Cared for Children Stepping stones team Social Worker

Social Worker - Cared for Children's Team (Stepping Stones)

interviews to take place week beginning 13th April 2026

1 permanent post - 36 hours

1 Fixed term 12 month post - 36 hours

£39,152 to £46,142 dependent on experience. (Grade 3C to 4A)

Please note that we welcome applications from Newly Qualified Social Workers. Applicants must be able to start once all checks and references have been completed. The starting salary of ASYE Social Worker is £36,363

We are on our way to achieving our goal to provide Outstanding support and care to children, families, carers and practitioners across Salford. We are investing in the right social workers to get us there and have a fantastic opportunity for a social worker to join our Cared for Children's team.

The cared for children's team is made currently of 4 teams, each with their own Practice Manager, Advanced Social Worker and five/six Social Workers. There are opportunities to work with our cared for children in various settings such as residential, foster care, with connected persons and at home with parents. Children’s care plans can vary from adoption, Special Guardianship, long term fostering, to name a few.

Workers in this department seize the opportunity to support families to make progress so risks are reduced for children and young people. Salford has a wide variety of support services to assist with this and prides itself on positive multi-agency working and approaches, through use of the Family Partnership model and tools to engage families and understand their agendas, or through more formal processes via the care planning and/or Legal Gateway mechanism. Our social work teams are supported by a small team of social work support officers co-located with the social work teams, dedicated administration support alongside minute taking pools to help to reduce the time spent on administrative tasks and close working relationships with our integrated family time service. The service also consists of champions and specialists to include Domestic Abuse, adoption, missing from home, with opportunities for all social workers to train and develop to become a Champion in an area of particular interest to them.

In Salford, we are interested in you as a person and the practitioner you are or who you aspire to be.

You will be responsible for:

• Building trusted relationships while making sure peoples wishes, feelings and beliefs are central to decision making.
• Having conversations with people based on what matters most to them.
• Connecting people to wider networks of opportunity and support.
• Increasing peoples creative potential and self-esteem.
• Responding quickly to crisis and sticking with children and families until things are better.
• Keeping in touch with children, young people and families and taking a genuine interest in how they are and if anything needs to change.
• Being ambitious, curious with a desire to learn and reflect.

Our offer to you:

• Up to 34 days holiday a year (plus bank holidays).
• Competitive salary following pay and grading review
• Free parking
• Hybrid working giving flexibility for you to manage your diary and offer a better work/life balance.
• Training in the Family Partnership Model which Salford is adopting across the Local Authority.
• Recently refurbished office space with free parking on site. The majority of our teams are sat together in Swinton at Unity House.
• Rich in resources to help you with any child or family you work with.
• Robust training offer and mentoring scheme to support you with your career and aspirations.
• A comprehensive Wellbeing Offer
• Regular, quality, reflective supervision from a consistent management and leadership team.

Our friendly teams could talk your socks off when it comes to all things Social Work. We appreciate you may want to have a look around our offices, meet some staff or your future potential teams and shadow we’re happy to arrange this.

We'd love to hear from you and find out more about what you're looking for so if you'd like to talk to us please just drop a quick message to keeley.mcilvaney@salford.gov.uk and we'll get a call arranged. We look forward to hearing from you!

Please be aware that this post is subject to a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check. If you have lived or worked abroad for 3 months or more in the last 5 years or 12 months or more (whether continuously or in total) in the last 10 years whilst aged 18 or over, please refer to the link below for details for how to obtain your Certificates of Good Character. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/criminal-records-checks-for-overseas-applicants