Head of Sufficiency and Brokerage - Children Services

Job Purpose
To provide strategic leadership, direction, and management of the Sufficiency and Brokerage functions within Children’s Services. This role will ensure the local authority meets its statutory duties regarding sufficiency of placements for children in care and those on the edge of care, and delivers effective brokerage of high-quality, value-for-money placements. The postholder will lead on the development of placement strategies, market shaping, and partnership working to secure the best outcomes for children and young people.
 
The Head of Sufficiency and Brokerage will lead on strategic market engagement and relationship management, with a particular focus on holding the market to account and fostering improved communication between social work teams, commissioning, sufficiency teams, and the wider market. The post holder will also be responsible for supporting interventions with individual young people and providers where situations have escalated, ensuring additional accountability is in place to maintain quality and safe homes for young people.

Key Responsibilities:

• Oversee the design, implementation, and management of technical solutions to analyse and evaluate sufficiency systems.
• Support social work, finance, and transformation teams in using sufficiency data for business case development.
• Create children’s social care dashboards to provide oversight of data and metrics relevant to sufficiency for children in care, children with disabilities, and those on the edge of care.
• Develop and strengthen sufficiency reporting and critical analysis governance processes across departments to identify business opportunities and service improvements.
• Support with communication/coordination of professionals for individual young people/providers where situations have escalated and additional accountability is required to ensure quality and safe homes are in place for young people.

 Outputs:

• Series of dashboards for children’s social care sufficiency
• Enhanced governance processes for sufficiency reporting and analysis
• Enhanced governance processes for social work and brokerage teams supporting timely moves for children and young people to quality homes that are value for money.

Person Specification
Essential:

• Proven track record in implementing projects similar to those outlined in the key responsibilities.
• Working knowledge of Power BI and relevant database systems (such as Liquid Logic).
• Ability to understand, interpret, and critically analyse data for needs assessment and service development.
• Confidence to proactively challenge and ask curious questions to fully understand and use data for service improvement.
• Ability to work autonomously across departments (social care, education, commissioning, finance, transformation) while managing competing priorities.
• Experience in relationship and change management.

Desirable:

• Experience working in Children’s Social Care.
• Understanding of the commissioning cycle and processes.