Specialist Therapist – Children and Families Service

Salary - Grade GBP £60,633 to £62,742 60633 - PO7 Contract Type Permanent Contracted Hours Full Time / Part Time - 36 hours per week DBS Required Yes Department Children & Education Service Children & Families Service Closing date 27/09/2026

Hackney is seeking enthusiastic, committed, and skilled Therapists to join our newly redesigned in-house Mental Health Service within Children and Family Services. Working closely alongside Social Workers, Corporate Parenting, Youth Justice, Edge of Care, and Early Help teams, you will play a central role in ensuring our most vulnerable children receive timely, high-quality, and evidence-based psychological support.

In this role, you will hold autonomous clinical responsibility for a complex caseload and have the opportunity to contribute directly to our Family Therapy Clinic. Beyond direct therapeutic delivery, you will bring strong indirect therapy skills—delivering expert consultations to social care managers, facilitating reflective practice groups, and providing clinical formulations that directly shape statutory social work plans.

Hackney is on an ambitious journey to embed a Systemic, Trauma-informed, and Anti-Racist (STAR) practice model. We are deeply committed to anti-oppressive practice, actively centering the lived experiences of families and clinicians with marginalised identities. Our STAR framework ensures a sharp focus on ethnicity and race, while deeply attending to the intersections of sexuality, faith, neurodiversity, and other protected characteristics. As a Specialist Therapist, you will integrate this STAR framework into every assessment, formulation, and intervention to dismantle systemic inequalities and improve outcomes for children and families.

– Autonomous Clinical Practice: Deliver regular, highly specialist therapeutic assessments, formulations, and multi-modal interventions (e.g., Systemic Family Therapy, Art Therapy, CBT, Psychotherapy) adapted for children in care, care leavers, or young people within the Youth Justice System.

– Safeguarding & Complex Caseloads: Hold accountability for managing clinical risk (including self-harm and suicidal ideation) integrated with social care safety plans.

– Specialist Consultation & Systemic Influence: Provide expert “strategic consultation” to Social Workers and managers to help formulate complex mental health needs, prevent placement breakdown, and translate psychological theory into actionable social work plans.

– Reflective Practice & Skills Sharing: Lead reflective practice groups for social care teams, act as a Trauma-Informed Champion, and deliver training and peer-mentoring across the Directorate.

– Multi-Agency & Court Representation: interface with NHS statutory health providers to manage complex care pathways and ensure no child falls between the gaps. Participate in Child Protection Conferences, LAC Reviews, and MARAC/MAPPA, producing high-quality analytical clinical reports for social care networks and Family or Criminal Courts when required.

We are looking for a registered, post-graduate qualified clinician (e.g., UKCP, AFT, HCPC, ACP, BPS, or equivalent) with significant post-qualification experience in mental health or social care settings. You will bring:

– A post-graduate degree-level qualification in a relevant therapeutic discipline and current registration with a recognised professional body.

– Proven experience in exercising autonomous clinical responsibility for complex assessment, formulation, and treatment of children who have experienced developmental trauma, loss, or abuse.

– Advanced knowledge of systemic theory, attachment models, and trauma-informed care applied within a statutory social…