Head of Service - First Assessment Service and Youth Justice Service

at  Bristol City Council

HEAD OF SERVICE – FIRST ASSESSMENT SERVICE AND YOUTH JUSTICE SERVICE

Are you passionate about making a positive impact on the lives of children and safeguarding their future? We are seeking an experienced Senior Manager to join our Head of Service Team in Bristol, providing leadership and support to deliver high-quality services for children and families.
This is a new role for Bristol following investment in our service. This role is pivotal in shaping Bristol’s strategic response to safeguarding, youth justice, and extra-familial harm while ensuring high standards of service delivery and compliance with statutory requirements

As the Head of Service for the First Assessment Service and the Youth Justice Service you will be working closely with and leading and managing the Service Managers to ensure timely, effective interventions for children and families. You will work with partners locally, regionally and nationally to ensure our services develop in line with the new frameworks and legislation to ensure that children are protected and supported in a proactive and child focused way. .
In addition to providing operational oversight and strategic development, you will support the Service Managers in managing budgets, workforce, and performance, while upholding the highest standards of practice.
The First Assessment Service is the primary point of access for children in need of help and protection across the city and our Youth Justice Service is a centrally based team supporting children in the community. Both services are clear about their vision in supporting and protecting children and families, raising expectations for all children irrespective of their starting point in life and the head of service is crucial to the focus and delivery of this vision.
This is an exciting opportunity to be part of our Families First transformation supporting us to expand our services in 2025. This is so that we can support children and families at the earliest point, whilst also providing intensive support to children and families when they need it, whether this be at a family help level requiring additional multi agency support or a specialist help level where children and families need that intensive intervention or for children in our care.
Our neighbourhood model and our new specialist teams will enable our family support workers, key workers and social workers to have the recommended number of children allocated to them that will enable them to deliver intensive support whilst also being supported by our new specialist teams when there is harm outside the home and or a child is at risk of needing to come into our care.
As we move into the new year, we are looking forward to building on the brilliant work our teams already do with children by expanding our services to create the conditions for our teams to feel supported, have the time they need to work intensively with children and families, access good training, feel psychologically safe and listened to, whilst experiencing healthy challenge to thrive in their roles in our joint vision with children and families. We will continue our commitment of working with integrity, honesty, kindness, transparency, collaboration and family led decision making as we build on what we do well and learn together to develop our work further.