"We’re constantly pushing ourselves to do better for children, young people and their families.”

These are the words of our new Executive Director of Children’s Services, Rachael Wardell the latest addition to our leadership team here in Surrey. We are determined to provide the very best for every child, ensuring good is good for everyone.

We are seeking to appoint an Assistant Director to lead and make a personal impact on the delivery of our high profile SEND Transformation Programme, a programme that is integral to us here in Surrey. Under your leadership, we will make a step change in culture and approach to SEND across our teams, partners, and services. You will improve the availability, accessibility, and inclusion of support across our entire system to ensure our children, young people and families achieve consistently better outcomes.

Working collaboratively across the directorate, council and our partners, the core priority of this role will be to deliver our programme ensuring our services work towards enhancing the lives of children, young people and families working and living in our county. In this role you will look to the future and not settle for what has been done before. Reviewing the impact of improvements, you will be able to evidence the use of qualitative and quantitive indicators to measure the performance of services and to devise future improvement strategies.

This is a leadership role, and as such, we will be looking to you to drive positive cultural change, embody our behaviours and values in all that you do, and ensure the effective implementation of all corporate initiatives and transformation programmes you lead.

About you

You will thrive on developing strong working relationships, quickly, inside and outside our organisation. You will have used your stakeholder management and system leadership skills and experience to ensure previous transformation programmes progresses positively, at pace.

Inspiring innovation and partnership working you will benefit from a collaborative management style, with the ability to engage, develop and drive services to achieve operational excellence, increasing efficiency and productivity. You will be able to positively engage communities in change programmes and have successfully delivered large-scale operational saving initiatives whilst driving service improvement.

Coproduction and codelivery of complex projects and programmes of scale will be second nature to you.

Surrey is a place where you can make a personal impact to the lives of children and young people. Your contribution to our transformation journey will build upon on the good progress we’ve already made in helping to improve outcomes for children, young people, and their families.

For more information about the role, please click apply below or for a confidential discussion about your suitability, please contact Frazer Thouard (07384 810 743) or Alex Hayes (0113 205 6109) from our recruitment partners, GatenbySanderson.

Closing Date: Midnight on Sunday 13^th June.