Deputy House Manager in Rochester

Are you passionate about transforming the lives of the most vulnerable children? Do you want to be a founding staff member of our new secure school, the first of its kind? Can you see yourself taking responsibility for ensuring the safe functioning of the school, and the care and development of our children and the staff who work with them? Could you bring energy, authority and compassion to the care of the children at the school?

We are offering a uniquely exciting opportunity for a person with experience of children’s residential care, social work or youth justice who is ready for a post in the team responsible for managing the care of the children and staff teams within Oasis Restore, the first secure school in England. Oasis Restore represents a revolution in youth justice: an opportunity for children within the criminal justice system to live and learn in a restorative environment that creates the potential for them to thrive in the future.

Our team of Deputy House Managers, working under the House Managers and wider Residential Leadership Team, will be dynamic, resilient, caring and skilled, able to organise, motivate and provide emotional containment to a large group of residential staff and to facilitate and participate fully in the life of the school, modelling excellent practice. The school can accommodate up to 49 boys and girls across 12 student-style flats, and offers an intensively aspirational and therapeutic environment for children remanded or sentenced within the criminal justice system. It is dual registered as a 16-19 Academy and Secure Children’s Home.

The Deputy House Managers, working under a robust multi-disciplinary leadership team, provide the backbone of the residential care system around the children. These are key roles, providing a vital link between the leadership team and front line practice.

Your role as a Deputy House Manager offers a unique opportunity to be part of a comprehensive team at Oasis Restore, joining us as we continue to recruit a large team of residential staff and onboard a new cohort of students, taking up a crucial role in their care and development. It will be your role to inspire and develop staff practice, manage their activities, utilise our management information systems and provide safety, care and well-being for children while developing a sense of safety and boundaries in their work.

You will be an important figure for children across the school and particularly in one of the three houses, representing a kind, decent and caring source of authority, present and involved in their daily lives. You will be someone who can work well in complex, demanding and emotive situations. You will have excellent relational skills and will be naturally curious and keen to learn about your own and others’ feelings and experiences.

You will be a champion of high standard of Children’s social care, with demonstrable experience of developing practice that delivers to Children’s Homes Quality Standards. You will be someone who can think well under pressure and who can empower and contain others in their work. You will have a powerful belief in the value of restorative work and will be able to hold your hope and compassion for the children in the face of the challenges they will bring.

This role reports into the Residential Leadership team, and works closely with the wider Senior Leadership Team, alongside a team of specialists within education, care, and health. Alongside colleagues, you will manage a large team of Senior and Restore Practitioners. As a deputy house manager you will have overall responsibility for case management of the children within your flat. This will include quality assurance all documents relating to the child (including adherence to legislative, regulatory and policy requirements) and all child facing practice from the Core Team around the child.

Your role will involve a significant responsibility for ensuring high quality standards of care for children and the healthy functioning of the whole school (including the home), chairing handovers, coordinating and ensuring the allocation of staff, managing the rota, holding reportees to account, providing support, presence and decision-making across the day and night, and working with staff to embed and sustain our restorative culture and achieving the very best standards as outlined in Children’s Homes Regulations and Guidance.

You will be a champion of therapeutic practice, placing relationships at the heart of everything you do and be responsible for ensuring excellent standards of care throughout the school. You will be someone who cares about developing others, working on organisational, team, group, family and individual levels to foster real understanding, good relationships and communication, within our culture of benign enquiry.

You will have a mature, reflective approach that aligns with the Restore Framework, our model of practice, aware of the conscious and unconscious impact of this very challenging work and the value of discovering its meaning. You will be committed to finding a way through, and never giving up.

Oasis Restore’s mission is to transform the life chances of children aged 12-18 years in the criminal justice system through delivering psychologically informed, integrated practice that centres on trusted, safe relationships between staff and children. Oasis Restore is a learning community that embeds hope, stability, and opportunity for children beyond the secure school.

As a relatively new established subsidiary of the wider Oasis Charitable Trust, you enjoy the benefit of being part of national organisation that employs teachers, youth and community workers, volunteers and supports staff to reach their full potential. Oasis Restore offers the following opportunities:

• A mixture of one to one and group reflective practice, coaching & regular line management/supervision sessions
• Experience an Appraisal policy that decouples pay and performance.
• An elected staff forum to listen to, and act on staff feedback.
• Access to the Local Government Pensions Scheme (a competitive, defined benefit pension scheme)
• Access to a funded cash plan health scheme
• Access to an EAP service
• 33 days annual leave including bank holidays, rising to 35 days after two years.
• Subject to meeting basic eligibility criteria, be entitled to up to 8 weeks full pay and 18 weeks half-pay paid maternity/adoption/shared parental leave (based broadly on the NHS Employers scheme).
• Subject to meeting basic eligibility criteria be entitled to up to 3 weeks fully paid paternity leave.
• Paid time off to attend antenatal appointments (those staff who are either pregnant or whose partner is pregnant)
• Have a structured and bespoke induction training plan plus a training offer bespoke to our context leading to a level 3 qualification in the therapeutic care of adolescents.
• Comprehensive de-escalation and restraint training (front line roles only)
• Supportive sick leave pay (based broadly on the length of service framework in the national ‘Green Book’ framework)
• Up to 5 days discretionary paid compassionate/emergency/general leave plus further discretionary unpaid leave
• Up to 4 weeks paid parental bereavement leave plus up to 5 days paid bereavement leave for the death of other specified close relatives.
• Blue Light Card (subject to meeting their eligibility criteria)
• Expenses and travel costs incurred as part of the working day (as appropriate, not including travel to work)
• Access to free car parking, season Ticket Loans, Specsavers eye care vouchers and a cycle to work scheme (subject to meeting their eligibility criteria).

If you have any questions please email to arrange a confidential phone call as soon as possible.

We are committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people. We expect all staff to share this commitment. All successful candidates will be subject to Disclosure and Barring Service checks along with other relevant employment checks including references and right to work checks. It is an offence to apply for a role if you are barred from engaging in regulated activity relevant to children. This post is also covered by Part 7 of the Immigration Act (2016) and therefore the ability to speak fluent and spoken English is an essential requirement for this role.

At Oasis Restore we recognise that our team is strengthened by the knowledge, experience and insights people from a wide range of backgrounds can bring. These beliefs and values are underpinned by decades of work and experience that Oasis has had in a wide range of sectors including education, housing and youth-work supported further by a wide range of independent research and studies elsewhere which evidence that creating teams with diverse experience and perspectives, and encouraging healthy debate, reduces the risk of ‘blind spots’ that often form barriers to success. Oasis Restore aim is to attract and retain the very best diverse talent and role models to help create an innovative, caring and extraordinary working environment for our staff, that enables us to deliver exceptional, caring and psychologically informed learning experience for our students.

We would therefore like to encourage applications from people with varied skillsets, life experiences, and from different backgrounds and sectors to help shape Oasis Restore. If you can demonstrate some of the criteria and believe you have what it takes, then we’d love to hear from you.

Given the nature of our work we also welcome applications from candidates with the following lived experience:

• Experience of working successfully with challenging people who have multiple and complex needs.
• Personal experience of the criminal justice system, or lived experience of the issues facing this client group (i.e. involved in gangs or knife crime).
• Knowledge of the issues facing this client group, such as gangs, knife crime, social exclusion and isolation, child criminal exploitation, adverse childhood experiences and trauma.
• Ability to actively listen and motivate young people.
• Ability to be a positive role model, demonstrating the virtues of a crime-free life to young people.

We’re also very happy to answer any questions you may have so please don’t hesitate to get in touch.