About Us

Social work in Essex

Essex is the second largest county in England, with 1.4 million residents and a number of large towns, including Colchester, Basildon and Southend. At the same time, 75% of the county is agricultural. This mixture of environments provides a diverse range of social care challenges and job opportunities.

The Schools, Children and Families Social Care Directorate

We’re investing in social work and social workers to put children at the heart of our social care agenda. Our aim is to be the best social care service in the UK by 2012 and to create a county where children are safe, healthy and have every opportunity to make the most of their potential.

To achieve this, we’ve introduced a structure that gives social workers all the resources, professional guidance and development opportunities they need to support the children of Essex.

For Social Workers and Senior Practitioners this means manageable caseloads and the focused support and guidance of a highly experienced senior manager. For Team Managers it means the freedom to mentor your team and focus on the quality of social care that we provide, rather than paperwork and red tape. Senior Team Managers will enjoy the chance to provide leadership for front line teams and influence the quality of social care we provide.

Join us and you will enjoy the scope to apply your skills, experience and expertise to make a real difference for children and families in Essex.

We offer a diverse range of careers at all the above levels in the following teams:

Assessment & Family Support

Dealing with all referrals, we conduct initial assessments and section 47 Child Protection investigations. Holding all open cases of ongoing family support and children subject to a child protection plan, we initiate care proceedings and are responsible for the initial care planning of children when they first become looked after.

Permanency

Working for all children (looked after), we’re involved with court work, care plans for children and adoption work. We also have a specialist team that assesses and makes plans for unaccompanied asylum seeking children.

Leaving & After Care Teams

Truly pioneering in our approach, we make a real, measurable different to the lives of young people aged between 15 to 24 who have left care or living in one of our internal residential homes or foster placements or are placed in a non-county provision. We offer advice, information and assistance to enable young people to live independently and assist them into education, training and employment.

Family Centres

We provide specialist assessments for care proceedings and children, as well as protection plans and targeted support programmes.

Fostering & Adoption

Recruiting and supporting adoptive and foster parents, we match children to families and provide continual support.

Corporate Parenting Services

We provide a number of residential children’s homes and commissions, and quality assures all external placement purchasing.

Children with Disability

Our teams working with children with disabilities also have a lot to offer staff and are extremely sophisticated in their approach to multi agency working, providing children and families with creative care packaging and sourcing excellent short breaks care.

Performance and Policy Safeguarding

Our Safeguarding service has strong links with the Safeguarding Board, and works across the entire Children’s Workforce in Essex to support staff with safeguarding responsibilities, deals with allegations against adults working with children and carries out specific functions with regard to licensing, competing checks on individuals and contributing to the processes by which dangerous individuals are monitored in the community with other agencies.

Involvement Team

We ensure that across Essex, children, young people and their families and communities are able to take an active part in design, development, delivery, governance and evaluation of our services. This guidance provides a useful tool for the self assessment of organisational progress and further supports individuals and organisations to record their achievements in relation to outcomes. For more information about this team, and the service please download the PDF ‘Guidance for Involving Children, Young People their Families and Communities’ or watch the associated video.

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