​What Does a Residential Support Worker Do?

Challenging and highly rewarding, roles within residential care are hugely popular and an excellent gateway to fantastic professional training and career opportunities. Some of the benefits include:

• Excellent Training to develop your skills and experience

• Free Professional Qualifications - Your company may fully fund you to obtain Level 3, Level 4, and Level 5 in Leadership and Management qualifications. Gain these fantastic qualifications without having to fund expensive higher education/ university fees yourself.

• Promotions - Rise through the ranks as your experience and qualifications increase, with Management positions paying salaries in excess of £30,000.

• Make a Real Difference - Helping to improve the lives of our most vulnerable people can be hugely rewarding and give you great personal and professional fulfilment.

• Be Part of a Team - Roles within residential care are very sociable and will allow you to work with many like-minded individuals with similar motivations, many of whom you could form long-lasting relationships with.

The Residential Support Worker Role

Put simply, a Residential Support Worker is there to help care for people that are otherwise unable to care for themselves. This could be supporting:

• Children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, or perhaps with learning disabilities or other difficulties such as autism.

• Adults with complex needs such as learning disabilities, mental health issues, or other issues

The support you will offer will depend on the needs of the people you are supporting, and may include the following:

• Social support - Offering company and showing an interest in them as an individual, as well as promoting their relationships with others

• Emotional support - Many service users will have come from distressing backgrounds and will need help to regulate and manage their emotions.

• Behavioural support - Confidently managing and de-escalating challenging behaviours in a calm and composed manner

• Practical support - Taking service users to school, appointments, or activities.

• Physical Care - If working with physically vulnerable people, they may need your help with personal care (toileting, cleaning etc), feeding or general assistance in moving.

• Promoting independence - Encouraging them to develop their life skills. For example assisting with shopping, paying bills or to travel on public services.

• Domestic support within the home - Maintaining the home to a good clean level. This may include cooking and cleaning.

Residential Support Worker Hours / Rotas

Though people with difficulties within residential care need to have access to support 24/7 (including weekends and bank holiday periods), rotas are split fairly amongst staff to ensure you receive adequate time off every week.

Shift patterns vary between different care services but generally consist of any combination of Early (e.g. 8am-3pm), Late (e.g. 2pm-10pm) and Long Day (e.g. 8am-10pm) shifts. Many shifts also include Sleep Ins (where you are paid additional money to sleep on site overnight in case of emergencies).

Additionally, you could choose to form part of Waking Night team, supporting service users overnight with shifts such as 10pm-8am. If working these shift patterns doesn’t work for you, you could join the Peters Dean Care team of Flexible Workers and take control of your own rota.

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Amazing Career Opportunities

Good care services recognise and develop top talent when they see it, so while roles may often start at lower pay rates, the opportunity for you to develop your earnings and take on senior responsibilities are vast. Staff often progress quickly, all the way from Support Worker to Senior Support Worker, Deputy Manager/Team Leader and Manager level purely though performance and work-based qualifications that are fully funded by your employer, with no need to pay hefty university or college fees.

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Interested to learn more? Contact us at Peters Dean Care for an initial, no obligation conversation or Apply Now to one our vacancies here

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