Early Help Practitioner – Hounslow Early Help Hub

Would you like to be a part of The London Borough of Hounslow, whose diverse workforce are committed to making a positive difference for our residents and visitors by ensuring the quality of our services are maintained to a high standard?

The Council is embarking upon a major programme of change to modernise the way we work and reduce our carbon footprint. In April 2019 we moved to Hounslow House, a new landmark building located in Hounslow town centre, our new technology will enable staff to work remotely and flexibly to improve the service we provide to residents and to help our staff achieve a better work/life balance.

About The Team

London Borough of Hounslow and partners have committed to a new Partnership Early Help Strategy for 2019-2021, aiming to ensure that more families are supported early when need arises and that we maximise the use of our collective early help resources.  

The Hounslow Early Help Hub is a new two-year programme which will drive the implementation of the Early Help Strategy across all services. It offers a day-to-day advisory, training and support service for multi-agency frontline practitioners – for example from schools, Health services, the Voluntary Sector and the Council - developing skills and confidence of the workforce and embedding use of the Team Around the Family and Lead Professional model. It also acts as the strategic co-ordination point for multi-agency prevention work, delivering quality assurance, impact analysis and co-ordination of responses to early help trends and themes.

It is an exciting time to be part of early help in Hounslow. In addition to the Hub, we are actively developing our tier 2 Mental Health programme within schools, our early help DV programme, our contextual safeguarding practice for adolescents, and delivery of parental conflict training

We are looking for an experienced Early Help Practitioner who is passionate about empowering other professionals to deliver early help and has the drive to embrace the challenges of this new programme. Please note that you will be acting in an advisory capacity to other professionals and will not be holding a caseload of families for direct work.

Key Responsibilities

1. You will take responsibility for championing a cultural shift in early help delivery across agencies in your locality, promoting and modelling the ethos that ‘early help is everyone’s business’.
2. You will be responsible for the development of multi-agency early help practice within your locality, building strong relationships and supporting practitioners with training, information, advice and guidance.
3. You will lead on the implementation of the new Early Help Practice Framework within your locality, with particular focus on high quality and timely early help assessments and plans, using the electronic early help system to support practice, and the role of Lead Professional and Team Around the Family.
4. You will deliver safe practice for children, young people and families in your duties in accordance with the Hounslow Safeguarding Children’s Board thresholds.

Your Skills

1. You will demonstrate a high level of expertise and experience in delivering quality early help interventions to children, young people and families in a related area, for example: safeguarding services, family support, children’s centres, youth services, community Health or education inclusion/ support services.
2. You will have the ability to advise practitioners confidently on safe and appropriate courses of action for individual families, including excellent ability to apply safeguarding thresholds and seek guidance where necessary.
3. You will have strong engagement and communication skills, with the ability to inspire others and influence their beliefs and behaviours in relation to practice, including challenging these where appropriate.
4. You will demonstrate ability to be innovative in problem-solving and developing integrated working between practitioners, including overcoming barriers.

Essential for the Role

You will be educated to degree level or equivalent in a related field. We welcome applications from all professional backgrounds related to early help, including Qualified Social Workers.

This post is considered by the authority to be a customer-facing position; as such it falls within scope of the Code of Practice on English language requirement for public sector workers. The council therefore has a statutory duty under Part 7 of the Immigration Act 2016 to ensure that post holders have a command of spoken English sufficient for the effective performance of the job requirements. The appropriate standards are set out in the employee specification.

If you would like an informal conversation regarding the position please contact claire.bridge@hounslow.gov.uk or 020 8583 5145 

Interviews will be held during week commencing: 3^rd/10^th February 2020

It is our practice that any offer of employment will be made at the bottom of our pay scale.