Early Years & Childcare Advisor - Quality and Sufficiency in Chichester

As an Early Years and Childcare Advisor for Quality and Sufficiency, you will support early years and childcare settings to deliver sustainable, high quality, inclusive practice. Your focus will be to support providers across West Sussex to sustainably meet the provision needs of children and their families. This is crucial to ensuring young children have the best start in life and identifying additional support through inclusive practice. You will collaborate and work in partnership with colleagues and a range of organisations, such as early years settings, childminders and out of school provision, to support every child to achieve their full potential. This role is varied, and the Early Years team are supportive and passionate about ensuring children receive the best experience in early years and childcare, enabling families to have access to childcare for 0-14-year-olds (or up to 18 for children with a disability).

Key responsibilities of this role include:

• Reviewing the sufficiency of childcare places and providing business support.
• Compliance of the Early Years Funded Entitlement and other funding streams.
• Supporting early years settings to provide a high quality, inclusive environment for children.
• Supporting early years settings to identify and support children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), as well as other vulnerabilities.
• Developing effective professional relationships with providers and customers.
• Observing and modelling practice to staff in early years and childcare settings.
• Keeping up to date with research, safeguarding, regulations, policies, practices, and procedures.

About You

As an EYCA, you will need a high level of professional knowledge as well as significant experience of working within the early years and childcare sector. We are looking for someone who has clear communication skills to offer advice and guidance, and who can adapt and re-prioritise work in response to changes. You will spend a significant amount of time working away from colleagues, so you will need to be organised and self-motivated. Please refer to the key skills in your cover letter as these will be used for shortlisting criteria.

Key Skills

• Excellent communication skills to provide specialist advice and guidance, through challenge and support, focussing on impact and outcomes.
• Ability to adapt to changing situations in a measured and flexible manner to adapt the advice, guidance or support to suit individual and changing circumstances.
• Ability to work with a wide range of learning styles and levels of experience, demonstrating tact, diplomacy and empathy as required with a focus on improved outcomes for children.
• Ability to contribute ideas and creative solutions to support the delivery of initiatives, contingencies or other requirements of the service.
• Ability to work with other service professionals to share best practice, knowledge and learning to drive forward improvement.
• A level of IT skills that will enable you to effectively and efficiently use a range of tools to complete work tasks, including using spreadsheets, databases and maintaining data accuracy and confidentiality.
• Excellent time management and personal organisation skills to organise own workload and meet deadlines.

About Us

Early Years and Childcare Advisors (EYCAs) work within the Children, Young People and Learning directorate, which groups all services including Early Help, Children’s Social Care and Education and Skills, that work together to put children first and improve outcomes for children and families across West Sussex. Our Vision is: “From birth every child is nurtured, supported, and given the opportunity to develop well and achieve their full potential in inclusive, safe, inspiring environments. The voice and needs of children and their families is sought and acted upon with holistic needs being identified early and effectively met, enabling children and families to be healthy and thrive.”

Rewards and Benefits

As an employer we recognise that it is our employees that are central to everything we do. We aim to create a supportive and dynamic working environment where employees can achieve their full potential, achieve a healthy work-life balance and are rewarded for the work they do. In addition to working within a great team and a brilliant opportunity you will receive:

• Employer Pension Contribution: 15% (this alters per annum on the 1 April each year)
• Annual leave: 27 days holiday + Bank Holidays = 35 days

For a full list of the benefits offered to you as a West Sussex County Council employee you can find them on our Rewards and Benefits page.

Further Information / Safer Recruitment

Reference number for this role is 328. For an informal conversation regarding the role, please contact: Hiring Manager Sue Woods, Early Years Team Manager – Quality Improvement, at sue.woods@westsussex.gov.uk. For further information regarding your application, or if you require any reasonable adjustments to support your application, please contact: Recruitment Specialist Natalie Greene at Natalie.Greene@westsussex.gov.uk.

We are committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, young people, and vulnerable adults. This post is subject to QTS check, an enhanced DBS check, five years referencing, and an occupational health check. Equity, inclusion and accessibility is very important to West Sussex County Council. We welcome and encourage applications from everyone, as this helps us build a diverse and talented workforce, that reflects the communities we serve. We ensure our approach to recruitment is flexible and supportive to enable all applicants to be at their best and to ensure they have the best possible chance of success. We operate a guaranteed interview scheme for applicants that have a disability, are a veteran or are a care leaver. More information can be found on our application help page.