Personal Advisor

Pathways Through Care Service – supporting Southampton’s children in care and care experienced young people.

Southampton City Council Pathways Through Care Team is a service passionate and striving to achieve the best outcomes for our children we care for and our young people who are care experienced, building relationships that enable our young people to feel and know that they are held in mind is important to us.

Working closely with partnership agencies to provide high challenge and high support, building strong relationships between practitioners and their families, enabling systemic and reflective work with our young people and their networks alongside these strong relationships is also a priority.

An exciting and rare opportunity has become available for a position as a Personal Advisor to support our young people in the next chapter of their lives and independence. The vacancy within this part of the service will be your chance to build meaningful and influential relationships with our care leavers, striving to continually improve and show our children in care and care leavers that we are aspirational and ambitious for them in what they can achieve and supporting independence and skills in their relationships, communities, education, training, and any other goals that they seek to improve on.

The service is building on exciting developments, stronger links with partner agencies and cohesion in service relationships and interface with our colleagues in SCC. The main area of focus for any person wanting to join Pathways Through Care must be an enhanced understanding of the importance of building trusting relationships with young people and being able to demonstrate in various ways that they are always held in mind.

In June 2023, Ofsted saw strong evidence that: “The experiences and progress of children in care are good. Improvements to the quality of support provided to children in care have accelerated recently. Careful and successful workforce recruitment, a comprehensive strategy to improve children’s placement stability and an impressive level of meaningful engagement by senior leaders with children in care all provide a firm foundation for further improvements”.

In the role as a Personal Advisor we are looking for genuine care, commitment and passion for young people and young adults who have experienced time in care. Our Personal Advisers have considerable energy and empathy to support those leaving our care to be the best people that they can be.

We have a strong corporate parenting strategy to give our care experienced young adults the best opportunities and support we can offer. You will need energy, commitment and empathy to offer the support our young people need to reach their potential and have aspirations for their futures.

You will have a good grasp of the relevant legislation for care leavers and experience of working with older children and young people, with a clear understanding of the impact of trauma and the need for high quality, committed relationships that provide security for young people at one of the most critical and vulnerable times in their lives. We are working within a Systemic Practice framework and you will benefit from reflective supervision and strong management support.

The service benefits from a permanent management team who have a wide range of experience from different service areas as well as a service manager who is visible and approachable. There are 4 teams within the care leavers service – 2 of which are for young people who are care experienced, 1 team has specialisms of working with children who are unaccompanied in the UK and there is a Staying Connected team who have work specifically with the young people…