About Us:

Working as part of Children’s Services will provide a challenging and rewarding career. We have high ambitions for the children and young people of Kensington and Chelsea.  We have formed a bi-borough Children’s Services team with colleagues from Westminster City Council. Our services, which include education, family services and safeguarding, have been rated Outstanding by Ofsted, and our drive to be the best doesn’t stop there.  By working with us, you will have the opportunity to make a difference to young people in one of the world’s most diverse cities.

The Role:

This role sits within our Transformation and Innovation team that serves Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea’s Children’s Services directorate. Our team leads diverse portfolios of work that span the entirety of the directorate. This is an exciting opportunity to join a flexible team at the forefront of delivering change and reshaping services to ensure we continue to deliver outstanding services to children, young people and their families.

Our team works closely with services and stakeholders across the directorate to ensure we’re creating sustainable change that is truly co-designed. We also have strong and positive links to our local health partners, such as NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs). This role is likely to sit within an emerging portfolio of work focused on looked after children with complex needs; it is envisaged that you will work closely not only with social work teams in each borough, but also the local CCG and our special educational needs and disabilities services. Effectively navigating this landscape of diverse stakeholders will be key to succeed in this role.

This role will lead on projects that report into a wider portfolio of work, so is an opportunity for autonomy and leadership whilst also staying aligned to and engaged with the bigger picture and overarching strategy of the portfolio.

We embrace flexible working in order to suit your needs. Usually, you will be based at Kensington Town Hall, with the option to work from home regularly, and will have the opportunity to work flexibly from Westminster City Hall also, to maintain a presence in each borough. This role may require you to travel to area offices and external meetings across both boroughs. However, for the foreseeable future we will be working from home due to covid-19. You will be provided with all the necessary equipment and support to do this successfully.

For more information on the role, please see the Job Description

About You:

Our team celebrates difference and welcomes applicants from a range of diverse backgrounds who can bring different perspectives to the role. It is important to our team that we strive to reflect the experiences of the diverse communities we serve. As a Disability Confident Employer, we are committed to ensuring our recruitment and onboarding process is inclusive and accessible.

We welcome candidates that are dynamic, innovative and work well as part of a team. Beyond our team, working effectively with the wider Children’s Services directorate and across organisational boundaries will be key to succeed in this role. You will have excellent communication and negotiation skills as well as high levels of emotional intelligence.

You will be able to think creatively and forge new opportunities for change and expansion of our team’s work that delivers impact in improving outcomes for children, young people and their families.

Experience of working with data, creating dashboards, maintaining datasets and reporting on data in creative ways is preferable. Experience of Microsoft Excel is required.

You will be comfortable with ambiguity and easily adaptable to changing priorities and directions of travel. You will be incredibly efficient when it comes to time-management and be able to effectively plan to ensure deadlines and savings targets are reached, and that all stakeholders remain engaged and on-board

We particularly welcome candidates who have an understanding of, or an interest in Children’s Services, service design and agile project management.

You will be managed by the Strategic Transformation Lead and will have the opportunity to matrix manage resource across the team, as well as potentially hold line management responsibilities.

Role Requirements:

• Successfully manage projects - monitor and mitigate risks and issues, deliver agreed savings and improve service performance and quality
• Analyse best practice and research to inform approaches that are forward thinking and built upon learning
• Use data to evidence approaches as well as to baseline, monitor and ultimately demonstrate the success of our work
• Build relationships with diverse stakeholders and ensure they are kept engaged in the project throughout its lifecycle
• Communicate effectively with a variety of audiences in a way that informs and leads to decisions and actions
• Confidently present information verbally and via written reports to stakeholders ranging from practitioners to senior leadership teams
• Understand the statutory and legislative contexts of areas of work
• Manage data and monitor savings to ensure targets are met
• Foster a culture of innovation throughout all work
• Attend wider portfolio meetings, facilitating items where needed, capturing and progressing actions
• Be unafraid to iterate approaches as necessary to ensure that outcomes are achieved, and challenge current ways of working where needed

We work in partnership with Hampshire County Council (HCC) who deliver many transactional services on our behalf. Although most communications will be from HCC, all selection and appointment decisions will be made by RBKC. Certain services are shared across more than one Council area to nearby neighbouring Authorities. This enhances delivery and reduces costs. Your recruitment information will advise if your remit extends beyond RBKC.

We will primarily contact candidates by e-mail throughout the recruitment process, please monitor your email junk / spam folder as our system generated emails may be allocated to these folders by your email settings.

We engage our staff with a variety of learning types including face-to-face and virtual learning because we want to ensure our staff understand our values and behaviours, grow their skills and develop their careers.

We are committed to promoting equality and respecting diversity and welcome applications from all sections of the community.

We are a Disability Confident Employer – committed to ensuring that our recruitment and selection process is inclusive and accessible.