The number of initial enquiries from potential foster carers in England has fallen to its lowest level in five years. According to latest figures from the Department for Education, 125,195 initial applications were received by local authorities and independent foster agencies in 2022/23. This is the lowest number of applications to become mainstream foster carers – which excludes family and friends foster carers - since current recording began in 2017/18, the statistics show. A peak in initial enquiries was seen in 2020/21 when 160,635 were received. In 2022/23, local authorities received around a quarter of the number of initial enquiries received by independent foster agencies which had 99, 375 enquiries. Of applications received by independent foster agencies and local authorities in 2022/23, 3,680 were accepted. Meanwhile, in the same year more households deregistered (5,125) than were approved (4,080). There were 275 households that were both approved and deregistered within the same year. “The largest proportion of newly approved carers in 2022 to 2023 were in their 40s and 50s. “Of the carers who deregistered this year, the highest proportion were aged 50 or over, at 64%. Those aged 60 or over made up 30%. “These proportions have remained similar for the 4 years that we have collected data on carers’ ages,” the report states. At the end of March 2023, there were 43,405 fostering households in England, including family and friends foster carers. Source: www.cypnow.co.uk Location: Barnardo's Fostering and Adoption NI Salary: £35,360 - £47,320 + £312 Office at Home Allowance per annum Contract type: Permanent Hours: 37 Closing Date: 8 April 2024 Interview Date: TBC We have an exciting opportunity for a Social Worker to join us within the Barnardo's Fostering and Adoption Service Northern Ireland team.
Objectives of the Service: The primary aim of Barnardo's Fostering and Adoption NI is to provide the highest quality placements for children and young people who cannot live with their birth families, striving to ensure that Barnardo's strategic aims to achieve safer childhoods, stronger families and positive futures are realised for every child with whom we work. Working Hours: Monday to Friday (37 hours per week) Location: 230b Belmont Road, Belfast, Northern Ireland, BT4 2AW This is a hybrid working role – We place value on colleagues spending time together at our office base on a regular basis, with flexibility to work from home for part of the week. Some of the Key responsibilities include but are not limited to:
Essential requirements to clearly evidence in your written application:
Further details and application documents here Team Fostering is a not for profit fostering Agency, with an annual turnover of £9m, based in the North East, Yorkshire and the East Midlands. We have been successfully supporting children and young people living in foster care to achieve positive outcomes since 2001. We are looking for a third Non-Executive Director, based within this geographical footprint, who has an extensive background in business management in a commercial environment with demonstrable recent success in developing a business with a multi-million pound turnover and proven skills in delivering excellence in customer satisfaction. This person must also be able to work within our values and behaviours framework, demonstrating an understanding of our Not for Profit status and subscribe to our principles of working as an ethical agency. This successful candidate will also provide a creative contribution to the Board via objective criticism and independent judgement on issues of strategy, performance and resourcing of the Agency, including involvement in key appointments and standards of conduct. The post holder will be independent of any of the company’s interested parties and bring a degree of objectivity and impartiality to the Board’s deliberations and play a valuable role monitoring executive management. This is a part time role requiring, as a minimum, 30 day’s work per year and a minimum of 1.5 days worked each month equating to £15,243.75 per annum. Part of this monthly commitment is attendance at a monthly Board meeting which will be held in either our North Shields, Middlesbrough, Sheffield or South Normanton, Derbyshire office. An annual retainer of £3,774.60 is also paid and other responsibilities and pieces of work taken on, at the direction of the Board, are paid at an hourly rate of £67.75. Please note Team Fostering does not accept CVs. The closing date for application for this role is 9.00 am on Monday 8 April 2024. For further information, please contact Mark Alden, Board Chair & Non- Executive Director on 07483 262208. All posts are subject to Enhanced DBS Disclosure Please note if you are shortlisted for interview we will contact you via the email you have provided. Please ensure you check your emails regularly. Full details and application documents here Location: Lincoln & Louth Salary: £23,400- £28,600 Contract type: Permanent Hours: 37 Closing Date: 5 April 2024 Interview Date: 15 and 16 April 2024 Barnardo's work in partnership with Lincolnshire County Council to deliver its Leaving Care Service for care experience young people aged 16-25.
Initial Specific Responsibilities
Supplementary Information
Further details and application documents here This morning (26 March), our Policy, Public Affairs and Campaigns Manager Lucy Croxton gave evidence to the Education Committee at Parliament as a part of a panel on children’s social care. The panel provided evidence on why costs related to children’s social care are rising; how need is not necessarily being addressed at the right stage in the social care journey; and the increasing complexity in needs and a lack of suitable provision for these children. Discussions also centred around profiteering in children’s social care and how a lack of homes is leading to out of area placements. Lucy championed a need for children in the care system or who have experienced care to have a voice in, not only their own homes, but also in a wider context of national policy - where people with lived experience of the care system have a chance to affect government policy around children’s social care. Alongside this, she also discussed the need for collaboration between care providers in the voluntary sector where vast amounts of knowledge can be shared. She also spoke about the barriers of entry to providers opening new residential homes for children and the issues these can cause in terms of providers moving to semi-independent homes where there have been problems in terms of quality of care. She gave evidence gathered from young people we have supported who have previously experienced semi-independent homes and the negative impact that these placements have had. Alongside Lucy, the panel also included John Pearce – President of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services; Roger Gough - Children’s Services Spokesperson, County Councils Network; Stuart Ashley - Director of Children’s Services, Hampshire County Council; Dan Turnbull, Senior Director for Markets, Competitions and Markets Authority; Mr Andrew Isaac – Chair of Children’s Services Development Group and Dr Mark Kerr. To find out more about our campaigning work and where we stand on a number of issues, visit: https://www.togethertrust.org.uk/campaigning
Source: www.togethertrust.org.uk/news/ Location: West Midlands. Salary: £35,893 - £39,880 p.a + £750 Homeworking Allowance p.a + £1,500 OOH Allowance p.a. Hours: 35 Hours Per Week Closing Date: 14/04/2024 Interview Date: 02/05/2024 Location – Home-based with travel required to visit foster families located across the West Midlands areas; including Shropshire, Staffordshire, Birmingham, Coventry, Warwickshire, Walsall, Wolverhampton, Dudley, and Sandwell. Travel also requires to attend staff meetings and team away days.
As a ‘not for profit’ organisation, TACT puts the needs of our children and carers first and looks to appoint individuals who are as passionate about fostering as we are. TACT invests all surplus income into staff, carers, and child development. This means that we have established expert in-house support services such as our TACT Health and Education Services and created TACT Connect, our ground-breaking scheme for care-experienced young people and adults. New staff will join us as we embark on a journey to become a wholly trauma-informed organisation with the aim of increasing our effectiveness and improving outcomes for the children and young people in our care. We pride ourselves on our flexible working opportunities, an extensive well-being programme, and our benefits package, all curated to support a healthy work-life balance for all our staff. We will also invest in your learning, supporting your growth and development during your employment with TACT. You will be encouraged to attend personal and professional development opportunities and will have access to learning and resources to empower you to advance your knowledge and skills. We are currently the 4th Best Charity to work for and the 16th Best Mid-Sized Company in the UK according to The Best Companies criteria and our survey results have evidenced “outstanding” levels of engagement amongst staff in recent years. You can view our Best Companies summary video here. As a Fostering Senior Supervising Social Worker with TACT West Midlands, you will be a part of our amazing team of professionals working with our organisational values at the heart of their everyday practice. You can review our values here. In addition to the annual salary, the Fostering Senior Supervising Social Worker role attracts Out of Hours Allowance of £1,500 per annum once participating in the rota. The main role requirements for this role include:
One of the areas of Fair Ways’ 5-year strategy was to review our Corporate Identity. It’s important to do this regularly as all organisations undergo change, and Fair Ways has certainly seen significant changes in the past few years. Our most visible change is that we are now a charity, ensuring we reinvest all our surplus funds into the organisation. We are on the way to becoming a trauma-informed organisation. We are larger than before with circa 420 employees, and we deliver more and better services to more individuals than we did 5 years ago. Some areas remain unchanged. Our values remain constant, our culture remains strong and our belief in the fundamentals of care, education & training and employee support is unwavering. Over the past year, a working group from across Fair Ways has reviewed our identity and any required changes. This group recently presented three key recommendations to the Board, which were approved as follows:
Vision To build a community that changes lives, makes a difference to society, and leaves a legacy greater than ourselves and our contributions. Mission To grow a compassionate, resilient, and trauma-informed community, that embraces learning, so that we improve the lives and outcomes of individuals. These statements are agreed upon by the CEO and MD. The working group advised that the existing Vision statement term ‘institution’ was viewed negatively and that the term ‘Community’ was much more reflective of who we are and represents our charitable status as a Community Benefit Society. A typical mission statement describes how an organisation gets to its vision. The working group recommended greater detail was required in our mission statement. As a result, the CEO and MD have restated the Vision and Mission statements for Fair Ways as above. Going forward, these statements will now be used across our website, our policies, training and marketing materials, and guide our strategic planning processes. The working group has identified that new team members can be put off by the scale of Fair Ways services and the many terms we use. It also identified that employees can struggle to clearly articulate what we do, but also that there are terms that we commonly use that are not found elsewhere. In fact, there is a shared language that is very much part of our identity. Examples are found throughout PRINT and RiiSE.
Going forward, we will now gather this language and introduce it in our Induction courses, our Management and other training, and incorporate it into Policies and other communications. Later this year we will launch the first list of commonly used terms and offer all employees the opportunity to add to this Fair Ways language as we go forwards. Source: www.fairways.co/ Location: North Wales Salary: £35,893 - £39,880 p.a + £750 Homeworking Allowance p.a + £1,500 OOH Allowance p.a. Hours: 35 Hours Per Week Closing Date: 31/03/2024 Interview Date: 10/04/2024 Contract – Fixed term 12 months initially
Location – Home-based with travel required to visit foster families located across the North Wales areas; including Flintshire, Wrexham, Denbighshire, Conwy, Gwynedd and Anglesey. Travel also requires the postholder to attend staff meetings and team away days. As a ‘not for profit’ organisation, TACT puts the needs of our children and carers first and looks to appoint individuals who are as passionate about fostering as we are. TACT invests all surplus income into staff, carers, and child development. This means that we have established expert in-house support services such as our TACT Health and Education Services and created TACT Connect, our ground-breaking scheme for care-experienced young people and adults. New staff will join us as we embark on a journey to become a wholly trauma-informed organisation with the aim of increasing our effectiveness and improving outcomes for the children and young people in our care. We pride ourselves on our flexible working opportunities, an extensive well-being programme, and our benefits package, all curated to support a healthy work-life balance for all our staff. We will also invest in your learning, supporting your growth and development during your employment with TACT. You will be encouraged to attend personal and professional development opportunities and will have access to learning and resources to empower you to advance your knowledge and skills. We are currently the 4th Best Charity to work for and the 16th Best Mid-Sized Company in the UK according to The Best Companies criteria and our survey results have evidenced “outstanding” levels of engagement amongst staff in recent years. You can view our Best Companies summary video here. As a Fostering Senior Supervising Social Worker with TACT Cymru, you will be a part of our amazing team of professionals working with our organisational values at the heart of their everyday practice. In addition to the annual salary, the Senior Supervising Social Worker role attracts Out of Hours Allowance of £1,500 per annum once participating in the rota. The main role requirements for this role include:
Further details and application documents here Location: North Shields - Hybrid Salary Banding: £26,368.97 to £29,964.75 per annum depending on experience Hours: 37.5 per week Closing Date: 2 March 2024 Full time: 37.5 hours per week (working flexibly between Monday - Sunday)
This role will involve some weekend working. This would typically be 3 hours one weekend a month, a responsibility which will be shared with colleagues on the team on a rota basis. There may be rare occasions where this would mean working more hours on a weekend but this would be planned well in advance. Weekend working would involve taking this time back during the working week to allow flexibility for both the post holder and the agency. Salary Banding: £26,368.97 to £29,964.75 per annum depending on experience Please note: we do not operate a performance related reward system or automatic incremental payments. We offer hybrid working which includes a blend of home and office working with a minimum of one day per week in our office. Team Fostering is an ethical not for profit fostering agency with a strong reputation and track record for providing high quality, value for money fostering placements for looked after children. We pride ourselves on our values and we expect our staff to commit to and demonstrate these values in their everyday work. As part of our continued growth as an agency and the on-going development of our services, we are expanding our Recruitment Team and would welcome applications from skilled professionals to support the agency in recruiting skilled and suitable foster carers by dealing with initial enquiries, liaising with potential foster carers, attending community based recruitment events, working closely with marketing colleagues, and engaging with current foster carers. The successful applicant will have:
Further details and application documents here TACT are once again disappointed at the lack of recognition for fostering families that came through in last week’s Spring Budget. TACT CEO Andy Elvin has commented below: “The UK is facing an unprecedented crisis in foster carer recruitment. If this is not addressed it is going to cost LA’s hundreds of millions of pounds over the next few years. The paltry response of the Department for Education to this has been to fund a small ‘pathfinder’ carer recruitment project in the North East that will have negligible effect. The budget was a chance to do something transformative such as forgiving council tax for all registered foster carers. However, it is abundantly clear that foster families and children in care generally are in no way a meaningful priority for government. Over recent years we have seen a revolving door of children’s ministers & no concerted and properly funded approach to enacting the recommendations of the Independent Care Review that they commissioned”. As the largest dedicated fostering charity in the UK, TACT, not only have we been helping to provide loving homes for vulnerable children for more than 30 years – we are also a voice for foster carers & children in care. We will continue to seek to influence public policy around care across the UK and use our considerable expertise and experience as a service provider to campaign for positive change. Source: www.tactcare.org.uk/ |
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