Child Maintenance Service: Advice and Guidance Team

**Details**:
**Reference number**:

- 370645**Salary**:

- £35,711 - £36,545**Job grade**:

- Higher Executive Officer**Contract type**:

- Permanent**Business area**:

- DWP - Service Excellence - Child Maintenance Group**Type of role**:

- Operational Delivery**Working pattern**:

- Flexible working, Full-time, Job share, Part-time**Number of jobs available**:

- 1Contents

Location

About the job

**Benefits**:
Things you need to know

Location
- Newcastle-upon-TyneAbout the job

**Job summary**:

- Family separation is never easy. The Child Maintenance Service (CMS) helps parents, who are unable to make a private financial agreement in support of their child(ren)’s living costs, ensure and at times enforce, the legal responsibility to provide financial support. Our mission is to ‘get money to children’ because it makes a real difference to children’s lives. Child Maintenance Service is not only undergoing a significant period of change as we drive forward our transformation agenda, but in tandem, we continue to deliver a politically significant and fundamentally crucial service to millions of separated families around the country who depend upon the work we do. Our story over the last two years is one of impressive progress and improvement. Despite the progress we’ve made, we are unashamedly ambitious about what more we can achieve and the difference we can make for the families who need us. Child Maintenance Service is an amazing place to work. Walk into any one of our service centres and you will be overwhelmed by the passion and commitment that our people have for supporting our customers.**Job description**:
Advice and Guidance provide centralised assistance across all areas of CMS for case specific enquiries that cannot be resolved on an instructional, policy or legislative basis.

The job holder will lead and manage the Advice and Guidance team to provide Child Maintenance case specific legislative policy advice to operational colleagues where the facts of the case are not covered in either the Instructions or Child Maintenance Decision Making Guide (CM DMG).

Responsibilities include:

- Provide effective leadership, being emotionally aware, enabling the team to be innovative, adaptable and flexible. Manage and develop your team, by providing a clear focus on priorities and empowering your people to succeed by creating an inclusive working environment, promoting good decision making and problem solving.
- Coach and support the team on complex issues, ensuring knowledge sharing and upskilling.
- General team management responsibilities.
- Promote adherence to relevant policies, operational instructions, regulations and legislation.
- Encourage colleague to colleague support to resolve enquiries. Ensuring an environment where sharing honest and constructive feedback is standard practice.
- Drive engagement through daily team meetings to review team goals, share and discuss concerns and maintain team spirit in hybrid working environment.
- Completing accuracy checks on completed work to ensure accuracy and consistency and identify areas for improvement.
- Identifying shortfalls in Decision Making Guidance and Operational Instructions. Researching issues to gather information across departmental products and law and drafting recommendations for improvements, escalating to Policy, Decision Making and Appeals (DMA) or Single View Of Change (SVOC) for review. Engaging with these areas to move issue forward, challenging where appropriate to deliver improvements.
- Identify and escalate concerns that could cause reputational damage to the department. Liaise with Policy for legal consideration and potential press office involvement.
- Provide formal quality review through analysis of documents and by attending workshops to ensure consistency against policy / legislation.

Please note:

- Some travel to other CMS sites may be required.
- You must be able to work a minimum of 34 hours.

**Person specification**:
**Essential Criteria**
- Strong and effective remote leadership experience, a confident decision maker, proactively managing team performance, demonstrating firm and fair approach to people management responsibilities whilst supporting development needs of themselves and others.
- Effective and confident communicator - both orally and in writing, with an ability to communicate with clarity, providing clear direction, owning difficult messages, inspiring, securing commitment and showing genuine care for colleagues and teams.
- Ability to work collaboratively and build trusting relationships and credibility with a range of colleagues and stakeholders across DWP teams, through effective collaboration and working partnerships to generate commitment to goals and gain buy in, demonstrating strong engagement skills.

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

- Leadership
- Communicating and Influencing
- Working Together
- Making Effective Decisions