Senior Early Help Officer

Senior Early Help Family Officer

Our Story:

Halton were one of 75 local authorities to be awarded Family Hub funding and we have developed 6 Family Hubs across the borough building on our strong and well established children’s centres. We are proud of what we have achieved in Halton and we have a strong offer to families ensuring good access to services to give young children the best start in life and providing early intervention & support where concerns emerge. Breaking the cycle of poor outcomes and providing early help and preventing issues becoming entrenched by building resilience in working alongside parents and communities.

Our offer supports access to strong universal entitlements to ensure children are ready for school, ready for life.

We are immensely proud that when asked what’s great about working for Halton, the most popular response from our workforce has been ‘our colleagues’.

Our Team:

Halton Family Hubs are a busy front-line service who support complex families with multiple needs. We are looking for a Senior Early Help Officer to part of a leadership team supporting Early Help Officers and Early Years Practitioners who have a wide range of skills, expertise and professional backgrounds.

This is an exciting time for the team as we prepare for Halton’s transition to a Family First service which will bring together targeted early help and child in need provision into one service

Your Contributions:

As a Senior Early Help Officer, within the Family Hubs, you’ll be responsible for reflective supervision, allocating work, and providing case consultation and advice. You may co-work or case-hold depending on need complexity and a robust understanding of safeguarding will continue to underpin your practice. We are committed to promoting your continued professional development with ongoing access to training and education opportunities.

Key responsibilities include:

• Delivering the ‘Start for Life’ program, focusing on the 1001 days (from conception to age 2)
• Ensuring the child’s lived experience is central to practice
• Supporting a preventative approach for vulnerable families
• Offering guidance on the Level of Need process (Step up/Step down)
• Collaborating with partners, community services, and delivering training
• Contributing to Family Hub & ICART cover and senior support to Early Help staff
• Supporting team development and contributing to Halton’s Early Help agenda

You will have substantive experience working with families of children aged 0-5 years facing issues such as substance misuse, domestic abuse, neglect, child exploitation, poor health, SEND and financial difficulties. Ideally, you will also have supervisory experience.

Hours: 37

Our Offer:

Aside from working with a great team, our employees have access to a fantastic range of benefits, including:

• A generous annual holiday allowance starting at 34 days per year (including bank holidays), increasing with long service
• Membership of our defined benefit, salary-linked Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) with generous employer contributions
• 3 x Salary Life Cover via Local Government Pension Scheme
• Investment in your personal development
• Free Car Parking at HBC sites
• Flexible working arrangements
• Extensive employee benefits platform including discounted shopping, car leasing, gym memberships, wellbeing hub and Employee Assistance Programme

Next Steps:

At Halton Borough Council, we want all of our candidates to feel well-informed so if you would like to have an informal chat about this role, please contact Think Family Principal Manager Clare Yearsley on 0151 511 7781.

Interviews will provisionally take place on 2nd September 2025.

At Halton Borough Council we want to ensure that our communities are represented across our workforce and a vital part of this is to encourage diversity in all respects. We are committed to making our recruitment practices barrier-free and tailored to best suit the needs and strength of the individual. This includes making adjustments for people with a disability, neurodiversity or with long-term health conditions. If you require accommodations, please reach out during the recruitment process so that we can make this the best possible experience for you – resourcing@halton.gov.uk

Please refer to the attached Job Profile for further information about the role and our values.

We reserve the right to close this vacancy earlier than the specified date should we receive sufficient applications. If you’re interested, please complete your application as early as possible.

We look forward to receiving your application!