Social Worker (Complex Safeguarding)

Contract Type: Permanent

Salary: Grade H. Scale 29 - £41,177 to Scale 34 - £46,579 with a professional bar at Scale 31 - £43,149**

Hours Per Week: 36

Base Location: Manchester Road, Ashton-under-Lyne OL7 0BQ

Assessment Date: To be arranged

Are you passionate about making a real difference in the lives of children and families? Do you bring compassion, curiosity, collaboration, conversation, and courage to your practice? If so, Tameside is looking for you.

The Role

As a Social Worker within the Complex Safeguarding Team, you will work with adolescent/young people who are vulnerable to, or experiencing, extra-familial harm. Adolescence is a unique and critical stage of development, characterised by increasing independence, identity formation, peer influence, and exposure to harm beyond the family home. Understanding the complexities of adolescent development is central to this role and will underpin all assessment, planning, and intervention.

Working within a trauma-informed, relationship-based, contextual, and transitional safeguarding framework, you will recognise the impact of adverse childhood experiences, trauma, exploitation, and systemic disadvantage on young people's lives. You will seek to understand behaviours within the context of a young person's experiences and circumstances, ensuring that interventions are compassionate, strengths-based, and focused on building safety, resilience, and positive futures.

You will:

• Work directly with adolescents and young people experiencing or at risk of Child Criminal Exploitation (CCE), Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE), county lines activity, missing episodes and online harm.
• Build meaningful and trusting relationships through persistent, strengths-based, and trauma-informed practice, recognising that engagement often takes time and consistency.
• Undertake specialist assessments and develop targeted intervention plans that address harm across family, peer, educational, community, and online environments.
• Apply contextual safeguarding principles to understand and respond to the extra-familial contexts where harm occurs, working with partners to improve safety beyond the home.
• Embed transitional safeguarding approaches when working with older adolescents and young adults, ensuring continuity of support and effective planning as young people move between children's and adult services.
• Work collaboratively with parents, carers, families, communities, and professional networks to strengthen protective factors and promote sustainable change.
• Contribute to Child in Need, Child Protection, Public Law Outline and Children Looked After processes where appropriate.
• Participate in disruption activity and multi-agency safeguarding responses alongside police, education, health, youth justice, housing, and voluntary sector partners.
• Produce high-quality assessments, reports, and court statements, ensuring all interventions are evidence-based, analytical, and outcome-focused.

About You

We are looking for a Social Worker who can demonstrate:

• Significant post-qualifying experience within children's social care, safeguarding, adolescent services, or complex safeguarding.
• A sound understanding of adolescent development and the ways in which trauma, exploitation, neglect, discrimination, and social adversity can influence behaviour and decision-making.
• Experience of working with young people affected by extra-familial harm, including exploitation, serious youth violence, missing episodes, or contextual safeguarding concerns.
• Knowledge of trauma-informed and relationship-based practice, with the ability to engage young people who may be distrustful of services or difficult to reach.
• Understanding of transitional safeguarding and the challenges faced by young people as they move towards adulthood and greater independence.
• Strong assessment, analysis, risk management, and multi-agency working skills.
• A commitment to anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and culturally responsive practice.
• Resilience, professional curiosity, and the ability to work effectively within complex and high-risk situations.

Join Us

This is an excellent opportunity for an experienced Social Worker who is passionate about adolescent safeguarding and improving outcomes for young people facing some of the most complex challenges. You will join a specialist service that recognises adolescence as a distinct developmental phase and places relationships, trauma-informed practice, contextual safeguarding, and transitional safeguarding at the heart of its work.

Together, we can help adolescents and young adults build safer, stronger, and more hopeful futures.

About Us

Message from Jill Colbert, Director of Children’s Services