Early Years Locality Leader
Camden is committed to early intervention and prevention, and creating a place where everyone has a chance to succeed and where nobody gets left behind. Camden continues to invest significantly in early years and early help because it is better and less expensive to prevent problems and intervene early.
The Integrated Early Years Service is responsible for delivering, coordinating and supporting a range of services for children and their mums, dads and carers, from pregnancy to age 5 years. The service has undergone a transformation, to create an enhanced Locality Model with investment in leadership and accessible services located in the heart of communities.
The service delivers and supports high quality early education, is implementing an innovative integrated health visiting and family support service and offers a pathway of services delivered through children’s centres. Working with families through purposeful consultation and co-design is an important principle to ensure early and sustained engagement in services.
This is an exciting time to join the service, as new ways of working are adopted across the borough to ensure the best start in life for children and their families.
Camden’s children’s centre provision is organised across five localities, with one children’s centre in each. In addition, there are four stand-alone nurseries.
The five Locality Leaders work in a designated locality with responsibility for:
- Leading early years services, taking a strategic approach to promoting and supporting the further integration of services.
- Leading and managing a wide range of work streams, projects and change programmes across IEYS, ensuring effective use of resources, focused on improving outcomes.
- Enabling and sustaining highly effective partnerships working with a wide range of services and organisations within a locality (e.g. schools, PVI settings, midwifery, GPs, and voluntary sector organisations), leading and coordinating a Locality Partnerships.
- Using data and information and working with families and communities to develop an in-depth understanding of the needs of families in the locality, ensuring there is a coherent and responsive pathway of services from pregnancy to age 5, to meet need and improve outcomes.
This post is exempt from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act and will require an Enhanced DBS.
About you
We are looking for a Locality Leader to join the existing four managers to be part of our senior management team. To be considered for this exciting opportunity the successful candidate will be educated to degree level and/or possess significant senior management experience in a relevant service area. You are likely to have a background in early education, public health services, early year’s family work or social work. You will be an experienced leader and manager, with the skills to lead change, be innovative and solution-focused, to deliver significant service transformation programmes. Experience of working within a complex system, confidently managing ambiguity and uncertainty is essential to lead the change programmes successfully and embed new ways of working.
You will have an in-depth knowledge of relevant research evidence and policy. You will be able to translate this knowledge into coherent service design and delivery, purposeful partnership working and parental involvement. You will be committed to driving integration and be able to communicate the benefits this brings to staff, families and best use of resources.
You will be able to demonstrate skills in achieving service improvement using a range of data to gain insights, including user feedback. You will understand the importance of robust quality assurance processes and measuring success through evidence of outcomes.
You will be able to demonstrate experience of leading teams, enabling the team to work to the deliver the service vision and priorities and contribute to setting the direction of the service. You will ensure there is a clear focus on priorities that link to meeting and adapting to customers’ needs. You will ensure staff have opportunities for professional development and creating a culture of continuous learning, using a variety of approaches.
You will therefore have the skills, experience, vision, drive and leadership qualities to enable a high performing service to deliver the best possible outcomes for children, and their families, from pregnancy to age 5 years.
About Camden
Camden’s main offices are located in modern, award-winning offices at King’s Cross. You can expect an exceptional range of benefits including discounted access to the onsite leisure facilities with swimming pool, recognition and reward for high performance with progression and pay increases, flexible and agile working hours and access to a leading pension scheme.
Camden is proud to be the country’s first Timewise council and as part of this accreditation, we work to help parents balance work with childcare. This fits in with our aim to be leaders in innovative, flexible and part-time working that allows for different patterns of care and for parents to share childcare responsibilities.
Click HERE to see the full details of our excellent benefits
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Discover and Diversity
To “discover” more about Camden and our commitment towards diversity, equality and safeguarding, please visit our recruitment website
If you want to find out more about what it’s like to work at Camden to help you decide whether we’re a good fit for you, please click HERE to complete our online scenario based questionnaire. Please note, this does not form part of the application and will not be used as part of the selection process.
Mayor of London’s Good Work Standard
Camden are very proud to be accredited to the level of excellence for the Mayor of London’s Good Work Standard. The Mayor’s Good Work Standard sets the benchmark for the highest employment standards and demonstrates that as an employer, Camden is contributing to a fairer and more inclusive London. These good practices are also an important step in attracting and retaining a diverse, talented and productive workforce.
How to apply
To apply for this job please follow the "Apply" link. In the ‘Why you?’ section of the application form you will be expected to explain how you meet the key requirements for this role listed in this advert. When explaining how you meet each of the requirements, please give examples that clearly demonstrate your skills, knowledge and experience. When writing your examples give a brief description of the situation or task but focus on the actions you took and the result of your actions.
Camden is committed to making our recruitment practices barrier-free and as inclusive as possible for everyone. This includes making adjustments or changes for people who have a disability or long-term health condition. If you would like us to do anything differently during the recruitment process, or provide any information in an alternative format, please contact us on 020 7974 6655, at resourcing@camden.gov.uk, or post to 5 Pancras Square, London N1C 4AG.
Closing dates for applications: Sunday 16th February 2020
Interviews to be held: Tuesday 4th & Wednesday 5th March 2020
Please quote reference: 190000SI
Camden welcomes new employees on a monthly basis; next available dates for induction are Monday 16th March 2020, Monday 20th April 2020 & Monday 18th May 2020