Project Officer

Please apply online via the link provided. Please note, we do not accept CVs submitted without a fully completed online application form.

Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council has made a significant and deliberate investment in children’s services. The Children in Care Sufficiency Strategy 2026-2030 is a Cabinet-approved, four-year programme designed to change how Barnsley plans for, commissions and delivers provision for children in care and children with special educational needs and disabilities. It’s funded, it’s live, and it’s already delivering.

The strategy works across three pillars: reducing avoidable entry into care, stabilising placements for vulnerable adolescents, and strengthening how the Council commissions and directly provides residential and specialist care. The interventions it funds include Reset Home, Mockingbird constellation fostering, a new Vulnerable Adolescent Pathway, a Reunification Fund, a strengthened kinship offer, and Barnsley’s own internal residential homes.

This sits alongside one of the most significant periods of national reform in children’s social care and SEND in a generation. Barnsley has chosen to get ahead of that, investing in real change rather than waiting to react.

The workforce that delivers this will grow alongside the programme. The strategy sets out additional staffing capacity across specialist intervention services, the Adolescent Pathway, commissioning and the development and operation of internal residential provision. Some of those roles are in development and will be advertised as the programme progresses.

The five roles we’re recruiting to now are the Programme Management Office: the team that sits at the centre of all three pillars, keeps the programme on track, maintains the evidence base, and provides the governance and assurance infrastructure that makes everything else possible.

If you want to be part of building something that genuinely changes outcomes for children in Barnsley, we’d like to hear from you.

Every programme depends on people who make sure the detail is right. The Project Officer supports delivery across the PMO, maintaining project documentation, coordinating governance administration, supporting data collation and analysis, and keeping the programme’s information architecture in good order.

Reporting to the Head of Programme Management Office, you’ll be comfortable working in a formal programme management environment, confident handling data and producing written materials, and organised enough to manage competing priorities without things slipping. Experience in a children’s services or public sector setting is useful. What matters most is that you’re reliable, precise and take the quality of your work seriously.

For more information please visit https://www.barnsley.gov.uk/services/jobs/childrens-services-roles/