Head of Service for Children in Care & Care Leavers

Head of Service - Children in Care and Care Leavers

Our Story:

Halton is a vibrant local authority with a rich history and heritage, featuring two iconic bridges that connect communities across the River Mersey. Located in Cheshire, Halton boasts excellent transport links between Liverpool and Manchester, as well as close proximity to both Liverpool John Lennon and Manchester Airports.

Our progressive community strategy aims to bring about meaningful, long-term improvements that enhance lives. It’s an exciting time to join us as we develop new policies and transform the way people access services.

We are immensely proud that when asked what’s great about working for Halton, the most popular response from our workforce has been ‘our colleagues’. 

Our Team:

Halton Borough Council is seeking to recruit an experienced manager to lead our Children in Care and Care Leavers Team and our provider services of fostering, adoption and residential short-break unit.

Your Contributions:

This is a key leadership role in which you will be responsible for delivering and transforming services to children and families across the borough. You will therefore have extensive and detailed knowledge of children’s services and an understanding of the legislative and statutory obligations relevant to such services.

With a proven track record in managing high quality, responsive and efficient services, you will have strong leadership skills and a clear vision that you are able to share and motivate and inspire others to adopt.

You will be responsible for reviewing and monitoring the Service’s performance against local, regional and national standards and key performance indicators so that necessary improvements are identified and implemented. You will therefore have demonstrable experience of performance monitoring and performance management systems, as well as an understanding of the agendas facing local government and how these might affect performance.

You will be able to adopt a collaborative approach with internal and external stakeholders, with experience of successfully using resources to work together in identifying and delivering a range of services to meet the community’s needs.

As the Head of Service, you will be authoritative in your advice and be able to analyse information and make judgements under pressure. In managing risk and implementing strategies you will be able to think laterally at both a strategic and operational level and meet challenges with creativity and innovation.

You will have experience of successfully controlling large budgets and will proactively manage, monitor and report on all the budgets allocated, securing financial efficiencies wherever possible.

As a systems leader of practice, you will support and embed the ongoing development of our systemic model of social work and ensure the workforce is skilled and able to evidence the impact of outstanding social work practice in achieving the best outcomes for our children in care and care leavers.

If this sounds like you and you’re passionate about making a difference in Halton, we’d love to hear from you.

Our Offer:

Aside from working with a great team, our employees have access to a fantastic range of benefits, including:

• A generous annual holiday allowance starting at 34 days per year (including bank holidays), increasing with long service
• Membership of our defined benefit, salary-linked Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) with generous employer contributions
• 3 x Salary Life Cover via Local Government Pension Scheme
• Investment in your personal development
• Free Car Parking at HBC sites
• Flexible working arrangements
• Car leasing schemes

Next Steps:

At Halton Borough Council, we want all of our candidates to feel well-informed so if you would like to have an informal chat about this role, please contact Katherine Appleton (Katherine.Appleton@halton.gov.uk).

Interviews will provisionally take place on Tuesday 1^st April 2025.

At Halton Borough Council we want to ensure that our communities are represented across our workforce and a vital part of this is to encourage diversity in all respects. We are committed to making our recruitment practices barrier-free and tailored to best suit the needs and strength of the individual. This includes making adjustments for people with a disability, neurodiversity or with long-term health conditions. If you require accommodations, please reach out during the recruitment process so that we can make this the best possible experience for you – resourcing@halton.gov.uk

Please refer to the attached Job Profile for further information about the role and our values.

We reserve the right to close this vacancy earlier than the specified date should we receive sufficient applications. If you’re interested, please complete your application as early as possible.

We look forward to receiving your application!