Office Administrator

Organisation	Maar Haven Ltd
Location	Corby, Northamptonshire (office-based with occasional home visits)
Reporting to	Operational Director (Faith Bvumbe)
Direct reports	None
Salary	£23,000 – £26,000 per annum (dependent on experience)
Contract	Full-time, permanent
Working pattern	Monday–Friday, standard office hours with occasional flexibility during inspection periods

About Maar Haven

Maar Haven is an independently owned children’s residential care organisation based in Corby, Northamptonshire, with the ambition of building one of England’s most therapeutically excellent and consistently Outstanding-rated providers.

Founded by Joseph and Faith Bvumbe, a qualified mental health nurse with direct adolescent, SEND, and forensic youth experience, and an operational director managing a regulated care enterprise currently employing over 130 staff, Maar Haven begins from a foundation of genuine expertise, not aspiration.

Our therapeutic model is built on Dyadic Developmental Practice (DDP/PACE), the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT), and a whole-home culture in which trauma-informed thinking shapes every shift, every relationship, and every decision. We do not claim to be trauma-informed. We are building an organisation that is trauma-organised.

Everything in this organisation flows from five core values: Presence, Belief, Integrity, Interdependence, and Continuity. They are not framing. They are the mechanism by which every decision, from a 2am crisis response to a board-level governance review, is made and judged.

PRESENCE The relationship is the work.

BELIEF Every young person is capable of a meaningful future.

INTEGRITY We do things properly when no one is checking, including in safeguarding.

INTERDEPENDENCE Children do not recover alone. Neither do the adults who care for them.

CONTINUITY We do not end when the placement ends.

If you are looking for a quiet, unambitious role in a comfortable organisation, this is not it. If you want to be part of building something genuinely excellent, and you have the skills, values, and drive to contribute to that, we want to hear from you.

Role Purpose

A children’s home is only as well-run as the systems behind it. The Office Administrator at Maar Haven is the person who makes those systems work, quietly, precisely, and reliably.

This is not a passive role. The Administrator manages the compliance calendar that ensures Regulation 40 events are never late-notified to Ofsted. They maintain the HR systems that ensure no staff member works with an expired DBS. They track the placement documentation cycle that ensures every child’s care plan is reviewed on time. These are not administrative tasks. They are safeguarding functions, and they are held to the same standard as clinical practice in this organisation.

The right candidate will understand that. They will approach every process, however routine, with the understanding that in a regulated care environment, administrative accuracy has direct child safety implications.

How the Five Values show up in this role Presence: The Administrator is consistently here, not ‘will sort that Monday’ but present to the organisation’s compliance needs in real time. Belief: The Administrator handles documentation about young people, care plans, LAC review records, placement files, and does so with the understanding that these are records about a human being with a future, not cases to be processed. Integrity: The Administrator’s standard is completeness and accuracy when no one is auditing. A compliance calendar maintained because it is right, not because Ofsted is coming. Interdependence: The Administrator sits at the centre of the organisation’s connected systems, HR, compliance, finance, placements, and understands that when one thread pulls loose, others are affected. Continuity: The Administrator maintains the records that make Continuity possible: post-placement contact logs, care plan histories, and the documentation that holds a young person’s story over time.

Key Responsibilities

Compliance and Regulatory Administration

• Maintain the Maar Haven compliance calendar: tracking all regulatory deadlines including Regulation 40 notifiable event timescales, Ofsted registration renewals, annual quality audits, and DBS re-check cycles
• Alert the Operational Director and Registered Manager to upcoming deadlines a minimum of 14 days in advance, never the day before
• Maintain the Ofsted notification log: all submissions documented with confirmation receipts, retained in accordance with the records management policy
• Support the preparation and quality-checking of Regulation 44 monthly RI reports, ensuring formatting, completeness, and filing within 5 working days of each RI visit
• Maintain the home’s policy library: tracking review dates, flagging policies due for update, and distributing revised versions with a read-confirmation log

HR Administration and Workforce Compliance

• Maintain the staff compliance register: DBS status, mandatory training completion, supervision records, probation review dates, and qualification enrolment across all staff, at all times, not just before an inspection
• Administer the onboarding process for all new starters: right to work checks, DBS applications, reference requests, induction scheduling, and system access, completed before the employee’s first day without exception
• Coordinate the staff training calendar, ensuring all mandatory training is booked, attended, and recorded, including safeguarding, first aid, medication management, PACE, and any restraint qualification
• Maintain accurate personnel files in accordance with UK GDPR and Ofsted requirements
• Process leavers accurately and promptly: DBS update service notifications, system access removal, reference management

Placement and Child Record Administration

• Maintain the placement documentation tracker: ensuring each child’s placement agreement, care plan, risk assessment, and LAC review schedule is current, filed, and accessible
• Track and log all placement enquiries, referrals received, and placement decisions, maintaining a full audit trail from first contact to placement confirmation or decline
• Administer the monthly care plan review calendar, alerting the RM when reviews are due and archiving completed reviews in the care management system
• Maintain post-placement contact records as part of the Continuity Protocol, ensuring the documentation exists that allows the RI to verify compliance at monthly visits
• Coordinate placement review meeting logistics: scheduling, invitations, documentation packs, minutes
• Support the RI in preparing monthly monitoring report packs, collating data from the care management system, incident logs, and occupancy records

Finance and Procurement Administration

• Process purchase orders, invoices, and expense claims in accordance with the financial authorisation policy
• Maintain the home’s petty cash record and bank transaction log, reconciling monthly with the Operational Director
• Support invoicing to commissioning local authorities for placement fees, ensuring fee schedules are current and invoice cycles are met without delay
• Manage procurement for household consumables, office supplies, and non-capital equipment, maintaining preferred supplier records and tracking against budget

General Office and Communications

• Manage the Maar Haven central inbox and telephone line: responding to or directing enquiries accurately and professionally
• Maintain the organisational filing system in accordance with the records retention policy
• Support the Operational Director with governance documentation, board reporting packs, and meeting administration
• Assist with the preparation of commissioner briefing documents and placement information packs, understanding that these documents represent the organisation to external stakeholders

Leadership & Accountability

The Office Administrator does not manage people, but they hold the organisation to account for its own compliance. If a DBS has lapsed and the tracking system shows it expired three months ago, that is a systemic failure the Administrator is responsible for preventing. This accountability is real and taken seriously.

Success measures: zero late Regulation 40 notifications attributed to administrative failure; 100% staff compliance records current at all times; placement documentation cycle completed within required timescales; RI report packs compiled and filed within 5 working days of each visit; post-placement contact records maintained in line with the Continuity Protocol; and no Ofsted adverse finding attributable to record-keeping or notification failure.

Person Specification

Qualifications

• Level 3 in Business Administration or equivalent, desirable
• GCSE English and Maths at Grade C/4 or above, essential
• UK GDPR/data protection awareness training, desirable; funded by Maar Haven if not held
• Enhanced DBS with children’s barred list check, required on appointment

Experience, Essential

• Minimum 2 years’ experience in an administrative role in a regulated, compliance-heavy, or professional services environment
• Experience of maintaining HR or compliance databases
• Experience of managing multi-strand calendars and deadline-tracking systems
• Experience of handling confidential information with appropriate discretion and accuracy
• Experience within a health, social care, education, or regulated sector environment, strongly preferred

Skills

• Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Office 365: Excel (data management), Word (document formatting), Outlook (complex calendar management)
• Demonstrated ability to build and maintain accurate tracking systems
• Exceptional written communication: clear, professional, precise. In a regulated care environment, errors in correspondence are not acceptable.
• Strong numeracy: invoice processing, petty cash reconciliation, budget tracking
• Ability to prioritise across multiple concurrent streams without losing accuracy in any of them

Values and Mindset

• Understands that administrative precision in a children’s home is a safeguarding function, not a clerical one
• Proactive: does not wait to be asked, identifies what needs doing and does it ahead of deadline
• Exercises confidentiality instinctively and absolutely: children’s information, staff information, and commercial data are never discussed casually
• Responds to pressure by becoming more organised, not less
• Genuinely interested in being part of an organisation that does something meaningful, and takes pride in the role their work plays in enabling that
• Understands that the records they maintain hold the stories of real young people, and brings care to that responsibility

What Makes This Role Different

Most administrative roles in care organisations are reactive. Maar Haven is building administrative systems that prevent failures before they occur, because in a regulated care environment, prevention is the standard, not the aspiration.

The Administrator at Maar Haven works closely with the Operational Director, who brings systems design and process architecture experience from a career in IT and regulated care management. You will not be inventing systems alone. You will be operating and improving systems designed for precision, and your contribution will include maintaining the post-placement contact records that make the Continuity Promise to young people something that can actually be held to account.

Culture & Expectations

Maar Haven’s administrative standard is the same as its clinical standard: Outstanding. That means your work is accurate, your systems are current, your communications are professional, and your organisation is impeccable.

We do not run a reactive organisation. The Office Administrator is the person who makes the difference between those two things in practice. That is the standard we are hiring for, and it is the standard we will support you to meet.