Warrington Council

Warrington Children’s Services

Can offer you a range of placement opportunities to further develop your career.

We have a strong vision for social work practice in Warrington and have developed a new approach to social work. We are currently embedding a relationship based practice model that has systemic practice at its core. We are working alongside the Centre for Systemic Social Work, who are providing a comprehensive training programme to social workers and managers across our teams.

Our teams support families through assessment, CIN, Child Protection and when required care proceedings. We also offer student learning opportunities for children who are in foster care, adoption and who are care experienced.

We recognise that the role can be challenging and we have a range of exciting and impactful developments in Warrington that our future social workers can utilise in supporting families, including:

A multi-agency hub where young people at risk of going into care get targeted support to cope with the multiple issues they face.

Which includes Family Group Conference Co-ordinators, PAMS assessors and family support workers.

to assist in arranging and supervising the time that our children in care spend with their families.

The team are able to assist with taking minutes of meetings, scanning documents onto the system and other administrative tasks.

A multi-agency hub where young people at risk of going into care get targeted support to cope with the multiple issues they face.

In Warrington we want all children and families to benefit from high quality and purposeful relationships with professionals. We believe this will help create the best opportunities for people to change and reach their full potential. We also believe one of the most effective ways to improve the outcomes for children and families is through providing our social workers with the best conditions in which they can thrive.

Here in Warrington we are proud to be graded Good in all areas in our 2019 Ofsted inspection.

Warrington has been successful in becoming one of the ‘pathfinders’ for the new children’s social care reforms. Warrington Borough Council is one of seven new areas to be chosen to deliver the Families First for Children Pathfinder programme – improving services to help more children stay with their families in safe and loving homes, and protecting vulnerable children from harm where needed.

The programme will make sure targeted early help is available for families suffering domestic abuse, addiction, or poor mental health, to help them overcome adversity before issues escalate and children are put at risk of harm.

Where child protection is necessary, it will be carried out by social workers with greater expertise and experience, and the wider family will stay involved in decision-making.

The “pathfinder”, backed by up to £19.5 million, sits at the core of the national children’s social care reform strategy, Stable Homes, Built on Love, which aims to revamp the current system to focus more on early intervention and best practice child protection where that is required.

Other reforms being tested include strengthened support for wider family members like grandparents, aunts or uncles to help them step in and provide support to children to help them continue living with their parents – for example help with additional weekly costs, buying a new bed, or topping up lost wages.

The Families First programme will transform how Warrington Borough Council supports families and children by:

• Creating multi-disciplinary family help teams, to make sure families with multiple needs can access all the support they need earlier and in one place
• Making greater use of extended family members, with them being the first port of call if extra support is required, and practical and financial support provided to them if needed
• Establishing dedicated multi-agency child protection teams
• Creating stronger and clearer multi-agency safeguarding processes, including an increased role for education and improved information sharing.

• Great training and progression opportunities.
• We value good supervision and Time to Talk.
• We recognise that everyone is on their own individual journey and will tailor support to help you to achieve.
• We thrive off good multiagency working and relationships and have excellent support services available to assist with supporting families.

We are within easy commutable distance of Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Merseyside regions. In addition, we offer flexible working for students, (providing this can meet the service needs).

We have now moved to our new building in Time Square, this is a great work space with hubs and pods which will provide a great environment to work, furthermore, with cafes and restaurants on the doorstep.

Our people make Warrington work! Now is a really good time to join Warrington Children’s Services.