Role Responsibility
Business Support Officer (KSC)
Integrated Childrens Services Early Help Unit
Base: Brook House, Whitstable
About the service
Integrated Childrens Services brings together teams across Early Help, Childrens Social Work and partner agencies to support children, young people and families from prebirth to age 25. The service focuses on early intervention, coordinated working and delivering the right help at the right time to prevent needs from escalating and to improve outcomes for families.
Early Help is a core part of this offer, working proactively with families where there are emerging or multiple challenges. Early Help teams work closely with partners and alongside Childrens Social Work through clear stepup and stepdown pathways, helping ensure continuity, consistency and timely responses. This joinedup approach relies on strong operational systems, clear communication and effective business support.
About the role
As a Business Support Officer (KSC), you will play an important operational role within Integrated Childrens Services, supporting managers and practitioners to deliver effective services. You will provide a wide range of administrative, coordination and business support tasks that help keep the service running smoothly and efficiently on a daytoday basis.
The role requires excellent organisation and communication skills, with the ability to manage competing priorities and respond to urgent requests and deadlines. You will act as a first point of contact for professionals, partners and members of the public, manage information across digital systems, produce accurate and professional documents, coordinate meetings using technology, and ensure records and data are kept up to date. You will also support business processes such as systems access, equipment setup and financial or procurement activity.
This is a varied and sometimes demanding role, suited to someone with a calm, methodical approach who is confident working on their own initiative while contributing positively as part of a wider team. Your work will directly support practitioners to focus on delivering highquality help for children and families.
Why work in Business Support?
Business Support is a vital part of Integrated Childrens Services. Business Support Officers provide the operational, digital and organisational foundations that enable frontline services to function effectively, safely and consistently. From managing systems and data to coordinating activity and supporting teams to work efficiently, Business Support plays a key role in how services deliver and improve.
This is a role for people who enjoy the administrative and operational side of service delivery working with systems, processes and information to keep services on track. As the service continues to evolve, Business Support remains central to developing smarter, more digitally enabled ways of working, offering variety, challenge and the opportunity to build strong, transferable skills.
About you
You will have strong administrative and IT skills, including an excellent working knowledge of Microsoft Office, and be confident working across multiple systems and managing data accurately. You will be organised, reliable and able to communicate clearly while working within pressured timeframes. You will enjoy problemsolving, managing information and supporting digital ways of working in a busy service environment.
Experience of minutetaking and producing clear, accurate records of meetings would be helpful for this role, as Business Support Officers support a range of service and partnership meetings across Integrated Childrens Services. Where applicants have not previously undertaken formal minutetaking, a willingness to learn and develop this skill is essential.
The role is primarily officebased at Brook House, Whitstable, with some scope for homeworking in line with service arrangements. Flexibility is important, and occasional travel across East Kent may be required.
What we offer
In return, we offer 29 days annual leave plus bank holidays, access to the Local Government Pension Scheme, the Kent Rewards benefits package, and a strong commitment to training and professional development. While a full list of responsibilities is outlined in the job description, we place real value on aptitude, motivation and willingness to learn, and provide a comprehensive induction and ongoing support to help you develop within our modern and evolving Business Support Service.
Further Information:
This post is considered by KCC to be a customer-facing position. The Council therefore has a statutory duty under Part 7 of the Immigration Act (2016) to ensure that post holders have a command of spoken English/Welsh sufficient for the effective performance of the job requirements. The appropriate standards are set out in the Job Description/Person Specification.
This post is subject to a Basic Disclosure Application to the Disclosure and Barring Service.