JOB SUMMARY

The Department for Education (DfE) is recruiting for a creative, enthusiastic and politically savvy person to join our media team.
We are the lead department for the Government’s mission to break the link between young people’s background and their chance of success.
Every child and young person should have every opportunity to succeed, no matter who they are, where they come from, or how much their parents earn.

We are responsible for:

• Raising school standards through excellent teaching, improving attendance and wellbeing, addressing inequality including SEND provision, and ensuring access to a broad curriculum with enrichment opportunities.
• Increasing young people’s participation in courses that lead to further study and employment, improving further and higher education quality, and providing effective careers guidance.
• Helping create strong family relationships through parenting support and high-quality early education and childcare.
• Reducing emotional and physical harm to children, tackling child poverty, and relieving system pressures to enable children to learn and thrive.

JOB DESCRIPTION

The Department for Education has an exciting, diverse brief that is full of key priorities for Number 10. We are looking for a media officer to help us tell the public and media about our work to transform early years, schools, colleges, universities and children’s services in an exciting, innovative way, that drives forward the government’s Opportunity Mission.
You will be joining a busy, high-performing and inclusive communications team that is highly valued by, and works with, Ministers, special advisors and senior officials to communicate key public policy and education priorities.

You will be required to:

• Create, research, develop and draft media handling for a range of channels to promote key announcements and policies from the Department.
• Establish and maintain key relationships with journalists, keeping them across future announcements from the Department and regularly pitching ideas to them to ensure coverage.
• Develop a good understanding of the business priorities for each Ministerial portfolio and identify and flag risks and issues identified.
• Monitor and evaluate media to improve future media handling.
• Use media and audience insight to inform your approach and adapt messaging and narratives based on the audience.
• Provide advice – and constructive challenge where required – to policy teams, the Permanent Secretary, ministers, and special advisers on the communication implications of new, developing and existing policy.
• Create and implement communication strategies and integrated media campaigns that keep us on the front foot.
• Demonstrate excellent written communication skills across both reactive issues handling and proactive media products to ensure appropriate content, messaging, tone and consistency in media communication.
• Represent the DfE in cross-government meetings, and work with external stakeholders to gain insight, to influence where necessary, to suggest joint initiatives where appropriate and to contribute to the existing or proposed initiatives of others.
• Participate in the out-of-hours duty rota providing an on-call service to members of the media.

TECHNICAL SKILLS

We’ll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• GCS - Insight: Press and Media
• GCS - Implementation: Press and Media
• GCS - Ideas: Press and Media
• GCS - Impact: Press and Media

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

• GCS - Insight: Press and Media
• GCS - Implementation: Press and Media
• GCS - Ideas: Press and Media
• GCS - Impact: Press and Media
  As part of the interview process, we will also require a written assessment in which you’ll be assessed against the Delivering at Pace behaviour which will form part of the overall assessment. Further details will be provided to candidates upon invitation to interview.

NATIONALITY REQUIREMENTS

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements

We are responsible for:

• Raising school standards through excellent teaching, improving attendance and wellbeing, addressing inequality including SEND provision, and ensuring access to a broad curriculum with enrichment opportunities.
• Increasing young people’s participation in courses that lead to further study and employment, improving further and higher education quality, and providing effective careers guidance.
• Helping create strong family relationships through parenting support and high-quality early education and childcare.
• Reducing emotional and physical harm to children, tackling child poverty, and relieving system pressures to enable children to learn and thrive