Business Support Officer - Building and Supporting Your Futures Teams & Child Safety and Asylum[...]

The Service

The Building and Supporting Your Future Teams and Child Safety and Asylum Team provide social work support to our children in long-term care placements, unaccompanied minors and support to our care leavers. Staff in these teams are responsible for ensuring that our statutory responsibilities for looked after children and care leavers are properly met.

The Role

Most work involves both written and oral communication to provide high quality customer care and the production of accurate and professional records, as well as the ability to multi-task and work well under pressure.

Duties will include:

Dealing with and signposting queries via email and telephone, communicating with professionals and service users daily. Booking appointments and arranging meetings. Sorting in-coming and out-going post, dealing with all correspondence in confidence. Processing purchase orders, i.e. purchasing items as required and correlation of invoices. Carrying out all necessary word processing, spreadsheets, database and presentation duties. Uploading correspondence and recording information onto caseload systems.

Facilitating the asylum unaccompanied minor\’s administration process and updating relevant systems in relation to government returns and related in-house processes and procedures. Arranging interpreters on behalf of the team. Taking minutes of more complex meetings, Safeguarding Strategy meetings and often of a sensitive and/or confidential nature.

The ideal candidate

You will need to have/be

• Experience of working in an administrative role. Ideally, have experience of working in Children’s and/or Young People’s Services.
• Able to take accurate, detailed minutes of complex meetings which will contain confidential and sensitive information.
• A customer-focus (internal and external) and be able to demonstrate consistently high standards of customer care and customer service.
• A willingness and determination to help service managers and practitioners provide an effective service and support to children and families.
• The ability to prioritise your workload and that of others as you maybe organising other diaries.
• Good attention to detail and level of accuracy and strong organisational skills, be a good team player, also able to work on own initiative
• Excellent communication skills both verbally and in writing. To have the ability to develop a good professional rapport with a variety of people. The ability to converse at ease with customers and provide advice in accurate spoken English is essential for the post
• Good awareness of Data Protection and Safeguarding Issues.
• Able to respond appropriately to enquiries from parents/carers/professionals/service users who may be anxious or emotional due to issues concerning the safeguarding and well-being of children.
• Able to demonstrate personal resilience and professionalism when exposed to explicit and emotionally challenging information, for example, in relation to child maltreatment and abuse.
• Good working knowledge of Microsoft Office, including Word, Excel, and Outlook. Have good numeracy and literacy skills.

Please see the Job profile for the full details and expectations of this role

Attendance requirements to the designated workplace for the role in line with the Hybrid Working

You will be required to work a minimum of 2 days in the office per week. Initially you will work in the office full time then transfer to hybrid working

Application process

We anonymise applications during application & shortlisting to ensure only relevant information is considered.

As part of your application we ask that you complete a personal statement, this statement is crucial and is where you must demonstrate how you meet the requirements of the job against each of the points described in the \’Who is the Person\’ points on the Job Profile using examples from your experience or transferable skills. This might be through qualifications or descriptive examples from your work / personal experience.

We are a disability confident employer and Armed Forces Covenant gold standard. More information can be found at Equality, diversity and inclusion – Careers portal

We are committed to offering an interview to all those candidates that qualify under our corporate commitments and meet the minimum criteria, however, for roles that receive a large number of applications, we will select the candidates that best meet the minimum criteria.

You will need to demonstrate that you have the Right to Work in the UK. No post will be offered without it.

About Portsmouth City Council

What we can offer you:

Portsmouth City Council is a unique organisation, committed to making a difference, and is guided by core values that set who we are as people, what we stand for, and how we act.

Read more about working at Portsmouth City Council and our benefits on our careers portal homepage: Careers Portal – Find jobs with Portsmouth City Council

Portsmouth City Council is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, and young people, and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment.

DBS Disclosure at Enhanced level will be required prior to any offer of employment and this post is exempt from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.

Every post is subject to PCC and Portsmouth Safeguarding Children Partnership safer recruitment procedures.

Should you require any support in completing the application form please contact recruit@portsmouthcc.gov.uk. or call the recruitment team on 023 92 616800

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