Organisation: Leicestershire County Council
Work Location: County Hall Glenfield, LE3 8RA
Worker Category: Fixed Location Worker
Salary: £49,221 - £53,826 per annum plus Market premium
Working Hours: 37Hrs
Contract Type: Permanent
Closing Date: 30th November 2025
Interview Date(s): TBC
Are you ready to lead with purpose and make a real difference in children’s lives?
We’re looking for a passionate, confident, and experienced Social Work Team Manager to join our fast-paced Assessment Team — the frontline of safeguarding and protection for children and families in our OUTSTANDING authority.
This is your chance to step into a key leadership role where your decisions shape safer futures, drive excellent practice, and support a high-performing team of dedicated professionals.
About the Role
You're a qualified social worker with a proven track record in child protection and frontline practice, confident in your judgment and driven by a strong ethical compass. You're ready to step into leadership—or build on existing management experience—with the tools to support, challenge, and develop a team to be their very best.
What You’ll Bring:
1. SWE registration & right to work in the UK
2. Strong knowledge of the Children Act, Working Together, and safeguarding frameworks
3. The ability to balance risk, make decisions, and lead with clarity
4. Passion for delivering relationship-based, trauma-informed practice
5. A commitment to putting the child’s voice at the centre of everything you do
Why This Role? Why Now?
6. Be at the heart of decision-making that protects vulnerable children and families at the earliest point of contact
7. Lead a dynamic, skilled team of social workers committed to high-quality, child-centred assessments
8. Bring your leadership to life in a local authority that values innovation, learning, and outcomes.
9. Work closely with partners to influence real, positive change across services
10. Thrive in a supportive environment that offers structured supervision, strong leadership backing, and continuous development
What You’ll Be Doing:
11. Leading the a small team of social workers in the Assessment Team, managing risk, and ensuring safe, timely decision-making. Our managers offer high support and high challenge to our social work colleagues so that we continually improve.
12. Inspiring social workers through effective supervision, coaching, and development
13. Overseeing quality assessments under Section 17 and Section 47 of the Children Act
14. The work is fast paced, focused on delivering against our key performance measures whilst maintaining our focus on the child. There is a specific focus on chairing strategy discussions to engage other partner agencies in the child protection process, taking a leadership role and developing joint action plans to safeguard our most vulnerable children. Therefore, collaborating across agencies to deliver effective multi-agency safeguarding responses
15. You will be accountable for decision making and implementing safeguarding processes, endorsing assessment outcomes, and ensuring that children have the right support and protection at the right time.
16. You will be part of a wider team manager peer group providing mutual support working to an established rota for duty and allocation of work. You will have the support of an experienced service manager with regular supervision embedded in a monthly cycle.
17. Driving service improvement, innovation, and accountability across your team
18. Making a difference—every single day
What We Offer:
19. A competitive salary and generous annual leave
20. Excellent professional development opportunities and leadership programmes
21. Flexible working options and a hybrid work culture
22. A supportive senior management team who listen and back you
23. Access to employee wellbeing services, peer networks, and more
A DBS enhanced check for a regulated activity is required for this post.
For information on our approach to the recruitment of ex-offenders, please see our .
About You
Please refer to the 7 point criteria giving examples of how you meet the criteria below:
24. Social Work degree or equivalent,. CQSW, DipSW (with specialism in children’s services), approved by Social Work England and evidence of continuing professional development.
25. You will be a qualified social worker with extensive statutory experience focused on applying threshold and applying Child protection processes including public and private law, stepping into support and practice if needed.
26. You will demonstrate your ability to support others including social workers, alternatively qualified staff and students and have experience of providing case work supervision
27. You will have strong communication and leadership skills, able to confidently chair complex meetings and lead important pieces of development work
28. You will demonstrate your ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment, managing competing demands, meeting tight deadlines and keeping a focus on the child’s needs
29. You will have experience of making decisions at an advanced level being accountable for recommended outcomes that safeguard children and you will have used performance data to drive your practice and the practice and throughput of others to not only meet key performance indicators, but ensure timely responses to children and young people where there are immediate and non-immediate safeguarding concerns
30. You will understand the complexity of the statutory child protection processes as set out in legislation and statutory guidance and evidence how you have applied these in practice
You must also have an understanding of, and commitment to, equality, diversity and inclusion.
In addition, we also expect you to share and will ask you to evidence when you have demonstrated them as part of the selection process.
Reasonable adjustments will be considered for applicants with a disability.
This is more than a job – it’s your chance to shape the future of social work.
If you’re ready to take the next step in your career and lead with impact, we want to hear from you.
Interested in Flexible Working?
We are keen to support employees to balance their working life with other commitments. Therefore, wherever possible, we will consider working arrangements that suit an individual's personal circumstances whilst still meeting the needs of the Council. If you would like to discuss the possible flexible working options that might be applicable to this role, please contact the person named below. This may include requests for term-time working, part-time hours, compressed hours, flexible start and finish times, home/remote working, etc.
Every role within the Council has a defined working style which determines where they can work. The worker category applicable to this post is detailed in the above advert. You can find out more about our worker categories in the page on our career site.
For more information or an informal discussion, please contact:
Jo Searle - Service Manager
section on our career site.
We reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive sufficient applications for the role. Therefore, if you are interested, please submit your application as early as possible.
If you have any technical issues when trying to apply for this post or you want to request an application pack in an alternative format, please contact our Employee Service Centre by telephoning 0300 3030222 (select option 2) or raising a ticket via our online portal:.
By applying for this post, you agree to our .