas and support peers in their implementation.

The post holder will participate in local networks and partnership meetings and oversee service improvement work within the service.

The post holder will provide line management duties, ensuring smooth operation on a day to day basis as well as conducting clinical supervision and performance reviews.

Working for our organisation

In return we can offer you:

• An amazing working environment, with a warm, welcoming and supportive team of SLTs and colleagues who bring experiences from all over the world.

• 1:1 monthly supervision, appraisal and CPD

• Leadership Development

• Protected service development time and regular team away days

• Opportunity to supervise and develop staff

• Monthly clinical leads meetings

• On-going clinical skills development, MDT working

• Opportunity to lead service improvement

• Involvement in quality improvement projects, 1. To be responsible for the operational delivery of the Schools service and traded services for children aged 0-18 years.

1. To provide a highly specialist speech and language therapy service to CYP in a variety of community settings.

2. To ensure stautory EHC health needs assessments are completed

3. To work with other Clinical Leads and highly specialist SLTs to develop policy and procedure across care groups

4. To take a lead role in working parties, clinical governance and development of service provision to ensure effectiveness

5. To provide supervision, advice, support, second opinions and appraisal to more junior speech and language therapists, assistants and volunteers and ensure that Trust and SLT policies are adhered to by those staff. (This may include the use of co-working, case review, in-service training and other supervisory techniques)

6. To lead in recruitment, induction and supervision of SLT staff.

7. To deliver core and specialist training relating to specialist areas to other speech and language therapists and to others e.g. health services and local authority staff

8. To ensure that the service takes account of the needs of clients from a wide variety of ethnic and linguistic backgrounds

9. To quality assure the service and make improvements to pathways and service delivery as required.

10. To provide effective line management to staff within the service including safeguarding supervision, appraisals and management of staff absences.

For a more details job description and person specification please see attached JD & PS.

For contact details please see below.

Making Things Better

Quality Improvement is a key part of our work to improve our services and refine how we do things. We have a global reputation for our quality improvement work and we don’t stand still! So we offer a fantastic opportunity for our staff to learn, lead and contribute towards improving our services.

We launched our Five Year Strategy in April 2018, which identified four main strategic outcomes to improve: population health outcomes, experience of care, staff experience and improve value. This complements the NHS Long Term Strategy and sets out our direction of travel.

Our Community

We provide a wide range of community health and mental health inpatient services to children, young people, adults of working age, and older adults in The City of London, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Bedfordshire and Luton. We also provide psychological therapy services to the London Borough of Richmond, and provide Forensic services to the whole of North East London. We provide services in urban and rural settings, sometimes in our inpatient units, but mostly in the community close to where people live. Integrated care is key in making the best use of resources and providing effective care.

Aiming High

We were rated ‘Outstanding’ by the CQC in 2016, were proud to be rated ‘Outstanding’ again in 2018 and continue to be rate ‘Outstanding’ in 2021.. We were named in the HSJ’s Top 10 best places to work in healthcare and were voted Provider Trust of the Year in 2018.

Staff and Service Users United

We strive to ensure that staff feel valued by the Trust and as they are truly pivotal in delivering better outcomes for our patients and service users. Our aspiration is to help to make ELFT the best place to work. This Trust is clinician-led and provides the highest possible level of clinical expertise throughout its services. We pride ourselves on our service user involvement. A service user will be on your assessment centre and interview panel if you are invited to meet us.

We especially welcome people with lived experience of health difficulties, with insight and understanding of different backgrounds, cultures and lifestyles in our population as we believe that this will equip staff to deliver a high standard of care to our service users and patients.

Diversity

ELFT Is committed to being a diverse organisation and our workforce is reflective of the population and communities we serve. We believe that having colleagues with a range of backgrounds and life experiences enriches and adds value to the outcomes we have set out to achieve. Having partnered and endorsed by organisations who are representative and experts in various areas of equality and diversity, we can ensure we are meeting the pre-set standards all the way from recruitment stage throughout the career journey of our employees by being accessible, having fair inclusive practices and a host of staff networks to support, nurture and celebrate our valued staff in the workplace.

Other reasons to apply

As a flexible working friendly organisation, we want to be sure that you can work in a way that is best for us and for our patients, and for you. Speak to us about how we might be able to accommodate a flexible working arrangement whether that’s job share, part time or another flexible pattern.

As part of the relocation scheme we presently have, the Trust could support you with offering up to £10,000 for removal and associated expenses. This is subject to change and terms and conditions apply.

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