Executive Assistant - OCSAU

Job summary

As an Executive Assistant in the CPS Organised Child Sexual Abuse Unit (OCSAU), you are responsible for providing proactive administrative support to senior leaders, including Chief Crown Prosecutors, Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutors and Heads of Area Operations, ensuring they are fully prepared to carry out their day-to-day duties through effective inbox and diary management and the completion of general administrative tasks.

You build and maintain effective relationships with CPS teams, colleagues across the organisation and external stakeholders in order to provide support to senior leaders, and are expected to keep up to date with local and national issues affecting CPS-wide priorities.

You provide advice to senior leaders on the protocols and approaches taken to a range of organisational and procedural issues.

You act as the main liaison point for senior leaders and, where required, their teams, with other government departments, agencies, and other external organisations and the public.

The Crown Prosecution Service is based in England and Wales. If you’re applying for this role and live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you must let us know when accepting this offer as you need permission to work from your home address if hybrid working is part of your role. There’s no guarantee that we will grant this approval.

You must be aged 18 or over at the point of starting in this role. The expected start date is approximately 8–12 weeks after the application closing date. You are expected to commence employment as soon as possible following the expiry of your notice period. Requests for significantly later start dates may not be accommodated.

As part of this role, travel across England and Wales may be required to support the senior leaders.

This role is being offered on a temporary basis with the possibility of extension or permanency. This is not guaranteed and would be subject to organisational needs and made at the discretion of the CPS.

Job description

Your roles and responsibilities

• Ensuring that the senior leaders' diaries are managed in line with organisational and local priorities, while supporting their well-being.
• Ensuring that the senior leaders' inboxes and correspondence, and team mailbox, is managed, ensuring prioritisation of activity, appropriate and timely action to resolve issues, responding to administrative enquiries, and supporting the maintenance of business continuity.
• Providing administrative support to senior leaders, including arranging work-related travel and accommodation, submitting expense claims on their behalf, issuing formal correspondence and ensuring briefings and submissions are provided using the correct templates.
• Acting as secretariat for meetings chaired by senior leaders, or where required by a governance meeting chaired by a senior leader, including agreeing agendas, issuing invitations, commissioning and circulating papers, taking and distributing minutes where appropriate, recording actions and monitoring progress against action points.
• Supporting and facilitating external conferences hosted by senior leaders and visits from other senior CPS officials or Ministers by providing administrative support before, during and after the event.

A copy of the full job description is attached.

Person specification

There is no essential experience for this role, it is desirable that you have the below experience but this is not required to apply:

• Drafting skills
• Diary management
• Use of MS Office tools
• Experience of organising meetings

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Managing a Quality Service
• Delivering at Pace
• Communicating and Influencing
• Making Effective Decisions

We only ask for evidence of these behaviours on your application form:

• Managing a Quality Service
• Communicating and Influencing
• Making Effective Decisions

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £31,840, Crown Prosecution Service contributes £9,224 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

Join the Crown Prosecution Service and find your purpose.

Why we work for the Crown Prosecution Service

The Crown Prosecution Service is passionate about ensuring that we're a top performing organisation and a great place to work. We're a committed equal opportunities employer, creating a culture where you can bring your whole self to work, and individuality is truly appreciated.

This culture of inclusion is underpinned by our staff networks covering disability, faith and belief, LGBTQI+, race, social mobility alongside our mental health first aiders programme and wellbeing sessions.

The Crown Prosecution Service commits to offer its employees the following experience.

• You can do impactful, purposeful work that’s making a difference to your local communities.
• You are able to learn and grow, with access to the right opportunities and resources.
• We care about your wellbeing.
• We want you to feel valued, trusted and included.

We also offer the following range of benefits:

• Civil Service contributory pension of up to 28.9%
• 25 days’ leave, increasing to 30 days after 5 years
• £350 each year to spend on personal development
• lawyer training programme for all new prosecutors
• an extra privilege day to mark the King's birthday
• competitive maternity, paternity and parental leave
• flexible working including flexitime, and a family friendly approach to work
• Cycle2Work scheme, employee savings.

Diversity at the Crown Prosecution Service is about inclusion, embracing differences and ensuring our workforce truly reflects the communities we serve. We want you to feel that you belong and can thrive, whatever your background, identity or culture. As a Disability Confident employer, we're happy to support requests for reasonable adjustments and improve your recruitment experience. If you'd like any reasonable adjustments made to our recruitment process, let us know within your application or contact [email removed].

The Crown Prosecution Service has fixed rates for its Executive Officer grade – a developing rate (the starting salary) and a spot rate (the maximum salary). Applicants typically join us on the developing rate and, after completing a 15-month development period, move to the spot rate if your line manager confirms you’re performing the role to a satisfactory standard.

If you’re joining the Crown Prosecution Service on a lateral transfer from another government department, you should contact us about the impact on your salary and the implications of any time you’ve already spent at that grade before applying or accepting an employment offer. Your salary may be adjusted if your location changes when you join us. This adjustment also takes into account any existing allowances that may have previously been consolidated into your basic pay – there’s no guarantee that you can retain these when you transfer.

We want to ensure our employees can thrive at work and home and offer a range of support to achieve a balance. This includes flexibility of working hours, flexibility to support caring responsibilities and a flexible approach to deplo