As a social work manager, you may be dealing with a range of issues which will encompass both social work practice and management practice:

• co-ordinating staff supervision, reflective supervision, and performance reviews
• overseeing caseload allocation across your team
• advising and guiding staff in the management of their caseload
• ensuring that all statutory processes are conducted correctly and within deadlines
• ensuring that internal record-keeping systems are kept updated
• managing, and reporting on, your team budget
• providing guidance and support to student social workers, and to newly qualified social workers within your team
• managing your team’s training and development needs
• co-ordinating and facilitating regular team meetings
• managing attendance/sickness
• dealing with any performance or disciplinary issues
• working with HR when recruiting to vacancies/hiring agency workers/dealing with leavers
• monitoring the general health and wellbeing of your team and signposting staff to other support services as appropriate
• attending management meetings.

Equally, as someone who aspires to be a social work manager, you will need to be adequately prepared for the transition from practitioner to manager – and the Partnership is currently reviewing how best to do this with its employer partners.

To this end, there are two key strands that we are investing our resources in over the coming year:

• developing the options available for our aspiring social work managers and preparing them for management roles
• developing and supporting our existing social work managers.

You may be interested in attending one of our Partnership events which are held at regular intervals across the year. Places are free at all of our events, and they have proved to be extremely popular. Make sure that you take a look at those we've scheduled by visiting our events page.