Working in children's residential care

Children’s residential care is meaningful, challenging, and deeply rewarding. You have the opportunity to support young people every day - helping them build routines, celebrate achievements, manage difficult feelings, and imagine brighter futures.

We believe in creating an inclusive and positive team culture. We treat each child with respect, considering their race, gender, culture, religion, and sexual orientation. We empower them by offering choices and encouraging independence. We work collaboratively with children, their parents and carers, health, and other disciplines to provide a service that is appropriate and responsive to their needs.

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Benefits and rewards

"Being a Residential Care Worker gives me the opportunity to enjoy a nice balance of working within a team, and also being independent and creative with my own ideas around working to support our young people."

Few careers offer the chance to change a young person’s life in such a direct and meaningful way. You’ll be part of a team helping children build trust, develop new skills, and create positive futures. Every conversation, every small success, and every connection matters and you’ll see the difference you make.

Pay

Residential Care Workers can earn up to £29,540, with additional payments for unsociable hours and any sleep-in duties you undertake. All roles offer clear and consistent pay structures. Your salary will increase each year in line with our council pay scales, giving you predictable progression and financial stability.

Annual leave

We offer 25 to 33 days of annual leave plus bank holidays. You can also purchase extra leave if you need that long-deserved break or you have a special occasion that requires more time. Your wellbeing is important to us, and we encourage that work-life balance.

Professional development and career growth

Your journey with us can start in any of our homes. From day one, you’ll have access to the same high-quality training, support, and development.

You’ll build skills, confidence, and experience, with opportunities to progress into senior roles, specialist practice, or leadership. You can also rotate across different homes to broaden your strengths, discover new passions, and shape the career that’s right for you.

From fully funded qualifications like the Level 3 Diploma in Residential Childcare to leadership training and Continuing Professional Development opportunities, you’ll have everything you need to grow your career. You will also be given a comprehensive induction, ensuring you feel confident and supported from day one.

Working hours

Our homes have their own shift patterns and hours of work. While the exact structure may differ, all roles are designed to ensure two things: the children receive consistent, high-quality care, and you have a healthy, predictable work-life balance.

Other benefits

We offer many more perks, such as free car parking, discount travel, employee discount perks for shops, cycle scheme and much more. Find out more about our employee benefits.

Our key principles

"No day is the same at The Big House. All the children have their own needs and different levels of support, communication and sensory needs - but this is what is so exciting and rewarding about this job!”

Our children and young people have usually faced  tough challenges before they arrive in our care. They have complex needs. They can feel mixed up, rejected, angry, confused, isolated, and abandoned, with trauma resulting from adverse childhood experiences.

Working with them has its challenges and its rewards, but the outcomes can be life changing for those young people.

We work using the following principles:

  • Children in our care should feel loved, be happy, healthy, safe from harm and able to develop, thrive and fulfil their potential. 
  • We value and nurture each child as an individual with talents, strengths and capabilities that can develop over time. 
  • We should foster positive relationships, encouraging strong bonds between children and staff in the home on the basis of jointly undertaken activities, shared daily life, domestic and non-domestic routines and established boundaries of acceptable behaviour. 
  • We are ambitious for our children, nurturing children’s school learning and out-of-school learning and their ambitions for their future. 
  • We are attentive to children’s needs, supporting emotional, mental and physical health needs, including repairing earlier damage to self-esteem and encouraging friendships. 
  • We are outward facing, working with the wider system of professionals for each child, and with children’s families and communities of origin to sustain links and understand past problems. 
  • We have high expectations of staff as committed members of a team, as decision makers and as activity leaders. 
  • We provide a safe and stimulating environment in high-quality buildings, with spaces that support nurture and allow privacy as well as common spaces and spaces to be active. 
  • We will build on our own resilience and support our children and young people to recognise their capacity to cope successfully with adversity to promote positive outcomes. 
  • We will help children and young people to identify a wider range of emotions in themselves and others, enabling them to develop empathy which is an essential role of residential care
  • We will listen and support and help young people to understand and share their experiences and emotions.