Programme Lead- Families First Partnership

About Us

Over the past two years, Sutton has embarked on a significant and necessary journey of strategic transformation. This period has been defined by our proactive response to the government's children and families reforms, whilst simultaneously navigating the complex challenges of increasing service demand and constrained financial resources. Our commitment remains to deliver the highest quality services and innovative practice for the children and families in our borough.

We are therefore seeking a dynamic Programme Lead to join us until 31st March 2027. This individual will be instrumental in getting us over the finishing line by providing the strategic leadership, governance, and momentum required to fully ope rationalise and sustain the Families First Model.

• Strategic Programme Management & Governance:
  Leading and overseeing all aspects of programme management tasks, ensuring the project remains on track, within scope, and aligned with strategic objectives. This includes managing risks, issues, dependencies, and resources across multiple work streams.
• DFE Compliance and Reporting:
  Taking the lead on completing the mandatory quarterly returns to the DFE, ensuring accuracy, timeliness, and demonstrating clear progress against reform expectations. This also involves working proactively to ensure the model achieves full compliance with DFE expectations, relevant national policy, and local guidance.
• Driving Learning and Development:
  Collaborating closely with internal teams and managers to ensure the workforce's learning and development needs associated with the new practice model are met. This includes embedding new ways of working, skills, and cultural shifts required for success.
• System Readiness and Digital Transformation:
  Working in partnership with IT colleagues to ensure the necessary system readiness for robust, accurate recording, and reporting. A key focus will be preparing our infrastructure for the long-term, particularly for the full operationalisation of digital reporting capabilities from April 2027.
• Practice Embedding and Quality Assurance:
  Partnering with Heads of Service (HOS) to systematically embed the new practice model into day-to-day operations. This includes establishing and refining internal review mechanisms and quality assurance frameworks to monitor practice fidelity and drive continuous improvement.
• Co-production and Service User Engagement:
  Leading efforts to work effectively with service user groups‑our children and families‑to ensure their voices are central. This co-production approach will be key to shaping and refining our ways of working, ensuring the model is truly responsive to community needs.

• Experience of best practice programme / project management methodologies, and evidence of having applied these to deliver complex and high profile projects and programmes.
• Good understanding of the key issues for local authorities, Children's Services and service users including the Governments Families First Partnership Programme.
• Be a direct employee and currently be in a grade 9 or above role.
• Have agreement from your current line manager to be released from your current role (noting that backfill arrangements where appropriate are permissible).

The post will report directly to Jackie McCarthy, Director of Children's Social Care and Safeguarding, indicating the seniority and critical nature of the programmes this role will manage. The successful individual will be expected to operate with a high degree of autonomy, working with multi‑disciplinary teams and stakeholder relationships across the Council and external partner agencies.