Safety and Assurance Officer
Location: Homebased, based in the Southern Area
Contract: Full time, permanent
Salary: £32,000 gross per annum
Closing Date: 21 November 2025
Are you a Safety Specialist looking for a new opportunity?
The Marine Society & Sea Cadets (MSSC) is the leading maritime charity for youth development and lifelong learning. We are a vibrant and growing charity inspiring young people to achieve their potential through challenge and nautical adventure and also enabling seafarers and maritime professionals to realise their potential through learning and career development. Working with our employees, cadets, and volunteers, we have built a strong vision and five-year Future Ready strategy to meet the growing demand for what we provide, both for young people, seafarers and maritime professionals – and the thousands who aspire to be the sea cadets and marine professionals of the future. It is also about equipping them to achieve their potential and thrive in a rapidly changing world, while growing our charity to benefit even more people – including those from under-represented or marginalised groups.
We are currently looking for a Safety and Assurance Officer to join our team.
About the role
The Safety & Assurance Officer (SAO) is an employee of the MSSC and a member of the MSSC National Safety Assurance Team (NSAT). This is a home-based role, with a primary focus on the Southern area, predominantly the South-East. The SAO will report to the Head of Safety, Health, and Environment.
The SAO will work closely with other SAOs and will be functionally accountable to:
The Head of Inshore Boating for inshore boat assurance
The Staff Royal Marines Officer for weapons and ammunition safety and security assurance
The role requires regular travel within the area of responsibility and, on occasion within the UK. It will involve evening and some weekend work to fulfil the role’s responsibilities.
Requirements
Qualifications: Good general education and NEBOSH (or equivalent), with completion required during probation if not already held.
Safety & Environmental Management: Experience implementing safety and environmental management systems, conducting risk assessments, and working within formal assurance frameworks.
Incident Management: Experience managing, investigating, and reporting incidents.
Training & Support: Ability to deliver training, guidance, and support to non-specialist staff or volunteers on safety, health, environmental, and assurance matters.
Workload & Volunteer Management: Proven ability to manage a busy workload and effectively support and manage volunteers.
Responsibilities
Join the Marine Society & Sea Cadets as a Safety and Assurance Officer, ensuring the highest standards of safety, health, environment (SHE), and operational compliance across our units and facilities.
You’ll lead assurance inspections, maintain compliance with legislation and organisational regulations, and support the safe management of weapons, armouries, and inshore boating activities. Working closely with other members of the National Safety and Assurance Team (NSAT) and Area teams, you’ll oversee safety at events, camps, and competitions, conduct audits, and monitor incident reporting.
This role plays a vital part in upholding the safety and welfare of our cadets and volunteers through proactive assurance, training, and continuous improvement.
For further information, please download theIf you are interested in this role, please apply now!
Benefits
25 days annual leave per annum, increasing with length of service
Hybrid working for many roles
Volunteering Leave
Life assurance (4x salary)
Private medical insurance
Generous pension (employer contribution up to 10%)
Cycle to work scheme
Access to the Marine Society Digital Library
Wellbeing portal and EAP with 121 counselling
Employee development: We are investing in our employees' development and have an annual calendar of learning and development opportunities, designed to support employees to develop into their roles and stretch them to achieve their full potential.
Additional Information
MSSC positively encourages applications from suitably qualified and eligible candidates from all backgrounds. Equity, diversity, and inclusion really matters to us, so we can best serve our beneficiaries from every community. We work to ensure a fair and consistent recruitment process and aim to be a charity where diversity of experience, identity and skills are valued and welcomed. MSSC is an equal opportunities employer.
We recognise our responsibilities to safeguard and protect the young people and vulnerable adults with whom we work. We do all we can to promote their health, safety and wellbeing, and we expect our staff to share this commitment and work in line with safeguarding policy, the MSSC’s values and ethos of inclusivity. We adhere to safer recruitment practices and therefore employment is subject to detailed pre-employment checks for successful candidates, including references and criminal disclosure checks and the completion of a disclosure questionnaire.
All successful applicants are required to attend safeguarding training and undergo pre-employment checks including a criminal record check.
Job title: Finance Officer
Reports to: Head of Finance
Location: Birmingham or Manchester
Salary: £26,000 - £30,000
Hours: Full-time (37.5 hours per week), open to flexible working.
Contract: Permanent
Overall purpose
As the Finance Officer, you will be required to ensure that our income and expenditure records are accurate, complete, free from error and comply with both the relevant accounting standards as well as donor restrictions. This role will play a key part in ensuring that the recording of financial information is compliant and auditable, in both the finance system and CRM.
You will also work alongside the Head of Finance to support the wider organisation in its financial understanding and management. This support will focus on both the fundraising team to empower them to raise as many funds as possible, especially unrestricted funds, and the services team to ensure their financial processes are robust and efficient. You will also be expected to contribute to and uphold our outstanding culture by living and demonstrating our values of being mission-led, welcoming, entrepreneurial and collaborative.
Key responsibilities
Finance responsibilities
- Record all income and expenditure general ledger transactions in the finance system, ensuring correct coding and full supporting documentation is stored in either the finance system or in the CRM.
- Have ownership of both the sales ledger and purchase ledger, ensuring all entries are recorded accurately with the correct VAT treatment while adhering to the relevant controls.
- Ensure all staff and client expenses are captured and recorded accurately, adhere to the relevant expense policy and are paid in a timely manner.
- Prepare and post payment runs alongside the Head of Finance
- Support the Financial Accountant in the monthly bank reconciliation
- Participate in month end processes to ensure the I&E figure is accurate within the pre-determined deadline, including posting prepayments, deferrals and accruals where relevant and other accounting adjustments as needed such as grossing up of platform fees.
- Ensure all finance documentation is complete and auditable including restricted fund evidence, and ensure the relevant GAUs are tracked on salesforce.
- Capture all restricted fund income and expenditure is the finance system on a monthly basis (staff and non-staff) alongside the Financial Accountant and Head of Finance
- Understand clawback risk on grants
- Ensure Breaking Barriers is claiming gift aid where applicable and optimising opportunities to reclaim input VAT in our business/non-business VAT return
- Reconciling to third party platforms on a monthly basis including fundraising platforms and Equals
- Work with the Head of Finance to upskill the fundraising and service teams to ensure they understand necessary financial processes
- Undertake income and expenditure control activities e.g. checking for grant rejection letters and verifying changes to supplier details.
- Be the finance team’s superuser for the CRM
- Support in year-end audit and the creation of relevant notes
- Support with ad hoc projects such as the implementation of a new finance system and policy and procedure updates
Technology
- Support the Financial Accountant, Finance Director and outsourced technology provider as needed for ongoing technology support and occasional projects.
Office and facilities management
- Support the financial team and any applicable offices as needed for ongoing office and facility management
Cross-cutting
- Ensure staff are effectively onboarded and our knowledge management processes ensure that required information on the finance and ops processes is accessible and understood
To view the full job description and person specification, as well as details on our accessible recruitment process, please view the attached recruitment pack when you click 'Apply'.
Other considerations
- As part of our safeguarding commitment to our clients, we carry out pre-employment checks to ensure that successful applicants are suitable to work with adults at risk. These include basic DBS checks, obtaining references and verifying a candidate’s identity and right to work in the UK.
- We are an equal opportunities employer and welcome applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, sex, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership status, pregnancy and maternity status, race, religion or belief.
Breaking Barriers is committed to protecting an adult’s right to live in safety, free from abuse and neglect and for their views, wishes and beliefs to be fully considered when deciding action.
How to apply
If you are looking for a role where you can make a real difference, we want to hear from you. To apply, please submit a statement of interest (up to approximately 500 words/1 A4 page) outlining:
- Why you are interested in the role
- What skills you would bring to be successful in this role
- Any experience you would like to highlight
- Any reasonable adjustments you require for the interview process
- Disclosure of disabilities if you wish to do so (as a member of the Disability Confident Scheme, we guarantee an interview to all disabled applicants who meet the minimum criteria for the role).
Closing date for applications is Sunday 16 November at 11:30pm.
We belong to the Experts by Experience Employment Network, which advocates and supports organisations to employ more people from a refugee background. With this in mind, we particularly welcome applicants with experience of seeking asylum and /or are from a refugee background. Please feel free to use information and resources found here, which may help in preparing your job application.
If you are an expert by experience (a refugee or migrant with direct, first-hand experience of issues and challenges of the UK asylum or immigration system), you can ask for independent and confidential support with your job application from the Experts by Experience Employment Network. Please reach out to HR Manager, Caroline Meechan for further details. You can find contact details on the final page of this recruitment pack.
We are open to flexible working arrangements and alternative working patterns.
If you are looking for a role where you can make a real difference, we want to hear from you. To apply, please submit a statement of interest (up to approximately 500 words/1 A4 page) outlining:
• Why you are interested in the role
• What skills you would bring to be successful in this role
• Any experience you would like to highlight
• Any reasonable adjustments you require for the interview process
• Disclosure of disabilities if you wish to do so (as a member of the Disability Confident Scheme, we guarantee an interview to all disabled applicants who meet the minimum criteria for the role).
Breaking Barriers exists so that every refugee can access meaningful employment and build a new life.
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.
We Are Survivors are excited to be on the search for a Social Worker to come and join our ever-growing team. In our efforts to ensure that NO male survivor is left behind, we are expanding and looking to fill the following roles:
You'll play a key role in supporting clients, managing communications, supporting in relationship management across the partnership. As well as working with partners like Pennine Care and TRC, you will work closely with our community development team and criminal justice teams to ensure survivors have access to the right support.
Why Join Us?
· a competitive salary.
· annual leave package with incremental rises plus bank holidays.
· company sick pay.
· Birthday annual leave.
· monthly clinical supervision.
· pension contribution.
· and a range of discount and benefit programmes.
Apply by sending your CV and a short supporting statement (max 2 page)
In your supporting statement we want you to answer these two questions:
• How can your experience support male survivors thrive?
• How you meet the role profile, ensure you answer ALL elements in your CV or supporting statement?
By applying for the any of the above roles, you confirm that you have read and agree to our Privacy Notice
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.