Overview
Make a real impact on the lives of children and the carers who support them.
Are you passionate about improving outcomes for children in care and ensuring foster carers receive the support and challenge they need to provide safe, nurturing homes? This role offers the chance to shape practice, influence service development, and play a key part in maintaining high standards across our fostering service.
The Fostering Reviewing Officer sits within the Quality Assurance function of the Fostering Service, championing excellent practice and ensuring that every fostering arrangement truly supports children to thrive. This role brings independent, insightful oversight to fostering arrangements, keeping the needs, safety, and wellbeing of children at the centre. It is a position for someone who isn’t afraid to ask the right questions to drive better outcomes.
You will be working across the county, responsible for chairing fostering reviews that are purposeful, reflective, and focused on improving children’s lived experiences. Providing a clear, balanced evaluation of the quality of care foster carers offer and assessing how well the fostering service is supporting placements, you will work closely with social workers, fostering teams, and partner agencies while maintaining a clear and independent, child-centred perspective.
The team is committed to continuous improvement and accountability, ensuring that practice meets statutory requirements, local policies, and best practice standards. Within this environment, the Reviewing Officer plays a key role in identifying strengths, highlighting areas for development, and supporting service-wide learning.
This role makes a real difference to the organisation by helping to ensure that:
- Foster carers are appropriately supported, challenged, and developed to provide the best possible care.
- Children in care receive safe, consistent, and high-quality care.
- Practice across the fostering service is regularly reviewed and improved.
This is a hybrid role, blending home working with time at Scott House in Huntingdon and visits across the county.
Responsibilities
You’ll take the lead in organising and chairing annual foster carer review meetings, ensuring all relevant information is gathered and that they run smoothly, professionally, and in line with fostering regulations. You will form balanced, analytical recommendations that support safe, high-quality care and clear recommendations central to determining a carer’s ongoing suitability.
A key part of your day-to-day work will involve undertaking robust assessments of foster carers’ ability to meet the needs of children. This will include considering the wishes and feelings of children, as well as feedback from professionals involved in their care, to form a balanced and evidence-based view of how carers are meeting children’s needs.
You will work closely with fostering teams, building strong, constructive relationships that help the review process run effectively. You will also play a key part in service improvement by:
Investigating concerns, allegations or issues relating to standards of care and providing clear, evidence-based findings including making judgements about the continued suitability of foster carers.
Contributing to quality assurance and service improvement by identifying themes, strengths, and areas for development across the service and providing analytical feedback to senior leaders to shape policy, practice, and training.
Supporting the ongoing development of quality assurance systems and highlighting emerging risks, including recruitment and retention challenges.
You’ll be someone who is confident making sound, defensible judgements. A strong commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion is essential, ensuring every assessment is fair, respectful, and reflective of individual needs.
Your work will directly contribute to the safety, stability, and wellbeing of children in foster care. You won’t manage staff, but you’ll collaborate daily with a wide range of professionals and report regularly to the fostering service and Head of Service.
About you
We are looking for an experienced and confident Social Work professional who brings strong knowledge of fostering practice and a commitment to improving outcomes for children in care. You will hold a Social Worker qualification and be registered with Social Work England, with significant post-qualifying experience, including work within family placement or fostering services.
You will have a sound understanding of relevant legislation and regulatory frameworks, including the Children Act, Fostering Regulations, and National Minimum Standards. Alongside this, you will demonstrate in-depth knowledge of fostering policy and practice, with the ability to both support and constructively challenge professionals to promote high standards of care.
The successful candidate will be a skilled communicator, able to engage effectively with foster carers, social workers, managers, and partner agencies. You will be confident in leading meetings, managing complex discussions, and producing clear, analytical reports with balanced recommendations.
You will have experience of working within a quality assurance framework, with the ability to identify good practice, recognise areas for improvement, and contribute to service development. This includes confidently addressing concerns, making evidence-based decisions, and escalating issues appropriately where required.
Strong partnership working skills are essential, as the role involves collaboration across multidisciplinary teams and organisations. You will be able to build and maintain professional relationships while maintaining independence and objectivity in your role.
You should be organised and able to manage a varied workload, with good IT skills to support recording and report writing. While direct experience in a fostering reviewing or quality assurance role is desirable, we would also consider candidates with transferable skills, such as experience in safeguarding, child protection, or reviewing roles (e.g. Independent Reviewing Officer or Child Protection Conference Chair), who can demonstrate the ability to analyse practice and challenge constructively.
A strong commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion is essential, alongside a clear understanding of safeguarding responsibilities and a commitment to promoting the welfare and safety of children and young people in all aspects of the role.
For a full list of the requirements of the role, please check out the Job Description & Person Specification.
Please note we are not accepting applications from candidates living overseas who require sponsorship to move to the UK.
About us
Cambridgeshire is a great place to work and live with a diverse population, including an urban centre in Cambridge, historic Isle of Ely, Huntingdon and St Ives as well as more rural landscapes.
Our four values are central to our culture, driving everything we do. We are proud to serve the diverse communities of Cambridgeshire and want our workforce to be reflective of this diversity. If you don’t meet every single requirement in the job role but think this could be you, please don’t be put off. We are committed to building a workplace that is compassionate and inclusive, so if you think you could be a good candidate please consider applying and speak to the recruiting manager if you have questions.
Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, along with our employee network IDEAL and self-organised peer support groups help us to foster an inclusive, supportive and safe working environment where people feel valued, respected, and empowered. We collect relevant diversity data for monitoring as part of the recruitment process to understand the diversity of our applicants and monitor trends.
We are proud to be a Disability Confident Leader. We fully support providing reasonable adjustments throughout our recruitment process, as well as when you join us, and encourage candidates to contact the Hiring Manager to discuss any adjustment needs. Through a Guaranteed Interview Scheme, we will offer an interview to all applicants who disclose a disability and meet the essential criteria for a job vacancy. On your application form you can indicate you are disabled. Some examples of reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process could include additional time to complete an assessment or printing a document on pastel coloured paper with larger font size. We would value talking about what might be possible to enable you to join us.
Visit our jobs and careers section to find out more about our wide range of learning and development opportunities; apprenticeships; wellbeing package; staff benefits; our commitment to equality, diversity and Inclusion. Visit: http://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/council/jobs-and-careers
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