Investing in you, investing in Newham
At Newham, we celebrate individuality, welcome people with different skillsets and are committed to helping our social workers find the best fit for their professional development.
Your background or the length of your experience are not as important as your willingness to learn, to engage and to contribute – and to champion the rights and needs of children.
Children's Social Care is a rewarding but challenging occupation, never more so than against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic and amid the disruption of remote working.
Newham needs social workers and managers who are compassionate; resilient; supportive of their families and their colleagues; creative in how they support families; mindful of how our children and families have responded to the developments of 2020 – and who understand that meeting challenges today is the only way we will build a better tomorrow.
If you can provide the right attitude, we can provide the training, development and accreditations opportunities to help you to develop and grow as a professional. You will enjoy exceptional support from fellow social workers, managers and family therapists – working alongside you to help deliver better outcomes for children.
The variety of opportunity at Newham is huge – a talented social worker could choose to move into management; be part of one of our specialist teams; become a Child Protection Chair or Independent Reviewing Officer; teach at a partner university; become a systemic family therapist, or explore many other opportunities.
At Newham, we believe in “growing our own” where possible – knowing that the improvements we’re committed to will be best achieved by people who have worked in and know and understand our local communities.
Circles of Support
Our Circles of Support Framework of Practice is a clear Purposeful, Planned and Focused approach to Practice. One that is Systemic, Restorative and relational. Placing children, their families and their systems at the heart of everything we do.
We want practitioners to think of themselves as active participants in relationships of change. Having the skills, the support and they systems to enable them to get alongside families, children and young people. To enter conversations that construct shared decision making, doing with and not to families.
We believe all of us, families, children, practitioners all need to be part of various circles of support. Circles that enable, encourage, appreciate and challenge us to do as well as we can.
There are six core principles underlying our Practice Framework.
- Co-Production
- Curiosity
- Compassion
- Confidence
- Clarity
- Community
To read more about our Circles of Support Practice Framework, please click here.
Our Systemic Offer
Systemic Social Work is included in the practice model we use in Newham Children’s Social Care.
It supports the relational approach we adopted and provides tools for workers to gain a better understanding of their families, both through their means of interacting with individuals, and how they analyse the issues the families are facing, including the ultimate impact on the children.
We have partnered with the Institute for Family Therapy (IFT) to provide specialist training for our social workers who wish to specialise in Systemic practice. Ours is a stepped offer to ensure that all staff are familiar with the basics of systemic practice, and we provide further training for those whose roles require a greater degree of knowledge or who wish to move towards specialisation as part of their professional development.
Internal Training Opportunities
The Academy offers a range of diverse CPD opportunities including those aligned to the career progression pathway for social workers post 1 year qualified and above.
It holds the complex and specialist pathways for professionals’ career development:
- Aspiring Managers
- Specialist in: Domestic Abuse, Substance Misuse, Mental Health, and more
- Professional Practice Educator
- Systemic Practitioner/Family Therapist
Training offer
A calendar of regular training events is published annually. The training is delivered to staff at three levels, i.e., Core, Targeted and Specialist. Between August and the end of March, we have shifted from the focus on basic standards to a more ambitious approach that supports Newham CYPS as a centre of excellence.
Bespoke Training as Requested
This is provided in response to local needs and the findings from audit activity. Key stakeholders across the Social Care Academy and Quality Assurance service meet monthly as part of the ‘learning loop’ to share audit activity results and feedback from colleagues across services to identify and plan bespoke training to meet local needs. With the findings from these meetings, the Practice Development Social Workers design new learning and development to address this need promptly.
Targeted Team-Based Learning
Where teams are experiencing challenges, such as managing change, we can offer the whole team support, for example, in response to necessary realignments of service specifications.
Externally Commissioned Specialist Training
When there is a need for training which requires specialist skills and knowledge, we commission external trainers.
Lunchtime seminars
The Lunchtime seminars are offered once a week on a Wednesday between 1 pm and 2 pm during term time. The workshops are open to the whole children’s social care workforce and colleagues in partner agencies; there are informal bite sizes learning opportunities.
How our Social Workers can book onto training opportunities:
All internal training is now booked via the Social Care Academy Learning Management System (LMS) – please click here for further information.
All staff, permanent and agency, are set up on LMS and have access to the full SCA training programme and book via the on-line platform.
LMS keeps a record of Social Workers’ training attendance so they can easily update their CPD on the Social Work England portal to maintain their professional registration.
Finally, LMS enables participants to give feedback after their training which is used to monitor the engagement of staff and make any required adaptations to the presentation.
Newham Safeguarding Children Partnership (NSCP)
Our local Safeguarding Partnership provides regular training that is open to all social care staff in the borough. It includes short sessions such as Perinatal Mental Health; Life Story Work, and the Graded Care Profile as well as longer courses such as Trauma Informed Practice; Complex and Contextual Safeguarding, and Prevent.
Continue on to find out about other Benefits, including:
- Leave Entitlements
- Pay Rates
- Retention Bonus
