Family Drug and Alcohol Court Social Worker, Permanent in England

This is a Gloucestershire County Council job located at Tewkesbury Borough Council Offices.

Salary: £39,152- £47,181 per annum

Hours per Week: 37

Contract Type: Permanent

Closing Date: 26/04/2026

This post is open to job share. Gloucestershire Children's Service are looking for an FDAC Social Worker to join the Tewkesbury Children and Families team.

Reward and Support

• Between £39,152 - £47,181 per annum subject to experience
• £4,000 welcome payment*
• £2,000 retention payment*
• Up to £8,000 for relocation funds**
• Flexible and agile working opportunities
• 25.5 days annual leave rising to 30.5 days after 5 years continuous service
• Option to purchase 10 days of additional leave per year (pro rata for part-time staff)
• Family friendly policies and benefits to help support you and your family
• Supportive and positive working environment with regular, robust supervision
• Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS)
• Access to our Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) that provides free, confidential counselling and advice for employees, available 24 hours a day, online and by telephone
• An in-house Occupational Health service
• Employee discount scheme
• Cycle to work scheme
• Links to employee networks such as Prism (LGBT+) and the Young Employees Network
• Career development and qualification opportunities
• Access to our Social Work Academy

In our recent inspection in June 2025, our Children's Services have been officially judged as 'Good' with 'Outstanding' elements. Ofsted also said 'Leaders have set out a clear vision for delivering success for children, by modelling values and creating a culture where the workforce, children and families feel valued and heard; risk is managed confidently with bottom lines clearly set out.'

This marks an important step in our journey to improve outcomes for our children and young people, and we remain focused on our mission: to continue building on this success and ensure that every child and young person in our county has the opportunity to thrive.

Gloucestershire offers a range of opportunities to develop your career, supported by a phenomenal Social Work Academy offer, a developing systemic practice methodology, an ambitious leadership team and an award-winning workforce.

We are a local authority adopting, and training all colleagues in, systemic social work practice. If you would like to be part of an authority that takes a relational approach to working with families and focuses on what needs to change in the system around a child and family to enable children to thrive, then consider a role with GCC.

We are looking for an FDAC Social Worker to cover our Tewkesbury locality. You will hold an FDAC family and work alongside the multi-agency service and TACS. You will work to deliver evidence-based therapeutic interventions in the collaborative, problem-solving court, FDAC. A crucial aspect of these roles will be to bring learning back into the locality teams and further enhance services to locality families and communities.

As a locality FDAC Social Worker, you will experience:

• Systemic practice that is curious, courageous, and compassionate
• Trauma-informed approaches
• Multi-professional collaboration and planning
• Deeper understanding of Hidden Harm and its impact on children
• Confidence in court settings and the expert voice of social workers
• Restorative practice with high support and high challenge
• Development of multi-agency interventions
• Use of language that cares
• Collaborative permanency planning
• Equal access to FDAC for families across all localities

You will be the 'spoke', holding one FDAC case from your locality. TACS will be the 'hub', supporting you as part of the wider family team. You will deliver interventions and share learning with your locality team.

What it will involve:

• Hold one FDAC case (approx. 2 days/week)
• Reduced caseload to support this work
• Attend fortnightly FDAC hearings with your family
• Write and curate all FDAC reports (review, evidence, final)
• Attend formulation and intervention planning meetings
• Deliver interventions and support permanency planning
• Work within a multidisciplinary team (including nurses, therapists, and support workers)
• Receive a full induction, peer and 1:1 supervision, and contribute to transformation reviews

You will have:

• Social Work England registration
• A recognised qualification in Social Work
• To have passed your Assessed and Supported Year in Employment (ASYE)
• DBS clearance

We welcome applications from newly qualified and social workers in the early years of their career. Depending on your qualification date and previous experience, you will be invited to either join our accredited ASYE programme or to complete an alternative early-career development in-house pathway. The appropriate option will be explored and confirmed as part of the interview and offer process.

How to apply

For an informal chat about this role, please contact or to apply please do so before the closing date. We reserve the right to close an advertisement earlier than the stated closing date if we receive a suitable number of applications.

If you would like to find out more about our Children's Service please take a look here: Children's Social Care Careers | Gloucestershire County Council.

*Please note that all our welcome and retention payments are subject to terms and conditions as well as tax and national insurance deductions.

**Please note that our relocation policy is subject to terms & conditions.

We may be able to offer sponsorship for this role, in line with Home Office guidance and subject to pre-employment checks. Applicants must already hold a valid right to work in the UK that Gloucestershire County Council can transfer.

Under the terms of our Safer Recruitment Policy, if you are invited to interview, we will take up safeguarding references prior to your interview to understand your suitability to work with vulnerable children. These references will then be discussed in your interview. Please give details of at least two referees, one of whom must be your present and/or last employer and the other from a previous employer(s). These will need to cover the last three years of employment/education. In the case of applicants leaving full time education or not having worked since doing so, the Head of School, College or University should be one of the named referees. We do not accept references from friends or family members or workplace colleagues (who are not more senior). To ensure we process your application in a speedy and efficient way, we will contact your referees by DocuSign. Where appropriate, please inform them of your application.

Additional Information

To access the job profile for this role, please follow the link below: Social Worker job profile. This position is subject to a DBS check.

Gloucestershire County Council is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people or vulnerable adults and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment.

We want to be an employer of choice, attracting and retaining excellent people to work for us, so that we can best serve all of Gloucestershire's diverse communities. Our promise to you is that we will provide an inclusive and supportive working environment that enables you to bring your whole self to work and realise your full potential.

It is a legal requirement, under the Immigration Act 2016, that anyone appointed to a 'customer facing role' must be able to demonstrate an ability to fulfil all spoken aspects of the role with confidence in fluent English.

Hybrid working arrangements are available for the majority of our roles, giving teams the opportunity to work in a way that suits them, balancing service need and individual choice, with a mix of both remote and office working.