Head Of Corporate Parenting
Help us achieve our Child Friendly Peterborough Ambition supporting all children to thrive.
We are looking for an experienced and ambitious leader to join Peterborough City Council as our Head of Service – Corporate Parenting & Fostering.
This is a significant leadership role within Children's Services, with responsibility for shaping and delivering high-quality Corporate Parenting and Fostering services and ensuring that children in our care and care leavers receive the support, stability and opportunities they deserve.
You will join our Children's Services Senior Management Team, reporting directly to the Service Director for Children's Social Care and Targeted Support, and have the opportunity to influence both the strategic direction of our services and their day-to-day delivery.
What you will be doing
At the heart of this role is a simple ambition: to achieve the best possible outcomes for our children and young people.
You will provide visible, compassionate and inclusive leadership across Corporate Parenting and Fostering. You will create the conditions for good practice to thrive, supporting your managers and teams while maintaining a strong focus on performance, quality assurance and continuous improvement.
A key priority will be expanding and developing our kinship care and fostering provision. You will help us increase the use of kinship care for children in care and increase the number and range of foster carers available to Peterborough's children, including carers able to provide parent and child placements, emergency placements and support for disabled children. You will also have oversight of fostering panels and act as the Fostering Agency Decision-Maker.
We want every child in our care and care leavers to achieve the best possible outcomes. Most of our children already live in a family setting, and our vision is to build on this foundation by reducing the number of children in external residential placements. You will help deliver this ambition by strengthening family-based alternatives and supporting carefully planned moves to family settings where these meet children's individual needs, with their safety, stability and long-term outcomes guiding every decision. As the Head of Corporate Parenting and Fostering, you will:
- Lead a strong performance culture, using data, quality assurance and feedback from children, families and carers to evaluate service effectiveness, address areas for improvement and achieve better outcomes against local and national standards.
- Provide strategic leadership around permanency and ensure robust oversight of children who require permanent plans.
- Ensure safeguarding is embedded throughout the services you lead.
- Develop productive relationships with partners, elected members, regulators and other stakeholders.
- Advise and report to committees and boards, including the Corporate Parenting Board.
- Lead and support services through change in line with national reforms, translating policy into clear local delivery plans and supporting managers and teams to embed new ways of working while maintaining safe, effective services and value for money.
- Champion innovation, quality assurance and a culture where colleagues feel empowered to challenge, learn and improve.
- Lead inspection readiness and coordinate the service response to inspections, ensuring there is clear evidence of the quality and impact of practice, an honest understanding of strengths and areas for improvement, and sustained action on inspection findings.
About you
You will already be an accomplished senior leader with a strong understanding of children's social care, safeguarding and corporate parenting and experience of leading complex services in a demanding environment.
You will understand that excellent leadership in children's services is about more than performance measures. You will be able to bring people with you, build trusted relationships and maintain a relentless focus on the experiences and outcomes of children and young people.
We are particularly interested in someone who can demonstrate:
- Significant senior leadership experience.
- Detailed knowledge of operational safeguarding children services and corporate parenting.
- Experience of leading transformation and service improvement.
- Strong performance and quality-assurance leadership.
- Experience of managing significant resources and delivering value for money.
- The ability to build effective partnerships and influence at senior, professional and political levels.
- A track record of developing, motivating and empowering people.
- A strong commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion.
Why Peterborough?
This is an opportunity to take on a role where your leadership will have a direct impact on children and young people at some of the most important points in their lives. Peterborough City Council has a clear commitment as corporate parents to improving outcomes for children in care and care leavers. There is a strong cross directorate culture on working together and you will be part of the wider leadership team.
Peterborough Childrens Services are on a journey of improvement and ambitious for all our children. Family Valued Practice is embedded across our services, and we have a strong learning culture. This is an exciting time to join the team as you will have the platform to shape services, develop practice, strengthen our fostering offer and work across the council and with partners to make sure our ambitions for children translate into meaningful, lasting change.
We are looking for someone who combines strategic thinking with strong operational leadership. Someone who will ask the difficult questions when needed, recognise what is working well and keep pushing for better.
If you are ready to bring your experience, energy and leadership to Peterborough, we would love to hear from you.
Our Commitments
We are proud to be an equal opportunities employer, dedicated to fostering diversity, advancing equity, and building an inclusive workplace for everyone. We welcome applications from individuals of all backgrounds and particularly encourage those from underrepresented groups, including disabled people, care leavers, and individuals from minority ethnic communities. Your unique perspectives and experiences are encouraged and valued and will play a vital role in our success.
We are committed to making our recruitment process as accessible as possible. If you are a person who has or considers yourself to have a disability and you require reasonable adjustments to the application or interview process, please contact pccrecruitment@peterborough.gov.uk.
Appointment to this post will be subject to the outcome of an Enhanced Disclosure obtained through the Disclosure and Barring Service. The Council is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and vulnerable adults and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment.
Salary range
- £82,864 - £100,796 per year