Quality of Practice Service

**The job itself**:
**The job itself**

The East Riding of Yorkshire Council, Children’s Services have been rated GOOD by Ofsted following our recent ILACS inspection. Since the last inspection in 2019, the leadership team has made significant and sustained changes in all the practice and leadership areas identified for improvement. Through extensive engagement with external partners and scrutineers, the improvements in the service mean that children and young people in East Riding receive a timely and effective response and intervention when they need it. Senior leaders and councillors are clear about what their strengths are and what still needs to be improved in service delivery, and their self-evaluation is accurate. They have ambitious plans and have secured significant investment to develop their services further as part of their continuous improvement journey. Senior leaders lead by example, and this has supported practitioners to embed the relational model of practice with the families they work with.

An exciting opportunity has arisen within the Participation, Innovation, and Improvement portfolio for an Advanced Social Work Practitioner (temporary role for one year to cover the secondment of the substantive post holder) to support our improvement journey, driving a strength and relational based practice model in our work with children, young people, and their networks. The role will support the Quality of Practice activity within the portfolios across Children and Young People Safeguarding & Support Services (CYPSSS) including our Early Help and Prevention space in completing and supporting the implementation of our Quality of Practice Framework, including but not exclusively, the completion of Reflective Space activity (audits) and analysing the outcome of the activity to feed into the wider learning and development offer across the practice system.

This is an opportunity to join an evolving service which has received significant investment to promote and embed an effective person centred, relational and restorative Quality of Practice Framework. The post holder will work directly with practitioners supporting them to reflect upon their interventions with children, young people, and their families, celebrating best practice and considering how interventions could be delivered differently to shape and influence future service delivery.

The post holder will drive and embed the overriding aims of the Quality of Practice Framework with the workforce, these aims include:

- Ensuring the child/young person is at the centre of the Framework and promoting the concepts that children and young people are listened to and heard.
- Linking together the three domains of the Framework: ‘voice, quality and practice’ to ensure that the quality of practice is linked into a robust learning, development, and feedback loop.
- Providing high reflective challenge alongside high reflective support to the workforce.
- Being outcome and impact focussed with emphasis upon the child’s and/or young person’s lived experience.
- Recognising that the performance data only tells part of the ‘practice story’ placing greater emphasis on quality of practice.
- Promoting and driving a relational based practice system

**Our model**

**‘You can, I can, We can’**

We have created a bespoke practice model that reflects and connects our vision, our value base and our behaviour as one East Riding of Yorkshire approach to working with children, young people and their families, which is nurtured and grown from within East Riding of Yorkshire CYPSSS and owned by our workforce.

We remain committed to Signs of Safety as a practice framework, but this will be set within a much wider, values based, model of practice that clearly connects Signs of Safety much more clearly with the East Riding value base, and our overall approach to making and sustaining relationships with children, families, and communities.

Without a well embedded model, there is nothing to centre our practice on to ensure that, while the work may be different, all our teams are grounded in the same values, beliefs, theories and approaches. Having a well-developed practice model helps to create a common language for the service and enables everyone to understand how we go about doing the right things, in the right way and for the right reasons for children and their families.

We are looking for an experienced practitioner with a passion for strength-based approaches and relational practice, and a commitment to securing good outcomes for children, young people, and their network by adopting reflective practices.

You will build upon your experience of working with children and young people in an exciting role that is central to the development of a culture of improving the lived experience for those children and young people we work with. This is a specialist role in a large and ambitious service, working across multiple portfolios, with multiple complexi