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Statutory Director of Children & Family Services (DCS)

Employer
West Sussex County Council
Location
West Sussex
Salary
 circa £125,000 per annum
Closing date
17 Apr 2019

About the job

You’ll provide professional leadership for the County Council’s statutory social services functions for children. You will work in collaboration with local partnerships and networks and be accountable for co-ordinating services across a diverse range of needs including, children’s social care, life-long services, children’s safeguarding, high risk adolescents and integrated prevention and earliest help.

The successful candidate will drive forward the recommendations emerging from our recent corporate peer review, which described the services as “fragile” and which encouraged the development of a learning organisation. The establishment of a voluntary improvement board was also recommended, and this has been taken forward and an independent chair appointed. You will lead the service on its journey to be a good performing authority and implement the recommendations from the recent ILACS inspection.

Working with elected members as a member of our Corporate Leadership Team you will develop, implement and track programmes that will ensure better outcomes for individuals and communities across our five core priority outcomes;

Join us – Make a difference in our communities

The context for West Sussex is changing. Increasing demographic pressures, providing residents and communities with greater levels of choice and control over services and the tighter financial constraints mean that as public sector organisations, we need to change the way we operate.

The service has recently received significant financial investment in recognition of the challenges that it faces with recruitment and retention and in the context of a very recent Ofsted ILACS inspection. We are redesigning our children’s residential services to respond to recent concerns and our looked after children looked service requires significant stabilisation and improvement. Our early help service has been reviewed by the LGA and requires significant reconfiguration to make sure that it is effective in reducing demand for children’s social care. Plans are in place to address these challenges, but we need to move at pace.

If you would like to discuss the role in further detail, please contact Nikki Greaves 0113 200 3733 or 07384 673913 nikki.greaves@hays.com or Dawar Hashmi 07772 368388 Dawar.hashmi@hays.com

Closing date: 17th April 2019

 

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