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Barnet Council

Our newly-formed Children’s Service has a clear ambition to achieve better outcomes for all children and young people in Barnet. The council has Investor in People status and the service considers the development of staff key to the successful delivery of services to our community.

In the Children’s service, we work with a wide range of partners in schools, health, the police and the voluntary sector to provide services to meet the needs of all Barnet’s children and young people. These services are co-ordinated at a strategic level through the Children and Young People’s Strategic Partnership Board.

Employment Opportunities

Our service to Barnet’s children and young people is delivered through an integrated children’s workforce, clustered around social care and safeguarding, schools and learning, complex needs and inclusion. This provides opportunities for social workers, teachers, youth workers, children’s centre workers, learning inspectors, complex needs workers, librarians and youth offending staff.

Best Practice

Our most recent inspection assessment recognised that our Children’s Service ‘consistently delivers services for children and young people to a good level [and] has taken significant steps to improve further integrated working [with] a good commitment to improving all services’.

Our ‘Education Champions’ scheme has received national publicity as an innovative way of securing the best possible educational outcomes for our Looked After Children. The scheme has senior managers across the agencies championing work with our looked after children.

Employment Policy

Barnet Council has a well-developed equalities policy and welcomes applications from all sections of our diverse community. We require that our staff are registered with their relevant professional body (where necessary) and have a thorough pre-recruitment process, which includes an enhanced Criminal Records Bureau check and a personal interview (as recommended by the Warner Report) where the post involves working with vulnerable children and young people.

Training and Career Development

We offer a comprehensive range of learning and development opportunities across the children’s workforce. Staff new to their post are provided with a full programme of induction and foundation-level training. Once in post, they are supported with post-qualifying training and other qualifications relevant to their role. These include:

· A Graduate Social Care Trainee scheme: whereby graduates from any discipline have the opportunity to train to become qualified social workers through a two-year traineeship, followed by a fully-sponsored Masters in social work at Middlesex University.
· A comprehensive induction programme for Newly-Qualified Teachers (NQTs) which can be accredited towards a Masters Degree
· A Common Core Skills training programme (with Middlesex University and Barnet College) at both graduate and certificate levels, where staff can achieve accreditation and use these credit points for further qualifications

Salary and Benefits

Competitive salaries across all Children’s Service disciplines, with the following extra benefits:
· Accelerated career progression
· Excellent final salary pension scheme
· Leading-edge ICT to support flexible working
· Strong support and supervision
· Comprehensive Professional Development programme
· Discounted local services
We are constantly reviewing our salary and benefits package to ensure that we remain an employer of choice for ambitious and committed professionals.

The future

Upcoming developments relate to further integration and joint working across the new Children’s Service, alongside the continued rolling out of the Every Child Matters programme, notably the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) and ContactPoint.