Somerset County Council Hiring for Senior Education Safeguarding Officer Job at Shepton Mallet, England Full Time

The Education Safeguarding Service is pleased to offer an exciting opportunity to join our developing team as a Senior Education Safeguarding Officer, based in Shepton Mallet.

As a SESO, you would manage and support one of our four locality teams of operational staff in supporting families and schools to ensure children can engage with education. You would manage and allocate casework and support with more complex cases directly. You would provide specialist and expert support and advice to education settings and challenge them to ensure their practice is early help and child focussed.

As well as providing support relating to attendance, as a SESO, you would provide support around children missing from education and those that are home educated.

Here’s what you can expect to be doing

You will lead a small, but busy team of our officers in supporting children, families, schools and other services. You will hold a small caseload, advising and supporting schools in your locality and working with parents and students to resolve issues around accessing education.

Using your experience of direct work with children and their families, you will build and maintain strong working relationships with colleagues, safeguarding and attendance leads, head teachers in your locality and other services to ensure the best available support is provided to those that need it. You will attend and lead multi-agency meetings to ensure barriers to learning are overcome.

You will lead on statutory proceedings against parents and carers relating to school absence. This will include overseeing legal casework undertaken by your team and, at times, preparing cases for prosecution in local courts.

A few things about you

As a motivated team player, you will be solution-focused and able to support the ongoing development needs of our Service, advocate for positive change and always place the needs of children at the heart of operational and strategic decisions.

Additional information

The salary for the role is Grade 11, ranging from £28,371 to £32,020 per annum

For an informal discussion about this role, please call Toby Jenkins, Service Manager at [email protected].

From 1 April 2023 the County and District councils in Somerset will be replaced by a new single unitary authority – Somerset Council. It’s a genuinely exciting time to join us as we work together with the four district councils to deliver the new council for Somerset

Why choose Somerset County Council

We are proud to offer an environment that is supportive and rewarding, working as part of a team who are passionate about the work they do to improve the lives of people in Somerset. We offer great training and development opportunities, with supportive management. As well as this, we have some fantastic employee benefits available:

• We promote a healthy work-life balance and offer flexible working arrangements wherever possible, including working from home.
• Generous annual leave allowance, with the opportunity to purchase additional leave.
• Staff discounts in gyms.
• Employee Assistance for the times you may need some support and a variety of employee wellbeing services.
• Auto enrolment onto our generous Pension Scheme and optional pension enhancement through our Additional Voluntary Contribution scheme.
• A Flexible Benefits Scheme via salary sacrifice to obtain a cycle for work and health screenings.
• My Staff Shop offering discounts in shops, online shopping, restaurants, cinema tickets, insurance benefits and more.

DBS information

The job requires a criminal background check (DBS) via the Disclosure procedure

Job Reference: SCC03763