Charity Programme Manager

Looking for a charity role where children and families are treated with warmth, curiosity, and compassion?

Ready for a role where operational leadership means noticing the details, solving problems early, building strong systems, and helping a busy service run smoothly and thoughtfully?

Looking for a thoughtful values-led organisation where kindness and accountability go hand in hand?

This is what our children and parents could soon be saying about the service you help lead

I feel like some of the darkness has turned to light .
It s like an egg has been opened up and all the good is coming out . Life feels like it is on the right track .

We need you and more importantly, our children and young people need you!

Join our lovely children s mental health charity team as Service Lead for our specialist part-time alternative provision, supporting children and young people with EHCPs whose needs sit in the intersection of SEND and mental health.

We are looking for someone who can quickly understand and work within the Love Squared ethos and approach, while bringing strong organisational leadership, warmth, and consistency to the service.

This role would suit someone who is perceptive, highly organised, and proactive, with the ability to quickly understand complex situations and keep a busy service running and developing smoothly and thoughtfully.

You will need strong organisational skills, fantastic attention to detail, and love problem solving, and proactively manage multiple moving parts with love and imagination.

It will suit someone who wants to take real ownership of making things work well!

A little bit about Love Squared

Our vision is a society where imagination, love, and kindness are the everyday words that people associate with child and family services. It is a vision where young people can walk into their futures with joy. We want to bring love to children and families services. We don t think it s enough to care a bit, you have to care a lot if you want to transform outcomes.

We want to change the national landscape of how children experience the mental health system, putting kindness at the forefront of every interaction. Building awareness, starting a movement, hearing the children s voices and those of their loved ones: we want to transform the experience of those impacted by mental health.

We are on a mission to ensure that no child has to lose out on a world of potential because of mental health. We don t have magic wands, but we do believe that every child and family has the right to get services designed and delivered for their individual needs, and with love and imagination. Everyone has a right to have their story remembered and treated with curiosity and sensitivity.

We directly deliver imaginative, and carefully case managed services for children and young people with social, emotional, and mental health needs (working in the intersectional needs of mental health and SEND). We do this through our work as a specialist non-school part-time alternative provision for children with education, health and care plans (where this particular advertised role sits!) and through our Glow services where we provide a number of therapeutic projects such as our children s listening helpline, Drop the Pressure, online mentoring projects such as Transitions, Game On and Remix, 1:1 counselling and mentoring in schools, and therapeutic mentoring workshops in schools as well as holiday groups in nature, and with cooking and a range of other activities. We believe that you can t change outcomes without looking at issues holistically and thoughtfully. For us it s about long-term change.

As our new services lead for (outreach ALP), you will help us continue seeking to make three key differences for our children and young people: Improved mental health, Reduced social isolation, Increased ability to thrive in education

The Role

Our Outreach (part time ALP) service will deliver services to around 45 children and young people at any one time over the next academic year. Our young people are often neurodivergent, have SEND and/ or mental needs such as anxiety, OCD and other diagnosed or undiagnosed needs. Many have very supportive and involved families and parents/ carers who also deserve our empathy and support, and many have had difficult childhood experiences and might be really struggling with loneliness and social isolation. The funding for outreach comes primarily from individual children s EHCP s and we design careful and thoughtful packages of education and wellbeing provision with an emphasis on therapeutic and trauma informed work. This is usually commissioned through local authorities (we work with a number across the South West and in London) and can also be commissioned by social care and NHS. The work with the children is delivered by a team of around 25 education and wellbeing practitioners. We usually deliver services in the home and the community and for many of our young people, who are usually not in school - we are key professionals, mentors and cheerleaders in their lives, delivering usually around 12 hours a week of services for each child as a part time ALP. Partnership work and safeguarding are day to day features of the services as is building supportive mentoring relationships with practitioners ensuring they have the right support, training and supervision to fulfil their roles and feel happy and supported, and building warm, nurturing relationships with families and wider stakeholders.

We have a clear idea of our objectives for this service for next academic year (we want to make it even more amazing for the children and young people) and we need someone who will be truly excited about running day to day and the year to year. This is a key operational leadership role within a busy and fast-paced service requiring someone who is highly organised, proactive and fast on their feet - its that head, heart and hand approach driving positive action and strategically aligned change across the service whilst holding their own case load, and able to maintain oversight of multiple complex moving parts, while ensuring children, families, and practitioners feel nurtured, inspired, and well-held.

In this role, you will:

• Oversee the day-to-day running of the Outreach (ALP) service reporting and ensuring on monthly and year to year deliverables.
• Manage relationships with children, professionals, families and practitioners dealing with cases from referral onwards, by phone, face to face and by email, and to be in proactive and sensitive communication including with professionals and vulnerable children and families. This will often require imagination, quick wit, empathy, and diplomacy to resolve.
• Take an active role in strategic problem solving; being able to think about what issues might come up, what lies behind the words or the data, and what needs to be done to reassure, and move things forward successfully.
• Collate and analyse a range of systems and data (quantitative and qualitative) with a view to improvement in communications, systems and processes and will make these improvements happen in the service and ensure they are embedded and become consistent.
• Deliver services which have meaningful long term impact for the children, but always be proactively seeking to do more and to make them better.
• Have confidence in dealing with conflict and disagreements, ensuring that the children and families voices are heard and working positively with our partners.
• Lead on personalised and holistic case management including initiation, planning, execution, monitoring/control and closure across children s cases.
• Proactive commitment to safeguarding best practise and information sharing including commitment to Love Squared safeguarding procedure including acting as Deputy Safeguarding Lead and attending relevant multi-agency meetings.
• Effective risk-management for service and individual children/ young people in liaison with other stakeholders.
• Manage practitioner and other relevant recruitment so that capacity is carefully managed across the service.
• Support and improve service design, delivery and best practise for the children including running regular team meetings for each placement, individual and group supervision, and providing wellbeing support for practitioners.
• Ensure that additional and joined up support is sought and achieved as needed to meet the children s needs and that this is proactive as much as possible rather than reactive.
• Ensure that reporting, planning, and other documentation both for individual children and at service level is compliant, to a high standard and well organised and managed.
• Support the ongoing development and sustainable growth of the service in alignment with the Love Squared ethos and approach
• Line manage and supervise Case Manager(s) and supervise and mentor the practice of the practitioners.
• Help ensure children and families experience services that feel thoughtful, imaginative, loving and genuinely supportive.
• Undertake other duties in the charity as required, being a willing and nurturing colleague and team member, supportive of senior leadership as well as practitioners and other team members.

This role needs someone who:

• Enjoys managing/ leading services proactively . click apply for full job details