Head of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

The postholder will be the ICB's lead for delivery against its duties to identify and meet the needs of children with special educational needs and disabilities. You will be the expert lead for the ICB on areas relating, but not limited to; Children Act, Children and Families Act 2014, SEND code of practice.

The Head of SEND will be responsible for leading a defined set of interdependent projects and programmes and the associated change activities across the ICB footprint. They will have primary responsibility for successful delivery of the required outcomes, including the establishment of appropriate governance and assurance, monitoring progress, managing risks and issues and ensuring the system readiness for change.

Please note this organisation does not hold a sponsorship licence, we regret to inform you that we are unable to consider applications from individuals who require sponsorship.

Key outputs of this role will include achievement of measurable improvement in the areas of work the overseen and effective relationship management across the ICB and local networks. Programmes will be complex and ambiguous, and as such the Head of SEND will need to be tenacious, adaptable and highly motivated, being able to manage multiple pieces of work at one time.

As the leadership voice of the NHS within relevant forums, you will lead strong partnerships with senior colleagues across the ICB and/or within local systems, relevant to special educational needs and disabilities - this includes the relevant local authority and voluntary sector colleagues, to support alignment of programme and project priorities.

Using your local knowledge and substantial experience of children's special educational needs and disabilities, you will ensure that population needs are fully reflected in the delivery and transformation of care pathways. This will ensure that areas of vulnerability and health inequality in particular are a focus of this work.

The postholder will manage and supervise the Designated Clinical Officer (0-25yr) function, including auditing, training, advocacy, quality oversight. You will ensure the deployment of staff to effectively discharge this function across the ICB footprint.

We offer excellent employment opportunities to new and existing staff. We aim to be a model employer by embedding best HR practice and to support new ways of working.

We pride ourselves on offering good working conditions, job security, lifelong learning, fair pay and benefits, staff involvement and a balance between work and personal life.

We enjoy a forward thinking and innovative culture and our vision is to have healthy people, living healthy lives in healthy communities. We understand the only way to deliver this is to have the right people with the right skills.

Here is a summary of some of the benefits and services which are on offer to staff:

27 days paid minimum holiday and bank holiday entitlement

NHS pension scheme

Sick pay policy

Occupational health services including staff counselling services

Flexible working and family friendly policies

Flexible retirement and retirement vouchers

Health Service Discounts - offers for stores, travel, equipment etc.

Successful candidates will be subject to a six-month probationary period.

This role will include the following portfolio of services:

Leadership of the strategy priority for SEND

Management and supervision of the Designated Clinical Officer (0-25yr) function

Leading the preparation for inspection readiness (e.g. Area SEND Inspection)

Analytical and judgement skills

Understand the complexities of meeting children and young peoples special educational needs and disabilities and how these can be met in an individualised way to maximise outcomes.

Interrogate and analyse, sometimes highly complex, information to support the delivery of clear programme reporting and programme outcomes.

Write and submit regular high-level reports for local and ICB-wide programme boards demonstrating progress against milestones, status, resource requirements, issues, risks and dependencies, making recommendations where a range of options may exist

Planning and organisation

Matrix manage multi-agency project teams to ensure the delivery of significant programmes for the HIOW ICB within your portfolio, targeted at improvements in quality, access, outcomes and experience.

Manage the whole lifecycle of a programme of local system change, ensuring excellent governance throughout.

Support and lead organisational change and the uptake of initiatives that support and embed excellence within the health and wider system.

Manage the set up and delivery of multiple projects within a programme of work, working with colleagues and subject matter experts to scope, plan design and deliver those projects.

Review project reports and risk logs for projects, advising individual project managers on escalation process and supporting delivery of projects where there may be significant barriers to delivery.

Manage the whole lifecycle of a programme of work containing multiple projects, reporting on progress and managing risks and issues, escalating where necessary to the programme/ board.

Provide expertise of best practice project management methodologies.

Ensure realisation of benefits for customers through planning and designing and that project outputs meet programme requirements.

Support organisational change and the uptake of initiatives that support excellence.

Demonstrate flexibility and support new programmes and projects where necessary.

Policy and service development

Responsible for ensuring that the ICB are aware of national SEND policy and directive changes and that these are reflected within local policy and practice.

Responsible for supporting the delivery of, robust, information systems to ensure that all project documentation is stored and used effectively (PID, dashboards, highlight reports, risk and issues logs etc) – ensuring Place data is available to ICS dashboards.

To act as a champion for patients and their interests and involve the public and patients in the service development and decision-making.

As part of the Project and Programme Management community of practice contribute to the development of project and programme management approaches and way of working across the organisation(s).

To ensure all public and patient contact with the Programme office is of highest professional standard.

To embed patient and public involvement at all levels of decision making.

Be a champion for best practice, learning from experience and from others, supporting the spread of innovation within the organisation.

Works within organisation and national guidance, interpreting national guidance relevant to the project and acting a subject matter specialist within the specific project area.

Support organisational change and the uptake of initiatives that support excellence.

Develop operational processes and polices that support the embedding of project management philosophy within the team and across the wider organisation.

Keep patient interest at the centre of all activities and involve patients and public in policy development and project and programme delivery where appropriate.

Financial and physical resources

Subject to the financial rules and processes in place:

Ensuring that decisions requests for individual health care support, outside of standard commissioned services is robust, streamlined and effective.

Secures local resources and direct planning scheduling, resourcing and estimating for complex programmes.

Responsible for budgets and matching the available budget to the appropriate staff resources and projects and for ensuring that the budget breaks even, co-ordinating and monitoring expenditure.

Responsible for supporting the commissioning of projects and procurement of services to support project delivery, acting in accordance with Standing Orders and Standing Financial Instruction.

Provide financial reports to Directors and the Board as required.

Work alongside functional teams e.g. HR, Finance, Business Development for advice and direction on complex matters, and to ensure appropriate financial, legal, workforce and recruitment methods are identified to support effective transformation planning.

People management

Provide day-to-day leadership and management for staff as required, including the Designated Clinical Officer function.

Forge close positive working relationships, in order to support and enable leadership of an effective matrix approach to achieve programme objectives.

To support, motivate and develop people within the team and beyond.

Responsible for recruitment of new team members.

Responsible for undertaking Personal Development Review and personal development of team members.

To lead and model a collaborative and influencing style of working, negotiating with others to achieve the best outcomes.

Work alongside functional teams e.g. HR, Finance, Business Development for advice and direction on complex matters, and to ensure appropriate financial, legal, workforce and recruitment methods are identified to support effective transformation planning.

Information management

Provide additional advice and guidance to the wider team through working flexibly to directly assist other projects and programmes where they may be a subject matter expert or through providing advice and guidance on best practice.

Provide advice and guidance across HIOW ICS on specific subject matter areas, where they are the known expert and can relate national policy and best practice to delivery across multiple health and social care systems.

Communicate highly complex information to wide range of audiences, including in public and local consultations where there may be hostile/antagonistic audiences.

Communicate, engage and build relationships with key strategic policy makers to influence the development of strategy and policies.

Engage and manage relationships with stakeholders to achieve a common purpose and realise mutual benefits.

Communicate the vision for Mental Health, and support the development of strategy and operational policies that support this vision.

Forge close working relationships across the system to facilitate an effective matrix style approach to delivery of projects and programmes of work.

Research and development

Plan, develop and evaluate methods and processes for gathering, analysing, interpreting and presenting data and information.

Deliver projects to comply with key performance indicators, and best practice guidance.

Co-ordinate Research & Development initiatives, delegating as appropriate.