SEND and Inclusion Project Officer

What will you be doing?

Much of your week will involve working alongside partners across education, health, social care and the voluntary sector to support delivery of the SEND and Inclusion Strategy. You'll help bring together information, track progress and keep workstreams focused on agreed priorities and outcomes.

Most of the work has already been assigned to different partners and organisations. The challenge isn't doing everything yourself. It's helping people stay focused on what they've committed to, understanding where progress is slipping and working with them to get things moving again.

Across the week, you'll find yourself:

• Supporting two SEND and Inclusion workstreams and helping monitor progress against agreed priorities.
• Bringing together updates, evidence and information from a wide range of partners.
• Coordinating meetings, action plans and governance activity, ensuring actions remain visible and on track.
• Producing updates and reports that support strategic discussions and decision-making.
• Supporting engagement and co-production activity involving children, young people, families and professionals.
• Helping identify risks, gaps and barriers that could affect delivery.

Plans won't always stay the same. Sometimes a board paper suddenly becomes urgent or a partner needs information sooner than expected, so being able to adapt and reorganise your workload is important.

Why Join Us

You'll spend time working with colleagues across education, health, social care and the voluntary sector, seeing first-hand how decisions are turned into actions and how different organisations work together to deliver the SEND and Inclusion Strategy. You'll also gain insight into the different perspectives that shape SEND services across West Northamptonshire, from professionals delivering support through to children, young people and families helping shape future improvements.

Along the way, you'll build a strong understanding of SEND, service improvement and how organisations work together when services need to change. You'll also gain experience of governance, planning and partnership working that can be applied in a wide range of future roles.

Working alongside experienced professionals from different disciplines will give you insight into how large-scale improvement programmes are developed and delivered. After a couple of years in this role, you'll have built experience that's hard to get in one place elsewhere. Whether you want to move into programme management, service improvement, SEND leadership or wider local government roles in the future, you'll leave with a much broader understanding of how change happens across a whole system.

Alongside a rewarding career, you'll benefit from:

• Flexible, hybrid and family-friendly working arrangements, with the team currently coming together in person once a week.
• Generous annual leave, with the option to buy additional leave.
• Enhanced maternity, adoption and family leave provisions.
• Access to our car lease scheme.
• Membership of the Local Government Pension Scheme.
• A wide range of employee discounts and savings.
• Learning, development and progression opportunities.
• Health and wellbeing support for your physical and mental wellbeing.

About you

You may have found yourself coordinating projects, supporting improvement work or helping different teams stay connected around a shared goal. That experience could have come from local government, education, health, children's services, the voluntary sector or somewhere completely different. What matters most is understanding how to keep progress moving when different people, priorities and organisations are involved.

There's a particular satisfaction that comes from helping ideas become actions. Following up on commitments, bringing people together, solving practical problems and helping important work move forward are often the parts of a job that people enjoy most.

An understanding of SEND and inclusion will help, but just as important is an interest in improving services and achieving better outcomes for children, young people and families. You're probably looking for a role that combines relationship building, problem solving and programme support while giving you a chance to contribute to improvement work that reaches far beyond a single team or service.

Our benefits

You can also see our full list of employee benefits on our careers site here: Why you should work for us | West Northamptonshire Council

About us

At West Northants Council, it’s about our people. People who thrive with ambition, bubble with new ideas, demand better ways of working, caring about every detail, and who never shy away from a challenge. Our culture is a gateway for new experiences. A place to forge new opportunities. To empower you in your career and unite you with like-minded people.

Our vision is ‘to make West Northants a great place to live, work, visit and thrive’. We truly stand by this and work hard every day to make this a reality. Our corporate values, THRIVE, stand for: Trust, High Performance, Respect, Innovate and Empower, they underpin everything we do and how we deliver services.   Hear from our Chief Executive, Martin Henry, about building a career at WNC.

We are committed to ensuring diversity, equality, equity, and inclusion is woven into the fabric of WNC and everything we do, to enable all colleagues to develop and maximize their full potential.  We are a disability confident employer, a member of the Armed Forces Covenant, and a Care Leaver Covenant partner

The following film was created by us to communicate our intentions - watch WNC colleagues explain what DEI means to us.

If you need additional support or reasonable adjustments during the application process, including needing the job description in another format or language, please email careers@westnorthants.gov.uk for support.

Please note we reserve the right to close the advert early if we receive a high volume of suitable applications, so we recommend applying as soon as possible to avoid disappointment.

West Northants Council, where careers thrive.