Job Purpose

Working Families is the UK’s work-life balance charity. Our mission is to remove the barriers that people with caring responsibilities face in the workplace.

We provide free legal advice to parents and carers on their rights at work. We give employers the tools they need to support their employees while creating a flexible, high-performing workforce. And we advocate on behalf of the UK’s 13 million working parents, influencing policy through campaigns informed by ground-breaking research.

Working Families’ legal advice services (LAS) team works at the forefront of access to justice for parents and carers at work. Many parents and carers find that the ‘system’ – including employers’ approaches to flexible working, available in-work benefits, leave and entitlement to time off – doesn’t allow them to work and care and thrive. We want to change that.   

We run a free legal email and telephone helpline providing bespoke advice to thousands of parents and carers on their rights at work every year. Our comprehensive online advice pages are regularly visited by over 1,000,000 people every year. The advice we provide ranges from pregnancy and sex discrimination and unfair dismissals,  to negotiating flexible working, dealing with childcare emergencies, advice on maternity, paternity, adoption and shared parental leave and pay and redundancy. We also have specialist in-work benefits advisors in the team. 

Our team won the Law Society's In House Team of the Year Excellence in Law Award in 2021 for our work during the pandemic.  We also advised on the impact of Covid-19 during the pandemic, when we experienced a six-fold increase in the demand for our service.

The purpose of your role within the legal advice team would be to help equip the UK’s 13 million parents and carers with the tools they need to thrive in a system that often prevents them from doing so. If you have a strong commitment to justice, awareness of issues that working parents and carers face and want to join a small team of dedicated advisers in supporting the UK’s parents and carers, we want to hear from you.  

To give you a better picture of our work during the pandemic, and the difference you can make, see our six months of COVID impact report. 

Role Overview

We are looking for an employment rights adviser to join our Legal Advice Service. Ideally, we are looking for an employment lawyer or an experienced employment rights adviser. The role could also suit someone who is not legally qualified but can demonstrate exceptional ability to grasp complex legal issues, and who has experience in advising on employment rights.

We think flexible working should be the norm, not the exception and this role can be done flexibly. The number of hours worked each week will need to be consistent, and we need applicants who can work a minimum of 22.5 hours each week. We do not require recent employment law experience and actively encourage those people to apply who may have had career breaks or time out of the workforce.

Key Accountabilities

Legal Advice  

Provide relevant and correct advice and guidance to parents and carers on employment rights, including:-

• Family leave, including maternity, adoption and shared parental leave;

• Discrimination, dismissals, and redundancy;

• Emergency and parental leave;

• Flexible working;

• Issues arising for parents and carers of disabled dependants;

• Contribute to the LAS precedent and case studies bank;

• Updating and enriching of the advice pages of WF website.  

Stakeholders and Partners  

• Assist with building and maintaining the relationships with pro bono solicitors and firms;

• Assist with supervision of Working Families’ cohort of team and student volunteers as and when necessary;

• Provide outreach, training for parents and organisations and partnering of other organisations and represent WF at relevant stakeholder meetings.  

Within the wider charity:

• Assist with identifying policy, legal and strategic issues arising out of the LAS to help to develop policy calls relevant to employment legislation. Work with the Policy team on reports and consultations and provide data and case studies to give rigour to our policy calls;

• Comply with LAS reporting requirements internally and externally;

• Represent Working Families externally;

• Assist and participate in fundraising activities for WF, including fundraising applications and impact reports;

• Liaise with the Marketing & Communications team, including dealing with media enquiries and checking for legal accuracy in communication outputs, helping ensure Working Families is positioned as the leading voice on families, work, and work life balance. 

Person Specification

Essential  

Advice 

• Ideally, legal qualification as a solicitor or barrister with at least 2 years PQE specialising in employment law or at least 2 years experience in advising on employment rights;

• Experience of providing telephone advice and/or email advice to members of the public providing people with practical solutions to questions and issues they are currently facing;

• broad knowledge of case law, and confidence in using textbooks and online resources to conduct legal research and put law into practice;

• Ability to explain and write clearly and in an accessible manner about complex issues;

• Ability to engage with parents and carers seeking our advice in an empathetic and professional manner;

• Ability to identify own training and development needs and to keep up to date with all relevant changes in employment rights. 

Policy and Communication  

• Awareness of the social and political issues relevant to Working Families: including parental rights at work, work-life balance, affordability of childcare .  

• Ability to assist the policy team in wider policy work and government consultations on these issues.  

Teamwork 

• Flexibility to adapt to working in a small team and the various demands not only of your specific role but also the wider organisation.  

• Working co-operatively in a small team of advisers

• Ability to set priorities and training needs and manage own workload.  

• Ability to engage with and/or supervise a wider team of volunteers

• Genuine interest in the values and mission of Working Families

Desirable 

• Legal qualification as a solicitor or barrister or studying for a degree in law

• Experience in employment law casework.

• Broad knowledge of maternity, paternity and parental benefits and workplace related maternity, paternity and parental rights and sex discrimination.

• Experience of providing training or second tier advice to advisers  

• Experience of using a case management database to record advice 

• Ability to identify policy issues arising from advice work 

• Ability to manage and interrogate database to produce reports  

• It would help to have some knowledge of in work benefits (although this is not a requirement).

  Deadline for applications is 9am on Thursday 29th September (extended from Monday 26th September).

  Successful candidates will be invited to an interview which will include a written test which will be sent to you 1 hour before you allocated interview time, followed by a Zoom/Teams meeting. Interviews will take place on Monday 3rd and Thursday 6th October. Please allow two hours for the written test and interview.

  Please let us know if you require any reasonable adjustments.

DUE TO A CHANGE IN THE TEAM PATTERN WE NO LONGER REQUIRE FRIDAY AS A COMPULSORY DAY - WEDNESDAY WOULD BE PREFERABLE AS WE ARE NOW SHORTER STAFFED ON WEDS