Relief Family Time Worker

This is an exciting opportunity to join the Supervised Contact Service as a relief Family Time Worker, working, as required, Monday to Friday across Cambridgeshire. The service sits within Children’s Social Care and plays a vital role in enabling children—who cannot currently live with their parents due to safeguarding concerns—to spend safe, meaningful time with their families during court proceedings.

Family Time is often a deeply emotional and complex experience, particularly for children who have experienced trauma. Our role is to support children to maintain safe connections with their birth families, helping them preserve a sense of identity, history and belonging, and to create positive memories whether or not they eventually return home.

Sessions take place primarily within our dedicated Family Time venues located near children’s foster placements. When risk reduces and progress allows, some sessions may move into the community. Because many sessions run into the late afternoon, Family Time Workers must be able to work flexibly, with the ability to support sessions that may finish around 6pm as part of their normal working pattern. As the role involves travelling between different Family Time locations, a full driving licence and access to a vehicle are essential.

As a Family Time Worker, you will:

• Facilitate and supervise regular Family Time sessions between children and their parents or wider family members.
• Support children emotionally throughout each session and help them manage transitions between carers and family.
• Observe and record interactions, using the Department of Health’s Parenting Capacity Framework, ensuring high‐quality, factual case notes that contribute to ongoing social work assessments.
• Role‐model positive parenting and intervene when necessary to ensure safety.
• Prepare rooms, resources, and plans to create a warm, welcoming, and child‐centred session environment.
• Contribute to children’s life story work, helping capture positive memories and experiences.
• Liaise with social workers, foster carers, and other professionals to share information and support robust safeguarding practices.
• Report to a Family Time Team Manager, attending supervision and team meetings as part of the wider service.

We are looking for a compassionate, resilient, and self‐motivated individual who has experience working with children and families, particularly those experiencing distress or emotional difficulty. Confidence to engage with parents in challenging situations while maintaining clear professional boundaries is essential to the role.

You will have excellent observational, written, and verbal communication skills and be able to manage your own workload, plan sessions, and work independently across different locations. As a reliable, organised individual you will be committed to safeguarding and child‐centred practice and be comfortable using basic IT systems for record‐keeping. You must hold a full driving licence and have access to a vehicle, as travel across Cambridgeshire is required.

We welcome applicants who have transferable skills from roles in education, early years, health, youth work, residential settings, or any family support environment.

Our benefits include:

• 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.

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.

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.