For the Attention of All Applicants

For the Attention of All Applicants

Re: Senior Parent Advisor (Helpline) – London or Glasgow

For the attention of all applicants

Thank you for your interest in this vacancy. The job pack consists of the following documents:

  • Application Form*
  • Guidance Notes*
  • Job Benefit Details
  • Background Paper
  • Job Description/Person Specification
  • Equal Opportunities Monitoring Form

Closing date: 9am 23rd November

Interview date: 1st and 2nd December

It would be really helpful if you could save your documents in the following format ‘yoursurnameappform.doc’ and ‘yoursurnameequalopps.doc’. This is so that we can identify them easily in a group of applications and cut down on the processing time in sending them to the panel.

If you do not hear from us by the interview date it does mean that we have not been able to include you on our shortlist.

To apply, a completed application form and an equal opportunities form (part of this job pack) should be emailed to:

* Download from our website

Guidance Notes for Applicants

Filling in the application form

  • Please complete all parts of the application form. (CV’s may be attached but will not be accepted in place of an application form).
  • Show clearly how your experience, knowledge, skills and abilities are relevant to the requirements of the person specification.
  • Give full details of your duties in your present or most recent job. This may be a voluntary role. Do not miss out experience gained in previous jobs, but select the most relevant points. Also include details of any skills or experience gained from voluntary, committee or community work, etc.
  • Use extra sheets if necessary, noting your name and the post you have applied for at the top of each sheet.
  • Check the closing date to allow time for your application to reach us.
  • We suggest you keep a copy of your completed application.
  • Contact a Family does not usually acknowledge receipt of application forms unless specifically requested and a stamped, self-addressed envelope is enclosed. Please note that if you have not been contacted by the advertised interview date then unfortunately you have not been successful in your application.

Short-listing

When short-listing we will be looking for evidence that you have the knowledge, experience, skills and abilities to do the job as detailed in the job description and person specification. These provide the essential criteria against which your application will be assessed. The short-listing panel will not have access to the monitoring details you provide.

Disabled candidates

Contact a Family welcomes applications from disabled candidates. Please make us aware of any reasonable adjustments we may need to make for you as a disabled person and particularly address any special requirements you may have if you are invited for interview.

Equal Opportunities Monitoring

For statistical purposes please complete and return the monitoring form. As stated above the form will be detached from your application form before the short-listing exercise.

Criminal Record Declaration and the Criminal Records Bureau & Central Registered Body in Scotland Disclosure Service

The declaration must be completed. Contact a Family is an organisation that provides services for families of children with disability. You will appreciate therefore, that Contact a Family must be particularly careful to enquire into the character and background of applicants for appointments to posts that (a) involve contact with children or supervise those who have contact with children, (b) who are in positions of trust and influence and (c) who, by virtue of the authority and responsibility inherent in the post they hold, might be expected to be positively suitable to work with children. Seeking this information is not, in anyway, to reflect upon applicants integrity but is necessary to protect the vulnerable and to assist us in making safe recruitment decisions.

If you wish to check any aspect of this, further details are available on the DBS website www.dbs.gov.uk or their DBS information line 0870 909 0811. The declaration form is not part of the short-listing process

We aim to make the application process as straightforward as possible. If you have any further questions regarding your application, the Disclosure or monitoring processes, or require any further general guidance or information about Contact a Family please contact a member of our Human Resources Department 020 7608 8766 or email

Thank you for applying to Contact a Family.

Staff Benefits

Senior Parent Adviser

Salary

  • NJC Scale 30 – 32 £26,293 - £227,924 (plus inner London weighting of £3,332 where appropriate).
  • The pay range is drawn from the NJC scales appropriate to the not-for-profit sector. Incremental progress where appropriate occurs on the yearly anniversary of the start date.

Annual Leave

  • 25days a year (pro rata) plus one extra day for each completed year of service up to a maximum of 30 days after five year service. Holiday year runs January – December.

Concession Leave

  • 3 days a year for the period of office closure between Christmas and New Year. Pro rata for part time employees.

Probationary Period

  • 6 months

Hours of Work

  • 35 hours (full time). Normal office hours are observed but flexibility can be arranged in most areas of work. Family Friendly and Work Life Balance policies are observed.

Pension Scheme

  • Private pension scheme available through Friends Life.

Employee Assistance Programme

  • Covering employees and their families, a full EAP free counselling service is provided through Health Assured.

Season Ticket Loan

  • Yearly season ticket purchase available after six months satisfactory service, repayable over a ten month period.

Contact a Family

Equal Opportunity Monitoring Form

The completion of this form is voluntary, but the information it contains helps us to monitor and improve our equal opportunities policies and procedures. This sheet is removed from the application form before the short-listing process, thus ensuring that all short-listing is based on merit.

  1. Full Name:

  1. Job Applied For:

  1. Date of Birth
/
  1. Marital Status

5. Gender: Male / Female
(delete as appropriate) / 6. Nationality:

7. I belong to the following ethnic grouping: (tick as appropriate)

A: White
A1: British
A2: Irish
A3: Any other white background (please specify) / B: Of Mixed Race:
B1: White and Black Caribbean
B2: White and Black African
B3 : White and Asian
B4: Any other mixed background (please specify)
C: Asian or Asian British:
E1: Indian
E2: Pakistani
E3: Bangladeshi
E4: Any other Asian background (please specify) / D: Black or Black British:
D1: Caribbean
D2: African
D3: Any other black background (please specify)
E: Chinese: / F: Any other ethnic group (please specify)

Please note that Contact a Family is committed to making reasonable adjustments to allow candidates with a disability to meet the requirements of the role.

8. Do you consider yourself to have a disability? Yes / No

  1. Do you have any disability for which special arrangements should be made, either in an

interviewor employment situation? If so, please specifythe nature of the disability and your requirements:

10. Are you a carer of a child under the age of 18: Yes / No

I understand that this information may be stored and processed as part of the Contact a Family Monitoring of equal opportunities and I give my consent to my details to be used for this purpose.

Signed: ……………………………………………. Date: ……………………………………

Contact a Family

Senior Parent Advisor - Welfare Rights

Background paper

About Contact a Family

Contact a Family is a UK-wide registered charity, established in 1979 to support families with disabled children.

Contact a Family improves the lives of all families with disabled children. With them, we transform their lives, break down barriers and tackle disadvantage through ambitious, collaborative and innovative work. We make a real and lasting impact and are a force for positive change.

Our new strategy will work to deliver the following differences:

  • Families with disabled children will know how to get the right support.
  • Families with disabled children will be more confident to deal with the challenges they face.
  • Alleviating the financial disadvantage that families with disabled children face.
  • Making sure families with disabled children are understood, valued and included as equals in their communities and society as a whole.

Contact a Family has a head office in Central London; with offices and home-based staff and volunteers working across the UK.

Contact a Family provides a free national helpline for parents offering advice and information on the issues affecting their daily lives.We produce a range of information resources, factsheets and disseminate information through local newsletters and bulletins for parents.We give developmental advice and support to parent groups and maintain a national database of support groups. Our online medical information is an essential guide to medical conditionsand support organisations.We work extensively with parents to ensure our services and support are geared to the needs of families with disabled children.

The charity continues to grow and develop the services we provide to support parents and families.Alongside this, we have exciting new projects to build on our work on education and strengthening family relationships. Contact a Family also supports the further development of parent participation work across England, embedding parent involvement in service planning and decision making across the country.

More about this role

Contact a Family has been providing high quality advice and information to families with disabled children for many years. We act as a one-stop-shop for families to get advice and information on any aspect of their rights and entitlements. We pride ourselves on getting it right first time, every time. Our helpline and online service has the Helpline Partnership Quality Mark and is a member of Advice UK. We also offer a listening ear service to parents, who can be quite distressed when their child is first diagnosed.

We have well respected information fact sheets on all aspects of rights for families with disabled children and a website with well more than a million visitors a year. We have the largest collection of rare disorder information in the country.

This job involves a combination of telephone/online advice work – primarily answering welfare benefits enquiries by telephone, letter or email. Along with your team members you will oversee and respond to enquiries from parents via facebook and twitter. You will write, edit and proof read our publications, such as benefit guides for parents, and updating our web-based information. You will deliver welfare benefits training to the wider helpline team, and ensure the team offers face-to-face advice work at family events across the UK from time to time. Some travel and overnight stays will be required.

The sorts of things that you might find yourself doing are:

a)Advising a parent who calls our free helpline about entitlements to other benefits following an award of Disability Living Allowance

b)Writing an article on Universal Credit for use in Contact a Family’s magazine.

c)Writing and updating our parent guides on welfare benefits and associated issues.

d)Making a call back to a parent who has asked for detailed advice about how a return to work will impact on their household benefits

e)Keeping an accurate record of the enquiries you have dealt with and entering these on our database

f)Offering a listening ear to a parent whose child has been newly diagnosed

g)Running reports on monitoring data and data on parent enquiries for use in campaigns or news stories

h)Making a follow up call to a parent who received advice from us to gather information about the impact of the advice we provided.

i)Drafting reports on team activities to funders.

Contact a Family is committed to the professional development of its staff.We will provide regular supervision, appraisal, training and support. You will be part of our helpline in an exceptionally friendly and supportive team, in a great organisation!

October 2016

Contact a Family

Job Description

Job Title: / Senior Parent Adviser - Welfare rights
Responsible to: / Helpline manager
Team Membership: / Helpline
Location: / Central London office, EC1 or Glasgow office, G51
Salary: / NJC Point 30 – 32
Salary in Glasgow: £26,293 to £27,924.
Salary in Central London: £29,625 to £31,256.
Hours of work: / 35 hours per week – full time
Annual leave: / 25 days per year plus one day for each additional year served up to a maximum of 30 days (pro rata for part-time employees).
Job Purpose: / The post’s primary focus is to provide a specialist welfare rights advice service by telephone, letter, email and social media enquiries to families with disabled children. This includes initial advice to parents on our freephone helpline and providing call-back telephone appointments offering in-depth advice and welfare benefits calculations.
Main Duties: / To provide specialist benefits and tax credits advice, promoting take of welfare benefits and tax credits.
To line manage and supervise the quality of advice provided by the parent advisers (welfare rights).
To provide information, advice and support on a range of issues that affect families of disabled children by telephone, email, and social media.
To produce high quality information including parent guides, factsheets, webpages, e-newsletters and news stories on welfare benefits.
To provide support and guidance to the helpline team and colleagues in different teams in other offices.
To add all enquiry data on Contact a Family database and enter financial monitoring impact data on excel spreadsheets as required.
To evaluate, monitor and contribute to funding reports in conjunction with the Helpline Manager.
To contribute to monitoring reports on impact and outcomes for funders, and provide statistics and case studies to funders and the wider organisation as required.
To work with the policy, media and communications team to provide evidence and case studies for use in Contact a Family campaigns and media opportunities.
To oversee the day to day management of the Glasgow office, in collaboration with the helpline manager if based in Glasgow.
To occasionally to attend conferences and events.
General duties / In common with all Contact a Family staff, the post holder will be expected to work in accordance with the aims of Contact a Family and to observe the policy and procedures set out by the directors of the charity.
The post holder will be expected to act in accordance with Contact a Family's Equal Opportunity Policies.
To liaise closely with other Contact a Family offices, and volunteers in advising and supporting families.
The post holder will be expected to assist with any reasonable duty at the request of the line manager for the post.
Contact a Family’s aims and objectives are set out in our Strategy 2015 to 2020. Operating policies such as Equal Opportunities, Health and Safety and other professional matters are available. The post holder will be expected to work within these aims, policies and procedures and to ensure that they are followed by all staff with line management responsibility.

Contact a Family

Person Specification

The person appointed will be expected to have the key essential skills, knowledge and experience listed below. The items under the heading ‘desirable attributes’ will also be useful for Contact a Family and the post holder. However, candidates who do not have these desirable attributes should not be deterred from submitting an application.

Job Title: / Senior parent adviser - Welfare rights
Experience
Knowledge
Competencies /
  • At least 2 years recent experience of providing welfare rights advice, including advice to families of disabled children.
  • An in-depth and up-to-date knowledge of the benefits that can be claimed by families with a disabled child, including the ability to carry out detailed manual benefits and tax credits calculations.
  • Experience of providing advice or emotional support by telephone.
  • Experience of using website, online and social networking services (website CMS systems, Facebook, Twitter).
  • Experience of writing factsheets, leaflets and other information for a range of audiences.
  • Experience of delivering workshops and face to face advice on occasion.
  • Excellent knowledge of information and advice provision in relation to issues that may impact on families with disabled children and young people in their own right.
  • General knowledge about other help available to families with disabled children including education and health.
  • Knowledge of relevant voluntary organisations and statutory agencies who may offer assistance to families caring for a disabled child.
Accountability – Takes responsibility or own behaviour and the consequences of own actions and acts in accordance with organisational standards.
Performance management – Sets clear and challenging objectives, encourages high performance.
Communication and influence – Gives and receives information effectively, persuades others and negotiates to achieve the best possible outcomes.
Delivering results – The ability to achieve objectives and ensure high quality results.
Teamwork and collaboration – The ability to work effectively with others to achieve a shared goal.
Creativity and innovation – Displays openness to new ideas and solutions, challenging conventional thinking and finding ways to improve.
Relationship building – The ability to maintain and strengthen partnerships with others inside or outside the organisation that are of mutual benefit.

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