The Qualities of a Placements Officer

When the local authority sends information to us about a child in care who needs a foster family, a placements officer will carefully go through each of the registered foster families who currently don’t have a placement to decide on the best match. This is a vital role in ensuring a placement works well for both the child/young person and the foster carer.

To be a placements officer, there are a combination of qualities we look for.

Being prepared
You never know which way your day is going to take you. On any day you can receive up to 60 referrals  which require your immediate attention, to read, consider and evaluate the young person’s needs, our carer availability and to respond to and record the information received.

Some referrals require a placement in an emergency situation, so you have to be prepared to leap into action, making all the necessary calls to our social work team, our foster carers and our local authority colleagues in an attempt to put forward a safe, well matched offer for consideration.

Persistence
We appreciate how busy everyone is and we know that sometimes people benefit from a gentle reminder. This might be for an update from a local authority social worker, chasing additional information about the particular needs of a young person or offering some more information about our services to help.

Sharing is caring
Our role is to share information in a timely and effective way, promoting the skills and experiences of our wonderful foster carers, sourcing more information about young people’s needs and supporting the team with preplacement meetings to gather everyone together to find out more.

Teamwork
The role of a placements officer requires working with a range of different professionals and ensuring that you’re available to support one another; from our admin team, our marketing and recruitment team, our social workers to our management team. We offer essential information about what local authorities are looking for to help build our agency and to be able to offer a variety of different placement types to help as many children and young people as we can.

Celebrating the hard work
Making a placement is the best feeling ever! Knowing that you have played a part of matching foster carers to help care, support and protect a young person when they need it the most is addictive and makes our role so worthwhile. To hear how a young person has progressed and developed in placement is just amazing.

Sarah James, Area Placements Manager

Thank you to Sarah James, our placements area manager, for explaining so well about the qualities needed to become a placements officer. If you’d like to become part of the amazing team here at Capstone Foster Care to help more children and young people to have a safe and loving home, take a look at our current vacancies.