Social Work Coordinator
Islington
£25/hr
Start date: ASAP
Full time: Mon - Fri 36/hrs a week
Key responsibilities
Islington's Children's Social Care is developing practice to help vulnerable children, young people and their families to make meaningful and sustainable change in their lives. We are transforming the way we offer help by using Motivational Social Work (MSW) as a foundational approach to practice, which is grounded in Motivational Interviewing (MI) principles. This means we are working more purposefully and collaboratively with our service users to help
them achieve their goals.
A Social Work Coordinator (SWC) is a para-professional whose primary function is to provide enhanced administrative support in meeting the demands of frontline practice. This practical support is critical in ensuring the child and family social worker's time is used to best effect in helping families to keep children safe. This requires a high level of understanding of a child and family social worker's job in helping families to safeguard children.
SWC are the first point of contact for the team from other staff, service users and other professionals. As an experienced administrator the SWC is expected to anticipate the planning and preparation necessary ahead of the range of meetings that take place with families or other professionals. The SWC is also expected to help the social workers they support stay organised. They manage the team calendar, which shows all meetings for the team so they will be able to help social workers prioritise their tasks.
Child and family social work is dynamic and responsive to both the local and national landscape, and the SWC must also adapt to changes within the organisation. The SWC role, as with all other roles in the Service, should engage in continuous quality improvement by always looking for ways to improve the way we work to identify gaps in systems and make improvements that will increase added value to frontline practice.
DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
1. Take responsibility for promoting and safeguarding the welfare of children and young person's / vulnerable adults in the care of the service, including undertaking regular Child Protection training at a level commensurate with role.
2. Create, maintain and improve administrative systems to enable the service to meet its aims of delivering a high quality service to children and families.
3. Work pro-actively and co-operatively within the service to ensure that timely and accurate information about activity and performance is produced and collated as required, and maintain statistical information to agreed deadlines and a high level of accuracy.
4. Develop and maintain good working relationships with other teams within Children's Social Care, other Council departments and clients referred to the service.
5. Deal sensitively with enquiries or telephone messages, logging calls accurately and alerting social work staff or managers immediately to any issues requiring immediate attention.
6. Use appropriate databases, Microsoft Office and other ICT systems to produce reports, spreadsheets and other documents as required supporting the service and assist others in the use of information technology systems when required
7. Follow guidelines to produce standard written or electronic responses to enquiries from family members or professionals to tight deadlines.
8. Undertake support tasks on projects as required.
9. Provide an effective diary-management function for social workers in order to effectively manage meetings, visits, etc.
10. Undertake other duties commensurate to the grade of the post.
ADDITIONAL EXPECTATIONS:
- Carry out duties in the most efficient and effective manner.
- Achieve agreed service outcomes and personal appraisal targets, as agreed by the line manager.
- Undertake training and constructively take part in meetings, supervision, seminars and other events designed to improve communication and assist with the effective development of the post and post holder.
- Carry out duties and responsibilities in accordance with the council's commitment to
customer service excellence and ensure compliance with the customer care standards.
- Be committed to the Council's core values of public service, quality, equality and empowerment and to demonstrate this commitment in the way duties are carried out.
- Ensure that duties are undertaken with due regard and compliance with the Data Protection Act and other legislation.
- Carry out duties and responsibilities in accordance with the Council's Health and Safety
Policy and relevant Health and Safety legislation.
- At all times to carry out responsibilities/duties within the framework of the Council's Dignity for all Policy (Equal Opportunities Policy)