Senior Practitioner Family Safeguarding

Roles at this level provide technical/professional services and advice to customers within a specific service area. Roles will use expertise to deliver a workload for which they have a standalone professional responsibility and focuses on understanding a wide range of procedures and policies and navigates a path through them to advise on appropriate solutions.

Scope of Work

Role holder is a qualified and registered social care, health, and wellbeing professional, who will provide services and advice internally and externally within a specialist social or health care area. Accountable for the quality and professionalism of their work and advice, role holders answer questions about ‘what’ needs to be done and ‘how’ to do them, in specific (and often complex) situations.

The emphasis is on short-term solutions and at this level horizons rarely extend beyond weeks/months. Their work will be based on a theoretical understanding of their technical/professional field, but they will be operating within well-established professional procedures and defined council policies. Work will involve a broad range of complex problems and role holders will need to manage changing priorities and use professional judgement to respond to differing situations.

Communication skills will be used to relay technical advice and guidance, working with members of the community to ensure that their needs are met.

Accountabilities/Responsibilities

• Provide practice development opportunities for own team and partner organisation.
• Responsible for making professional risk-informed complex decisions.
• Provide statutory support to residents, including the provision of information, advice, assessment, support planning and safeguarding in line within statutory guidance and council policy and procedures.
• Work in partnership with voluntary sector organisations, partners and others to provide integrated and coordinated support to residents and families in the community.
• Manage an allocated caseload to deliver specialised support and services to residents and the community within defined standards.
• Make recommendations on procedural, process and service improvements to enhance overall team and service performance.
• Recognise and monitor risk, escalating issues to more senior colleagues when necessary to ensure that situations are addressed at the earliest possible time.
• Operate effectively within and contribute to the development of organisations and services, including multi-agency and inter-professional settings.

Managerial

• Provides line management to a small team. This will include translating wider objectives into detailed activities for their team, and monitoring performance against this.
• Control team activities to meet (daily/weekly/monthly) caseloads performance targets and schedules.
• Cascading information on the corporate context so that organisational messages are understood in the team and disseminating best practices to help teams understand and enact changes and improvement.
• May support the control of budgets to deliver service priorities and to ensure appropriate resources are available.

Professional

• Prioritise work and resolves day-to-day operating resource issues.
• May provide specialist development or support to core/standard professionals.

Skills, knowledge and experience

• Typically degree qualified (or equivalent) in relevant subject plus number of years’ experience in a similar role or significant vocational experience, demonstrating development through involvement in a series of progressively more demanding relevant roles. Formal professional qualification (where relevant).
• Up to date and thorough knowledge and understanding of the work practices, systems, processes and procedures relevant to the role, and a good understanding of the council policies and services related to the role.
• Knowledge of relevant legal obligations relating to social care, health, and wellbeing, in addition to the policies, processes and procedures governing the service area including implementing evidence-based practice.
• Understanding of the organisation’s political environment and able to explain the formal political structures and decision making processes in the council.
• Ability to plan and organise own work across weeks and months, with a clear understanding of how own work affects others across the organisation.
• Excellent communication skills to deal with members of the community, providing specialist advice to residents in differing situations with empathy, and to communicate at different levels across the organisation.