About The Role
Are you passionate about making a positive, lasting difference to children and young people’s lives?
Do you want to work for a leading and progressive national childcare provider? Or perhaps you’re a social worker looking for their next challenge. If this sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you!
We have an exciting opportunity for a knowledgeable and experienced child protection social worker to join our organisation as a ‘Safeguarding Social Worker’. You will share our commitment to delivering high quality by carrying out monitoring and reviewing activity across our residential children’s homes.
About us
Compass community provides fostering, residential, educational and therapeutic services for the young people in our care. This role will work specifically within our residential services in the south region and will mirror an established safeguarding service in the midlands and north regions.
We are a child centred service, placing safeguarding of our children and young people at the centre of everything we do. Compass adopts a REACH (Resilience, Education, Acceptance, Child-centred and Holistically) approach that is a framework based on resilience theory, attachment theory and aspects of social pedagogy. We believe that this helps us to provide bespoke, consistent and therapeutic care for all the children whilst supporting our staff and foster carers to ensure each individual child has the best possible outcome.
You will be a registered social worker seeking to apply and expand your existing skills and knowledge in our child centred organisation.
It is essential that you can:
- Work in collaboration with the operational colleagues to ensure that safeguarding practice and quality standards are adhered to and underpinned by continuous improvement
- Mentor, support and challenge where safeguarding requires improvements
- Ensure that all paperwork produced in each service is to a high standard and evidences that children and young people in our care are being looked after safely.
- Drive a safeguarding culture and help create an environment of continuous improvement where safety is demonstrated through robust quality assurance and compliance processes which includes the recruitment, induction, supervision and appraisal process in line with organisational policy.
- Ensure that recording and documentation demonstrates social work theory and practice, underpinned by analysis of information, inquisitive questioning and on-going reflective practice.
- Continually support the development of management information systems to ensure that safeguarding is managed effectively.
- Advise and recommend strategies and policy developments to support and develop safeguarding across the group.
- Deliver coaching and workshops on safeguarding children in residential care
- Demonstrate experience of identifying safeguarding concerns and be able to effectively communicate these concerns verbally and in report form
- Have a good knowledge of children’s homes regulations & working together to safeguard children
- Have the ability to make objective professional assessments of children and young people.
- Have access to a car and a valid driving license.
Travelling for the role is required. Travelling times will vary, and you will be expected to travel up to 2 hrs in your area. Flexible working will be part of this role but visits to children’s homes will also be required along with attending meetings at other Compass offices.
The benefits of joining Compass Fostering
We are looking for applicants who share our vision and values and who truly believe in the principles of excellent social work and inclusivity.
In return for this, we offer:
- Cashback for various medical appointments & treatments with MediCash.
- Win up to £150 per month in our REACH awards.
- Receive £200 (2 years), £400 (5 years) and £600 (10 years) service awards, plus up to £500 special recognition award for outstanding practice.
- 25 days annual leave, rising to 28 days within 4 years, plus all bank holidays.
- Additional 2.5 days each year for your birthday, a health and wellbeing day and a half day festive shopping day.
- Life Assurance Scheme.
- Salary sacrifice schemes, including childcare vouchers, technology and cycle to work.
- Clear progression pathways with our Management Training programme.
Our recruitment process aims to create and maintain a safe workforce and contains robust vetting procedures. The successful applicants will be offered a role subject to satisfactory references and an enhanced DBS check. Please note that Compass reserves the right to close this vacancy early upon receipt of sufficient applications.
