Registered Manager

Residential Children's Home (EBD)

Kettering, Northamptonshire

£50,000 to £60,000 basic salary plus £10,000 annual bonus, £60,000 to £70,000 total potential earnings

We're recruiting an experienced Registered Manager to lead a three bed children's home in Kettering, Northamptonshire, supporting three young people with emotional and behavioural difficulties, alongside a full staff team that's already recruited, trained and settled into the home. This is a position offering a basic salary of £50,000 to £60,000, plus a £10,000 annual bonus, which takes total potential earnings up to £70,000 for the right person, and reflects a salary structure that's been built around the genuine complexity of this particular role.

Ofsted inspected this exact home only a matter of months ago, and judged every single area, the experiences of the young person living there, how well they're protected, and the effectiveness of leadership, as good.

The organisation behind this home was set up a few years back by someone who spent close to two decades working with adults experiencing homelessness before choosing to bring that same depth of experience into children's residential care instead. There's a genuine emphasis on getting the fundamentals right, properly matching young people to homes rather than filling beds for the sake of it, keeping group sizes manageable so care can stay personal, and giving managers real access to a multidisciplinary clinical team, including psychologists and therapists, rather than leaving you to work out trauma informed practice on your own. Inspectors picked up on the warmth between staff and the young person they spoke with, and on a family who had nothing but good things to say about the team around their child.

What you'll be doing

• Taking full day to day responsibility for the home, making sure it consistently meets the Children's Homes (England) Regulations 2015 and the accompanying Quality Standards

• Holding Ofsted registration as the home's Registered Manager, and leading the home confidently through inspections under the social care common inspection framework

• Recruiting, supervising, training and developing a staff team that's already in place, building on the strong foundations they've put down so far rather than starting from nothing

• Working closely with the home's Responsible Individual, the wider senior leadership team and external clinical specialists to embed individualised, trauma informed care for each young person

• Building genuine working relationships with placing authorities, education providers, families and other professionals involved in each young person's care and future

• Managing the home's budget, quality assurance systems and statutory paperwork, including Regulation 44 visits and Regulation 45 reviews

• Leading on safeguarding, risk assessment and safer recruitment practice across the home, making sure every member of staff holds an enhanced DBS and the right level of ongoing training

What you'll bring

• A Level 5 Diploma in Leadership and Management for Residential Childcare, or a genuine, demonstrable commitment to completing it within the required timeframe

• Strong experience as a Registered Manager, or as a Deputy Manager who's ready and capable of stepping into registration with the right support around you

• A confident working knowledge of Ofsted's inspection framework, the Quality Standards and the Children's Homes Regulations 2015, and the ability to apply that knowledge practically rather than just on paper

• Real, hands on experience supporting young people with emotional and behavioural difficulties, ideally with some background in trauma informed or therapeutic approaches to care

• A full, valid UK driving licence, since the role will involve transporting young people and travelling to meetings across the local area

• The emotional resilience and maturity needed to lead a small, settled staff team through both the good weeks and the harder ones, while keeping sight of why this work matters in the first place

• A genuine belief that every young person deserves the chance to properly thrive, not just get by, along with the patience to back that belief up day after day

• A Full UK Driving Licence

If any of this sounds like the role you've been hoping would turn up, it's probably worth having a conversation before you scroll past it. We'd much rather talk you through what the home is really like, who you'd be working alongside and what support looks like day to day, than have you apply on the strength of a job advert alone and find out three interviews in that it wasn't quite what you expected.

Send your CV across or drop us a message, and we'll take it from there, with an honest conversation about whether this could be a genuinely good move for you right now.