Consultant Social Worker

Consultant Social Worker:
Fostering and Residential -

Grade: G11;
Salary Range: £51,356 - £54,495

Children are at the heart of Walsall local authority. They receive support, help and services that reduce risks for them and meet their needs. (Ofsted, 2025)

Do you want to join our OUTSTANDING local authority?

If so, we have a current opportunity for an experienced social worker to work as a Consultant Social Worker in our fostering and residential services

Children and families are at the heart of our practice in Walsall as identified within our recent Ofsted inspection:

As Consultant Social Worker for Fostering and Residential Services, you will play a key role in strengthening practice, learning and development across our fostering and residential workforce. You will lead the design, delivery and evaluation of training and development activity for foster carers, residential colleagues and practitioners, ensuring that trauma-informed, therapeutic and reflective approaches are embedded in day-to-day practice.

This is an exciting opportunity to join a leadership team that has “created a learning organisation that has effective and accountable relationships with each other and with partners” (Ofsted, 2025). You will provide practice leadership, reflective supervision, coaching and consultation, helping practitioners and carers build confidence, develop their skills and respond effectively to the complex experiences of children in care. You will also use learning from quality assurance activity, feedback and service priorities to shape bespoke development activity, strengthen placement stability and support continuous improvement across fostering and residential services.

We are looking for an experienced, confident and values-driven social worker who is passionate about improving outcomes for children and young people in care. You will bring strong knowledge of children’s social care practice, fostering and residential regulatory frameworks, and the impact of trauma, attachment and adversity on children’s development and relationships.

You will be skilled in developing others through reflective supervision, observation, coaching, mentoring and training. You will be able to analyse learning needs, design creative and accessible development opportunities, and support practitioners, residential colleagues and foster carers to translate learning into confident, child-centred practice.

Most importantly, you will share Walsall’s ambition for children and young people. You will be collaborative, restorative and relational in your approach, able to build strong working relationships across services and with partners, and committed to equality, inclusion and continuous improvement. You will be someone who can bring energy, professional curiosity and creativity to a role that directly supports the quality, stability and experience of care for children in Walsall.

To provide the right conditions for you, we are committed to manageable workloads, high support from managers, essential paperwork only, enabling technologies.

Within Walsall we offer a comprehensive training and development programme which contributed to our OUTSTANDING Ofsted grading in May 2025.

There is a comprehensive training offer for workers in Walsall. There is an impressive offer to workers in gaining a social work qualification and for newly qualified social workers developing their knowledge of frontline practice. The general training offer is wide ranging and gives workers the opportunity to learn incrementally about their role.

Wellbeing is at the heart of our work. We offer specialised clinical supervision, to support work/life balance, flexible working and specialist employee assistance and therapeutic support when it is needed. We know we need to make social work a career people want to stay in.

Closing date for applications: 23 rd August

Interviews: 3 rd September