Soka Partners
Head of Care
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Head of Care
Location: National (Extensive UK travel required)
Salary: £65k + Car allowance + Benefits
An exciting opportunity has arisen for an experienced and strategic care leader to join a leading specialist education and care provider as Head of Care.
This is a senior leadership role responsible for shaping and leading high-quality care services across a diverse portfolio of specialist settings. You will play a pivotal role in ensuring outstanding, person-centred care, driving operational excellence, maintaining regulatory compliance, and embedding a culture of continuous improvement.
Working closely with executive leaders and multidisciplinary teams, you will influence strategic direction while ensuring the highest standards of care, safeguarding, governance, and service delivery.
The Opportunity
As Head of Care, you will provide strategic and operational leadership across multiple specialist education and residential services, supporting children and young people with complex needs.
- Lead the development of innovative care practices
- Oversee quality assurance and compliance
- Drive workforce development
- Ensure services consistently deliver exceptional outcomes for those they support
This role offers the opportunity to make a genuine impact at organisational level while leading experienced teams through growth, transformation, and continuous improvement.
Key Responsibilities
- Develop and deliver a strategic vision for care services across a national portfolio.
- Lead the integration of care and education to ensure holistic, person-centred support.
- Drive continuous improvement through robust quality assurance, governance, and performance frameworks.
- Ensure all services remain inspection-ready and fully compliant with relevant regulatory standards, safeguarding legislation, and best practice.
- Provide strategic oversight of clinical governance, complex care provision, and delegated healthcare practices.
- Lead service development initiatives, embracing innovation and digital solutions to enhance quality and operational efficiency.
- Oversee safeguarding, risk management, behavioural support, and safe care practices across all services.
- Provide leadership to multidisciplinary teams, promoting high performance, accountability, and professional development.
- Support workforce planning, recruitment, retention, and succession planning across care services.
- Work collaboratively with education leaders, healthcare professionals, commissioners, families, and external partners to improve outcomes.
- Monitor organisational performance through data, reporting, and quality metrics, using insight to inform strategic decision-making.
- Represent the organisation during inspections, partnership meetings, and external stakeholder engagements.
- Travel extensively across the UK to support services within the portfolio.
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About You
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We're looking for an inspirational leader with significant experience operating at senior level within specialist care, education, or residential services.
You will bring:
- Proven experience leading large-scale, multi-site care operations.
- A strong understanding of care quality, safeguarding, governance, and regulatory compliance.
- Experience delivering high-quality services for individuals with complex health and care needs.
- Demonstrable success leading multidisciplinary teams through change and service improvement.
- Excellent strategic planning, operational leadership, and stakeholder management skills.
- Strong commercial awareness and experience managing performance through data and quality metrics.
- The ability to inspire teams, build positive cultures, and drive continuous improvement.
- A willingness to travel nationally on a regular basis.
Why Apply?
This is an outstanding opportunity to join a progressive organisation committed to delivering exceptional care and education for children and young people with complex needs.
- You'll have the autonomy to shape strategy, influence organisational direction, lead high-performing teams, and make a lasting difference to the lives of those who rely on specialist care and support.
- If you're an ambitious senior care leader looking for your next challenge, we'd love to hear from you.
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