Family Drug

This is a Gloucestershire County Council job.

• Job Title: Family Drug & Alcohol Court Locality Social Worker
• Job Location: Stroud and Forest of Dean
• Salary: £39,152 - £47,181 per annum
• Hours per Week: 37.00
• Contract Type: Permanent
• Closing Date: 19/10/2025
• Job Requisition Number: 12811
• This post is open to job share

GCC are looking for FDAC Social Workers to deepen their practice and develop their skills.

Reward and Support
For all your hard work, you will receive the following:

• between £39,152 - £47,181 per annum subject to experience
• £4,000 welcome payment*
• £2,000 retention payment*
• up to £8,000 for relocation funds*
• flexible and agile working opportunities
• 25.5 days annual leave rising to 30.5 days after 5 years continuous service
• option to purchase 10 days of additional leave per year (pro rata for part-time staff)
• family friendly policies and benefits to help support you and your family
• supportive and positive working environment with regular, robust supervision
• Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS)
• access to our Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) that provides free, confidential, counselling and advice for employees, available 24 hours a day, online and by telephone
• an in-house Occupational Health service
• employee discount scheme
• cycle to work scheme
• links to employee networks such as Prism (LGBT+) and the Young Employees Network
• career development and qualification opportunities
• access to our Social Work Academy

Right child, right support, right time, every time
In our recent inspection in June 2025, our Children's Services have been officially judged as 'Good' with 'Outstanding' elements. Ofsted also said 'Leaders have set out a clear vision for delivering success for children, by modelling values and creating a culture where the workforce, children and families feel valued and heard; risk is managed confidently with bottom lines clearly set out.'

This marks an important step in our journey to improve outcomes for our children and young people, and we remain focused on our mission: to continue building on this success and ensure that every child and young person in our county has the opportunity to thrive.

Gloucestershire offers a range of opportunities to develop your career, supported by a phenomenal Social Work Academy offer, a developing systemic practice methodology, an ambitious leadership team and an award-winning workforce.

We are a local authority adopting, and training all colleagues in, systemic social work practice. If you would like to be part of an authority that takes a relational approach to working with families and focuses on what needs to change in the system around a child and family to enable children to thrive, then consider a role with GCC.

We are looking 2 FDAC social workers to cover three localities; Stroud, Tewkesbury and Forest of Dean. You will hold an FDAC family and work alongside the multi-agency service and TACS. You will work to deliver evidence-based therapeutic interventions in the collaborative, problem-solving court, FDAC. A crucial aspect of these roles will be to bring learning back into the locality teams and further enhance services to locality families and communities.

As a Locality FDAC Social Worker, You'll Experience

• systemic practice that is curious, courageous, and compassionate
• trauma-informed approaches
• multi-professional collaboration and planning
• deeper understanding of Hidden Harm and its impact on children
• confidence in court settings and the expert voice of social workers
• restorative practice with high support and high challenge
• development of multi-agency interventions
• use of language that cares
• collaborative permanency planning
• equal access to FDAC for families across all localities
• you'll be the 'spoke', holding one FDAC case from your locality
• TACS will be the 'hub', supporting you as part of the wider family team
• you'll deliver interventions and share learning with your locality team

What it will invole:

• hold one FDAC case (approx. 2 days/week)
• reduced caseload to support this work
• attend fortnightly FDAC hearings with your family
• write and curate all FDAC reports (review, evidence, final)
• attend formulation and intervention planning meetings
• deliver interventions and support permanency planning
• work within a multidisciplinary team (including nurses, therapists, and support workers)
• receive a full induction, peer and 1:1 supervision, and contribute to transformation reviews

How To Apply
For an informal chat about this role, please contact

We reserve the right to close an advertisement earlier than the stated closing date if we receive a suitable number of applications.

If you would like to find out more about our Children's Service please take a look here: Children's Social Care Careers | Gloucestershire County Council

The council will consider sponsorship for this role, in line with Home Office regulations and subject to satisfactory pre-employment checks.

• Please note that all our welcome and retention payments are subject to terms and conditions as well as tax and national insurance deductions

Under the terms of our Safer Recruitment Policy, if you are invited to interview, we will take up safeguarding references prior to your interview to understand your suitability to work with vulnerable children. These references will then be discussed in your interview. Please give details of at least two referees, one of whom must be your present and/or last employer and the other from a previous employer(s). These will need to cover the last three years of employment/education. In the case of applicants leaving full time education or not having worked since doing so, the Head of School, College or University should be one of the named referees. We do not accept references from friends or family members or workplace colleagues (who are not more senior). To ensure we process your application in a speedy and efficient way, we will contact your referees by DocuSign. Where appropriate, please inform them of your application.

Additional Information
To access the Job Profile for this role, please follow the link below:-

Social Worker Role Profile

Senior Social Worker Role Profile

This position is subject to a DBS check.

Hybrid working arrangements are available for the majority of our roles, giving teams the opportunity to work in a way that suits them, balancing service need and individual choice, with a mix of both remote and office working.