Specialist Paediatric Occupational Therapist

Barnet Children's Integrated Therapies have an exciting opportunity for an enthusiastic, innovative and self-motivated Occupational Therapist, who is experienced in interdisciplinary working with children and young people in the community. This is part of a two-year Project we are running with our Education partners at Barnet Council, from September 2023 to August 2025. OTs in Barnet work as part of a dynamic and innovative Integrated Therapy Team which includes Speech and Language Therapists, Physiotherapists and Therapy Assistants as well as OTs. This Project builds on established interdisciplinary working and aims to further develop interagency collaboration.

Following the success of the Project's first year, we are delighted that from September 2024 we will have an additional Band 7 role joining the team already in place focussed on supporting children and young people through clinical review, stakeholder engagement and the delivery of a Targeted training programme for staff and parents.

The successful candidate will work in both primary and secondary mainstream schools across Barnet. The role in primary school is to support children entering mainstream reception classes with special and complex needs that may include autism, learning difficulties and sensory processing differences.

The secondary school role is related to reviewing and updating EHCPs together with delivery of support for parents and staff at the Targeted level, (Gascoigne et al, 2013)., 1. Working closely with Barnet Education's Specialist Inclusion Service to train and support the implementation of Occupational Therapy advice and strategies into the mainstream schools core offer.

2. To be responsible for the assessment of young people in Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 with a range of functional needs and the provision of advice for them, their families and the staff working them.

3. To provide targetted training and support for staff working in mainstream primary and secondary schools

4. To be innovative and develop new training offers to schools to meet the sensory and motor based needs of their pupils while upskilling staff on OT based strategies and recommendations.

5. To support children with complex profiles in mainstream reception classes

Whittington Health serves a richly diverse population and works hard to ensure that all our services are fair and equally accessible to everyone. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the way we look after our staff. We aim to employ a workforce which is as representative as possible of this population, so we are open to the value of differences in age, disability, gender, marital status, pregnancy and maternity, race, sexual orientation, and religion or belief. The Trust believes that as a public sector organisation we have an obligation to have recruitment, training, promotion and other formal employment policies and procedures that are sensitive to these differences. We think that by doing so, we are better able to treat our patients as well as being a better place to work.