Participation Practice Lead (757965)

This role leads CELCIS’s strategic approach to involvement and participation, ensuring that our work and change and improvement efforts across Scotland and beyond is driven by what matters most to those who have experienced these services first-hand.

FTE: 1 (35 hours/week)
Term: Open Contract

Change-makers sought! Do you want to help Scotland to Keep The Promise?

At CELCIS, we are driven by a powerful ambition: to create lasting, transformational change in the lives of children, young people, and families.

At the heart of this ambition is our unwavering commitment to ensuring that the voices, experiences, and rights of people with lived experience of support, care or protection services are not only heard, but understood so that these can meaningfully shape the decisions, services, and systems that affect their daily lives. And we are committed to embedding lived experience throughout CELCIS - ensuring it informs and influences our internal culture, our ways of working, and our activity, from policy and research to practice improvement and system change.

This exciting new role is central to that ambition. We’re looking for a values-led leader to join us as our Participation Practice Lead, to lead and manage our involvement and participation function.

The successful candidate will build on the strong foundations on participatory practice that have been established at CELCIS and will have an opportunity to shape the role and develop CELCIS’s work into new areas.

Leading our strategic approach to embed the voices and experiences of children and families, our Participation Practice Lead will work with our experienced, multidisciplinary teams across CELCIS, and work in partnership with organisations and the children’s services workforce across Scotland and beyond.

While this is a strategic role, it is also about sharing good practice to equip and enable colleagues and stakeholders. In this role, you’ll support the workforce and leaders to create readiness and build the confidence, skills, and culture needed to involve people with lived experience in safe, ethical, and meaningful ways. You’ll design and facilitate reflective learning spaces, co-production activities, and inclusive activities that are trauma-informed and rights-based.

We’re looking for someone who brings integrity, and deep understanding of this work, someone who has “walked the walk” in social work, youth work, or a related field, who is passionate about creating the conditions where children, young people and families are truly seen, heard, and valued.

You’ll be a trusted facilitator, a credible leader, and a passionate advocate for children’s rights and wellbeing, helping to turn insight into impact, and experience into evidence for change.

Applicants with lived experience of support, care or protection services are welcomed and valued.

Does this sound like you? Apply now.

https://www.celcis.org

This is an open-ended contract that is linked to grant funding and the continuation of the post is linked to renewal of this funding.

Formal interviews for this post will be held on Thursday, 4 December 2025.

Informal enquiries about the post can be directed to Kathleen Doyle, Head of Strategy (kathleen.doyle@strath.ac.uk).

Click here for further details.

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