Social Work Assistant

**Social Work Assistants**

CF Social Work are recruiting Social Work Assistants (SWAs) across London and the South-East of England. We are a busy service with a steady flow of incoming support requests, and due to an increase in demand we are now looking to expand our team of SWAs.

CF Group is an innovative and forward thinking company, whose range of services are developed to meet the current and emerging needs of children, young people and their families, as well as the commissioning teams, schools and social workers who support them. Established and managed by education and social care professionals, our services are responsive, reliable, and adaptable. The field team are safely recruited, inducted and trained to provide a high standard of care and support, overseen by competent and confident managers across the company.

**Why Social Work Assistant work?**

At CF Social Work we understand that practitioners make the decision to work for us for lots of reasons, including wanting to manage the volume of work they are undertaking, being able to work completely flexibly and allowing time for other commitments/work, and to build and refine their report writing skills. In addition, despite being based in Ipswich, CF Social Work provide SWAs to a number of Local Authorities across the South East, meaning you are able to work at a distance from home you are comfortable with. We also offer a travel allowance should you want to cover work away from your home area. Our dedicated SWA project team are here to help, offer advice around safeguarding issues, and liaise with referrers for all the relevant paperwork and materials, meaning you have more time to focus on practice with families and don’t need to worry about chasing resources

Working with CF Social Work as an SWA also means having the opportunity to take part in and support Reverse Residential Assessments (RRAs), a pioneering assessment tool designed by and trademarked by CF Social Work. This flips the model of residential assessment on its head. Instead of families being asked to leave their established support networks to move into environments to be assessed that don’t necessarily reflect the real world; the support, assessment and supervision is provided to the family in their own homes, often for 24 hours per day, which gives a true reflection of the ongoing risk, strengths, prognosis for change and safety for the child. This is done in partnership with our Independent Social Work service and is an exciting area of social work that is growing in popularity with families, LA’s and courts. As well as our exciting RRA work, we support families with Contact, Family Support, and Reunification of children back to their parents care.

**The impact of our work**

We are proud to have been part of numerous positive interventions in family’s lives. We have supported children to stay within their birth families where it is safe to do so, supported parents to build their ability to care for their children, been instrumental in reunifying children from care back to their birth families, and we advocate for those we support. We ensure that our practice supports clear and quick decision making for children, and ensure our work is delivered on time, every time. Some recent words used by families we have supported to describe our work are: ‘Effective, Professional, Respectful, Helpful, Unintrusive, At ease, Clear, On Point, Listened’. We are proud that social workers, lawyers and families we have supported remember the quality of our interventions and come back to us to request other support work in the future.

**Our offer of support**
- All newly appointed SWA’s are offered a high intensity of coaching and mentoring within their first few months completing work with us. In addition, all SWA’s have access to a qualified and experienced CQC Registered Manager and Social Work Service Manager to discuss any issues, worries, or barriers they may have on a specific piece of work. Each new worker is assigned an individual mentor to lean on for support and to learn from.
- At CF Social Work, we have a dedicated and supportive team who deal with the day to day admin and liaison with LA’s, court parties and others to allow you to focus on the face to face practice with families.
- Hourly rate of £12 as well as expenses incurred.
- Travel Budget
- Robust, strengths-based QA process designed to ensure the quality of all of our reports, while offering guidance and suggestions to our practitioners for their own professional development.
- Guidance from the Social Work Service Manager to resolve any issues or disputes that may arise when undertaking any piece of work.

**Requirements for this role**:

- Must drive and have access to own transport with business class insurance and be able and willing to travel when required - travel time and mileage are paid as part of this employment.
- Skills: you must have computer skills to input information and access to a