Position: Policy and Public Affairs Officer (Scotland)
Hours: Full-time, 35 hours a per-week
Contract: Permanent
Location: Home Based in Scotland
Salary: Starting from £26,384 per annum plus excellent benefits
Salary Band and Job Family: Band 1, Charity
You will start at our entry point salary of £26,384 per annum, increasing to £28,033 after 6 months service and satisfactory performance and to £29,682 after a further 6 months.
About us
We make sure people living with MS are at the centre of everything we do. And it’s this commitment that unites us across the UK.
Our strategy is based on what people affected by MS have told us is important to them. It gives us a clear and determined focus.
Our work is based on the hopes and aspirations of our MS community. Together we campaign at all levels, fund ground-breaking research and provide award winning support and information.
Our people are our greatest asset and the key to our success. We offer a vibrant, progressive working environment where you'll be able to make a difference.
About this job
We’re looking for an enthusiastic and talented policy and public affairs professional to join our team. You should have experience of working to develop policy and have the ability to communicate our position to a wide range of audiences across Scotland.
In this exciting role you will work with the MS community to influence change in public policy, continuing to make the case for improvements in the treatment, care and support of people affected by MS.
This is a fantastic opportunity for someone who understands the political and policy environment in Scotland, who has experience in external facing influencing roles, who is outcome-focused and delivers tangible results. The successful candidate will work closely with the MS community, the Scottish Policy and Communications team as well as key external partners such as MSPs and their teams.
Closing date for applications: 9:00 on Monday 1st of June
Interested?
PLEASE PRESS THE 'HOW TO APPLY' BUTTON FOR MORE INFORMATION.
Equal Opportunities
We particularly welcome applications from people with disabilities and or from ethnic minority backgrounds.
We’d be grateful if you downloaded and completed the equality and diversity monitoring form and submit it with your application.
Disability Confident Employer
We’re a Disability Confident Employer and we’re committed to promoting equality and diversity.
You can ask for reasonable adjustments as part of both our recruitment and new starter on-boarding processes.
If you need any help or adjustments to apply for this role, please contact us. You can also ask for the application materials to be sent to you in a different format. Such as for them to be sent to you by email or in a larger word format.
More about our employee benefits:
We have a wide range of employee benefits including (but not limited to):
Encouraging work life balance
- 38 days paid annual leave (including bank holidays), pro-rata for part-time
- More annual leave entitlement, based on length of employment
- Smart working options (with the opportunity to work remotely and find a smart working pattern that suits both you and us)
- Flexible working options
Caring for you and your family
- Generous sick pay entitlement
- More sick pay entitlement, based on length of employment
- Opportunity to buy and sell annual leave in each calendar year
- Free access to a GP virtually 24 hours a day/7 days a week allowing you unlimited advice, reassurance and where appropriate diagnosis
- Enhanced leave for new parents
- Free access to a confidential 24 hours a day/7 days a week helpline service for both you and your family with a specialist range of support and information
- Special leave options (such as up to 5 days paid leave for domestic or personal emergencies a year)
- 10 days paid disability leave a year, pro-rata for part-time
- 10 days paid carers’ leave a year, pro-rata for part-time
- Cycle to work scheme
- Death in service scheme
- New family-friendly benefits, including paid leave:
- In the event of miscarriage or still birth
- To support fertility treatments
- For antenatal appointments for both parents
Thinking about your finances
- Enhanced salary sacrifice pension scheme
- Discounted season ticket loan and interest-free emergency loans
- Give as you earn to support other charities of your choice before tax
- New employee portal including lifestyle savings vouchers and personal wellbeing
Enriching your life at work
- Personalised development plans with a wide range of training courses and opportunities to source additional training options with your line manager
- Yearly internal apprenticeship opportunities
- New, modern offices that embrace working together both in-person and remotely
- Various opportunities to influence how we internally operate (including surveys, and focus and committee groups)
- Active and supportive internal employee networking groups for collaboration and peer support
- 2 days paid leave a year for volunteering for MS Society activities during normal working hours (such as fundraising events, or campaigning in the local community)
- 2 days paid leave a year for volunteering with other charities during normal
Safeguarding
We’re committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of everyone who uses our services and we come into contact with.
This is regardless of Gender, Race, Disability, Sexual orientation, Religion or belief, Pregnancy, Gender reassignment.
We recognise our particular responsibility to make sure vulnerable adults and children are protected.
We have measures in place to protect everyone we come into contact with from abuse and maltreatment of all kinds.
Your right to work in the UK
You must have the right to work in the UK to work in paid employment with us. You’ll need to share documents showing you’re eligible to work in the UK if we offer you employment.
You can find the UK visas and permits granting you the right to work in the UK on the UK Government website. We currently don’t have a Sponsor Licence agreement with the Home Office and aren’t able to support you with your visa applications.
No agencies please.
To fund world-leading research, share the latest information and campaign for everyone's rights. Together we are a community. Together we can stop MS
Location: Remote (Based in England & Wales with occasional travel required)
Salary: £24,479 - £25,360 pro rata (£9,792 - £10,144 actual)
Hours of work: 14 hours per week
Contract type: Permanent
Why work for Kids Matter?
- Generous annual leave – 25 days (plus bank holidays) per year pro rata, with time off between Christmas and New Year's additional to this allowance.
- Remote working contribution – receive £26/month pro rata towards the costs of working from home and/or using a co-working space.
- Access to coaching sessions, training opportunities and our Employee Assistance Programme (a confidential support service for staff).
- Flexible working across weekdays to suit your schedule.
About us
Kids Matter is one of the UK’s fastest growing children’s charities.
Our vision is to see every child in need raised in a strong family. Our mission is to reduce the impact of poverty on children through community-based parenting programmes.
Research shows that group-based early intervention parenting groups are the most effective way to support children in need. We train peer facilitators in local churches - the largest voluntary body in the country - to run our affordable, accessible and highly effective parenting programmes, written by Clinical Psychologists. They come alongside parents and carers, building long-lasting community in addition to encouraging confidence and learning positive parenting skills.
We value difference and diversity, and we want our workplace to be built on shared values of equality and mutual trust, with team members representing the wide range of backgrounds and experiences that exist within the UK. We therefore actively encourage applications from people of diverse backgrounds and varied experiences, particularly those who are African, Afro-Caribbean, Asian or part of other minority ethnic communities, who have lived experience of the impact of low-income/low-support circumstances, and who are living with a disability or identify as being neurodivergent.
About the role
The Accounts Assistant role involves:
- Processing day-to-day finances, ensuring all bank accounts and transactions are reconciled and coded correctly on Xero at month end.
- Ensuring all income is accurately processed and recorded on Xero and our CRM system (Beacon).
- Generating invoices as required, inputting into Xero, and chasing outstanding payments
- Overseeing and managing the expense card system (Volopa), topping up individual cards as required and processing payments
- Supporting the Finance Manager in the planning and production of accurate annual budgets.
- Supporting the Finance Manager with preparing documents required for annual audit.
About you
Are you organised with good attention to detail? Do you have booking training or experience? Are you a Christian with an active faith in Jesus? Do you have a passion for Kids Matter’s vision of seeing every child in need raised in a strong family?
Then we would love to hear from you!
How to apply
You can apply for the Accounts Assistant position by clicking ‘Apply via Website’ and completing a copy of our online application form.
The deadline for applications is Monday 25th May at 4pm. All successful and unsuccessful applicants will be notified by email.
We also ask for all applicants to submit an Equal Opportunities Monitoring Form, which will be sent to you to complete following the submission of your application. This form will be used for anonymous analysis to ensure our overall recruitment procedures are fair and transparent. It will never be viewed or used as part of the selection process. It is optional to submit this form.
If you would like any application/interview support or you need any reasonable adjustments throughout the application process, or if you would like an informal phone call to ask questions or discuss the role, please contact Katie Washington (HR & Systems Manager).
Please see the job pack for more details on the role and application process.
We exist to reduce the impact of poverty on children in need across the UK.


The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.
What does it take to keep a charity like ours running? What sits behind every support call answered, every research database accessed, every fundraising campaign delivered? Infrastructure. And the people who build, protect and evolve it.
As a Senior Infrastructure Engineer, you'll play a central role in shaping, operating and maintaining our predominantly Microsoft cloud environment — keeping it strong, secure and ready for what comes next. Reporting to the Infrastructure Services Manager, you'll support, maintain and enhance our enterprise infrastructure across Azure cloud, Microsoft 365, identity, endpoint, network and core platform services.
You'll lead on complex incidents, drive root-cause analysis, and bring the kind of calm, expert thinking that keeps services running and colleagues confident. This is a hands-on, cloud-first role with real scope to influence how we design, govern and optimise cloud services and our infrastructure for the long term.
This role would particularly suit someone who has moved beyond traditional, on-prem infrastructure into operational Azure and Microsoft 365 engineering and is confident owning cloud platforms end to end.
This is a 12 month fixed term contract.
About you:
You're an experienced infrastructure professional who brings both depth of technical knowledge and the mindset of a trusted colleague. You understand that the work you do has real consequences for real people, and that motivates you to get things right. You're equally comfortable diving into a complex incident at pace and stepping back to think about how we build more resilient, secure and cost-effective cloud services over time.
You take security seriously, communicate with clarity across technical and non-technical audiences, and you thrive in environments where collaboration and accountability go hand in hand. You're someone who keeps learning, shares what you know, and makes the team around you better.
You'll have:
- Proven, demonstrable experience in Microsoft cloud technologies, including in-depth hands-on Azure experience (cloud platforms, virtual compute, storage, networking and the governance principles that keep it all accountable).
- Experience administering and optimising Microsoft 365 services, including identity, security and collaboration tooling.
- A grounding in enterprise infrastructure — servers, directory services, hybrid identity — and the hands-on experience to back it up.
- Experience managing and supporting Disaster Recovery services to address continuity of vital business functions.
- A security-first mindset, with practical knowledge of MFA, conditional access, privileged access management and vulnerability remediation.
- Proven networking foundations across WAN, VPN, firewalling and secure remote access.
- The discipline to work within ITSM frameworks and the rigour to maintain accurate configuration and asset data.
- Experience working alongside a Managed Service Provider as part of an augmented team, including managing service quality and accountability.
- A track record of producing documentation that works for diverse audiences — runbooks, procedures, service improvement write-ups.
- Genuine curiosity about the infrastructure landscape and a commitment to staying sharp as it evolves.
What you'll focus on:
- Owning, evolving and maintaining our hybrid (predominantly Microsoft cloud platform) infrastructure — secure, stable and performing, day in, day out, and under pressure when it counts.
- Owning complex incidents from first response through to root-cause analysis and lasting fixes.
- Working shoulder-to-shoulder with our Security team to embed good practice across everything we build and run.
- Helping us get more from what we have — through cost optimisation, service rationalisation and smarter configuration.
- Being a dependable partner to suppliers and managed service providers, holding them to the standard our users deserve.
- Championing modern identity protection across the organisation.
- Bringing energy and expertise to a team that genuinely wants to do good work together.
The infrastructure you build here will help us reach more people living with dementia, more quickly, more reliably. If you're ready to bring your infrastructure skills and wider technology expertise to a role with real purpose, we'd love to hear from you.
Important Dates
- Application deadline is 23:59 on Sunday 31st May 2026
- Interviews begin week commencing: 8th June 2026
About Alzheimer's Society
Dementia is the UK's biggest killer. One in three people born in the UK today will develop dementia in their lifetime.
At Alzheimer's Society, we're the UK's leading dementia charity and the only one to tackle all aspects of dementia by giving help and hope to people living with dementia today and in the future. We give vital support to people facing the most frightening times of their lives, while also funding groundbreaking research and campaigning to make dementia the priority it should be.
Together with our supporters, we're working towards a world where dementia no longer devastates lives.
Our values make sure that our focus is clear for the challenges and opportunities ahead and remind us of what we all stand for.
Our commitment to Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
We need to ensure the voices around our table better reflect and understand the communities we exist to serve. We strongly encourage individuals to apply who have a disability, impairment or health condition or individuals who identify as Black, Asian or from another minority ethnic background, as these groups are currently under-represented at Alzheimer's Society.
We want everyone we work with, as a colleague, volunteer, supporter, or someone we support, to feel included and that they belong at Alzheimer's Society.
Our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy here along with our internal employee forum and Employee Lived Experience network groups help us promote inclusion and belonging, becoming an engaged and inclusive organisation for all our people.
Our hiring process
During your recruitment process we want to make sure that you bring your whole self and can be at your best. We are working hard to ensure our recruitment process is as inclusive as possible, so please do inform us of your experience and anything you think we could do better by completing our candidate survey when you apply. Please also contact Alzheimer's Society Talent Acquisition Team via [email protected] for application support or any adjustments you might need.
To ensure fairness and consistency to select the best candidate for this role, all our applications are anonymised up until an interview has been confirmed. We recognise the benefits of AI, but if you're considering using it to submit your application, we encourage you to reflect on the value it truly adds. AI tools often lack the personal touch and authenticity that set candidates apart. We want to hear your unique perspective, experiences, and skills, so we encourage you to showcase them in your own voice.
We try to avoid closing roles early where possible, however if we receive a high volume of applications, we may close earlier than the advertised closing date. Should this occur, we will aim to provide you with at least 48 hours' notice.
We are committed to safer recruitment and ensuring the welfare of those we work with, due to the nature of some of our roles, we might need to carry out a Criminal Record Check at the relevant level. You can read more information via our Website.
Giving back to you
Our employees work hard every day to make a true difference in people's lives. We are proud to support them with a range of benefits, recognition and many options for working agilely, all contributing to a strong work life balance. We also have various learning programmes to support you in your development and help you grow to realise your potential and shape a career with Alzheimer's Society.
You can also visit our Working for Us pages, which give you more information about what it's like to be an employee at the Society.