Adolescent Early Worker

Are you hardworking, committed, and passionate about helping young people and their families improve their lives and avoid family breakdown? Do you have multiple skills?

We have an exciting opportunity in the Adolescent Early Help West Kent 1 Unit, covering Maidstone and Swale.

The Integrated Adolescent Service has been formed in recognition that adolescents should be given a bespoke offer of support. We want professionals capable of bringing understanding and emotional intelligence to everything they do. The service promotes a practice philosophy which seeks to empower young people and their families, building on individual strengths, and helping them to develop strategies which support them to understand, manage and respond to the difficulties they face.

Your role as an Adolescent Early Help Worker will involve undertaking assessments and providing intensive support to empower young people and their families to develop effective long-term solutions to manage their family relationships and develop strategies to overcome the risks that adolescents face during this phase of their life.

You will play a vital role in Kent’s Out of Court Resolutions, using the Child First Approach. You will assess children who have caused harm to others and offer support to help prevent them becoming first time entrants into the Criminal Justice System. You will write a Prevention Diversion Assessment Toolkit (PDAT) which will help a multi-disciplinary team decide on an outcome for a child to deter them from further harmful behaviours, through planned supportive work identified by the child and the family themselves.

This is an exciting time as you will be able to be part of shaping the future service and to contribute towards its longer term development.

You will complete assessments of young people and their carers to determine their needs and capabilities as well as draw up plans of support. You will deliver 1:1 interventions with young people as well as working with their family as part of a systems led approach.

You will need to demonstrate an ability to engage with children, young people, their families and carers, coupled with the integrity to work within a confidential, professional environment. Using strengths based and solution focussed intervention methods, you will seek to mediate, reunify, and promote young people remain safely at home with their family and support networks. You will support young people to express their wishes and feelings, providing them with advocacy wherever necessary.

You will be asked to contribute towards safety planning, as well as linking young people in with positive activities and partner agencies to ensure their needs are met in a holistic way.

The work will be challenging but rewarding and you will be given opportunities to develop specialisms according to your areas of interests in regards to family work.

Applicants will need to be able to work as part of a team including building positive working relationships with professionals in the Youth Justice Teams, Adolescent Early Help Units, Youth Open Access and Adolescent Support Team staff. You will need to have an understanding of multi-agency work. This post, alongside creativity and good communication, requires flexibility, innovative thinking, and good organisation skills and also requires a positive young person centred approach.

You will need to enjoy working with adolescents with a range of difficulties and draw upon various theories in order to bring about change.

A high standard of written English is an important requirement as all team members must be able to produce a good standard of report writing and maintain accurate, comprehensive written records. You will also work with families to draw up genograms, compile chronologies and other forms of case summaries. Excellent organisational skills, communication and IT skills are therefore essential.

You will have experience of working with children, young people and families in a similar role or setting. Ideally, you will have an NVQ Level 3 in childcare or equivalent. The ability to travel across a wide geographical area in a timely and flexible manner is also an integral…