Social Work in Newham is underpinned by a culture of Systemic and Restorative practice with high quality relationships at the heart of our approach. Our DCYPS teams provide statutory services to children and families who live with disability. As a Senior Social Worker you will work a varied and complex caseload, including but not restricted to new referrals, CiN, CP, and looked after cases. This is often long term, rewarding work; focusing on sustaining an improved quality of life for the families you work with.
We are looking for qualified Senior Social Workers who will thrive working restoratively in partnership with families to increase independence, promote family resilience and keep children safe from harm.
“Our social workers deal with interesting and unique cases, building specialist knowledge which will be invaluable for their futures. Working in CwD is about being an advocate; it’s about giving a voice to those who need it most. We enable families to learn and grow together, improving quality of life for children and young people who might otherwise be left behind.”
- Helen Cusick, DCYPS Service Manager
You will be required to liaise with health and education professionals to develop support packages for children with complex needs, so the ability to understand and navigate multi-agency systems and processes is essential. As a senior member of the team you may be required to support students or colleagues with less experience; though there are no direct reports to Senior Social Workers at Newham.
You are a qualified social worker registered with Social Work England and will have at least 3 years of post qualifying experience, including experience working statutory cases supporting children and families living with disability. You will have an extensive understanding of how SEND can affect families and the statutory processes affecting children and young people with SEND, and must be confident supporting lesser experienced colleagues in these areas.
“Patience and tolerance are key, and you need to be able to be a calming influence on families. You need to be able to connect and build a trust with the families, and have them trust you to be able to find strategies to support them.
You have to be passionate, trustworthy, and empathetic; with a genuine love and passion for helping children and their families, and being that advocate for them.
Finally, you need strong emotional strength and resilience. That is what makes a social worker- that resilience within yourself. It comes from my heart the work that we do”.
- Juliet Y, DCYPS Senior Social Worker.
We’re a vibrant, dynamic, culturally rich London Borough with a young population and limitless potential. We’re a challenging yet rewarding place for social work practise to flourish and we are steadfastly committed to our workforce being representative of the families that we work with. We are taking coordinated, meaningful and focused action to develop an inclusive culture because we believe this is at the heart of enabling diversity in all respects, including diversity of thought. We are taking positive actions to challenge all forms of discrimination and injustice to help make Newham a fairer and more equitable place for children and families to live, learn and thrive.
We’re building a fairer Newham through investment, co-production and by continuously developing our 'Circles of Support' practice model; centring on systemic and restorative practice and a specialist support offer for our practitioners. Ofsted described Newham as having a positive culture of learning and development and we always try to develop talent in-house. We promoted 30 internal colleagues in 2023 alone, and have put more than 47 practitioners through further education since 2020. We value your development and at Newham career progression is a reality for many of our colleagues.
We understand that social work can be a challenging yet ultimately very rewarding profession that makes demands of you personally and professionally. In Newham we value your wellbeing and we aim to ensure that you have a better work/life balance through a remote working offer when you are not visiting children and families, a modern office space for when you’re on site, a flexible working policy where all requests are considered, and a clinical offer to support you to do your best work.
We’ve been working hard to make Newham a great place to practise social work:
