Fostering Panel Advisor

About The Role

The role will involve a mix of office-based and home working. Fostering Panel is twice per month and is an in-person meeting. Quality assurance of paperwork can be done from home but an element of the role will require regular contact with staff in the Fostering, Kinship and Children's Social Work Teams.

Are you an experienced Social Worker looking for an exciting and rare opportunity to support and develop foster carers and the service offered to children looked after?

The Fostering Independent Reviewing Officer (FIRO) sits within the Children Looked After Service overseen by the Service Manager for Fostering and Permanency. In this role you will provide strategic advice and overview of the needs of the fostering service and would develop links with Islington's Foster Care Association to build relations and contribute to the development of our foster carers. You will work closely with the IROs for Children We Look After to understand the needs of our children who our foster carers are taking care of.

Can you join us and maintain the very highest quality oversight of our foster carers' development to ensure they provide the best care for our children and young people?

Islington Council's Fostering Service is dedicated to creating a better future for our children and young people. Key to this is having a diverse, skilled group of foster and kinship carers ready to offer care and support when children and young people are unable to remain at home.

Our children, young people and their families are at the heart of everything we do and the development of our practice model allows us to them towards their version of meaningful and sustained changed. Islington's Motivational Practice Model provides an integrated care, safeguarding and change model, which includes Motivational Interviewing skills helping to build meaningful relationships and promote safety, collaboration and purposeful change.

Our practice model is further complemented by Trauma-informed practice (including Dyadic Development Practice), as we believe that by better understanding the lived experiences of those we are here to serve, we are better positioned to engage, support and assist children and young people to reach their full potential.

Relationships are also central to achieving the very best outcome for our children, young people, their families and their carers. We work closely with our fostering team and placements service to support our carers in offering a trauma informed approach to care, and to offer stable placements where our children and young people can achieve their potential. Therefore, relationship-based practice is key to approach.

Children's Services is shaped by our Motivational Practice Framework which places trauma informed practice at the centre of our work with children and their families.

As a Fostering Panel Advisor you will provide expert guidance to ensure high-quality, legislatively and statutorily compliant fostering services, focusing on quality assurance, training panel members, advising the Agency Decision Maker (ADM), and ensure statutory requirements are met for considering the suitability to foster of all Islington's mainstream and kinship foster carers. They quality assure reports, develop practice, offer professional advice on policy and help recruit, train and appraise panel members, ensure fair processes for foster carers and effective outcomes for children.

• You will be a qualified social worker and have experience of working with Children Looked After and Foster Carers and social work practice leadership.
• Demonstrable knowledge and understanding of Children Act 1989 and 2004, Fostering Regulations and National Minimum Standards, care planning legislation and the Training Support and Development Standards.
• Awareness of current national policy, evidence-based research and best practice.
• Ability to use methods based in Dyadic Development Practice and challenge practitioners and the fostering service in a way that enhances the capacity to reflect and create change in practice and relationships with children in the…