City Solicitors Division, Children & Families Legal Services

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We have multiple vacancies across the following roles – Head of Group, Group Manager, Principal Lawyers , In House Advocates and Senior Lawyers

Head of Children & Families Legal Services

Salary: £65,550 to £ 70,785

Grade SS1

Location: Town Hall Extension, Albert Square Manchester M60 2LA (hybrid working from home and office)

Hours: 35

Contracts: Permanent

Closing date: 24^th September 2023

Interviews week commencing: Week commencing 9^th October

Application: - Curriculum Vitae and detailed Expression of Interest setting out how your skills and experience meet the role profile

Put your legal experience to work for Manchester: having investment into our structure we are growing our already effective management team who produce incredible, outstanding results with an enhanced vision for the future.  Aligning ourselves with Children’s Services to deliver safe, efficient, and effective services to families, the enhanced vision is supported by new team structures, an enriched training, mentoring and coaching tool and a new Case Management System.  Highly valued by our clients, our excellent relationships and continual looking for better ways of doing things and achieving greater heights produces an innovative, responsive, inclusive and transparent legal service. 

The appointable candidate will have recent and extensive management experience alongside an extensive, technical and demonstratable knowledge of the law relating to safeguarding and child protection including coronial and judicial review and the preparation for and attendance at Coronial and Court hearings.  At the heart of everything we do is:

• the safety and needs of children
• high-quality representation of Children’s Services.

There is little else in life graver than a parent or carer losing a child from their care. How do we do this emotionally demanding work and not burn out? It’s through teamwork – working together, trusting each other, combining our experience, and sharing our knowledge and expertise to get the right result.

We support each other, laugh, interact, problem-solve and have difficult conversations. This promotes deep learning and a strong sense of belonging and common purpose, creating effective mutual relationships that achieve our team’s goals.  We feed on one another’s contagious enthusiasm for our projects with a dynamic team spirit made possible by the synergism between us all.

• Are your skills and legal mind being rewarded?
• Do you work together as part of a supportive team?
• Is your work wide-ranging and varied?
• Are you achieving your goals?

Be part of our incredible journey.

Why work with us?

We offer our lawyers flexible start and finish times with an effective hybrid working-practice model.  There’s opportunity for development and variety thanks to the way our teams practise in our Lexcel-accredited and supported legal service.

Legal work for public services in Manchester, Salford and Rochdale Councils and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority puts you among the few practitioners in England’s first, and biggest, devolved region, where major decisions are now taken in-house rather than in Whitehall and by NHS administrations.

If practising in a supportive public service legal team is the right cultural fit for you, please get in touch for an informal discussion.

To arrange an informal discussion on these roles please contact Jonathan Broad, Assistant Director of Legal & Democratic Services, Children & Families Legal Services, on email at jonathan.broad@manchester.gov.uk

Manchester City Council is an Equal Opportunities Employer and we positively welcome applications from all candidates regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation.