Therapeutic & Emotional Support Service; TESS Team Manager

We are seeking an experienced, compassionate, and creatively minded Therapeutic Social Work Team Manager to lead one of our specialist Therapeutic and Emotional Support Teams, working with children and young people in care (under 18) and their carers.

TESS is an emotional wellbeing service that offers assessment and a wide range of individual, dyadic and group interventions to Birmingham’s children in care, their parents and carers, unaccompanied asylum‑seeking children, and care experienced young adults up to the age of 25 years. TESS also provides consultation and support to the professional and care network.

This is an exciting opportunity to shape and lead a relationship‑based, trauma‑informed, and attachment‑focused team that responds to complex emotional wellbeing and promotes placement stability. The service is a multidisciplinary therapeutic team operating from a social care perspective, working closely with children and young people in residential and foster care settings to support emotional and safe connections, build trust within the primary care relationship, and offer direct therapeutic support to children and young people.

• Provide clinical and operational leadership to a multidisciplinary therapeutic team
• Work collaboratively with the wider TESS service and Birmingham Children’s Trust.
• Ensure the delivery of high‑quality, trauma‑informed and attachment‑focused interventions
• Promote creative and flexible therapeutic approaches, including play‑based, relational, and non‑traditional methods of engagement
• Support and supervise practitioners to deliver relationship‑based therapeutic work with children, young people, and carers
• Lead a collaborative, multi‑agency approach to service delivery, placement stability and improving emotional wellbeing
• Oversee therapeutic planning, risk screening and safety planning, and outcome monitoring for complex presentation
• Develop and deliver training and consultation to carers and professionals
• Embed reflective practice and staff wellbeing within the team culture

Postholders will be joining a friendly, supportive, very well established and highly regarded multi‑disciplinary team of clinical psychology, systemic family therapy, play and art therapy, and other therapeutic Social Workers trained in a variety of models (e.g. DDP, CBT, DBT, etc). A wide range of approaches and models are utilised within the service to best meet the needs of our care experienced children and young adults, and innovative and creative work is encouraged.

We are looking for someone who has experience working therapeutically with children and young people who have experienced trauma, loss, and attachment disruption and is confident leading and managing a multidisciplinary team with a grounding in trauma‑informed, attachment‑focused, and relational approaches.

We work with children, young people and care experienced young adults who reside in Birmingham and out of the city, who are from a wide range of diverse backgrounds and experiences. Our workforce represents the diverse families of Birmingham that we support.

Children and young people who are referred for support experience a wide spectrum of concerns, including issues of separation and loss, emotional, behavioural and neurodevelopmental difficulties, mental health issues and developmental trauma. We work closely with our children, young people, care networks and other agencies. An ability to demonstrate team and multi‑agency working are crucial elements to this role.

• Compassionate, reflective and emotionally resilient
• Confident working with trauma, attachment and loss
• Comfortable navigating complex systems and multi‑agency work
• Passionate about ethical, child‑centred and anti‑oppressive practice

This is a great opportunity join a developing service to shape and grow a specialist therapeutic team with space for creativity, innovation, and reflective leadership. This is a chance to make a real, lasting difference to the lives of children in care.

We will provide you with access to training, regular professional supervision, and on‑going support.

If you have…