Senior Programme Officer (SME Children's Social Care)

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

Build Something That Matters

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.

Children in care sufficiency is at the heart of this programme. Barnsley is investing in a strengthened kinship offer, foster care service, the Mockingbird constellation model, and its own internal residential provision. This role holds the thread across all of it.

You’ll bring subject matter expertise in looked after children, placement sufficiency or children in care commissioning. You’ll know the system from the inside, whether through social work practice, commissioning, data or programme delivery, and you’ll understand what the pressures facing children in care teams actually look like day to day.

Strong analytical skills are essential. You’ll be working with complex demand and cost data, interpreting trends, and translating that analysis into clear programme intelligence for senior governance. Excellent written communication matters too: the reports and briefings you produce will inform gateway decisions and go to senior leadership. Accuracy and clarity are not optional.

Reporting to the Head of Programme Management Office, you’ll work closely with social work teams, commissioners and the Head of PMO to keep the Children in Care workstream on track against milestones, and you’ll be expected to spot drift and escalate risks before they become problems. This is a role for someone who takes both their subject matter and the quality of their outputs seriously.

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