TESS Therapeutic Senior Practitioner

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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.

Our work is relationship‑based, trauma‑informed and attachment‑focused, supporting young people who present with complex emotional needs. We deliver creative, flexible therapeutic interventions and work closely with social care, residential services, health, and education partners to build emotionally safe and stable care environments.

We are seeking an experienced and skilled Senior Practitioner to join our service. This is a therapeutic post with additional leadership and development responsibilities, with a focus on service delivery for children and young people up to the age of 18.

You will hold a complex therapeutic caseload while also providing practice leadership, supporting team development, contributing to service improvement projects, and offering supervision to support our outreach workers.

This role is ideal for a social work practitioner who wants to grow into leadership, influence service development, and remain closely connected to frontline therapeutic work.

As a TESS Senior Practitioner, you will:

• Deliver high‑quality, trauma‑informed and attachment‑focused therapeutic interventions with children and young people in care
• Use creative and flexible approaches to engagement, including relational, play‑based and non‑traditional methods
• Contribute to therapeutic assessments, formulations, and care planning
• Work directly with carers and professionals to strengthen the care network around children and young people

Post holders will be joining a friendly, supportive, very well established and highly regarded multidisciplinary 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 working within a multidisciplinary team, grounded 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.

We are looking for someone who:

• Is an experienced therapeutic practitioner with a strong grounding in trauma, attachment and relational practice
• Has experience working with children and young people in care and their carers
• Is confident managing complexity and risk within a social care context
• Has emerging leadership skills and a desire to support and develop others
• Can balance direct therapeutic work with wider service responsibilities
• Values collaboration, creativity, and reflective practice

This is a great opportunity to join a developing specialist therapeutic team with space for creativity, innovation, and reflective leadership. This is a chance to be part of a specialist, values‑led therapeutic service with protected time for direct therapeutic work and…