SEND Senior Practitioner

You will work as part of a small project team of four full-time colleagues. You will be based within the Children and Families directorate of the Council, specifically working alongside teams and services that help schools and other education settings. This is an exciting project for two years to develop and deliver transformed systems that support children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities to get the very best from their educational experiences, in a cost-effective way. What about the Role? As the project's Senior Practitioner, you will act as technical lead for specific, time sensitive projects using SEND and finance knowledge to inform project work and you will support SEND service in delivering high quality and effective services. You and the project team will work alongside other teams and services to accomplish the project's objectives which are:

• Review and embed robust and consistent decision-making processes around the statutory assessment and review process for children and young people with special educational needs and/or disabilities
• Support the review and change processes associated with improved transition pathways to ensure children and young people with SEND get the right support, in the right place and the right time
• Design, test and deploy digitised Descriptors of Needs for use by families and professionals
• Review, redesign, test and deploy Newcastle's Local Offer to help families and professions navigate the services and support that they are able to access more effectively
• Actively support all mainstream schools in implementing the Newcastle Inclusion Quality Framework
• Design and embed an easy-to-use way for children, young people, their families and professionals to get answers to their questions quickly.
Further background may be found in the final report produced by iMPOWER following five months of working with stakeholders in the city. The final report can be accessed here. To apply for this role, you will need to be confident, customer focussed, able to communicate with a wide and varied audience and have a flexible approach to work, meeting challenging deadlines. If this sounds like a job for you, please keep reading and look at the Job Description and Person Specification provided. The City Council offers a range of opportunities for training and development to support you to achieve the best outcomes for yourself and the people we support. The wide range of services provided across the Directorate and the Council means that there are always opportunities to develop and grow during your careers with the Council.

Fixed term (2 years) Why work for Newcastle City Council? Newcastle City Council offers you an exciting opportunity to work in a vibrant city with proactive and committed people who have a genuine desire and motivation to support positive outcomes for the residents of Newcastle, striving to achieve the values of being Proud, Fair and Ambitious. What do we offer? As an employee of NCC, you will have access to:
• a competitive salary
• access to Local Government pension scheme
• 25 days annual leave, rising to 29 days after 5 years service in addition to Bank Holidays, with the ability to buy additional leave annually
• Family Supportive Policies
• a bespoke induction
• agile working, enabling both home working and office-based working
• a generous Flexi Scheme
• access to Occupational Health, Mindfulness sessions and other wellbeing initiatives
• access to various salary sacrifice schemes - covering cars, white electrical goods and tax efficient saving contributions towards your pension
• discounted travel passes.