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Tameside and Children’s Services
Tameside is one of the 10 local authorities that make up Greater Manchester, nestling between the buzz of Manchester City Centre and the beauty of the Peak District on our doorstep. We have clear and stable leadership, and in the last few years have created an integrated management structure with our local CCG. However, with a manufacturing and industrial heritage, we face many endemic issues associated with poverty, a low-skills, low pay economy and inter-generational health challenges. Our vision for a new Tameside is captured in our shared plan – Our People, Our Place, Our Plan. This ground-breaking approach works for us and more importantly, is delivering the benefits of an integrated system for our people.
Our holistic approach to generational change at Tameside places a great focus on investing in all our children, through our schools, our early intervention work, our children’s social care, and by creating opportunities within the borough to thrive, be healthy and succeed. That’s why we’re investing in our Children’s Services, with the resources, support and strategies to drive up the quality of outcomes for all our children and young people, including those that need specific support at different stages of their lives.
We’re looking for two new Assistant Directors to continue our journey, to bring drive, increased momentum and passion: one leading on Children’s Social Care and the other leading on Early Help and Partnerships. Joining our new DCS in our transformational journey to achieve Good and Outstanding services for Children, this is an exciting time to join us. We have clearly agreed plans and strategies that we’re convinced will deliver, backed by a strong team, corporate and political commitment. This is not about a radical re-set – it’s about calm, reassured, confident leadership that keeps building, whilst picking up the pace of improvement and remains steadfast when needed.
Ongoing priorities for both roles include:
- managing our high numbers of children in care and the associated costs
- embedding a culture that views all we do through the eyes of a child and moves from reactive services to pro-active interventions
- co-designing holistic, locality-based services to harness community assets
- stabilising the workforce
- increasing the impact of our early intervention work
- getting our key partners more engaged with key services
- being a voice across Greater Manchester and
- improving our relationships with regulators
Assistant Director Children’s Social Care – the role
The primary focus for this role is to lead our children’s social work, drive up the quality and consistency of our support and interventions and as a consequence, improve outcomes for our children.
Our new Assistant Director Children’s Social Care will have recent, relevant experience of achieving better outcomes for children within Children’s Social Care as a qualified social worker, bringing significant experience of shaping successful and relevant services that have transformed the lives of children. You’ll need to show you can drive ongoing service improvement with challenging oversight, under pressure and putting children first. We want calm leadership, constancy of purpose, resilience, robustness, drive and excellent people and partnership skills. We’ll focus on your skills, experience, and capacity to lead a clear, but demanding agenda within a highly political environment. We know this is a tough role at an exceptional time as we emerge from the pandemic. At Tameside you’ll find the leadership, support and team environment to help you grow and flourish. If you have the energy, enthusiasm, and tenacity to do the very best for children and families of Tameside we want to hear from you.
Hybrid working at Tameside: Moving forward as working practices settle into permanent patterns post-Covid we envisage 2 – 3 days in the office, the rest remotely, although probably a little more presence in the workplace in the first few months in the role but we have a focus on family flexible working.
