Senior programme manager jobs in belfast

This is a key leadership role within the CSA Centre, central to our ambition to raise awareness of the true scale and nature of sexual abuse and to drive evidence-informed improvements in policy and practice.

About the role:

The CSA Centre aims to reduce the impact of child sexual abuse through improved prevention and better response, and effective internal and external communication is absolutely central to that mission.

Leading our Communications Team, you will play a key role in developing and delivering the CSA Centre's communication plans over the immediate and longer term, helping us to ensure that our evidence, learning and resources have the widest possible reach into policy and practice at both local and national level.

As a member of the CSA Centre's Senior Management Team, you will work closely with the CSA Centre's multi-agency, multi-disciplinary team, enabling you to draw on expertise from a wide range of different professional backgrounds. You will lead our engagement with communications colleagues from across Government departments and key stakeholder groups.

We are looking for a highly motivated leader with strong skills and significant experience in communication roles, and the ability to manage an extensive and varied workload to deliver multiple objectives. Communication activity at the CSA Centre is extremely diverse; in any given week you might find yourself developing a new strategic approach to disseminating CSA Centre resources throughout practice, leading a briefing session on new research findings for prominent national media outlets, advising senior Government leads on plans for a new awareness raising campaign, working with expert stakeholders to develop national media guidelines for the reporting of child sexual abuse… No two days are the same!

As Assistant Director, Communications, you will play a role tackling child sexual abuse alongside the work of our colleagues across practice, research, policy and training. This is important work - the CSA Centre conservatively estimates that one in ten children will experience some form of child sexual abuse before age of 16, and our ambitious programme seeks to improve the knowledge, skills and confidence of professionals (social workers, teachers, social workers, nurses etc.) in identifying and responding to child sexual abuse. We have already made great progress, but there is much more to be done – and we need your leadership to help us do it!

CSA Centre roles are currently funded until 31 March 2026, in line with our current grant funding arrangements. This will be reviewed in late 2025, as future funding for the CSA Centre from 2026/27 onwards is confirmed.

About us

We are the Centre of expertise on child sexual abuse (CSA Centre). Our aim is to reduce the impact of child sexual abuse through improved prevention and better response. To tackle child sexual abuse we must better understand its causes, scope, scale and impact.

Established since 2017, we are a multi-disciplinary team that is funded by the Home Office, hosted by Barnardo's and we work closely with key partners from academic institutions, local authorities, health, education, police and the voluntary sector. We're proudly independent and our team will challenge any barriers, assumptions, taboos and ways of working that prevent us from increasing our understanding and improving our approach to child sexual abuse.

We bring about change by:

• Collating and analysing existing research, policy, practice and the real experiences of those affected, and filling the gaps we identify with new research, insights and analysis;
• Using that evidence and insight to challenge and improve existing policy and practice, develop new approaches and increase everyone's knowledge and confidence to more effectively tackle the issue.

This role is home based with regular travel required, usually to London.

Salary:

The CSA Centre acknowledges that tackling child sexual abuse can feel challenging but is incredibly rewarding and positive when actively making change. Our open working environment ensures that there is support for all employees, across the team and with access to a therapist, if needed. Please do get in touch if you would like to discuss any aspect of this further.

The salary for this role will range from £65,256 - £69,917 (Full Time Equivalent). Other salaries are shown so that applicants are aware of the progression salaries.

We believe in creating equality of opportunity in the workplace and supporting people to manage their work-life balance; we are therefore are open to offering flexible working arrangements.

The CSA Centre is committed to having a diverse and inclusive workforce. We actively encourage applications from disabled candidates and candidates from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, as they are currently under-represented at the CSA Centre.

When completing your application please refer to your skills knowledge and experience in relation to the Person Specification and Job Description.

Please note due to the high volume of applications for some posts, this advert might close before the displayed closing date. We recommend that you apply for this role as soon as possible.