Social Worker - Exploitation Team

The Role

As a social worker within the exploitation team, you will work alongside young people to understand their needs and lived experiences in relation to exploitation and contextual safeguarding, whilst considering and understanding wider vulnerabilities and protective factors. Social workers within the exploitation team, work with young people from the start of their journey with social care, and work with young people considered at medium or high risk of exploitation identified through our daily exploitation triage.

The Exploitation Team are Co-located with Exploitation police and the Youth Justice Service, and virtually connected to wider Exploitation hub partners such at Walsall Street Teams, The Beacon (substance misuse support), Community Safety Partnership, Adult Social Care, Education Inclusion Hub, which supports professional working relationships with partners and with families, enabling better coordinated help and support for the young person and their families.

The assessment process enables practitioners to build an understanding of the young person and family and their wider contexts by gathering a range of information about what has happened before, what is happening now and what needs to happen next to support change and ensure that young people are safe and that their needs are being met.

The child and family assessments completed by the social workers within the Exploitation Team support in identifying and analysing the extra-familial risks the young person is experiencing alongside the familial risks and protective factors. This is achieved through the use of specific prompts and questions throughout the assessment process and direct work tools, enabling the practitioner to gain a greater understanding of how the young person interacts with the wider contexts around them and what risks this may pose to them.

Participation and partnership working with the young person and their families is key within the work of the exploitation team, ensuring time is taken to build a positive relationship with the young person and their family and fully involve them in their safety planning and decision making. The team adopt an AMBIT approach and strengths based practice, alongside motivational interviewing techniques have supported to enable young people to feel listened to and support them to recognise the exploitation they are experiencing.

A successful candidate will receive training in Systemic Family Practice, motivational interviewing and the AMBIT model (Adaptive Mentalisation based integrative treatment), which is a psychological model drawn up by the Anna Freud Centre, and is based around life story, life experience, mentalisation and trauma. The approach is particularly developed to work with young people with complex needs who are often hard to engage with.

AMBIT is a whole team approach designed for services who work with adolescents presenting with multiple and complex problems including mental health difficulties, exploitation, homelessness, family relationship breakdown, and/or substance misuse, who attract the involvement of multiple agencies. Young people experiencing such difficulties, and their families, can often be working with multiple professionals from different agencies, working towards different goals and using different methods of intervention. The model recognised that these interventions at time can be poorly coordinated and often overwhelming and may be experienced as aversive by the young person and their family and an unwillingness to engage with professionals is often seen (Anna Freud). Utilising the AMBIT model for working with young people who are experiencing exploitation will enable practitioners to build trusting relationships with the young person as well as the team and wider colleagues. It will help practitioners mentalize and understand what drives behaviour and help understand feelings, worries and needs. In turn, this enables for better working relationships with young people as they feel listened to and understood and appropriate intervention from the most appropriate practitioner can be offered. When a relationship of epistemic trust is built up, this is a trust in which new learning can take place from another person, and often leads to better engagement and more sustainable change for the young person and their families.

As a social worker within the exploitation team, you will engage in group supervision with other involved practitioners around the family, in addition to individual monthly supervision. You will also be offered clinical supervision through a trained clinical psychologist.

What our young people, families and partners think:

• ' She listened to me with no judgement' (Young Person)
• ' A person to turn to for help' (Young Person)
• ' The work was centred to our family's needs' (Parent)
• 'A really positive impact - I would say both the young person and their mother felt supported and empowered to participate in the assessment process. This helped to reduce the family's negative view of professionals and make interventions easier and more impactful' (YJS practitioner).

If you are passionate about supporting young people who are experiencing exploitation and their families and want to work as part of a friendly team in an OFSTED-rated 'Good' local authority, committed to ongoing learning where you will receive good supervision and training, please get in touch for an informal discussion with Rebecca Warren, Group Manager, Help and Support or .

Our Offer in Walsall

Walsall is a great place to work. We strive to provide the best services and outcomes to our children, young people and families.

To provide the right conditions for you, we are committed to manageable workloads, high support from managers, essential paperwork only, enabling technologies, and all social workers will receive training in Systemic Family Practice.

Wellbeing is at the heart of our work. We offer specialised clinical supervision, a 9-day fortnight to support work/life balance, flexible working and specialist employee assistance and therapeutic support when it is needed. We know we need to make social work a career people want to stay in, and we have a comprehensive career development offer including specialist training.

We are committed to anti-discrimination and equality and to developing a workforce that reflects the communities we service.

Salary Scale £38,223 - £43,421 (% Retention Payments after 2 years, increasing at 4 and 6 years)

Would you like to talk to a social worker about the realities of working in Walsall? If so, please contact Rebecca Warren, Group Manager, Help and Protection, who will connect you with one of our practitioners: or .

We kindly request that recruitment agencies do not contact us regarding this job vacancy. We are not accepting agency applications or referrals at this time.

Closing Date: 3rd November 2024.

Shortlisting will take place on 4th November.

Interviews to take place 11th November.