Administrative Assistant/Receptionist

The Role

This is a Front of House and administration role, well suited to someone with a passion for customer service. You will provide a professional/positive first impression and support to all visitors, parents, scholars and staff. You will also provide important administrative and pastoral support. You will need to be unflappable, calm under pressure and enthusiastic in holding yourself and others to our high standards.

Key Responsibilities

• Providing outstanding front-line customer service to scholars, parents, staff and visitors to the school as well as a high standard of administration duties.

• Assist the school’s receptionists with answering calls, dealing with visitors and presenting a positive image of the school that upholds the school’s values and ethos.

• Interacting with parents, carers, colleagues and visitors to the school, at all levels of seniority, with confidence, tact and professionalism.

• Ensure safeguarding procedures are followed for all visitors and appropriately handling incoming calls and enquiries.

• Ensure that all communications are correctly logged and routed to their intended recipients, or an appropriate member of staff, to ensure a quick and effective communication system.

• To provide general administrative support.

• To undertake reprographics work.

• To book cabs when required.

• To ensure that the reception area remains tidy and that literature and forms are updated and replenished as necessary.

• Willingness to be first aid trained in order to provide first aid to scholars and staff where necessary

• Responding to Oncalls

• Undertaking routine school duties, such as lunch duty.

• Assist with student welfare and liaise with parents where necessary

• Provide cover for other areas of the admin department and carry out all administrative duties when required and directed to do so by the Operations Manager.

How is Ark Greenwich different?

• We are part of the Ark family of schools and benefit accordingly from outstanding networking and career opportunities and first-class CPD.

• Staff wellbeing is one of our main priorities. We provide breakfast for staff each morning, lunch for early careers staff and have a 6pm/weekend work-related communication cut off. We do not do knee jerk reactions, fads or last-minute deadlines. Our systems and processes for communication, marking and feedback and assessment are streamlined and the approaches we take are research led and based on our local context. We offer a WFH day to HoDs for curriculum design and also offer external marking of scripts to support workload. Our full approach to staff wellbeing/workload can be found here .

• This is a small school model (600 scholars aged 11-16) because we believe that our close-knit family community provides the optimum conditions for success.

• Scholar behaviour is exceptional with clearly defined and embedded routines. This means our teachers can focus their time on the things that matter – planning and delivering brilliant lessons for our scholars.

• This is a strict no excuses, no mobile phone school. Phones are not permitted onsite at all. Scholars wear business dress to prepare them for a professional career.

• Our curriculum is traditional and academic, and we do not take shortcuts to seek to boost our position in school league tables – we do not, for example, offer equivalencies such as Btecs or Vcerts..

• We put high-quality teaching at the heart of what we do. We are committed to providing staff with weekly high-quality training. We run coaching for staff who want to see rapid progress in their discipline. Live coaching and current best practice in the field of education is central to our approach.

• We don’t grade individual lessons or ask for lesson plans but we do place a primacy on curriculum design, independent learning and formative assessment.

• Our scholars enjoy a compulsory co-curricular program on a Wednesday afternoon which includes a strong focus on community volunteering and we facilitate 6 drop-down days per academic year ensuring scholars benefit from a range of life-enriching experiences.

Alignment with the school’s vision, values and approach to education is essential.