Senior Practice Development Lead
Tower Hamlets
£44.32/hr
Full time: 35/hrs a week
Start date: ASAP

AKTON Recruitment is working closely with the local authorities and we are looking for a Senior Practice Development Lead in the Tower Hamlets area. 3 - 6 months contract with chance of a longer contract.

This is an exciting time to join Tower Hamlets Council. A key priority within the Tower Hamlets Council Strategic Plan 2022-2026 is to transform and improve services for young people in the borough. We are ambitious about ensuring that all young people in the borough have access to a diverse range of youth work opportunities and support through the delivery of a high-quality youth service, this includes:
- Universal 'safe spaces' in every single ward throughout the borough where young people can stay safe, participate in positive activities and educational opportunities as well as access additional support from youth workers. This will be an increase from five commissioned universal services to at least one in every ward therefore providing accessible 'safe spaces' for all young people.
- Targeted whole family support for vulnerable young people and their families.
- Integrated detached youth work team providing a preventative and responsive approach to harm outside the home.
- Commissioning of specialist youth provision for specific groups of young people.

The Role
We have an exciting opportunity for a Senior Practice Development Lead to directly support the way services are delivered within a youth service setting. The Senior Practice Development Lead will be responsible for leading on arrangements related to quality assurance, workforce development and learning reviews across Young Tower Hamlets and Youth Justice Service as part of achieving the best standard of service delivery for children and young people.
The key focus for this role is to lead on the design and implementation of a new quality assurance framework, developing an infrastructure that recognises and enables continuous improvement of excellent youth work practice.

The service areas in scope are:
- Universal Team - Youth Justice Service
- Detached Youth Work Team
- Targeted Youth Support Team - Youth Participation
- Sports Team

In this dynamic role the Practice Development Lead will:
- Support the Director and Head of Service on the Quality Assurance workstream ensuring all activities and plans are scoped and being delivered.
- To develop, embed and review a quality assurance framework incorporating universal, detached, participation, sports, targeted youth support and youth justice.
- Develop and implement a new child centred quality assurance framework and related activities to ensure the quality of youth work delivery is consistently good across all deliverables as well as driving excellence.
- Develop and implement comprehensive audit tools informed by the National Youth Agency as well as toolkits for youth work practitioners to use as part of their day-to-day practice.
- Review pathways and processes to ensure there is alignment to provide consistency in youth work practice.
- Development of Young Tower Hamlets policies, guidance and procedures and ensure they are translated into practice.
- To create a training and development approach to the workforce to ensure that the new ways of working are firmly embedded into day-to-day practice.