Centre for Adults’ Social Care – Advice, Information and Dispute Resolution

Project Overview

CASCAIDr is an online specialist advice charity, expert in the legal principles that are supposed to govern how adult social services operate in England and Wales, and which intertwine with rights to NHS services.

There’s no ‘appeal’ against social work or clinical decisions in these sectors – only complaints and litigation, but law is still relevant to those processes, and that’s what they help to explain. 

About the Role 

The roles encompass a range of tasks and responsibilites:
a) talking to people on our Voice Over Internet phone and getting their stories/issue out of those who cannot cope with the referral form or operate online;
b) being part of the charity’s main Triage team gutting the basics of people's issues from referral forms, and identifying who needs to say more, and who is in or out of scope, once a you have developed an understanding of community care law;
c) legal research and drafting of preliminary advice (the second part of our Triage service) and drafting instructions to counsel, to whom we can go, directly;
d) research and writing tasks to service our outreach and awareness raising work (fortnightly specialist Round-Up);
e) some writing up of case reports and Local Government Ombudsmen reports for our site.

This is a great opportunity for a student drawn to public law and welfare law – to round out knowledge to equip them for a career in advice work – housing, benefits etc. Community care law is only able to be learned otherwise on paid for courses, in a legal aid firm or in a local authority training seat, or on the job in a pupillage. 

Training and Supervision Provided:

CAJ provides training on Working with Vulnerable Clients. 

CASCAIDr will provide training on community care law from their own resources. All triage work will be supervised and done on behalf of CASCAIDr. 

IT training will be provided on how to access the systems all relevent work systems (Google Workspace, Trello, Microsoft Teams, Actionstep). 

Eligibility and How to Apply: 

Applications for this opportunity are now closed.