Professional Practitioner - Family Intervention Fostering

• The opportunity to work flexibly in line with the demands of the role, working from home and your contracted work base.
• 30 days annual leave, plus bank holidays.
• Permanent for 37 hours per week
• Office base could be in Bridgwater, Shepton Mallet, Taunton or Yeovil.

Please note that part of the role of Professional Practitioner is a supervisory role for our out of hours and weekend Fostering Intervention Team. This requires staff to work on a rota, covering shifts between the hours of 7 am until 11 pm daily, including weekends. The expectation is that the successful applicant will be part of the duty rota and will involve occasional evening and weekend work.

The Fostering Intervention Team is a specialist county-wide Team, which offers support and interventions to children and young people in foster care and their families . We deliver a bespoke intervention package working with them at an early stage to help them remain within their fostering homes and support foster carers to sustain homes for our children and young people. 

We’re working to improve the lives of people in Somerset – and you’ll be a key part of that.

Key purpose of the role….

You will be part of a strong and ambitious Children’s social care team, where the goal is to support fostering families to ensure children have the best opportunities to grow and develop their potential and remain within their fostering home.

Using a strengths-based approach, our workers ‘get alongside’ fostering families to help them identify what it is they want to change and why and then build sustainable family plans for change. We support families along the journey of change and are there to help them celebrate their successes.

We offer ongoing support, training and guidance to help you be the best you can be but it will really help if you have a proven track record in using appropriate techniques and best practice to make ongoing holistic, professional assessments of allocated children, young people, and their families/carers to reflect individual circumstances.

You will be:

• a resilient, engaging, and supportive to ensure that intervention with children and young people is as supportive and effective as possible.
• passionate about working with children and young people and be able to quickly build up effective relationships based on trust and respect.
• passionate about the work you do and proud of your profession.

Additionally, you’ll be able to reflect and think creatively about how you can build relationships to make a difference to the children and foster carers that you work with. You’ll be robust, confident, and resilient in your approach and be able to engage with carers and families many who will have complex needs.

We’re proud to be here for the people of Somerset. And that means everyone in Somerset. An important part of this is ensuring that we are as diverse and inclusive as the people and communities we serve.

We welcome applications from a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences to enrich our team. You can always contact the hiring manager for a chat if there’s anything you want to talk about before you apply.

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.

The salary range for this role is £37,280 to £41,771 per annum

You will need to be able and willing to travel countywide, including travel outside standard work hours and to areas that are not currently serviced by public transport.

For more information or an informal discussion about this post please contact: Lisa Walker, Operations Manager for Fostering and Kinship – lisa.walker@somerset.gov.uk

Please ensure you submit a supporting statement or covering letter with your CV/application.

Interviews will be scheduled for week commencing 5^th January 2026.

When completing your application/CV please provide your full employment history and ensure that any gaps in employment are explained. Please start with your current or most recent employment.

If you have all the information you need, just hit the apply button - we can’t wait to hear from you.

This post requires a criminal background check via the Disclosure procedure.