Strategic Lead Youth Play & Participation

Manchester is a dynamic and thriving city that creates opportunity. We have one of the highest young populations in the country and ensuring that each one of these young people can reach their full potential is key to this city's success. The Youth, Play and Participation team play a key part in this; ensuring young people's voices are heard, that they are able to influence decisions, and that they have the opportunity to access play and activities outside of a formal education setting.

To reach our ambition, we are looking for an exceptional candidate who can not only accelerate our work in this field but also form strong relationships across the youth and play sector. To demonstrate our commitment to ensuring that children and young people have the best opportunities and can achieve their full potential we have increased our investment and support into communities and facilities. We are on course to becoming a UNICEF Child Friendly City and want to ensure that children and young people influence, challenge and inform City priorities and services.

About The Role

This senior post within Manchester City Council will provide a crucial leadership role for the city council and across the City's Youth Play and Participation Sector in our ambition to be a UNICEF Child Friendly City. The role will ensure effective co-ordination of key strategies in relation to Youth, Play and Commissioning and will identify and oversee opportunities to improve provision across neighbourhoods through enabling community groups and partners and enhancing infrastructure.

The role will ensure effective co-ordination of key strategies in relation to Youth, Play and Commissioning and will identify and oversee opportunities to improve provision across neighbourhoods through enabling community groups and partners and enhancing infrastructure.

The task we've set ourselves - to deliver excellent services for our children and young people is challenging and will take hard work, collaboration and innovation to achieve our ambitions.

The City Council's commitments are set out in the Our Manchester Strategy: a) Young people having a strong sense of citizenship and pride in the city. b) Young people improve their health and wellbeing and be more active. c) Our young people are known to have a high quality of life, better green spaces and access to world class, sport, leisure and culture provision.

The postholder will sit within the Neighbourhoods Directorate, Communities Division, with an opportunity to embed YPPS within the Communities Division to ensure more effective neighbourhood communications, particularly as we develop new Area Youth Forums and revised governance, whilst retaining a strong link to the wider existing and growing universal youth offers from libraries, galleries, culture, parks and leisure.

You will be a key member of our management team who are proud and passionate about Manchester; supporting the delivery of consistently high standards of practice and be able to demonstrate our behaviours.

We are looking for candidates with a strong record of leadership and delivery to apply for this exciting opportunity. As an effective leader within the City Council, you will have a unique opportunity to strategically lead and influence practice and partners to improve outcomes for children and young people, for someone who understands 'good' practice and can effectively work with others in a culture of high support and challenge; and is experienced in delivering improvements and is skilled in strategically leading multi- agency partnerships. The successful candidate will have knowledge and experience of the youth and play sector; this may be through public, private or third sector experience

This post requires you to have a suitable qualification relevant to the role and will require you to undertake occasional evening and weekend working.

You will also need to have,

- comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the Youth, Play and Participation sector at a national, regional and local context

- a strong understanding of the legislative and policy context within which a Youth Play and Participation Service and the wider sector operates
- A strong track record of successfully managing commissioned services.
- Experience of strategic planning and working effectively with partner organisations and the ability to develop business cases for investment decisions.

We're the local government authority for Manchester, and have teams across the city helping to make this a great place to live for everyone. We're proud to do local government differently, in a city with an international reputation for diversity, creativity, culture and passion.

When you join us, you're joining a team of over 7,000 council staff helping to make our ambition for Manchester a reality. Whatever your role, you'll be supporting our residents and communities to be the best they can be, and helping to build a Manchester that's fairer for everyone who lives, works, volunteers, studies or plays here.

To make our ambition a reality, every person we recruit needs to play their its part. It takes a certain type of behaviour, attitude and way of working to get Manchester where it wants to be. Our people and partners have agreed five 'behaviours' - the grounding for how we must work together and treat one another:

• We take time to listen and understand


• We work together and trust each other


• We show that we value our differences and treat each other fairly


• We 'own it' and we're not afraid to try new things


• We're proud and passionate about Manchester


A career with us means you can be yourself, thrive, and build the career your talent and ambition deserve.

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