Take the next step in your leadership career in a Metropolitan Borough Council with huge potential to make an impact.
We have big ambitions to continue our improvement journey in Sandwell. Your role will be crucial to ensuring local children and young people benefit from the best start in life and a high quality of education and support throughout their school years.
Keep our services for children moving forward
Sandwell is a vibrant Black Country community with a young, diverse and rapidly growing population. This is a place that people are proud to call home, but local families do face challenges. Child poverty is double the national average and, historically, there have been lower levels of educational attainment. We have had a strong recent focus on improving our services – with a good record of investment including spending on family hubs. By continuing our improvement journey, you can make a positive impact on childhoods across the borough.
Your role
You will provide direction and leadership in social care and education, with the aim of driving long-term performance improvement and better outcomes for young residents.
To create and deliver effective programmes, you will work closely with the Cabinet, Elected Members, Chief Executive and whole senior management team. Partnership working is also central to the role as social care sits with Sandwell Children’s Trust, while education services and schools is a commissioner-provider split. Key responsibilities include:
- Delivering excellent frontline public services, value-for-money and cost-effective systems for setting targets, monitoring performance and delivering improvement.
- Developing, supporting and promoting a culture of continuous improvement, problem solving and customer focus.
- Leading, motivating, supporting and managing Service Managers to get the best from them and their teams.
- Inspiring your teams to embrace modern business methods, flexible management arrangements and agile working in a way that supports change and key goals.
- Taking a long-term view of services, to help ensure that our vision and plans are fit for the future and changing circumstances.
- Building active working partnerships with the public, private and voluntary/charitable sectors, and with local businesses and community representatives.
Your profile
You need proven experience in a senior management role in a Local Authority or a related setting – we are open to social care or education backgrounds. We are also looking for:
- A successful record of managing and delivering complex change and improvement programmes.
- Experience of managing services and complex teams and of partnership working in the public sector.
- Excellent forward-planning abilities and a proven ability to think strategically when establishing, planning and delivering corporate priorities.
- Highly developed interpersonal skills and the ability to inspire your teams to become stronger innovators and problem solvers.
- An imaginative approach to creating the linkages within the service area and across the council and community.
Our hybrid working involves a minimum three days a week in the office. There will be a requirement to travel to attend meetings, including public meetings and occasional overnight stays or working outside normal hours.
For more information, and to apply, please contact the team at sandwell@osbornethomas.org or call 020 3280 3671.