Family Group Conference Coordinator

Cambridgeshire has a well-established Family Group Conference Service, which sits within Children's Social Care. The Team undertake Family Group Conferences and Family Network Meetings, actively promoting and facilitating family led decision making during social care involvement.

We have an exciting opportunity to join our team, as we are recruiting to a part time (30 hours), Family Group Conference Coordinator post. This is a hybrid role with a mix of office and home working alongside countywide visits across Cambridgeshire. We would like to invite applications from practitioners with experience of working with complex family dynamics.

The role of the Family Group Coordinator is to promote collaborative decision-making and participation with families. The children and their families take a central role in decision making, creating an attainable and realistic family plan, designed to keep families together and improve support.

What will you be doing?

• You will be responsible for facilitating Family Group Conferences including where children are at risk of becoming looked after or who may already be looked after and where planning for their return home, or placement with other family members is necessary.
• The role of the coordinator is to prepare families and children for their Family Group Conference, facilitate individual Family Group Conferences and contribute to the promotion and development of the Family Group Conference service, ensuring that the child's voice is heard throughout the process.
• Tasks include: pulling together the issues that need to be addressed from the social worker; visiting children and families and their identified support networks to gather their feedback; using a strengths-based approach to facilitate a meeting, sometimes with a large number of people, that is child and family led, resulting in the creation of a shared family plan.

The coordinator role requires the candidate to be innovative, organised, collaborative and self-motivated.

About you

• You will have experience of working with children and families and have the ability to understand and manage complex family dynamics, empowering families to find their own solutions.
• You will be able to hold a child centred approach in your work, developing innovative ways to support all parties to participate and ensuring that the child's voice is heard, whilst mediating during potential periods of conflict.
• The successful applicant will need excellent time management and organisational skills to manage their own workload, as well as outstanding communication skills.
• To be flexible in your working is essential, as visiting and meeting during evenings may be required to meet the needs of children and their families.

We are committed to your career and professional development, so you will receive formal and impromptu supervision, an annual appraisal and access to a range of training opportunities. We also hold monthly practice meetings which are an opportunity for learning, sharing and development.

You must have the ability to work from a variety of locations and travel countywide independent of public transport.

For a full list of the requirements of the role, please check out the Job Description & Person Specification.

We value our colleagues in Cambridgeshire County Council and have developed a number of benefits in addition to the basics like annual leave, sick pay, pension and mileage:

• A comprehensive wellbeing package to cover all aspects of wellbeing, both in and out of work, which can also be accessed by your family.
• Buy up to 4 weeks additional annual leave (pro-rata) through our salary sacrifice scheme.
• Take your bank holidays flexibly to better suit your personal circumstances.
• Make Additional Voluntary Contributions (Shared AVCs) to your pension with tax and National Insurance savings.
• Access to development opportunities, apprenticeships and qualified coaches to support your personal and professional growth.
• Paid volunteering hours each year so you can make a positive impact on our community during your normal working day.
• Access to Peer Support Groups through our IDEAL staff equality, diversity and inclusion network.
• Opportunities to nominate and receive Employee Recognition Awards.
• An Our Cambs Rewards account, giving you access to in-store and online discounts as well as our Car Lease and Cycle to Work schemes.

About us

Cambridgeshire is a great place to work and live with a diverse population, an urban centre in Cambridge, historic Isle of Ely, Huntingdon and St Ives as well as more rural landscapes. Our four values are central to our culture, driving everything we do.

We are proud to serve the diverse communities of Cambridgeshire and want our workforce to be reflective of this diversity, which we firmly believe benefits our colleagues, the organisation and our communities.

If you don’t meet every single requirement in the job role but think this could be you, please don’t be put off. We are committed to building a workplace that is compassionate and inclusive as well as diverse, so if you think you could be a good candidate for this role please consider applying and speak to the recruiting manager if you have any questions.

Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, along with our employee network 'IDEAL' and self-organised peer support groups help us to foster an inclusive, supportive and safe working environment where people feel valued, respected, and empowered.

We are proud to be a Disability Confident Employer. We fully support providing reasonable adjustments throughout our recruitment process, as well as when you join us, and we encourage candidates to contact the Hiring Manager to discuss any adjustment needs.

Visit our jobs and careers section to find out more about our wide range of learning and development opportunities; apprenticeships; our wellbeing package; staff benefits; our commitment to equality, diversity and Inclusion.