(Jane McSherry, Executive Director: Children, Lifelong Learning and Families)
I'm passionate about being a director of children's services because it's such a privilege to come to work every morning, work with a team of fantastic staff who make a difference to children and families' lives every day.
So why should you come and work in Merton? Well, Merton has outstanding children's services. We have leaders, and that involves leaders both within the service and our political leaders who really put children and families at the heart of decision making.
We have robust safeguarding partnerships. We put partnership working really core in the way we work. So developing those really important kind of links so that we can give the best services to families.
We have lots of innovative ways we work together in Merton and the most important of those is that we work as one team across education and social care. So this enables us to deliver more streamlined services for families and enables staff to work together to develop strategies that are effective in delivering services.
But we also have co-located teams, multidisciplinary teams, including police colleagues, education colleagues, and also our CAHMS professionals, so that we're able to offer really robust services and support for our staff as well.
We ensure that social workers get the right training and development opportunities from the very beginning of their journey. So we work with universities. We have apprenticeship routes. Social workers can start with us. We give additional support during your ASYE years.
And then we also ensure that we balance case loads so that it's manageable, so that social workers can really spend the time they need to delivering services to families that are really going to make a difference.
