Ministry of Justice

Job title: HEO Engagement Advisor

Directorate: Strategy, Analysis and Change

Workstream: User Inclusion Team

About us

HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) is responsible for the administration of criminal, civil and family courts and tribunals in England and Wales. Our roles support our service users and colleagues, where people and businesses access potentially life-changing justice.  We’re looking for individuals who are committed to public service and want to make a difference in people’s lives in delivering justice. If you’re interested in developing a career with a real purpose, please apply.

About the role

The Strategy and User Insight division drives HMCTS’ direction and decision-making. We do this by using our collective expertise to develop HMCTS priorities which have users at heart.

This is done through:

• Strategy and planning that supports the organisation’s vision and purpose
• Using insight and evidence to guide service delivery and continuous improvement, helping enable access to justice for all
• Providing a range of expertise including on innovation, inclusion, workforce planning and evaluation

The Team:

This role sits within the User Inclusion Team. The purpose of this team is to improve Access to Justice by enabling HMCTS to design and deliver inclusive services and support for vulnerable users.  We do this through:

• Providing a cross jurisdictional strategy to designing and delivering inclusive services and support for users.
• Designing, testing and iterating solutions to remove access to justice barriers and meet user support needs.
• Facilitating a forum for public user engagement, to help HMCTS improve our services (strategy, design and delivery) by understanding the experiences that public users have.
• Providing SME Advice on inclusion, vulnerability and equality.

The Role:

This role holder will support the User Strategy & Engagement Lead in delivering HMCTS public user engagement. Engagement with public user representatives enables us to hear the voices of our users who are most likely to feel the impact of our services. Our engagement takes place at a strategic HMCTS wide perspective and at a jurisdiction level aiming to facilitate effective co-design of our services. We work with a mix of organisations who provide advice or support for those who use the courts and tribunal services. This involves the delivery of a total of 5 public user engagement groups.  The insight we gain through this engagement directly informs the development of HMCTS services. The job holder will lead on the delivery of 2 – 3 of the public engagement groups. They will be the main point of contact for their groups and maintain effective working relationships with relevant HMCTS teams to support, champion and embed public engagement and best practice across the whole range of HMCTS services and operations.  The role holder will have regular contact with internal senior colleagues and external stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities:

We are looking for a highly motivated individual whose responsibilities will include:

Secretariat of HMCTS Public Engagement Groups

• Secretariate for 2 – 3 HMCTS public user engagement groups. This includes:
• Collation of meeting papers
• Meeting logistics
• Briefing meeting chairs
• Accurate drafting and review of meeting minutes

Development of Engagement sessions and material

• Working across HMCTS to understand where teams should be engaging with public users and help them to develop the appropriate engagement content.
• Scoping out engagement items that would be of interest to group members and presenting these to engagement group Chairs for approval.
• Support teams across HMCTS to develop appropriate and high-quality engagement material that can be shared to external stakeholders.

To develop and maintain a feedback loop for engagement insights

• To liaise with colleagues and external stakeholders to follow up on actions and recommendations from meetings and to understand and track the impact of engagement.
• Work to communicate the feedback from stakeholder insights to HMCTS services, jurisdictional boards and MoJ policy.
• To develop proposals for continuous improvement of the groups, lead on reviewing the model when required and summarise feedback for senior colleagues.

Support and promote one-off stakeholder engagement

• Organise bespoke engagements groups to enable HMCTS colleagues to carry out timely engagement with external stakeholders.
• Organising meetings with external stakeholders and senior HMCTS colleagues, providing briefings as needed.
• to undertake engagement with our stakeholders outside of formal meetings.

Who are we looking for? (Person Specification)

The ideal candidate for this position should demonstrate:

Essential

• Experience in managing internal and external stakeholder relationships.
• Good interpersonal and written communication skills, particular around being able to tailor content to be appropriate for different stakeholder groups.
• Strong administrative and organisational skills, with excellent attention to detail.
• Ability to manage changing and conflicting deadlines.
• Experience in working across teams to deliver a project or programme of work.
• Strong Word, Excel and PowerPoint skills.
• A passion to improve the accessibility of HMCTS services.

Desirable

The below criteria are desirable only. These will not be assessed throughout the recruitment process but will be used in the event of tied scores between candidates.

• Experience working as a part of a secretariat.
• Experience in co-production or co-design approaches that involve service users in the design of services.
• Experience in organising events or large meeting, virtually and face to face
• Knowledge or experience of the courts or tribunal services, or wider justice landscape.

How to apply

Application Stage

Please submit:

·         An anonymised CV. Please ensure your CV is uploaded in a simple format to prevent any formatting issues when it's downloaded or reviewed.

Your CV should:

• Be succinct and clear.
• Be factually accurate – You must ensure that any evidence submitted as part of your application is truthful and factually accurate. Please note that plagiarism can include presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own.
• Include your qualifications, highlighting any modules or accreditation relevant to the role.
• Include your relevant experience, providing dates.
• Provide details – we are interested in how your knowledge, skills, and experience demonstrate the capabilities we are looking for in this role.
• Statement of suitability demonstrating how you meet the essential criteria (up to 750 words).

Your Statement of Suitability should be no more than 750 words and should give us real life examples of how your skills and experience match those needed for this role. Consider addressing particular points in the person specification requirements and key responsibilities. We recommend following the STAR format.

You must ensure that any evidence submitted as part of your application is truthful and factually accurate. Please note that plagiarism can include presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own. 

Interview Stage

If successful at sift, you will be invited to attend a remote interview, via Microsoft teams. During your interview, you will be assessed against the following Civil Service Success Profiles which will include:

Questions in relation to the following Civil Service behaviours:

• Communicating and Influencing
• Managing a quality service
• Working together

Strengths will also be assessed however these are not shared in advance.

Further details

Working pattern

Full time only - This is a full-time position only due to the nature of the role.

Opportunities for development

HMCTS is committed to staff development and offers an extensive range of training and development opportunities.

About our benefits

We reward our people for their hard work and commitment. We have a number of family

friendly and flexible working polices that will help you achieve a healthy work-life balance. In addition, we offer a range of employee benefits which include generous annual leave, a highly competitive contributory pension scheme, childcare benefits, season ticket and bicycle loans.

Proud to Serve. Proud to keep justice going.