The Service & Team:
This is an exciting opportunity to play a key role in commissioning high-quality services for children in care and care leavers, supporting the delivery of Cornwall’s Better Homes sufficiency strategy.
Working within the Together for Families directorate, you will contribute to shaping and delivering high-quality, sustainable services that enable children and young people to live in safe, stable and nurturing homes, as close to their communities as possible.
The successful candidate will work closely with social care colleagues, including social workers, NHS Colleagues and People commissioning, building strong and effective relationships to ensure commissioning activity is fully aligned with operational practice, best value for money and placement decision-making.
The Role:
As Commissioning Officer, you will play a central role in implementing Cornwall Council’s Better Homes sufficiency strategy, negotiating on cost to ensure best value for money and ensuring that local provision meets the needs of children and young people.
You will drive innovation in contracting and market development, supporting the creation of a diverse and sustainable provider market. This includes securing local sufficiency, ensuring best value, and improving outcomes through evidence-led and outcome-focused commissioning.
The role holder will undertake analysis, planning, delivery and review—using data, insight and feedback to develop market intelligence that shapes service design. You will support the development of performance frameworks that set clear expectations for quality, safeguarding and impact, while supporting continuous improvement across services.
A key aspect of the role is building strong collaborative relationships with operational colleagues to ensure a shared understanding of need and a coordinated approach to placements and support. Through this, you will help reduce reliance on out-of-area placements and strengthen local provision in a cost-effective manner. You will use a bench-marking methodology to ensure placement costs are value for money and based on the needs of the child or young person.
You will also work in partnership with colleagues across health, education and the voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector to develop integrated pathways of support. The role requires proactive cost negotiation and close working with providers to foster innovation and resilience in the market.
You will manage, review, negotiate and monitor placements, ensuring compliance with governance and procurement frameworks while maintaining a strong focus on quality assurance, cost, performance and outcomes. This includes monitoring service delivery, bench-marking performance and driving continuous improvement to ensure services deliver meaningful impact and value for money.
You will represent the Council at local and regional forums, contribute to system-wide improvement and respond to emerging pressures and policy developments. Through your work, you will help ensure children in care and care leavers in Cornwall are supported to thrive, achieve stability and independence, and experience the best possible outcomes.
This is a public/customer-facing role, where the statutory English language requirement for public sector workers applies.
This position will be subject to an enhanced criminal record disclosure check.
Working Pattern:
Monday - Friday full-time (37 hours per week) hybrid working from home and the office
What you’ll need to succeed:
- Strong experience in commissioning, procurement or contract management within children’s services or a related field
- A thorough understanding of the needs of children in care and care leavers
- Experience of leading across the commissioning cycle, negotiating costs and performance management
- Strong analytical skills, with the ability to use data and insight to inform decision-making and service improvement
- Excellent relationship-building and partnership-working skills, with the ability to influence across internal and external operational and strategic settings
- Knowledge of safeguarding, quality assurance and regulatory requirements within children’s services
- A proactive, innovative and solution-focused approach to challenges
Cornwall Council’s ambition is to be an employer of choice, a high performing Council and a learning organisation. We commit to providing a reward and benefits package to attract, motivate and reward our employees. We offer a range of flexible working options to our staff. This helps provide our employees with a greater work/life balance. Whilst still ensuring that service needs are met.
Our core employee rewards and benefits include:
- a competitive salary.
- a defined benefit pension scheme, based on your career average earnings. This includes the option for extra voluntary contributions
- a generous annual leave entitlement with the potential to purchase additional leave.
- a national award-winning employee health and wellbeing programme
Employee benefits scheme giving employees access to a wide range of discounts to local and national goods and services
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Additional Information:
Cornwall Council is unable to offer visa sponsorship or transfer existing sponsorship for this role.
We recommend saving a copy of this to refer to if you are invited to an interview.
For more information or an informal chat about the role please contact Michaela Kerridge
[email protected]
Application Process
We will be assessing the information you provide in your supporting statement to understand how your knowledge, skills and experience meet the requirements of the role. You should upload a supporting statement that clearly addresses each of the following points. Do not upload any additional information as this will not be reviewed as part of hte shortlisting process.
- Please provide details of how you have successfully worked with others in order to negotiate costs to achieve organisational aims and objectives
- Please demonstrate your ability to work effectively and imaginatively under pressure and within limited timescales and with limited resources
- Please demonstrate your ability to liaise appropriately with all levels of professional staff within own department and externally
- Please provide details re your ability and proficiency (beginner, intermediate or advanced) at using the following Windows applications: Outlook, Word, Excel
- The role requires a good level of English and Maths. Please provide details of qualifications or equivalent experience.
Please note that applications cannot be edited after they have been submitted, please contact [email protected] if you have any queries or require assistance with your application.
Existing employees must apply using their Cornwall Council email address through the Opportunity Marketplace on Oracle.
