Senior Social Worker

**Senior Social Worker - Shared Lives**:
**Employer**: Medway Council

**Salary**: £45830 - £51130

**Location**: To be confirmed

**Contract**: To be confirmed

**Working Pattern**: To be confirmed

**Hours**: 37.

**DBS Check**: No

**Closing Date**: 06/07/2025 at 23:55

**Reference**: ASC/25/099/NW

As the Senior Social Worker on the Shared Lives team, you will be required to contribute to the delivery of a highly regarded Registered service in Adult Social Care. Shared Lives is registered with the Care Quality Commission currently rated as Good.

The Shared lives service recruits, assesses and trains new Shared Lives Carers who then offer short, and long-term placements within their own family homes, for people who have care and support needs.

You will support the delivery of the service using a strengths-based, personalised approach, and will take the lead on agreed areas of quality assurance and audit activity to ensure the required standards of service provision are met.

You will be involved in the recruitment of new carers, the completion of their assessment, and presentation to an approval panel. Once approved you will provide ongoing support and monitoring ensuring they meet and maintain the required standards of care and achieve the positive outcomes needed. As a senior social worker you will be required to identify training needs and take a role developing and delivering training as required. You will be required to take a role in the operation of the on-call advice line for carers.

You will be responsible for the professional supervision and oversee a small team of social care staff, coaching and mentoring. You will provide oversight, professional advice and guidance to the team whilst maintaining your own complex case load.

You will work within organisational policy and legislative requirements including The Care Standards Act, The Care Act and Mental Capacity Act. You will be required to develop good practice guidance and tools within a specialist area of the service ensuring learning is shared across all professionals to improve practice and achieve better outcome for our carers and service users. You will work closely with the team/registered manager to complete annual shared lives carers reviews and health and safety checks, and represent the service in a range of department meetings, ensuring follow up on agreed actions and work closely with colleagues within the council and external partners ensuring that person centred outcomes are met in ways which utilise available resources as effectively as possible.

**In return we will offer you**:

- Generous annual leave entitlement
- Generous local government pension scheme package
- Access to wider training and development qualifications
- Flexible working scheme
- Travel plan discounts
- Access to CAREFIRST advice & counselling service
- Employee discount scheme for national and local retailers

Career Progression Frameworks (CPF) have been introduced for all roles at Medway Council. These frameworks provide a mechanism for employees to take ownership of their development within their post and be rewarded accordingly. This means that the salary you will be offered will be at level A unless, based on an assessment against the CPF criteria, you demonstrate that you are meeting the criteria of level B or C. There will be further opportunity once in post to progress from level A to B, and B to C.

The person specification of a job profile is split into three levels:
Level B details the developed competencies that an individual who is practised in this role would be able to demonstrate and will be a progression of knowledge, experience and skills from level A.

Level C requires the highest level of competence and applicants would need to fully meet and demonstrate all aspects of the job profile, including qualifications, knowledge, skills and experience.

**Our organisation**:
Medway is a unitary authority in the South East of England, made up of the towns of Strood, Rochester, Chatham, Gillingham and Rainham and more rural areas, including the Hoo Peninsula.

Situated in Kent in the South-East of England, the area has plenty of green spaces, excellent facilities and easy access to the national motorway and rail networks, facilitating superb transport links to London.

We provide all local Government services for a quarter of a million people, looking after education, environment, social care, housing, planning, business and much more - everything from frontline services such as rubbish collection and events like the Dickens Festival to work that goes on behind the scenes to ensure services in Medway run smoothly and cost effectively.

Working at Medway Council means that you get to be part of this journey working alongside talented, professional colleagues to drive forward change to transform the lives of our residents and the communities they live in.

**Important Information-**

Applicants must be able to demonstrate all essential requireme