Short Breaks and Support Information Officer

Short Breaks and Support Information Officer
£41,133 - £43,680 per annum
Fixed term contract for a period of 12 months

Job Description

We are Newham

We are a vibrant, dynamic, culturally rich East London Borough with a young population and limitless potential. We are a challenging yet rewarding place to work, with the networks in place to enable you to be the best Practitioner that you can be and make a real difference to our children and families.

We’ve been working tirelessly to establish a Centre of Excellence for Children’s Services through investment, co-production and by continuously developing our 'Circles of Support' practice model; centring on systemic and restorative practice and a specialist support offer for our Practitioners. Ofsted described Newham as having a positive culture of learning and development and we’d love for you to learn and grow with us.

About Us

Early Help and Prevention Services in Newham offer timely and dynamic joined up support to children and families.

Our primary aims are early detection and identification of children and family’s needs, offering ‘the right support at the right time’ to mitigate against escalation of children’s needs and risks by supporting families to avoid crisis through earlier identification, targeted support, safety and contingency planning.

We adopt the role of Lead Practitioner, offering planned purposeful and focused targeted interventions, our aim being to reduce volume of referrals to child protection services, and in accordance with Newham’s Early help strategy, to improve children's long-term outcomes around health and education, improved emotional wellbeing, ensuring that children and young people can feel safe and thrive in their communities.

Our targeted SEND Early Help team is managed by our Senior Parent and Young Carer Lead and comprised of two SEND specific Early Help Practitioners and Short Breaks Coordinator.

Changes within Early Help will align with wider context of proposed Family Help model and Families First Partnership reforms (March 2025).

We are recruiting to a number of positions in Newham’s SEND Targeted Early Help team.

About the Role

We are seeking an officer to join a newly created Early Help SEND team. In your role you will be a core part in leading in creating new and diverse activities in accordance with thresholds reflected in the short breaks guidance. You will lead on short breaks opportunities and have a good understanding and working knowledge of the legislation surrounding short breaks and SEND and direct payments. You will be required to work collaboratively with a multi agencies, CYPS and families with a presence in the community. Experience of good IT skills, data recording and reporting would be beneficial to this role.

For an informal discussion about the posts, please contact Vipeena Limbachia on telephone number 02033734633.

The closing date for receipt of your applications is 25/01/26, however, interest in these jobs may be high and we therefore reserve the right to close the vacancy early.

You will be notified if your application has been successful, we are aiming to shortlist and schedule interviews W/B 02/02/26. We thank you for your interest.

Additional Information

The London Borough of Newham is a Disability Confident employer. Candidates who declare that they have a disability in accordance with the Equality Act 2010 and meet the essential criteria as specified in the Job Profile will be guaranteed an interview.

Priority consideration on all advertised roles will be given to London Borough of Newham Redeployees.

The London Borough of Newham is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, young people and vulnerable groups and expects staff and volunteers to share this commitment.

Please be aware that a Disclosure and Barring Scheme (DBS) check will be required for any position with access to these groups under the provision of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.

Please attach your supporting statement, explaining in no more than x2 A4 sides why and how you meet the criteria for this role.

We practice anonymised recruitment. Please ensure that you remove all personal information from any documents that you upload.

The personal information we have collected from you will be shared with Cifas who will use it to prevent fraud, other unlawful or dishonest conduct, malpractice, and other seriously improper conduct. If any of these are detected you could be refused certain services or employment. Your personal information will also be used to verify your identity. Further details of how your information will be used by us and Cifas, and your data protection rights, can be found by https://www.cifas.org.uk/fpn.