Family Support Worker - Central Team in Nibley

You will be responsible for carrying out whole-family assessments, providing advice and guidance to help establish appropriate plans. You'll ensure that services are effective and supportive to meet the needs of families. You will regularly review and monitor early help plans, responding to changing needs and renegotiating where appropriate in line with safeguarding procedures. You will manage your own caseload to ensure that specialist input is provided and effective outcomes are achieved. Records and reports will be completed in accordance with professional and council guidelines.

You will work collaboratively with partners across different sectors, ensuring effective communication so that knowledge and best practice are shared. This role sits within an area currently undergoing a period of change due to the government-led social care reform. As the sector evolves, some elements of the role may naturally develop, offering opportunities to grow, adapt and be part of meaningful change. We'll keep you fully informed throughout and make sure you feel supported, valued and confident as the updates arise. It's an exciting time to join us and help shape the future for our children and families.

This role is a permanent full-time position and will be office-based. You will be required to travel widely within the authority, so you must either have a current driving licence and provide a car or have access to appropriate means of travel. Business insurance will need to be added to your current car insurance policy. Please note that due to the nature of this role it is a requirement of employment that an enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check is obtained for this post.

We're a positive, proactive team, with supportive management who listen to ideas, and act on them - fast. Coming out of Covid, we've seen rapidly increasing demand to support children and families with ever more complex needs. We recognised the pressure this was placing on our frontline teams and to ensure we can deliver on our high ambitions for our children and young people, we're making significant new investments in these areas. We're expanding our frontline teams. We've created 60 new roles, which will mean consistently lower caseloads for our social workers, so they can deliver genuinely child-centred support.

We're making it easier for staff to work flexibly, enabling them to work how and where they need to, to do their jobs as well as they can. We're strengthening our reward offer to recognise the fantastic job our staff do. We're adopting clinical supervision to support staff because we recognise that our work can be tough emotionally. It builds on our training offer, helping staff to develop critical thinking skills and support their work with families. We're building early intervention partnership capacity because we know we can achieve better results for families if we get multi-agency working right. We're increasing what we spend on evidence-based specialist expertise and capabilities, including specialist trauma support and an in-house psychologist to support families. We're introducing new initiatives like the Mockingbird extended family model in fostering, a Caring Dads scheme and a new approach to domestic abuse. We're enhancing an already exceptional training and development offer. A new systemic practice academy will drive our focus on relationship-based social work. Finally, it might be boring, but we're investing in our systems and processes, because we want them to help us, rather than hold us back in our work. These investments demonstrate our absolute focus on providing an excellent, family-centred service.

We keep workloads manageable, we welcome flexible working and we're recognised for the opportunities we provide for career development, training and secondment. It's not the managers who say this - it's our colleagues. Right now, we're looking for talented, ambitious social workers to join us across our adult and children's services.

Our commitments to you:

• Unmatched training, development and secondment opportunities
• A proactive team with supportive management
• Commitment to excellence
• Realistic caseloads
• Flexible working opportunities
• A comprehensive Assessed and Supported Year in Employment (ASYE) programme

South Gloucestershire offers a rich mix of stunning countryside and urban culture. At the same time, due to our being near to the M4, M5 and M32, it's an easy commute from Bristol, Bath, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Somerset and, with the bridge charges recently abolished, south Wales.

It is essential that you are qualified to a level NVQ 3 or equivalent in a relevant discipline or working towards an appropriate qualification related to the provision of services to children and young people. You must have experience of the use of evidence-based practice working with vulnerable and disadvantaged children, families or young people. You will have previous experience of writing holistic, multi-agency assessments and plans with families. Given the nature of this role, you will have well-developed interpersonal and communication skills to build relationships and engage successfully with colleagues, service users and partner organisations. Given the elements of this role, you will be skilled at engaging families quickly, so our help continues to support families to use what they have learned once the Families Plus involvement ends.

At South Gloucestershire Council, we'll support you at every moment. As part of our benefits package, you will receive generous annual leave (pro rata), employee wellbeing support and you will have access to a range of staff discounts, including eye tests, travel, shopping and leisure activities. We recognise that our diverse team of skilled and dedicated people make us a great place to work. We welcome applications from everyone and ensure that individuals are selected, promoted and developed on the basis of their merits and abilities. We value our staff as individuals, investing in their careers and we are recognised for the quality, breadth and depth of our training and development offer, which helps make the greatest long-term difference in work.

What is special here is the strength of the team ethos. We are a relatively small local authority, so managers know staff well. They can plan their services to ensure teams have manageable caseloads and have effective supervision so feel supported to make decisions which are right for the children and young people they work with. We are committed to safeguarding and promoting the safety and welfare of children, young people and vulnerable adults. Ensuring all our staff are given the right skills, knowledge and support to recognise and respond effectively to potential abuse or neglect.

Our teams at South Gloucestershire Council are making a real difference to the lives of people who live, work and learn here. We're building and shaping communities which people are proud of. We're working with the most vulnerable in our community to help them achieve what they want in life. We're investing in our schools to ensure every child and young person in South Gloucestershire achieves their full potential. We've achieved a great deal, but we need talented and dedicated people to ensure we continue to make a difference. We're making a difference, be part of it!