Service Manager: Adoption and Permanency

Staffordshire County Council; Stafford; On-site; GBP 63,000 - 68,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Disability Confident employer

Armed Forces Gold Award

Guaranteed interview for care leavers

Job summary

Staffordshire County Council in Staffordshire is seeking an experienced social work leader to head adoption and permanency services, driving high-quality practice and timely, secure family arrangements.

You will lead across adoption, kinship and permanence planning, champion safeguarding, support partners, and oversee performance, budgets and risk to deliver lasting outcomes for children and families.

Qualifications

• Degree-level qualification and registration as a Social Worker.
• Significant management experience within children's social care and multi-agency settings.
• Extensive knowledge of adoption, permanence and kinship care legislation and policy.
• Experience leading service improvement, planning and change programmes.
• Budget management and quality assurance with strong leadership and partnerships.

Responsibilities

• Lead adoption, kinship and permanence services to achieve safe, stable family arrangements.
• Drive continuous improvement through quality assurance, performance monitoring and learning from audits.
• Build strong partnerships with regional agencies, health, education and legal services.
• Provide leadership to managers and practitioners, fostering reflective practice and accountability.
• Oversee service performance, budgets and resources for sustainable delivery.
• Champion voices of children and carers to shape service design.
• Undertake the Agency Decision Maker (ADM) responsibilities.

Job description

Service Manager: Adoption and Permanency

Company: Staffordshire County Council

Salary: £63,237 to £68,083 a year

Hours: Full-time

Location: Staffordshire Place 1, Stafford, ST16 2DH

Are you an experienced social work leader with a passion for helping children achieve safe, stable and loving homes? This is an exciting opportunity to lead adoption and permanency services, driving high-quality practice and ensuring children experience a strong sense of belonging through timely and secure family arrangements.

Working across adoption, kinship and permanence planning services, you will play a pivotal role in shaping excellent outcomes for children, families and carers.

Our Children and Families services and our vision here in Staffordshire is rooted in four core principles that underpin everything we do:

• Families first – network and community always
• Right help, right time – proportionate, timely and co-produced with children and families
• Whole-system responsibility for supporting children and families to be happy, healthy and safe
• Permanence as belonging from day one

To achieve our ambition, we have taken a bold decision to transform our service structure and we’re looking for talented, values-driven leaders who can champion these principles, inspire others and help shape the future of Children and Families services in Staffordshire.

We want to create a more resilient, child-centred and future-focused system that enables children, young people and families to receive the right help at the right time.

Through this redesign, we are strengthening leadership, increasing capacity and creating clearer lines of accountability across our services. These changes will support high-quality practice, stronger partnerships and better outcomes for children and families, while ensuring we are well positioned to respond to national reforms and future challenges.

Main Responsibilities

As Service Manager, you will provide operational leadership across adoption and permanency services, ensuring children achieve lasting, positive outcomes through effective planning, high-quality support and strong partnership working. You will lead service improvement, champion excellent practice and ensure services are delivered in line with statutory requirements and quality standards.

You will:

• Lead and develop adoption, kinship and permanence services to ensure children achieve safe, stable and legally secure family arrangements.
• Drive continuous improvement through quality assurance, performance monitoring and learning from audits, feedback and inspections.
• Build strong partnerships with regional adoption agencies, health services, education, legal professionals and community organisations to support effective permanence planning.
• Provide leadership, support and challenge to managers and practitioners, fostering a culture of reflective practice, accountability and continuous learning.
• Oversee service performance, operational risk, budgets and resources to ensure effective and sustainable service delivery.
• Champion the voices of children, adoptive families and kinship carers, ensuring their experiences help shape service design and development.
• Undertake the Agency Decision Maker (ADM) responsibilities.

The Ideal Candidate

The minimum criteria that will be used to shortlist for this role will be:

• A recognised degree-level qualification and registration as a Social Worker.
• Significant management experience within children's social care services, including multi-agency environments.
• Extensive knowledge of adoption, permanence and kinship care legislation, policy and best practice.
• Experience of managing adoption support and kinship support services, including assessment, therapeutic interventions and support arrangements.
• Proven experience of leading service improvement, operational planning and change programmes.
• Strong leadership, partnership-working and performance management skills, with experience of budget management and quality assurance.

Interviews will be held in person - date to be confirmed.

Our benefits:

We recognise that it is our employees that are central to everything we do. We aim to create a supportive working environment where employees can achieve their full potential and achieve a healthy work-life balance.

In addition to your salary, as a member of staff, you will have access to

Our rewards and benefits - Careers at Staffordshire

Staffordshire County Council is an equal opportunities organisation and Disability Confident employer. We encourage applications from all background and communities

As part of our commitment as a

Disability Confident employer, a

Gold Award Armed Forces employer and our commitment to supporting

care leavers - we offer a guaranteed interview as long as yourapplication meets the minimum criteria for the post.

As you’ll know safeguarding and promoting the welfare of our children and young people/vulnerable adults is important to us and that’s why this position is subject to a criminal record check from the Disclosure and Barring Service. If applicable you should disclose details of unspent and unfiltered spent reprimands, formal warnings, cautions and convictions in your application form.

Proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme