Giving children and young people the best start in life is a key priority for the Council. Children’s Services leaders, with strong corporate and political support, have made a commitment to improve children’s outcomes and to achieve the council’s top priority of the ‘best start in life’, with significant investment paving the way for important improvements in both leadership and staffing capacity.
However, South Gloucestershire continues to face an extremely challenging situation, with increasing demand from young people with ever more complex needs, and for specialist support and placements. We have made significant additional investments in children’s services worth more than £15 million.
With over 460 staff (370 FTE) and a current annual budget of £42 million, this role will be accountable for the full range of children’s and young people’s integrated services, including:
- Preventative Services: Providing early intervention and preventative services, including Children's Centres, Parenting & Family Support and Youth services.
- Access and Response: Managing initial preventative and social care contacts – screening and assessment including child protection investigations, consisting of two access teams and 4 response teams.
- Social Care Long Term: Consisting of six child protection and children in need locality teams, in addition to a specialist exploitation team. This service is located across the wider geography of South Gloucestershire; based in our offices in the Patchway Hub (North), Kingswood Hub (South) and Yate Hub (Central).
- 0-25 Disability Services: A service working to improve outcomes and make a positive difference to the lives of children / young adults with disabilities who have health and social care needs; this service consists of two 0-18 Children with disabilities teams and one 16-25 Young Adults with disabilities team.
- Corporate Parenting, comprising of:
- Looked After Children - Managing children in care work and care leaver cases.
- Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children – Supporting unaccompanied young persons with accommodation, foster care, education, health and their asylum claim
- Fostering - Recruiting, assessing and supporting foster carers; assisting in family finding and matching of children and young people who need to be cared for outside of their family of origin.
- Transition to Independence Service - Supporting young persons who are leaving care and other vulnerable young people.
- Emergency Duty Team: An emergency social work service outside of normal office hours for children, young people and adults, covering 4 unitary authorities - South Gloucestershire, Bristol, Bath & North East Somerset, and North Somerset