One role, many rewards
Do you want to continue to make a real difference to vulnerable children’s lives and develop your career with us? We are committed to supporting all our staff to learn, grow and develop new skills and expertise to ensure they are ready for their next career move.
As well as giving back to society by helping some of its most vulnerable children and families, you'll be fully supported in your role and given everything you need for your career to thrive.
The purpose of Action for Children is to improve the outcomes of the most vulnerable children, young people and vulnerable adults by providing specialised help in order to safeguard and protect, promote opportunity, prevent problems and act early and effectively when concerns arise.
Safeguarding is integral to everything we do.
We are therefore committed to safer recruitment practices, to make sure the people we employ have the right attitude and behaviours to provide a safe and positive experience for our service users.
• 71% of children we work with improved their mental health
• 77% of children and young people are more able to achieve their educational potential
• 73% of children at risk of neglect have warmer more supportive relationships with their parent or carer(s)
• 74% of children at risk of neglect who we work with experience an improvement in family life due to improved routines
These are the differences we measure and our strong evidence base means we can share our work with other organisations who also believe that every child should have the love, support and opportunity they need to reach their potential, that they all deserve hope for their future.
We want all of our employees to feel valued and well rewarded for the vital work they do. When you work with us, we'll recognise your efforts:
By having money saving offers and schemes which include:
• Salary sacrifice pension arrangement
• Salary sacrifice childcare vouchers
• Salary Sacrifice cycle to work scheme
• Season ticket travel loans – interest free and repayable in monthly instalments
• Access to our retail discounts website ‘My Savings’
By providing you with support to do your job
• Independent confidential telephone counselling and advice service
• Discounted healthcare provision: Comprehensive health cover with premiums to suit most pockets and needs
• Equality & Diversity (engagement forums): Individuals from the organisation are invited to become employee ambassadors
• We have a recognised agreement with two unions: Unite and Unison
By giving you even more benefits
• We’ll pay for your eye tests if you use screens as part of your job and contribute towards your glasses
• We give you the chance to job share and have flexible working. We are big believers on a healthy work/life balance and have policies and practices for you
• We’ll support your development from day one through to continuing professional development (CPD).
It is really important that you continue to grow professionally, learn new skills and have a variety of learning experiences whilst employed with us, this ongoing development will help us continue to make a difference to all the service users we support.
We are absolutely committed to providing an inclusive, supportive environment and creating opportunities for people to learn and develop.
Leadership Development:
We believe in nurturing everyday leadership and so whether or not you are leading a directorate or leading your own areas of responsibility we want to support, encourage and help you become the best leader you can be.
Learning and Development is most effective when it is a mix of approaches:
• Experience – 70% of learning is most effective through on the job opportunities which stretch us out of our comfort zone and help build depth and breadth of experience such as shadowing, new projects, stretching tasks and secondments.
• Exposure – 20% of learning comes from seeing others in action and learning from their strengths, skills and knowledge such as mentoring or coaching.
• Education – 10% of learning can be through formal learning activity such as training courses, webinars or reading
We are committed to promoting equality, valuing diversity and working inclusively across our entire organisation. We uphold these principles in our behaviours and practices - as an employer, as a service provider and as a campaigning organisation.
We use the Equality & Human Rights Commission's nine protected characteristics to help focus our equality and diversity work and ensure the Code of Practice is followed to inform the procedures and practice standards.
We aim to eliminate discrimination, harassment and victimisation and have due regard to advancing equality for the relevant protected characteristics. We will not tolerate discrimination against employees or service users who have one or more of the protected characteristics:
In Northern Ireland we also recognise the diversity strand of community background.
We need to collate data to find out the diversity of those working for us, and to provide a tool to measure success in eradicating discrimination across Action for Children. The information you provide to us will be used for monitoring purposes only and will treated in the strictest confidence.
Action for Children has just won the first ever award for inclusion at the National Fundraising awards.
The #ChangeCollective Award was for our BAME mentoring scheme. These are ferociously contested awards so this really is amazing recognition of our work in this area.
Our Recruitment Service team is here to help and guide our applicants through the process. Contact RecruitmentService@actionforchildren.org.uk or call 01923 378608 for any related queries.
We are proud to be a ‘Care Leaver Friendly Employer - Gold Partner. We have applied the covenant principals across all our Nations to support care experienced people to get a job in our organisation and thrive while you are employed by us
As part of our promise and commitment we offer a guaranteed interview and constructive feedback to applicants who identify as care experienced and who meet the minimum criteria for the role.
Please click here to see our applicants guide
Action for Children are committed to interviewing applicants with a disability or health condition who meet the minimum criteria for the job.
The aim of this commitment is to encourage positive action, encouraging people with a disability to apply for jobs and provide an opportunity to demonstrate their skills, talent and abilities at the interview stage.
If you have a disability or health condition and need to discuss reasonable adjustments for any part of this recruitment process, so you have the best opportunity to demonstrate that you can do the job or wish to discuss how we will put in place any adjustments if you were to be successful, please email recruitmentservice@actionforchildren.org.uk and a member of our team will be happy to help you.
