Adolescent Early Help Worker

Role Responsibility

Are you hardworking, committed, and passionate about helping young people and their families improve their lives and avoid family breakdown? Do you have multiple skills?

The Integrated Adolescent Service has been newly formed in recognition that adolescents should be given a bespoke offer of support. We want professionals capable of bringing understanding and emotional intelligence to everything they do. The service promotes a practice philosophy which seeks to empower young people and their families, building on individual strengths, and helping them to develop strategies which support them to understand, manage and respond to the difficulties they face.

Your role as an Adolescent Support worker will involve providing intensive support, empowering young people, and their families to develop effective long-term solutions to manage their family relationships and develop strategies to overcome the risks that adolescents face during this phase of their life. This is an exciting time as you will be able to be part of shaping the future service and to contribute towards its longer-term development. 

You will deliver 1:1 interventions with young people as well as working with their family as part of a systems led approach. You will need to demonstrate an ability to engage with children, young people, their families, and carers, coupled with the integrity to work within a confidential, professional environment. 

You will undertake or contribute towards assessments of young people and their carers to determine their needs and capabilities as well as draw up plans of support. Using strengths based and solution focused intervention methods, you will seek to mediate, reunify, and promote young people remain safely at home with their family and support networks. You will support young people to express their wishes and feelings, providing them with advocacy wherever necessary. 

You will be asked to contribute towards safety planning, as well as linking young people in with Youth Open Access and other partner agencies to ensure their needs are met in a holistic way.

The work will be challenging but rewarding and you will be given opportunities to develop specialisms according to your areas of interests in regards to family work.

Applicants will need to be able to work as part of a team including building positive working relationships with professionals in the Youth Offending Teams, Adolescent Early Help Units, Youth Open Access, and Adolescent Support Team social workers.

You will need to have an understanding of multi-agency work. This post, alongside creativity and good communication, requires flexibility, innovative thinking, and good organisation skills and also requires a positive young person-centered approach. You will need to enjoy working with adolescents with a range of difficulties and draw upon various theories in order to bring about change.

A high standard of written English is an important requirement as all team members must be able to produce a good standard of report writing and maintain accurate, comprehensive written records. You will also work with families to draw up genograms, compile chronologies and other forms of case summaries.

Excellent organisational skills, communication and IT skills.

You will have significant experience of working with children, young people and families in a similar role or setting. You will have an NVQ Level 3 in childcare or equivalent. The successful candidate will receive quality regular supervision, enjoy good support from peers and have access to a wide range of training opportunities.

Our teams and our people are our greatest asset - if you want to make a positive difference you will be surrounded by like-minded individuals who will support you and help you along the way.  If you would welcome the opportunity to join a friendly team in a worthwhile and challenging role, we would like to hear from you.

See job description for full details of requirements expected of the post holder.

This role is subject to holding a Full UK Driving Licence – The Council is committed to making reasonable adjustments so whilst this job requires the jobholder to drive your application will still be considered if you are unable to drive due to a disability.

This post is subject to an Enhanced Disclosure Application to the Disclosure and Barring Service.

This post is considered by KCC to be a customer-facing position. 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/Welsh sufficient for the effective performance of the job requirements. The appropriate standards are set out in the Job Description/Person Specification.

Contact Details

If you have any further enquiries regarding this post please contact Kara Leece via  kara.leece@kent.gov.uk

About the Company

Work that works for you and us - let’s talk flexibility!

KCC is committed to building a workforce which reflects the diversity of the county’s working residents, encouraging applications from people of all ages, abilities, genders, sexual orientations, ethnic backgrounds, faiths and those with caring responsibilities, and aspires to create an inclusive workplace where everyone can be themselves at work.

Please note – if you are interested, please apply as soon as possible as the closing date for this advert may be earlier than stated should a number of suitably qualified candidates apply.