Children and Families are at the heart of our work in Telford and Wrekin. We remain focused on achieving the best possible outcomes for the children young people and families we work with. This is a collective endeavour supported through activity across the whole of our organisation and is not solely the responsibility of Children’s Services we are passionate about delivering continuous service improvement that work alongside our Council Plans and Priorities and the vision of “protect, care and invest to create a better borough”.
Relational practice is at the core of our support, we acknowledge that in order for children, young people and their families to reach their full potential and make and sustain change the relationship with their practitioner is the core foundation.
Family Safeguarding
We have embedded family safeguarding within our child protection and family support services. Our Social Work teams work in collaboration with adult practitioners to provide a whole system approach to supporting children and young people supported by child in need and child protection processes.
This involves:
- Establishing multi-disciplinary teams where specialist adult practitioners in domestic abuse, mental health and substance misuse are co-located with Social Workers under a unified management structure. This enables a multi-disciplinary whole family response through direct assessment and support from specialist adult practitioners as well as multi-professional group case discussions and sharing of knowledge and skills across disciplines.
- Use of Motivational Interviewing (MI) as a framework for practice for all staff. Staff undergo training and ongoing skills development workshops and follow a structured solution-focussed intervention programme with families which aims to work collaboratively with families and increase engagement.
- Using an electronic assessment workbook which provides a single data tool for all professionals and links to the work programme. This increases ease of information sharing between professionals and reduces social worker time spent recording and sharing information.
Systemic practice
We have enhanced our Systemic practice offer to include check points for consultations to aid care planning and relational working alongside families from a therapeutic lens. This has also included direct therapeutic work to support children and their families. Every service has a POD to explore systemic concepts to aid relational working. There is a programme of training to aid the embedment of systemic practice across Children’s Services.
Training
We have enhanced our training and development offer to include wider advice, tuition and reflection on trauma informed and transformative practice to aid connective practice that builds upon strengths and seeks to enable change. The training and development plan is firmly set within the National agenda of children’s social care.
Co-production
We are committed to learning from children, young people, carers and parents who have been supported by our services. This includes listening to their feedback as well as co-producing ideas and training to continually improve the support we provide.
Supervision
Telford & Wrekin has a robust supervision policy which is geared towards achieving positive outcomes for you as a worker and for the children and families we work with. We are committed to ensuring that all staff receive good quality, effective and regular reflective supervision in line with their needs and requirements. This includes those working on a temporary contract (including agency staff), staff who are permanent, part time or full time. Whilst this policy is applicable to all staff working within the Children and Families Service, we recognise the specific requirements for practitioners and staff who work directly with children and their families.
Staff Consultation Group
This group is comprised of a range of representatives from all areas of Telford & Wrekin Children’s Services. The group meet with the Executive Director, Children’s Services to discuss and respond to our annual staff health check; plan for our annual practice week; and to look at ways to improve practice and champion new developments across the service.
Staff briefings
Staff briefings are held quarterly and provide an opportunity for staff to network and to keep abreast of developments across the breadth of the service. In addition to formal inputs, regular speakers are organised so that workers can also hear about the national agenda to support learning and development.
Practice standards
Telford and Wrekin Council has clear practice standards and organisational standards of behaviour. High quality social work is vital to safeguarding the most vulnerable families, children and young people in Telford and Wrekin.
Our practice standards have been developed by our social work practitioners and set out principles that relate to good practice in social work. Adherence to these standards will play a vital role in making Telford and Wrekin a Family Friendly community where children feel safe, and help lead joint working to improve outcomes for the most vulnerable children.
Our ambition is not just to be the best for families, children and young people, but to be the best council for the staff and services that work with them. This is a great opportunity for us to work together to make Telford and Wrekin a centre of leading practice in social work.
Our overarching principles:
- In all our activities, the child’s best interests come first.
- We will always aim to meet the needs of children and young people and their families at the earliest stage, either through the provision of early help or where necessary support from safeguarding services.
- Children are best cared for by their families and we will continue to work alongside families for this to be achieved. In situations where this cannot be achieved safely children need to be looked after in safe and stable alternative caring arrangements.
- Our practitioners act as a resource for children and young people and their families, helping parents/carers to make positive changes. To do this they need to practice under the lenses of reflectivity and professional curiosity whilst taking responsibility for self-development, and using supervision effectively.
- In our assessments and work we aim to understand and improve the child’s lived experience.
- Work is carried out in partnership with parents and carers to enable them to meet their responsibilities and achieve best outcomes.
- Children are involved in decisions that affect them.
- In all our work, we maintain an awareness of equal opportunities and the impact of discrimination.
- We work closely with other agencies to improve support that is offered to children, young people and families.
- Work with children and families is undertaken within the legislative framework and makes use of best practice.
- Our records are accurate, complete and demonstrate the child’s story.
- Work with children is managed and supervised to achieve the best possible outcomes.
- We treat children, families and our working partners with courtesy and respect.
Our Social Workers/alternatively qualified practitioners
- Are curious, sensitive, and reflective as well as being authoritative, professional and tenacious in improving life outcomes for children.
- Work alongside families with empathy, compassion and creativity using relationships for positive change.
- Use a systemic approach to work purposefully, openly and compassionately with the whole family system.
- Use reflective critical thinking and analysis to evaluate and integrate multiple sources of knowledge and evidence to create meaningful assessments and plans.
- Build skilful and influential working relationships with other professionals and agencies.
- Draw on a range of approaches, used proportionately and regularly reviewed.
- Make good and emotionally intelligent use of supervision.
- Have high quality planning and decision making skills.
- Demonstrate understanding and skill in working as a member of a team and organisation.
- Understand their legal and statutory responsibilities and execute these in children’s best interests.
- Take appropriate responsibility for their conduct, practice and learning.
13 reasons to choose to work for Telford & Wrekin Children's Social Care:
Our Ofsted single inspection of services for children in need of help and protection, children looked after and care leavers and review of the effectiveness of the Local Safeguarding Children Board (SIF) took place in January 2020 and we were judged to be Outstanding. Whilst we were proud of this achievement we didn’t become complacent we continued to strive for the best possible practice that underpins the best outcomes for children, young people and their families and carers. To this end we continued to enhance out practice and service development which was then evidenced by our ILLAC inspection in April 2024 where we were judged to maintaining our outstanding rating. We are extremely proud of this achievement and will continue to enhance our practice development and service delivery to continue to be at the forefront of practice.
We have a continuous workforce development programme that is informed by staff consultation, national learning and local learning, We are committed to including the bringing together of learnt and lived experience to promote the best possible outcomes for our community and to ensure that all of our staff are trained to a high standard. We are committed to systemic practice as our overarching framework and within the different service areas staff are trained in systemic practice, relational approaches, Dyadic developmental psychotherapy and motivational interviewing.
Relational practice is at the heart of all of our work across children’s services we believe that connection and trauma attuned approaches are key to working alongside families to support them to bring about change.
Our programme is facilitated by the multi- agency partnership board, the west midlands teaching partnership and the works centre aiding a link to research for practitioners, universities and ensuring we are actively engaging in learning from external sources such as the National Review Panel, the Nuffield observatory and from academic research which is shared within the work force. We are fortunate to provide an in-house training offer informed by the quality assurance framework, in addition to externally commissioned training on bespoke areas of practice.
Our Ofsted inspection highlighted ‘staff benefit from a strong learning culture. Social Workers have a range of training opportunities available to them, including bite –sized learning’
‘Senior leaders ensure that children’s services continually improve as research based practice is embedded across the service’.
We strive to ensure that practitioners have manageable caseloads so that they have time to see children and families more frequently, giving our staff more time to dedicate to building relationships that matter. Our Ofsted report highlighted
‘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.’
‘Social Workers know their children well, children are visited regularly and social workers use games, play and conversation to build trusting relationships’.
We have a supportive team culture. Our teams work very closely together and help each other out, in addition there is a systemic offer of support to all teams to ensure an environment that allows for reflection, support and mentoring. Our Ofsted report highlighted ‘Social workers are well supported informally and formally by managers’.
We have invested in dynamic and innovative training programmes and have clear career development pathways. From continuing your professional development with ongoing practical training, specialist training within a number of roles, to reaching senior management levels, at Telford & Wrekin Council there are a variety of opportunities for those with talent and ambition.
We have an enviably low agency percentage across the service. Our senior leadership team are all permanently employed staff which demonstrates the high skill and knowledge base of current employees which in turn means better outcomes for the children and young people in Telford and Wrekin.
We are constantly striving to improve. We know that social workers and managers need good quality support and challenge and believe our culture of high challenge / high support is key to our success. It underpins the way we work and helps drive continuous improvement.
We want social workers to have manageable workloads and fulfilling lives outside of the workplace. Our supportive culture helps this become reality. We are well adapted to a hybrid model of working which includes a combination of time spent in the office and at home – our approach is to promote greater level of flexible working around personal and family commitments. We also offer a flexi-time scheme.
We offer a competitive salary for staff and recruitment incentives for experienced social workers. In addition to this we offer a range of flexible working options and free onsite parking.
We include a market factor payment for Social Workers, Senior Social Workers and Team Managers. We also offer a Golden Hello payment of £5,000 for all experienced social workers commencing in post within our Family Safeguarding Service as new employees of Telford & Wrekin Council.
In addition to this, essential car user allowance, free on-site parking and full reimbursement of your annual Social Work England registration fee.
We are investing heavily in new ICT case management and recording systems. We strive to continually develop and refine these systems to make them user friendly and fit for purpose. This should mean far less repetition of paperwork. With greater efficiency and time saving, our staff will be freed up to focus on case work and making a difference to families they are working with.
We know ourselves well and know what we want to achieve. We want to be an authority which other councils want to benchmark against. You will be joining an organisation that is rewarding in every sense, and most importantly, serves our community to the highest possible standards.
Our overarching ambition is to be a child–friendly borough, which is part of our commitment to create a performance-led culture that puts the child at the centre of everything we do. Within our family first agenda we recognise that the best place for children is to remain within their relational network and this is always our starting point of support. For children/young people where this isn’t possible we seek to ensure alternative caring arrangements foster a sense of belonging and where ever possible links to their relational network are maintained and continuously revisited. We also seek to provide opportunities to build peer support for children to aid their socialisation, sense of belonging, friendship groups and reduce relational poverty.
Our senior leadership team are truly passionate and motivating in terms of the work we do and they operate an open door policy for staff. The enthusiasm they possess cascades down through the whole service. We only recruit people who possess the same passion for transforming the lives of children and young people. Our Ofsted report highlighted ‘The impact of stability of the strategic quartet in the leader of the council, the lead member for children, the chief executive and the direction of children’s services is impressive, as they work together to make sure that children are the priority across the whole council’.
‘Senior leaders have continued to implement ambitious plans which prioritise the needs of children and young people’.
Last updated: 24/09/2024 14:58
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