Fostering Placements Officer

Overview

Fostering – Recruitment and Family Finding Team

Fostering Placements Officer – Scale 6 - £31,537 - £33,699

Full-time - 37 hours per week

There has never been a more exciting time to join our service: alongside making a difference to the lives of individuals and families, we have adopted exciting new strengths-based approaches and are passionate about delivering continuous service improvement.

In this role, you will be part of our innovative and forward-thinking Fostering Service. We are an ambitious and aspirational service. We are looking for a fostering placements officer that has an interest in ensuring that our children are appropriately matched and placed with internal foster carers that can meet our children’s needs.

The successful applicant will be responsible for finding families for our children to live when they can’t be cared for by their family. The role will also include ensuring that our carers are fully supported by identifying support at the point of a match being made.

The successful applicant should have a skill to develop a strong and robust direct working relationship with all internal foster carers in order to speak to them on a daily basis to identify new placements, support carers to manage children's needs and ensure that foster carers are supported to fulfil their role as therapeutic foster carers. This post will include some evening and weekend working and responding to emergencies.

Our team is very experienced, highly supportive, friendly and passionate about what we do. We work hard but also find time to celebrate achievements and good practice. The Recruitment and Family Finding team work closely and collaboratively with colleagues within the Mainstream Support and Supervision team, Kinship team as well as with Social Workers and managers from other areas of Children’s Services.

The work is interesting, often complex and challenging but is crucial to achieving placement stability and permanence for our children.

The fostering service has a systemic practice approach, supporting our foster carers to parent therapeutically.

Our brilliant practitioners are at the heart of our ambitious approach to improve outcomes for children and families in Telford and Wrekin: that’s why from tailored in-house training to the West Midlands Teaching Partnership, we will ensure that you have access to the best development opportunities.

Here at Telford and Wrekin Council, we have been judged to be outstanding overall in terms of effectiveness for the second time! Here’s just some of the great things Ofsted had to say when they visited us in April 2024:

• Children and families in Telford and Wrekin continue to experience exceptional social work practice when they are in care and as care leavers.
• Participation is a real strength and children’s and families’ involvement is threaded throughout service developments.
• Social workers know their children well and have developed effective relationships with parents.
• The virtual school is a significant strength in Telford and Wrekin.
• Care leavers benefit from an extremely comprehensive and generous local offer.
• Corporate parenting is a strength in Telford and Wrekin.
• The stability of the experienced workforce creates the perfect environment to benefit children and care leavers. As a result, social workers maintain relationships with children who know them over many years, which contributes to children’s feeling of belonging.
• Staff enjoy working in an environment where senior leaders are visible, and they feel valued.

If you share our passion for making a difference, we would be delighted if you joined us.

For further information on the role please view the job description and person specification.

At Telford & Wrekin Council, we know that having a diverse workforce is key to providing the best possible services to our community. We celebrate having a diverse and inclusive culture where people are able to be themselves at work, and everyone has a voice.

Posts working with children or vulnerable groups will be subject to an appropriate criminal records check. It is an offense to apply for a role that involves engaging in regulated activity with children and…