Senior Mental Health Practitioner

Salary: NJC Grade 12 £48,226 to £51,356 per annum

Working Pattern: 37 hours per week, full time, 09:00-17:00 Monday to Friday

Contract: Permanent

Location: County Hall, Chichester

Please note: There is a regular and intrinsic requirement to communicate in English with members of the public. You must be able to travel throughout the county including to locations that are not always accessible by public transport.

Closing date: 25 May 2026
Interview date: 05 June 2026

Do you have experience of working with children and young people with mental health difficulties?

Have you trained in low or high intensity CBT?

Do you enjoy supporting, supervising, and training colleagues?

This is a great time to join WSCC as we have new opportunities for Senior Mental Health Practitioners in Thought-Full: Mental Health Support Team.

In this role, you will work closely alongside Advisory Teachers and senior members of the Thought-Full team, as well as with multi-disciplinary teams, outside agencies, clinicians, and other mental health and education professionals, to help develop and deliver the Thought-Full core functions to the schools in your area.

You will deliver clinical skills and caseload management supervision to Educational Mental Health Practitioners (EMHP) and Children's Wellbeing Practitioners (CWP), supporting with their training and role modelling best practice.

You will also hold a caseload of young people with mild to moderate mental health problems, where you will deliver a variety of brief evidence-based interventions, primarily using a CBT model. You will use your skills and knowledge to provide specialist advice on mental health to ensure services are working closely to meet the needs of young people with a person-centred approach.

As part of this role, you will be required to complete the PGCert Supervision of Therapeutic Practice at the University of Sussex to be able to carry out supervision for a team of trainee and/or qualified clinical practitioners, depending on service need and capacity.

Key responsibilities of the role include:

• Clinical work to provide psychological assessment, therapy, advice and consultation, promoting carer involvement and delivering evidence-based interventions.
• Teaching, Training and Supervision to oversee the supervision and development of EMHP's and CWP's and receiving supervision to support with your own Continuous Professional Development.
• Research and Service Evaluation to collect routine outcome data and support the evaluation and development of the service.
• Management and Leadership to work alongside Senior Leadership to support the clinical delivery and oversight of your team and support with more complex clinical issues.
• General role responsibilities to follow codes of conduct, safeguarding, risk assessments, and working with professionals to promote inclusion and recovery.

About You

We are looking for someone who is passionate about supporting the mental health of children and young people and who is self-motivated and organised, as you will need to manage your own workload and that of others.

Integrity, openness, emotional resilience and an awareness of yourself and others is vital, as you may be dealing with distressing or emotional circumstances.

You will travel independently to carry out assessments, and there will be periodic physical requirements to the role.

Please refer to the key skills in your cover letter as these will be used for shortlisting criteria.

Key Skills:

1. Supervision: The post holder will be expected to supervise junior staff (Educational Mental Health Practitioners and Children's Wellbeing Practitioners) and support trainees within the team. This supervision will give clinical and caseload oversight of low-intensity CBT interventions, as well as managerial support.
2. Assessment & Intervention: To work with a defined caseload of service users as part of a multi-disciplinary team, providing assessment, care planning and care delivery for service users with mild to moderate mental health difficulties, in schools. This will include the provision of highly skilled professional care, psychological interventions, mostly using low-intensity CBT, group work, clinical assessment, risk assessments / risk management, and promoting recovery and inclusion and ensuring co-production with service users, families and carers and the education staff.
3. Specialist advice: To provide specialist advice to other members of staff and trainees and act as a role model.
4. Evidenced based: To ensure that care activities are research based and in keeping with changes in the field of activity.
5. Creative & Innovative: To contribute to the development of ideas and innovative practice and propose changes to protocols and procedures within Thought-Full and related services where required and support embedding a research culture within the service and has an ongoing commitment to developing practice through research within the team.
6. Analytical: To support in the evaluation of the service and service development tasks using appropriate audit, evaluation and research tools.

For more information on the Key Skills, Qualifications and/or Experience required, please refer to the Job Description attached.

About Us

Our Mental Health Support Team is made up of over 70 professionals, and we are continuing to increase our service to support the growing needs of our communities.

We currently have opportunities for Mental Health Practitioners to make a real difference in supporting Mental Health in Children. You will be working within our Mental Health Support Team (MHST) on exciting new initiatives and an important strand of the Government's 2017 Green Paper 'Transforming Children and Young People's Mental Health Provision'.

We fulfil 3 core functions:

• Delivering evidence-based interventions in education settings (primary and secondary schools and colleges) for mild to moderate mental health issues.
• Supporting the senior mental health lead in each education setting to introduce or develop their whole school or college approach.
• Giving timely advice to school and college staff, and liaising with external specialist services, to help children and young people to get the right support and stay in education.

For more information, please visit our Thriving in Education Thought-Full website

Benefits

For a full list this can be found at our Rewards and Benefits page.

Upon joining us you will have access to a range of benefits including the following:

Employer Pension Contribution: TBC, this alters per annum on the 1 April each year (previous employer contribution for 2025 18.70%)

Annual leave: 30 days holiday + Bank Holidays = 38 days

How to Apply

The reference number for this role is CAFHE06332.

For an informal conversation or for further information regarding the role, please contact thought-

To apply, please follow the links below to upload your CV and Cover Letter.

In your cover letter please outline your motivations for applying and explaining the skills and experience you can bring to the role (please refer to the key skills) ensuring that any gaps in employment are covered in your CV. Please ensure you have saved the job description attached to the main advert on our website as, once the job has closed, you may not have the opportunity to download again.

We are committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, young people, and vulnerable adults.

This post is subject to an enhanced DBS check, five years referencing, and an occupational health check.

Equity, inclusion, and accessibility is very important to West Sussex County Council. We welcome and encourage applications from everyone, as this helps us build a diverse and talented workforce, that reflects the communities we serve. We ensure our approach to recruitment is flexible and supportive to enable all applicants to be at their best and to ensure they have the best possible chance of success.

We operate a guaranteed interview scheme for applicants that have a disability, are a veteran or are a care leaver. More information can be found on our application help page.

If you require any reasonable adjustments to support your application, please contact Natalie Greene, Recruitment Specialist, at