Head of Safeguarding, Quality assurance and Improvement

Salary starts at £85,390 per annum

Desirable experience:

* Head of Service / lots of Service Manager experience

* Principle Social Worker

* Adults Social Care

Statutory requirements

Requires professional registration with Social Work England or HSPC (Social Worker (SW), Allied Health Professional (AHP), Registered Nurse (RGN))

About the role

As the Head of Safeguarding, Quality Assurance and Improvement you will be a key member of the Adult Social Care Leadership Team for ensuring the effective operation of our safeguarding and care management systems for Adults. As the centre for driving the quality and impact of practice, you will be our eyes and ears, maintaining a watchful eye for emerging risks and issues – and setting in train the response to these.

Working alongside the operational social care teams, you will be responsible for driving quality assurance and improvement across the wider social care workforce, ensuring the development and delivery of supporting workforce development strategies, and leading our improvement and innovation journey.

Part of your role will also be to fulfil the statutory role of the Principal Social Worker Adults as such you will support the leadership of the Council’s Adult Social Work function by championing effective and high quality professional practice, overseeing professional development programmes and supporting senior management. You will be a source of sound, responsive professional advice to the senior leadership of the Directorate and represent the Council with the national and regional professional and regulatory bodies for social work.

Specific Accountabilities of the Role

* To be accountable for shaping and leading a strategic framework for policy, service development, strategic safeguarding and quality assurance, providing expertise and advice to elected members, senior managers across the Directorate and the wider organization.

* To lead the implementation of the Quality Assurance Framework; drawing out all available learning from data, audit activity, internal case reviews and a range of other sources, to learn about the quality of practice and service delivery.

* To lead improvements in outcomes for adults within Adult Social Care and the wider Safeguarding Partnership: ensuring that partners are supported, scrutinised, and challenged with regards to their safeguarding practice and to ensure the delivery of a cross phase safeguarding training offer.

* To lead on the professional development of social workers, ensuring that staff recruitment and retention are effective and appropriate for students, social workers and social work managers to attract, develop and retain the workforce based on the principles of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.

* To provide strategic leadership and management of policy & practice, directing the team across Adult Social Care to promote understanding and commitment to practice and quality assurance, in order to achieve the delivery of effective, person-centred and legally compliant services. Make a broad and sustained contribution to the achievement of the authority’s and departments aims and objectives.

* To lead a service of practice leads who are responsible for the implementation of policies and procedures as well as coordinating processes for thematic, regional and organisational level practice evaluations, collating and analysing the learning from these to understand themes and potentially systematic areas of improvements.

* To be accountable for the development of and driving a culture of self and peer assessment and of continuous improvement within the service. Manage, measure and monitor the quality of service provision and standards across Adult Social Care and Health through practice audit and review, statistical analysis and performance management to inform practice and policy changes.

* To lead and manage the development of all aspects of strategic safeguarding and quality assurance ensuring that government and departmental policies on safeguarding are effectively implemented and that London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD) is compliant with its statutory duties.

* To work with the senior management team, and operational staff to ensure practice is consistently audited across the service and to ensure that performance improvement and quality assurance develop together, adding value to each other.

* To have overall responsibility for the development of key plans, self-assessments, reports and other key documents to ensure the work of the Adult Social Care workforce is adequately reflected and reported against strategic outcomes. Set and monitor targets for the service and ensure that the service is operating within national and local performance indicators and ensuring improvements against targets when necessary.

* To ensure effective and robust Adult Social Care policies and procedures are in place and continuously review the effectiveness of these and that they are developed and co-produced in conjunction with relevant staff and people with lived experience.

* To contribute to the continuous improvement of practice and service development across Adult Social Care. Identify and address risks, issues and opportunities for improvement as early as possible. Ensure the Directorate learns from complaints.

* To manage the Adult Social Care’s contribution to Safeguarding Adult Reviews and other reviews, ensuring lessons learnt are disseminated across the workforce.

* To take responsibility for the budget management of the Safeguarding and Quality Assurance Service, managing effectively and efficiently all resources with the service area, achieving value for money and monitoring to ensure that variations to expected patterns of expenditure and income are fully investigated and appropriate corrective action is taken.

* To advise the Senior Leadership Team, Chief Executives and Members and the Local Safeguarding Partnership on individual and thematic safeguarding matters and risks, ensuring that responsibilities to protecting vulnerable adults are paramount.

* To have overall responsibility of ensuring that Adult Social Care are prepared for Care Quality Commission (CQC) assurance and during a CQC inspection all relevant policies, documents and data is available as requested by the Inspector.

* To support the nurturing and enhancement of our 'technology-first' commitment, guaranteeing that our systems and solutions reflect the cutting-edge standards our community deserves.

* To provide the statutory Director of Adult Social Services with objective professional advice on national, regional and local social work policy and practice issues

* To ensure effective communication on issues affecting professional practice between social work practitioners and their managers and the Director of Adult Social Services, and be able to represent the Council’s perspective with the Chief Social Worker (Adults)