Legal, Risk and Governance Officer

Contract: Full-time, permanent

The role is required to be onsite, though there is flexibility to work from home during the school holidays.

Benefits of working at Westminster include:

• Free access to the School’s leisure facilities, including a fitness gym (restricted hours)
• Cycle to Work Scheme and season ticket loans following completion of our standard probation period
• Private medical insurance (opt in)
• Discretionary Christmas shutdown period
• Free school meals are also available when on-site during working hours for the role.

The closing date for this role is midday on Wednesday 22nd September 2026. Interviews will take place in-person shortly after the closing date.

Westminster School is seeking an astute and detail-orientated Legal, Risk & Governance Officer to provide essential administrative and operational support to the Head of Legal, Risk and Assurance (HLRA) and the Clerk to the Governing Body (GB). This role supports with ensuring effective management of legal compliance, risk frameworks, governance processes, and insurance matters, contributing to the School’s overall assurance and regulatory obligations.

Reporting to the HLRA, the role involves maintaining a number of databases, monitoring compliance deadlines, and supporting various legal functions. In risk management, the role helps to maintain the central Risk Register, liaise with risk owners, track mitigation actions, and support internal audits and business continuity planning. The role also includes coordinating insurance renewals and claims, ensuring compliance with policy requirements, and assisting with data protection duties such as responding to subject access requests, maintaining breach logs, and reviewing data protection documents such as DPIAs and LIAs. Additionally, this role supports the governance function of the School by assisting the Clerk to the GB with scheduling and administering Governing Body and Committee meetings, managing governor records, and facilitating governor inductions, events, and cyclical visits.

This role may be of benefit to a recent graduate looking to gain legal and/or compliance experience, though this is not essential. The successful applicant is expected to be highly organised with a willingness to learn. They will be expected to develop and improve stakeholder relationships, particularly with the Governing Body and Senior Management. A high degree of professionalism is therefore required.

Key Responsibilities

Support to the Head of Legal, Risk and Assurance (HLRA)

• Maintaining the contracts and properties databases as well as filing relevant correspondence;
• Using the contracts database, provide reports on material contracts;
• Monitoring compliance with key dates, including statutory deadlines, contract and policy renewals etc. to ensure HLRA is aware of the need to review in good time;
• Assisting with initial drafts of documents such as leases, licences, loan agreements, debt letters and policies;
• Assisting with all legal compliance and other tasks to support the legal and compliance function, as required, including research tasks, securing Governor availability to sign legal documents, and assisting with the signing process.

Supporting the HLRA with:

• Maintaining the central Risk Register and associated assurance framework;
• Liaising with risk owners to help them develop and maintain their departmental risk registers;
• Implementing and reviewing of mitigation actions;
• Reviewing around risk scoring and risk appetite;
• Reporting on organisational risks to the leadership teams and Governors;
• Developing a rolling schedule of auditing School, fundraising, commercial and operational procedures, practices, and documents to identify possible weaknesses;
• Legislative and policy compliance, including monitoring changes in legislation that may impact the School;
• Providing administration around internal audits conducted, reviewing findings with the leaders of the areas being reviewed and monitoring completion of action plans to address the findings;
• Assisting the HLRA with the Business Continuity framework, liaising with other teams to help ensure effective plans are in place to manage a crisis or compliance violation and to ensure appropriate improvement activity is identified;
• Assisting the development of an Incident Management and reporting framework.

Insurance

Assisting the HLRA with:

• The annual insurance renewal process;
• Providing administration of ongoing insurance matters and claims, liaising with relevant staff, our broker and insurers;
• Liaising with staff to help ensure compliance with insurance requirements;
• Co-ordinating with external insurance partners as required.

Data Protection

Assisting the HLRA with data protection matters including:

• Responding to data subject right requests, including Subject Access, Erasure etc;
• Maintaining the data breach and Subject Access Request log;
• Leading on data protection impact assessments (DPIAs), legitimate interest assessments (LIAs) and maintaining the associated logs;
• Responding to data protection queries, liaising with the external Data Protection Officer (DPO) as required;
• Helping to establish and maintain a comprehensive asset register and risk maturity framework;
• Assisting with ongoing legislative compliance and updates to internal policies and notices;
• Ensuring that staff and Governors receive data protection training on a rolling schedule, in liaison with the external DPO.

Other tasks

• Providing administrative support on UKVI matters, as required;
• Maintaining a log of the School’s intellectual property (IP) and licenses, e.g. music licenses;
• Assisting with the review of policies under HLRA ownership, including assisting with review reminders of policies under the Bursar & COO ownership;
• Supporting the preparation of reports for submission to the Audit, Risk and Compliance committee that fall under the HLRA;
• Providing diary management for the HLRA, arranging and administrating meetings internal and external;
• Any other assistance as the HLRA may reasonably require.

Support to Clerk to the Governing Body (GB)

Providing administrative support for Board Committee and GB Meetings, including:

• Preparing, updating and issuing the annual meetings calendar;
• Issuing termly calendar invites for relevant meetings;
• Arranging logistics for these meetings (e.g. venue, IT and catering);
• Collating and circulating papers on the governors’ portal, Board Intelligence (BI);
• Supporting the Clerk on the day of the meeting.

Arranging other meetings involving governors as required, including:

• New governor induction and visits;
• Governor and Chair’s dinners.

Other responsibilities as required, including:

• Supporting the Clerk in the maintenance of governor records, working with HR to ensure compliance;
• Keeping governors informed of School events and handling bookings, working with the school booking team and system;
• Daily diary management – arranging and administrating meetings internal and external;
• Supporting with the annual SORP declarations process;
• Any other assistance as the Clerk may reasonably require.

Hours of work

09:00 - 17:00, Monday to Friday with an hour unpaid lunchbreak. Start and end times can be flexible and can be discussed at interview.