Family Practitioner

The Fostering service is recruiting a full time Family practitioner to work in the Stability and Sufficiency Fostering Team offering support to foster carers, children and Young people across the service as part of Stability Programme.

This is an exciting and developing role, in a team offering intensive additional support to foster carers and placements at risk of instability on a county wide basis and will be based in Stafford. This service provides an additional county wide support service provision to children and young people in Staffordshire Foster placements that are at risk of placement breakdown with the intention to retain those children within the home of their primary carer

The service has ongoing targets to reduce unplanned endings and ensure greater stability of placements across Staffordshire. As part of this you will contribute to offering direct work to children and young people and Carer coaching support.

You'll provide high quality support to foster carers enabling them to develop relationships with children and young people, helping them to feel safe and secure living with their fostering family. You'll work creatively as part of a team to prevent unplanned endings and to avoid children moving into residential care. You'll also undertake some outreach work to support fostering families to help children to live with their families.

Overall you'll provide practical, emotional and coaching support to children and their foster carers, undertaking time limited, focused, direct work with children in care, utilising Therapeutic models, Social Learning Theory and Restorative Practice models.

Furthermore, in this role you'll:

• Promote strength-based relationships in all aspect of work undertaken with foster carers, in the districts with staff, partners, colleagues and children and families.
• Provide practical, emotional and coaching support to children and their carers to maintain stability within the home.
• Support fostering families, Special Guardians and children utilising Social Learning Theory, Social Pedagogy and Restorative Practice an therapeutic models to deliver direct work to provide stability.
• Carry out work outlined within assessment and planning on specific topics with children, families and carers (including but not limited to) staying safe, loss and grief, behaviour management, attachment and criminal exploitation. This may include time limited direct work to enable children to remain with their fostering and connected families.
• Undertake flexible, creative and imaginative approaches to offering support to children, young people their families and carers.
• Under guidance to contribute to relevant assessments, foster carers annual reviews and foster carer supervision, support and training
• Support the completion of documentation, reports and records
• Support the social work team including H&S documents, safe care plans, some unannounced visits and DBS checks.
• Direct work with foster carers and children including life story work, feelings/emotions work
• Duty work including some scheduled weekends and evenings.
• Support the carers with TSD (training standards) and training progression.
• Foster Carers Support groups as required.
• Source and purchase appropriate equipment for fostering placements as agreed by the manager.
• Support the recruitment of foster carers.

For this role you'll need as a minimum:

• An NVQ 3 Qualification in working with children and their families or equivalent, and a commitment to continuing professional development.
• Experience of direct work with children, their families and carers in a statutory or voluntary agency which provides services to vulnerable children and their families
• Due to travel involved you'll need to have a drivers licence and access to a vehicle
• some experience working with families and others using a restorative approach, offering high support and high challenge and interventions to help stabilise and support children, young people and their families.
• have a good understanding of the fostering role and the needs of children in care.

Within the role there will be weekend working on a Rota basis offering out of hours telephone support and direct work visits where necessary to fostering households. Also, flexibility to work at any other location across the district as and when required is needed. There may also be a requirement at time to support our Kinship families living across the country.

Above all, you’ll bring the desire to work with children and families to give them the right support, at the right time with the aim of keeping families together where it’s safe to do so.

Interviews will be held at the Staffordshire Place Once office in Stafford on Monday 18th May 2026.

If you require any other information about the role please contact katie.palin@staffordshire.gov.uk

This role is currently subject to a review of weekend working arrangements, including any paid enhancements.

Don’t feel you meet all the requirements? We value transferable skills, experiences, and qualifications so consider applying anyway or for an informal chat about the role please contact Katie Palin, Team Manager at: katie.palin@staffordshire.gov.uk

Our Recruitment Process: We anonymise applications during shortlisting to ensure only relevant information is considered. Please complete your application fully, especially the supporting statement, to highlight what you’ll bring to the role.

We are no ordinary county council:

Our Values:

The core of who we are as an organisation. Just like we all have personal values that shape our thoughts and behaviour, organisational values drive how we think and act collectively.

Our values were created and shaped by colleague feedback and national best practice and they sit at the heart of People Strategy:

We have a real sense of community spirit that brings our people together. This feeling of belonging means we are all connected to what we do and take pride in the difference we make every day for Staffordshire people. We are ambitious and our sights are set firmly on a better future.

We look forward and race ahead - that goes for your career too.

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

Our recruitment process:

As an Authority we are committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people/vulnerable adults and expect all staff and volunteers to share this commitment.

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 your application 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.