Project Workers – Women’s Turnaround Cheshire
Project Worker – Women’s Turnaround Services
Salary: £26,742 per year
Job Ref No: PWC042025
Hours: 2x 37 hours, 1 x 22.5 hours
Location: Warrington Gateway, 89 Sankey Street, Warrington, WA1 1SR and community venues in Halton ,Widnes and Runcorn and HMP Styal
Contract type: Fixed term until 31/03/2027
PSS in a nutshell:
At PSS, we’ve got an important job to do; and that’s to help people make the most of their lives, no matter what life throws at them. Whether you’re working directly with the people who use our services, or behind the scenes in one of our offices, every day you’ll be helping to make other people feel happier, healthier and more supported.
We’re a social enterprise or, as we like to call it – a ‘business with a heart’. This means that all the money we make goes back into finding new ways to help people. Our aim is simple; we want to help people change their lives for the better – no matter what life throws at them. We’ve got offices across Merseyside, North Wales, Lincolnshire, Manchester, Norfolk and Suffolk and the Midlands, where we’re making our stamp. Our Women’s Turnaround service is based in our head office Eleanor Rathbone House in Liverpool with outreach across Merseyside.
What’s our Women’s Turnaround service all about?
Our open-minded Women’s Turnaround team have been supporting female offenders in Merseyside since 2010. Based on the success of the service in delivering positive outcomes, Women’s Turnaround has recently expanded into Cheshire . Our team work alongside the probation service and the women to understand the multiple reasons behind their offending behaviours and find ways to reduce their likelihood of reoffending in the future. Women are given the opportunity to access a range of specialist support options from groups to one-to-one support, to remote support through PSS services and partner agencies. This holistic approach supports women with things like: managing emotions, overcoming substance misuse, support with mental health and wellbeing. Women can also be referred to partner agencies for practical support on areas such as housing and employability.
Meet Amanda
Amanda was signposted to Women’s Turnaround by the drugs service she was using after leaving prison. She met with a Women’s Turnaround project worker who carried out an assessment with her and saw she had multiple needs. Amanda was a heroin user with a child in care, she had witnessed violence, was experiencing a lot of grief and social isolation in her life.
A support plan was created alongside her project worker, and some interventions were put in place to help meet her needs. Amanda was offered counselling and trauma support for her grief as well as support for the ongoing drug use. These were both seen as significant risk factors in her potential choice to reoffend.
After 13 weeks, Amanda had fully engaged with her support plan and was drug free with the support of Turnaround and the drug and alcohol services she was using. Her project worker supports her to have unsupervised visits with her child and she is working to regain custody and have her child returned from care with the support of the service.
What you’ll do as a Women’s Turnaround project worker
You’ll join a dynamic new team to work with female offenders with complex needs, in custody for pre-release support and in the community across Cheshire , working in the main in Cheshire East area. You’ll assist with launching the service into a brand-new region and have an exciting part to play in shaping our future. As a project worker you’ll support people to turn their lives around, offering totally person-shaped support based around the unique and complex needs of every woman you work with. You’ll consider the needs of the individual, the complexity of their situation, any associated risks and offence-related issues. A commitment to treating people with dignity and respect is essential as you support people to understand their offending behaviours and reduce their chances of reoffending in the future.
You’ll take your responsibilities very seriously, focusing on:
Being a people person
- Completing assessments with women and creating detailed holistic support plans alongside them.
- Offering the people you support a range of holistic activities and interventions on a one-to-one and group basis. These will look at a wide range of pathway areas and happen in the community and in custodial settings like prisons.
- Providing practical and emotional support where needed; accompanying women to court, appointments and pre-release preparation meetings.
- Referring and signposting the people who use our service to other support options in their community.
- Offering flexibility for the people you support and travelling between locations to support them.
Keeping up a great standard
- Maintaining case records and other documentation using case management systems and contributing to the collation of data needed for quality monitoring purposes.
- Ensuring that both Local Authority and PSS Safeguarding policies, procedures and protocols are fully understood and put into practice.
- Making sure that activities and interventions follow all the relevant policies and procedures and comply with court orders and legal framework.
Supporting our service to shine
- Networking and liaising with colleagues within the probation service, the criminal justice system, prisons and elsewhere to establish and maintain strong partnership working.
- Empowering the people we support to shape our service through co-production.
What do I need for this role?
We need people who live up to our values of being: genuine, big-hearted, open-minded, determined and professional. You’ll need to be committed to supporting women and improving their life opportunities and have experience of working with women with multiple and complex needs as well as experience of working in the criminal justice system. A Level 2 Diploma in Social Care or a comparable qualification is also required in addition to experience of providing structured support to individuals.
You will also need a full, clean driver’s license.
Above all, we need someone who believes that every person should have the chance to improve their lives and will support people to achieve their hopes and dreams.
This post is exempt under schedule 9 part 1 of the Equality Act 2010.
In the event that you are offered the above position, an Enhanced Disclosure will be required.
Before you apply, we just want to let you know some key information about our selection process:
We have an equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policy, which aims to remove any kind of discrimination in employment. Our candidates are selected on merit only, which means they’ll be given equal opportunities no-matter what their age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, race, religion or beliefs might be.
Once you hit that ‘apply’ button, you’ll be taken across to an online recruitment system called Applied. Applied is the only hiring software with diversity and fairness built into every step of the process and we’re very proud to partner with them to help us give you an unbiased recruitment experience.
Applied wants to make sure its doing its job by finding out more about the socio-economic backgrounds of people applying for roles through their site. Once you register your details on the Applied site, you’ll be asked to give a bit of info about you: things like your age, gender, ethnicity, etc. You’ll also be asked questions around whether your parents went to university and whether you had free meals at school. These questions are set by Applied experts based on extensive research and expertise, and you can find out more about this here.
This information is completely anonymised, and here at PSS, we never see answers linked to a candidate’s name. The answers you give here don’t form any part of our decision-making. We only receive combined data about an applicant pool (and only when there’s enough applicants to ensure that answers can remain anonymous). We report on this data every quarter to help us find out if there’s anything in our process that harms the chances of success for candidates from minority groups and any possible steps to help improve this.
If you still prefer not to answer, that’s no problem at all – there’s also an option to select ‘prefer not to say’. The only EDI-related information that we will learn about you is if you tell us that you have any reasonable adjustments needed at any part of our process.
Your trusty candidate pack will also help you get a feel for what it’s like to work with us, find out what we’re looking for, explain the recruitment process and help you decide whether you can see yourself as a part of our amazing team. Each section is crammed with hints and tips to help you make a great application, so please take the time to give it a good read.
Please feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions about the above by emailing [email protected] or calling our team on 0151 702 5555.
We also welcome any feedback you might have about our approach so there’ll be plenty of opportunities for you to give this as part of the process.
Key dates
- Closing date – Friday 25th April 2025
View Recruitment of Ex-offenders Statement
⇒Click here to apply⇐
PSS values the importance of Diversity