Quality Assurance Improvement Lead

Job Description

Organisation: London Borough of Waltham Forest

Salary: PO5 £52,194 - £55,323

Retention Bonus: £2000 per year

Contract Type: Full-time/Permanent

Working hours per week: 36

Application Deadline: 24/02/2026

Proposed Interview Date(s): w/c 02/03/2026

Reference: 2023

About Us:

Bursting with culture, energy, and opportunity, the London Borough of Waltham Forest is a fantastic and exciting place to work.

We are a highly ambitious borough. Driven by culture and the innate creativity of our residents, we have developed new and innovative ways to build our communities. Our Council is relentlessly resident-focused, insight-led, digitally driven and commercially minded; a Council focused on meeting the needs of our existing and future residents.

London Borough of Waltham Forest is one of the Mayor of London’s Good Work Standard employers. This accreditation is a proof of our commitment to creating a healthy, fair and inclusive workplace. This includes fair pay and conditions, workplace well-being, skills and progression and diversity and recruitment.

About the role:

The Quality Assurance Improvement Lead will plan, develop and implement quality assurance strategies that support the development of children’s social care practice in both service-user facing settings and offer overarching scrutiny of our statutory frameworks e.g. Public Law Outline.

>> Click here to download the Role Profile <<

Key Responsibilities:

An important aspect of this role will be acting as lead for high quality court processes, ensuring alignment with the Public Law Outline, guiding colleagues and overseeing the continuous improvement of court cases, ensuring compliance with procedures. The postholder will work with front line managers, Social Workers, the local authority legal department and with agencies across the Family Justice System to drive improvement through quality assuring, monitoring, measuring, and tracking progression of court related cases and costs incurred by all agencies to gain a view of whole system effectiveness.

This role will undertake and design audits in line with the Quality Assurance Framework, ensuring the delivery of high-quality services to children and young people with care needs. They will promote robust and effective quality assurance processes that improve practice and will lead to the development of initiatives that support continuous improvement. The postholder will work closely with senior leaders across Childrens Social Care to ensure continued adherence to robust frameworks and mechanisms are in place and will work to assess the quality of services and guide service improvement plans.

Working within the newly structured children’s quality assurance, safeguarding and practice improvement service, this role will play a key part in embedding learning from quality assurance activity effectively to achieve practice improvement that delivers outstanding outcomes for children, supporting the overall quality assurance and practice improvement agenda for Childrens Social Care. Overall, this role will be responsible for driving good practice and quality assurance across all teams within children services.

Qualifications and Requirements:

Qualified Social Worker

Terms and conditions:

The below terms and conditions apply to this role:

Satisfactory employment references and CIFAS identity checks;

Satisfactory declaration of interest;

This role is subject to safer recruitment practices as it involves work with children and/ or vulnerable adults;

Satisfactory DBS check;

Continued professional body registration;

As a public authority, we must ensure that members of staff in public-facing roles are able to speak fluent English. This means that they must have a command of spoken English, with confidence and accuracy, sufficient for the effective performance of their role. This requirement does not refer to any particular English language qualifications, regional or international accents, dialects, speech impediments or the tone of conversations. It does not require staff to speak only in English.

How to Apply:

Interested candidates are invited to submit their applications online by pressing the ‘Apply’ button below. This includes a supporting statement that outlines to us how your skills and experience make you a good candidate for this vacancy.

We reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive sufficient applications for the role. Therefore, if you are interested, please submit your application as early as possible.

Equal Opportunity Employer:

Waltham Forest is a diverse borough where diversity is valued and is integral to both, service delivery and employment of its staff. The Council is proud of its rich mix of communities and as the largest employer in the area, it works hard to respond to the changing needs of its population. We use our statutory duties on race, gender and disability equality and best practice in respect of age, faith and sexual orientation to ensure equality of opportunity in the workplace. The Council is committed to meeting its 4 equality objectives: - Promoting equality of opportunity - Opposing all forms of discrimination, intolerance and disadvantage - Ensuring our workforce reflects the diverse communities of Waltham Forest at all levels. - Providing fair, appropriate, accessible and excellent Services to all. Respecting Diversity is a core Council value.

To support the above and reduce the risk of bias in its recruitment activities, the council is operating an anonymous shortlisting process, which hides personal information that can identify individuals until their application has been considered for shortlisting. The council also operates a scheme whereby, for jobs graded up to and including scale SO2, internal candidates are considered first. This includes those candidates who self-identify as having a disability for the purposes of the Disability Confident scheme. For more information, please refer to our recruitment and selection policy.

We are keen to support employees to balance their working life with other commitments. Therefore, wherever possible, we will consider working arrangements that suit an individual's personal circumstances whilst still meeting the needs of the Council. If you would like to discuss the possible flexible working options that might be applicable to this role, please contact the person named below or feel free to discuss this during your interview.

For more information on the benefits of working for the Council, please visit https://www.walthamforest.gov.uk/jobs-and-training/find-jobs-and-other-opportunities/working-us.

Contact Information:

If you have any questions about this vacancy or the application process, please contact Shaista Afzal, Principal Social Worker at Shaista.afzal@walthamforest.gov.uk

If you have any technical issues when trying to apply for this post, please contact our Recruitment Team via email at recruitment@walthamforest.gov.uk.

The Council’s preference is for online application. However, if you have a disability and are unable to complete an online application, please email recruitment@walthamforest.gov.uk so we can arrange an alternative application method.

Click here for further information on the Human Resources recruitment privacy notice.