Children’s social workers play a crucial part in supporting children, young people, and their families during challenging times.
From assessing the needs of children and their families, developing and implementing care plans, to ensuring the safety and well-being of children, their work includes home visits, coordinating with other professionals and agencies, providing support and counselling to families, and responding to emergencies or crises involving children at risk.
Collaboration is a key aspect of frontline social work. Social workers regularly work with other professionals, including teachers, healthcare providers, police officers, and therapists, to ensure comprehensive support for children and families. They will attend multi-disciplinary meetings, sharing information, coordinating services, and developing care plans to address the needs of children.
To become a frontline social worker in children’s services, you need social work qualification and registration with Social Work England.
“We believe in the power of collaboration and share a common goal with those we regulate—to protect the public, enable positive change and ultimately improve people’s lives.”
Source: Social Work England
When we speak to social workers, we’re always looking for the key skills they need: strong communication and interpersonal skills are essential, as are empathy, compassion, the ability to manage stress and work under pressure, critical thinking and problem-solving abilities. A solid understanding of child protection laws and policies is also essential.
Pertemps Social Care works with almost every local authority in the country. As a result, we offer a wide range of opportunities within children’s services.
Our vacancies regularly include child protection, referral and assessment, children in need, and fostering. Additionally, we recruit for roles in adults’ services teams, including hospital teams, mental health, adult safeguarding, and services for older people.
However, local authorities rely on us for our rapid response rates, and success with hard-to-fill roles. Relationships built on trust and respect work in favour of our candidates too, and we work directly with key decision-makers if we think they will benefit from the skills and expertise of one of our candidates.
We like nothing more than long-term relationships with our social workers. From ASYE opportunities to senior practitioner roles, team leadership and management positions, we’re happy to help social workers progress. They often focus on specialist skill areas such as adoption, fostering, or child protection, and we have the roles to make that happen.
We’re also supportive of our social workers gaining the qualifications they need to become independent reviewing officers, policy advisors, or educators in social work training programmes. Continuous professional development and gaining experience in different aspects of social work can open up these pathways, and we are delighted to help candidates find the next role they need to help with that journey.
If you’d like to hear more about jobs in children’s social care, or our high-calibre social work candidates, please get in touch to find out how we can help.