Registered Manager

Queens Park, Bedfordshire MK40

Salary £48,000 to £55,000 depending on experience

This is a brand new solo placement EBD children's home offering residential care in one of Bedford's well established residential neighbourhoods.

This is a role for someone who wants to build something from the beginning, from the Statement of Purpose inward, rather than step into a service already running and try to make it their own.

Most Registered Manager adverts for brand new homes come with the implicit expectation that you'll figure the registration process out largely as you go, leaning on guidance notes and hoping for the best with Ofsted. To be honest, that's a reasonable concern and worth asking about, because the organisation behind this home isn't new to it. Another home within the same group went through its first ever Ofsted inspection not long ago and came back rated good for the experiences and progress of children living there, and good for how well they're helped and protected, it means the leadership around you has genuinely been through it and knows what it involves. You're not the first person in this group to submit an SC2, and that's more valuable than it might sound to a candidate who's weighed up other new homes and walked away unsatisfied by what was on offer around them.

Queens Park sits in the heart of Bedford, a borough with a well established local authority children's services framework and a commissioning environment that understands what smaller, high quality residential provision can offer young people who need it.

The wider group this home sits within is growing at a good, considered pace, three homes open currently, six expected open by end of this year and that growth brings real progression for managers who want more than one home's worth of responsibility eventually. Operations and regional leadership roles will follow naturally as the group grows, and the organisation is already demonstrating a preference for growing its own people rather than hiring at every level from outside, which means whoever registers this Bedford home and runs it well is building a reputation inside a group that will have plenty of room for them to grow into.

What the role involves

• Leading the full Ofsted registration process for a brand new children's home in Queens Park, Bedford, from SC1 and SC2 application through to inspection readiness, supported by a leadership team with direct, recent experience of the same process elsewhere in the group.

• Developing the home's Statement of Purpose and the full suite of policies, procedures and care planning frameworks for the young people who will be placed there, building them to reflect genuine, individualised practice rather than templates lifted from somewhere else.

• Recruiting and building a staff team from scratch, putting consistent supervision, regular team meetings and quality monitoring in place from the outset rather than trying to retrofit them once the home is already running.

• Acting as the primary contact with Ofsted, Bedford Borough commissioning, placing authorities and the young people's professional networks throughout registration and into the home's early operational period.

• Setting the culture and the standards of the home from day one, which is considerably easier to do at the very start than to course-correct once a team and a way of working are already established.

What you'll bring

• A genuine track record in children's residential social care, either already at Registered Manager level or as a Deputy Manager who is properly prepared to lead a registration for the first time and can speak credibly about that readiness.

• A Level 5 Diploma in Leadership and Management for Residential Childcare, or a clear and realistic plan to achieve it with the support of an organisation that takes that development seriously.

• Confidence navigating the Ofsted registration process and the Children's Homes (England) Regulations 2015, or a genuine willingness to learn both properly rather than just pick them up as you go.

• The ability to build a team and a culture from nothing, and a genuine preference for that kind of blank-page challenge over walking into a service already running.

• A strong working understanding of safeguarding, safer recruitment and what good quality assurance actually looks like when it's embedded in a small home's day to day practice rather than just reviewed at a monthly management meeting.

If leading a brand new children's home through registration in Bedford and building it into something brilliant sounds like the kind of role your experience has been pointing you toward, it's worth having a conversation before you decide.

Apply through Indeed, or get in touch directly if you'd rather talk through the detail first.