The Yard is an award-winning charity that runs adventure play services for children with disabilities and/or additional support needs and their families.

Join us to help improve the lives of disabled children, young people and their families and carers by becoming our new Family Worker in Edinburgh.

About the role:

As Family Worker you will be providing information, emotional and practical support to families with children with a wide range of additional support needs, empowering them to understand and access the support available to them from external services.

The Family Worker role is essential in ensuring that families get the right help when they need it most.

About you:

This job is for you if you have:

• experience of working with children and young people with a range of disabilities and additional support needs
• excellent relationship building skills
• knowledge of children’s rights, trauma informed and inclusive practices
• an understanding of child and adult protection practices
• excellent organisational skills and administrative abilities

If you would like to work in a supportive and understanding work environment, ensuring that families feel valued and part of an inclusive community, we would love to have you on board.

The Financial Wellbeing Worker will play a key role in delivering OPFS’s Whole Family Support offer, providing high-quality, person-centred and strengths-based income maximisation and financial wellbeing support to single parents and their families across Scotland.

Working within the OPFS My Life and Me framework, the postholder will support parents to understand their financial circumstances, maximise household income, manage essential expenditure and build financial resilience.

The role will involve working with single parents experiencing financial pressures including low income, benefit changes, debt, rising household costs, insecure employment and childcare costs.

Key responsibilities

• Provide high-quality one-to-one income maximisation and financial wellbeing support.
• Assess household income, expenditure, financial circumstances and priorities.
• Identify opportunities to maximise income through welfare benefits, grants and other financial support.
• Support parents with welfare benefit applications, renewals and changes of circumstances where appropriate.
• Undertake benefit entitlement checks and calculations.
• Provide early intervention and preventative financial wellbeing support, helping parents identify and address financial pressures before they escalate into crisis or unmanageable debt.
• Support parents to budget effectively and identify opportunities to reduce household expenditure and essential living costs.
• Provide Better Off in Work calculations to help parents understand the financial implications of employment or changes to working hours.
• Support parents to understand the financial impact of changes in circumstances.
• Identify and respond appropriately to immediate financial hardship, including food,fuel and other essential needs, supporting parents to access relevant crisis assistance, grants and emergency provision.
• Provide income maximisation and financial wellbeing support within the agreed scope and competency of the role, identifying where specialist welfare rights, debt or regulated advice is required and ensuring timely referral to the appropriate OPFS or external service

Supporting single parents and families

• Build positive, trusting and respectful relationships with single parents, recognising their individual circumstances, strengths and aspirations.
• Use a person centred, strengths based and trauma informed approach.
• Work alongside parents to identify financial goals and develop realistic action plans.
• Support parents to build confidence, knowledge and skills in managing household finances.
• The postholder will take a holistic, whole-family approach, recognising the links between financial wellbeing, employment, housing, childcare, health and wider family circumstances. They will identify wider needs, strengths and goals and connect parents to appropriate OPFS and partner support, ensuring families can access the right support at the right time.
• Empower parents to make informed financial decisions and develop greater financial resilience.
• Recognise the wider impact of financial hardship on parents, children and family wellbeing and identify needs which may require support beyond the presenting financial issue.
• Take a whole-family approach, connecting parents to appropriate OPFS services and external support including family support, employability, childcare, welfare rights and debt services.
• Identify safeguarding, wellbeing or other concerns and respond appropriately in line with OPFS procedures.

Information, advice and signposting

• Provide accurate and accessible financial and benefits information within the remit of the role.
• Keep up to date with changes to welfare benefits, Scottish social security and relevant financial support.
• Make appropriate internal and external referrals to specialist services
• Work closely with OPFS Debt Service, Advice and Information, Family Support, Employability and other services to provide coordinated support.
• Maintain knowledge of relevant national and local services and resources.

National outreach and partnership working

• Deliver income maximisation support nationally across Scotland through face-to-face, telephone and digital approaches.
• Undertake proactive outreach and develop flexible and accessible approaches to engage single parents who may experience barriers to accessing traditional advice and support services.
• Develop effective relationships with statutory, voluntary and community organisations.
• Represent OPFS at relevant partnership meetings, events and networks.
• Promote the OPFS income maximisation service and wider support available to single parents.

Administration, monitoring and evaluation

• Maintain accurate, confidential and timely case records in line with OPFS policies and data protection requirements.
• Record outcomes and progress and contribute to monitoring, evaluation, case studies and funder reporting.
• Record evidence of the financial impact of the service, including income maximised and savings achieved where appropriate.
• Contribute to reporting requirements associated with the Whole Family Support Third Sector Delivery Fund.

Capture parent feedback and identify emerging issues affecting single parents.

Service development

• Contribute to the development and continuous improvement of OPFS’s national income maximisation offer.
• Share learning, good practice and emerging issues with colleagues and managers.
• Contribute to developing accessible financial wellbeing information, resources and workshops.

Health, safety and safeguarding

• Comply with OPFS policies and procedures relating to safeguarding, confidentiality, equality, diversity, inclusion, health and safety and data protection.
• Promote the wellbeing and safety of single parents and their children and ensure concerns are appropriately identified, recorded and escalated.
• Maintain appropriate professional boundaries when working with parents and families.

General responsibilities

• Attend team meetings, supervision, training and development opportunities.
• Share learning and good practice and contribute to effective team working.
• Promote equality, diversity and inclusion in all aspects of the role.
• Undertake any other duties commensurate with the post as requested by the Service Manager.

A fantastic opportunity to come and join the Children First team in North Ayrshire

This is an exciting opportunity to be part of our Family Wellbeing Service in North Ayrshire and an innovative partnership between Children First and The Alcohol and Drug Partnership (ADP), working alongside families, building strong relationships, taking an approach that is restorative, relational and trauma responsive striving to achieving positive outcomes for families. This post is funded by the ADP and will contribute to the delivery period 1st September 26- 31st August 27 (this post being from 1st Jan 27 – 31st Aug 27 fixed term).

We are also determined that the full incorporation of the UNCRC means that children will have their rights respected in all areas of their lives and will have a real say in the way they are supported. If you share this determination, we would love to hear from you.

Our project builds on the voices of the recovery community and our extensive experience in supporting children and families impacted by substance use. We will do this through early help providing community-based whole family support that can be accessed easily in a non-stigmatising way and prevention and education work within local primary schools and alongside other specialist addiction services within all our North Ayrshire Secondary schools.

Our project seeks to:

• Ensure children, families and communities affected by substance use in North Ayrshire access early help to prevent crisis and to support the whole family to recover from the impact of substance use.
• Reduce the number of people who develop problem drug use.
• Promote a whole system’s approach personalised to the specific needs of families impacted by substance use, ensuring that individual’s most at risk, have access to specialist support that aids their recovery.

What kind of people are we looking for?

• have experience of keeping children safe in their own families
• are fiercely passionate about children’s rights
• thinks it’s a privilege to work with and on behalf of children and families and,
• are kind and will bring their whole selves to the job: heart and mind

What kind of Family Wellbeing team member will you be?

Knowing our ambition for children, you will be someone who is:

• resilient, skilled and knowledgeable who wants to transform children’s lives
• determined to support children to stay safely with their own family
• big hearted and courageous
• able to build strong relationships and to manage the tricky conversations
• is compassionate and understanding of trauma
• a cool head and clear minded at times of pressure
• inspiring colleagues and teams to be even better
• an amazing ambassador for children and Children First

Above all else, the most important thing to us is that you are someone who will do the right thing for children and their families at every turn.

Base

You will be based in Irvine, Bourtreehill within our Children First North Ayrshire space and will travel to connect with other parts of the organisation and North Ayrshire HSCP. You will work on an outreach basis to connect with children and families in communities across North Ayrshire.

What we offer:

• A workplace with values of with love, with purpose and with strength.
• 40 days annual leave, inclusive of bank holidays.
• Pension scheme and wellbeing support.
• Flexible and hybrid working arrangements.
• Access to Westfield Health, giving colleagues and their families confidential counselling support, wellbeing resources, and access to health and lifestyle benefits to support physical and mental wellbeing.
• Blue Light Card discount.
• A Fair Work accredited workplace

The Relationships Scotland Network is the largest provider of family and relationship support in the country. We offer relationship counselling, family mediation and child contact centres through a network of 20 member services across Scotland, which provide face-to-face support to around 15,000 people each year.

We are looking for a motivated and hardworking individual to join our team as a Communications and Marketing Manager, on a fixed term maternity cover basis. The primary purpose of this role is to work with the Chief Executive to deliver and further develop the Relationships Scotland Network’s Strategy as it relates to communications, marketing and political engagement.

This is a new post funded through the Whole Family Support Third Sector Delivery Fund and Weave Partnership. We are in this partnership with One Parent Families Scotland, Families Outside, and Fife Gingerbread. The Scottish Poverty and Inequality Research Unit (SPIRU) will be the learning and evaluation partner.

The post has been funded until 31st March 2027 in the first instance, with the intention set by Scottish Government that this funding will be extended to 31st March 2029.

We have an office in Edinburgh and would expect the post-holder to work from here on a Tuesday (this is our office day). The remaining hours can be worked remotely if needed, or there is a desk space at York Place if you prefer to be office based. Additional office days will be required for meetings in person.