Social Worker Family Worker; Link South

About The Role

Social Worker Family Worker (Link Role), South Essex – Permanent, Full Time

£37,185 to £50,081 per annum

Location:

Basildon

Working Style:
Community‑based worker

Closing Date: 12th February 2026

We’re recruiting for two Social Workers (Link Family Workers) to join our high‑performing Family Solutions team based in South Essex. This is a fantastic opportunity to work within a service described by Ofsted as “exceptional”, delivering early help to families facing multiple and complex challenges.

Family Solutions is part of Essex’s Children & Families service, working holistically with disadvantaged families to help them make meaningful and lasting changes. You’ll be part of a supportive, multi‑disciplinary team that values collaboration, innovation, and professional growth.

To read more about our business area, please visit:
Children & Families. Please take a look at our ‘No Magic’ Children & Families video.

• Act as a source of advice and support for colleagues, including joint visits and joint working on complex cases that would benefit from social worker expertise such as concerns around neglect.
• Support the team to build positive and constructive working relationships with colleagues in statutory children’s services.
• Manage your own caseload and assess safeguarding risks.
• Work in partnership with the team manager and practice supervisor to review referrals and support threshold decisions as required by the team.
• Build strong, trusting relationships with families to promote positive change.
• Provide practical and specialist advice.
• Facilitate complex family meetings and coordinate additional support services.
• Offer emotional and practical support in homes and community settings.
• Work closely with your manager or senior social worker through regular supervision.
• Opportunity to support the further integration of Family Solutions and Children Social Care as part of the Family First Partnership Programme.

• Support manager and practice supervisor to undertake screenings of new contacts, understanding threshold.
• Determine direction and actions required in order to progress cases forward on a day‑to‑day basis; recognise when key decisions regarding risks/concerns need to be referred to the Team Manager or Practice Supervisor.
• Serve as source of advice, guidance and support to colleagues in relation to complex cases that would benefit from social work expertise, mentoring and guiding alternatively qualified colleagues in best practice.
• Undertake holistic assessments of family needs to create intervention plans and identify how outcomes can be achieved that fully reflect the family and young person’s views and aspirations, delivering interventions, including group work programs, to support families to make change.
• Facilitate complex family meetings, manage the potentially competing views of families and professionals, in order to find achievable solutions.
• Undertake individual and group programmes of work to enable children and families to develop their skills to resolve issues and problems themselves; provide information and accompany families to help access other local services.
• Provide specific practical, personal and emotional support to families in their homes or other settings as part of an agreed plan in order to achieve agreed and sustainable family outcomes.
• Actively participate in regular supervision to review work and ensure effective interventions for families.
• Ensure the principles of effective practice are fully embedded in service delivery; work collaboratively with staff and partners to ensure effective risk management in line with the thresholds of the Effective Support and Guidance document to ensure the Family Solutions team understands and follows the SET child protection procedures.
• Specific individual and shared targets and objectives are defined annually within the performance management framework.

• Qualified Social Worker, registered with Social Work England, and post‑ASYE.
• Recent experience in a frontline children’s services, including completing assessment and managing CIN and/or CP cases.
• At least three years’ experience post…