Team Manager - Family Safeguarding Court Lead

Are you an experienced Team Manager or Senior Social Worker looking for an opportunity to shape and improve court practice across Children's Services? Do you have experience in quality assurance and a track record of fostering a learning environment that supports social workers to enhance their practice?

If so, then this could be your next challenge. We are seeking an exceptional practitioner to take on a new and influential Court Lead role, driving quality, performance, and best practice across pre-proceedings and care proceedings.

We have an opportunity for you to take the lead in the development and implementation of an overarching quality assurance framework to embed consistent, high-quality practice across all court-related work for Cambridgeshire County Council's Children's Service.

This is a new permanent Team Manager position within our Family Support and Safeguarding Service. For an initial period of approximately 12 months, the successful candidate will undertake the Court Lead function across the service, responsible for overseeing the progression of court work, ensuring that care proceedings and pre-proceedings progress efficiently, within statutory timescales, and to a consistently high standard of practice. Once this programme of work is complete, the role is expected to transition into a Family Help Team Manager position, subject to the future needs of the service and the implementation of the Families First model.

You will play a pivotal role in driving performance, reducing delay,and strengthening the quality of court work, ensuring that care planning is robust, child-focused, and legally sound.

As Court Lead you will act as the key link between Children's Services, the judiciary and courts, Legal Services, Cafcass, social work teams and managers. You will oversee and track all court- related activity, monitoring legal trackers to ensure compliance with timescales and practice standards and promote best practice and consistency across all court work, ensuring the child's voice, wishes, and feelings remain central to all planning and decision-making.

We will be looking for you to embed a culture of continuous improvement and reflective practice, ensuring continuous performance management and driving high-quality practice across both Public and Private Law proceedings. You will model excellent practice and provide constructive challenge where standards are not being met, supporting colleagues to achieve consistently high-quality outcomes. Working collaboratively with Team Managers, Service Managers, and the Head of Service to ensure the appropriate support, challenge, and development are in place to improve practice and outcomes for children and families.

This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of court practice within Cambridgeshire's Children's Services. You will have the autonomy to influence service-wide improvement, work alongside experienced leaders and legal professionals, and play a key role in ensuring the best possible outcomes for children and families;

Interviews will be held in person and are expected to take place during the week commencing 5th October.

Appointment to this post will be subject to the outcome of an Enhanced Disclosure obtained through the Disclosure and Barring Service. The Council is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and vulnerable adults and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment.

Our benefits

We value our colleagues in Cambridgeshire County Council and have developed a number of benefits in addition to the basics like annual leave, sick pay, pension and mileage

• A comprehensive wellbeing package to cover all aspects of wellbeing , both in and out of work, which can also be accessed by your family
• Buy up to 4 weeks additional annual leave (pro-rata) through our salary sacrifice scheme
• Take your bank holidays flexibly to better suit your personal circumstances
• Make Additional Voluntary Contributions (Shared AVCs) to your pension with tax and National Insurance savings
• Access to development opportunities , apprenticeships and qualified coaches to support your personal and professional growth
• Paid volunteering hours each year so you can make a positive impact on our community during your normal working day
• Access to Peer Support Groups through our IDEAL staff equality, diversity and inclusion network
• Opportunities to nominate and receive Employee Recognition Awards
• An Our Cambs Rewards account, giving you access to in-store and online discounts as well as our Car Lease and Cycle to Work schemes

What will you be doing?

In this role, you will:

• Quality assure social work statements, parenting assessments, court reports, and care plans, ensuring evidence is robust, analytical, child-centred, and legally compliant.
• Support Team Managers and practitioners to improve the quality of assessments, report writing, and evidence presented within court proceedings.
• Drive performance and challenge drift in case planning by proactively identifying, addressing, and escalating risks, delays, and non-compliance, working closely with Service Managers and Team Managers to remove barriers, improve timeliness, and strengthen outcomes for children and families.
• Maintain and oversee legal trackers, ensuring accurate monitoring of case progression and identifying delays or risks at the earliest opportunity to ensure compliance with statutory timescales, court directions, and Public Law Outline requirements.
• Act as the key link between Children's Services, Legal Services, Cafcass, the judiciary, and external partners, serving as a lead point of contact during court proceedings to reduce delay and improve whole-system effectiveness.
• Provide expert consultation, coaching, and reflective support to social workers and managers navigating complex court processes.
• Lead on case progression panels, following up on identified practice issues, supporting service improvement, and ensuring agreed actions are progressed.
• Deliver training, briefings, and practice discussions, both independently and alongside Legal Services colleagues, to embed learning and continuously improve standards.
• Create a positive learning culture that encourages reflection, professional development, and continuous improvement across the workforce.
• Analyse performance data, court activity, and case progression trends to identify themes, influence service improvement, and support strategic decision-making.
• In addition, you will provide management cover for other locality Team Managers across Family Support and Safeguarding and Assessment during periods of absence.

About you

To be successful in this role, you will need a deep understanding of childcare legislation, the Family Court system, statutory frameworks, and the Public Law Outline (PLO) with substantial exposure to complex child protection, safeguarding, and care proceedings.

You will be able to evidence working effectively with various stakeholders, including the judiciary and external agencies, demonstrating the ability to build strong professional relationships and confidently challenging where needed.

You will be an excellent communicator with strong interpersonal and communication skills, both written and verbal.

You will display strong analytical, organisational, and performance management skills and be able to demonstrate experience creating a learning environment that has enabled social workers to improve practice through coaching, mentoring, training or line management.

You must:

• Be a qualified Social Worker registered with Social Work England.
• Have the ability to work from a variety of locations and travel countywide independently

For a full list of the requirements of the role, please check out the Job Description & Person Specification.

About us

Cambridgeshire is a great place to work and live with a diverse population, an urban centre in Cambridge, historic Isle of Ely, Huntingdon and St Ives as well as more rural landscapes.

Our four values are central to our culture, driving everything we do.

We are proud to serve the diverse communities of Cambridgeshire and want our workforce to be reflective of this diversity, which we firmly believe benefits our colleagues, the organisation and our communities. If you don't meet every single requirement in the job role but think this could be you, please don't be put off. We are committed to building a workplace that is compassionate and inclusive as well as diverse, so if you think you could be a good candidate for this role please consider applying and speak to the recruiting manager if you have any questions.

Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, along with our employee network 'IDEAL' and self-organised peer support groups help us to foster an inclusive, supportive and safe working environment where people feel valued, respected, and empowered. We collect relevant diversity data for monitoring as part of the recruitment process to understand the diversity of our applicants and monitor any trends throughout the recruitment processes so that we can take meaningful action.

We are proud to be a Disability Confident Leader. We fully support providing reasonable adjustments throughout our recruitment process, as well as when you join us, and we encourage candidates to contact the Hiring Manager, whose details can be found in the advert, to discuss any adjustment needs. Through a Guaranteed Interview Scheme, we will offer an interview to all applicants who disclose a disability and meet the essential criteria for a job vacancy. On your application form you can indicate you are disabled. Some examples of reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process could include additional time to complete an assessment or printing a document on pastel coloured paper with larger font size and line spacing. We would value talking about what might be possible to enable you to join us and thrive, so if there is something that would help you to do your best during your journey with us, please get in touch.

Visit our jobs and careers section to find out more about our wide range of learning and development opportunities; apprenticeships; our wellbeing package; staff benefits; our commitment to equality, diversity and Inclusion.

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