Inside Out Strategic Project Lead

Your role will be to lead a small team to deliver Inside Out, a community-based family support service for children and families affected by familial imprisonment across West Yorkshire.

The service has three key elements:

• awareness raising and capacity building with schools, school support, early years services and Family Hubs across West Yorkshire, to increase understanding about the impact of imprisonment on children, challenge discrimination and develop community-based services that are responsive to families’ needs
• one to one and group work support for children and young people (aged 5-18 years old) who have a parent/carer/sibling in custody
• one to one and group work support for parents/carers who have dependent children aged 0-18 years old and have a child or partner in custody.

Aim   

To develop and deliver a child and family centred, strengths-based model which will aim to alleviate the impact of parental imprisonment and support children and families in West Yorkshire to thrive.

Engage with schools and early years providers to develop a strategic engagement plan, develop and deliver workshops for school, school support and early years staff and co-ordinate and facilitate school practitioner forums.

Key Tasks, Duties & Responsibilities

Support to children and families

• Assess family support referrals and allocate cases to the Inside Out Children and Family Outreach workers.
• Support and manage the Inside Out Children and Family Outreach workers (2 x 0.6FTE) who will be providing tiered support to parents/carers and children and young people (aged 5-18):
• Support and manage the Inside Out Children and Family Outreach workers to co-ordinate a peer support group for parents/carers and children’s activity groups in school holidays.
• Advocate for families dealing with imprisonment, promoting their human rights, and ensuring their needs are considered, and views are heard at all levels.
• Co-ordinate and chair a schools practitioner forum to support school staff to support children and families affected by imprisonment.

Strategic development

• Lead Jigsaw family services within the community, attending meetings with local authority education teams in Leeds, Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees and Wakefield, to identify key schools/school clusters who they think may benefit from the training, identify routes by which we can share training details and promote referrals pathway into our family support service for children and parents.

• Engage with local services to ensure we are aware of the range of support services available to families across West Yorkshire (so we can make appropriate referrals when needed) and to ensure services are aware of Inside Out and our referral criteria.
• Liaise with West Yorkshire police Safer Schools Officers to understand how we might work with them to support school community engagement, enhance Safer Schools officer’s understanding of the impact of parental imprisonment on children, and promote the referral pathway into our service.
• Liaise with Family Hubs and Children’s Centres across West Yorkshire to engage them in our training workshops, promote our referral pathway and enhance our local understand of family support services across the region
• Establishing relationships with Academy education providers to promote our training and share referral pathway details.
• Share the learning and impact data from Inside Out with strategic partners to raise awareness about the impact of imprisonment on children and families and influence local policy and practice.
• Promote Jigsaw in the community to attract support from additional statutory and third sector partners.

Training delivery

• Support and manage Inside Out administrator to promote, co-ordinate and take bookings for training events.
• Develop and deliver workshops to schools, school support services and early years/family support practitioners (an average of one workshop per month). Workshops will be delivered on school/Family Hub sites, in-prison at HMP Leeds and HMP Wealstun and online.
• Ensure effective monitoring and evaluation of training events.

People Management

• Co-ordinate staff resource to ensure the smooth running and high performance of a comprehensive service which runs alongside, and complements, that provided by Jigsaw, being prepared to personally cover for roles across the team in response to operational need.
• Provide warm, encouraging, person-centred management to the Inside Out team through support and supervision, training, and appraisals as required.
• Encourage team development through weekly case team meetings and training opportunities, and foster collaborative working particularly between different services to enable the sharing of best practice and enable the seamless support of service users.
• To lead, with support, the recruitment, and induction of staff, as required.
• Provide support to Jigsaw at HMP Leeds as required in the absence of the Jigsaw Director

Operational planning and performance monitoring

• Develop and implement a local strategic schools, school support and early years engagement strategy for the service, in line with Big Lottery funding bid contractual requirements, and with support from the Jigsaw Director; and ensure the service meets the key performance indicators for the lottery bid contract
• Work with the Inside Out evaluation consultant to produce and collate statistics and effectively monitor services, provide regular reports for the Jigsaw Board and National Lottery and use the information to identify ways to improve the service.
• Collate case studies and monitoring information to present to board and National Lottery quarterly.
• Support the Inside Our evaluation consultant to undertake service evaluation activities.
• Co-ordinate and chair quarterly project expert steering group (made up of multi-agency representatives and parent/carer with lived experience).

Safeguarding

• Promote and implement the Jigsaw Safeguarding policies, ensuring staff are trained and competent to identify safeguarding concerns and that any concerns are reported in line with the policy.

Data protection and data security

• Ensure children and families’, schools, Family Hubs and early years information is held securely, and where data breaches occur, that correct reporting procedures are implemented and improvements are made to avoid future breaches.

Service user engagement and involvement

• Engage and involve children and families in the development and delivery of Inside Out, ensuring that their views/experiences inform: training delivery, strategic development and the delivery of Inside Out services.
• Support the Inside Out evaluation consultant to engage children and families in service evaluation.
• Support Children and Family Outreach workers to engage parents/carers in the Inside Out expert steering group.

Prison security and procedures

• To ensure prison security and other prison policies are adhered to by the Inside Out team, and ensure that the team is aware of any changes to local prison arrangements, and that Inside Out staff attend appropriate training provided by the prison.

Jigsaw is a developing organisation and this role is likely to develop over time. Consequently this job description may not be comprehensive and some specific duties may change in accordance with organisational needs.