Early Help Worker - Adolescent Unit

Role Responsibility

Adolescent Early Help Unit

Do you recognise Adolescence as a difficult time? Do you have empathy for families of adolescents, who struggle to navigate the changes?

An excellent opportunity has arisen for a self-motivated and committed Early Help Worker to join the Adolescent Early Help Team covering West Kent.

Your role 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.

Our practitioners need to be resilient and persistent; be solution-focused; look past challenging behaviours; build positive relationships with adolescents and their carers, and to inspire young people to reach their potential.

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 deliver 1:1 interventions with young people as well as working with their family as part of a systems led approach. 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.

You will need to be able to work as part of a team including building positive working relationships with Youth Justice workers, Open Access and the Adolescent Social Work Team. 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 centred 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.

This role also requires strong interpersonal and organisational skills, good IT skills and system understanding is essential.  

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 ability to travel around the area is also an integral part of this role as we cover a wide geographical area and part of your duties will involve visiting families at home.

The successful candidate will receive excellent training in case formulation, contextual safeguarding and trauma-informed approaches. We’re currently offering trauma-informed supervision to practitioners and managers to enhance how we support our workforce. You will also be able to access a range of employee benefits, aimed at promoting your wellbeing.

Interviews will be held on 19 October 2020.

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

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

For an informal discussion or to find out more please, contact Helen Burton, Team Manager on 03000 411422.

About the Company

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.