Private Secretary

Summary

We are the public body that looks after England’s historic environment. We champion historic places, helping people understand, value and care for them.

Historic England have a fantastic opportunity for you to join us as our Private Secretary to the Chair and Chief Executive.

This is a full-time, permanent post.

Salary £40,000 - £42,000 per annum.

The location of this role is London where we offer hybrid working, the expectation is that this role would be office based three days a week.

We offer a wide benefits package including a competitive pension scheme starting at 28.97% employer contributions, a generous 28 days holiday, corporate discounts, free entry into English Heritage sites across the country and development opportunities to ensure you achieve your goals.

To view our full range of benefits please follow the link here.

What you will be doing

This is a rare and exciting opportunity to join the Historic England team to support the Chief Executive and Chair in all aspects of their roles.

This is a pivotal role at the heart of Historic England. You will represent the Chief Executive and be the public face of their office. With your tact, diplomacy and attention to detail you will ensure both Chief Executive and Chair are seamlessly supported. Your exceptional communication skills will ensure that the Chief Executive and Chair's priorities are not just met but exceeded. This is more than a support role; it's an opportunity to make a significant impact and be a key player in our success story.

This role will manage the CEO and Chair’s Executive Assistant and requires strong communication skills to establish and maintain effective lines of communication and internal relationships across the Historic England Teams, particularly with the Executive Team members and their offices. You will also create strong external relationships externally with multiple stakeholders, including our sponsoring department at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Who we are looking for

· Extensive experience of managing complex and constantly changing priorities, workloads and diaries.

· Proven experience of working as part of a team operating in a busy and fast-paced environment.

· Confidence in building and maintaining effective working relationships with a wide range of internal and external stakeholders.

· The ability to absorb, assess and progress new issues quickly and confidently, bringing in appropriate expertise and knowledge from across the organisation as needed.

· Experience of managing office and administrative systems, devising new systems and improving existing systems and process.

· Demonstrable ability to manage an Executive Assistant to ensure right judgments are made, attention to detail is paid and actions are timely

Please note your application will be scored and assessed against the above criteria.

We are an equal opportunity employer which values diversity and inclusion. If you have a disability or neurodiversity, we would be happy to discuss reasonable adjustments to the job with you. Having just won the Gold Award from MIND, we also recognise the importance of a healthy work-life balance.

We are an inclusive employer and believe that flexible working options are for everyone. We want to make sure our working arrangements don’t prevent anyone from joining us because of their personal circumstances. We also want to provide you with the best balance in your home and work life that we can.

We are open to considering options including job sharing, part-time working, compressed hours working and different working locations, including hybrid working. Please visit our jobs pages or contact us to find out more.

Why work for Historic England

We are committed to promoting equality of opportunity for everyone. Diversity helps us to perform better and attract more people to support our work. We welcome and encourage job applications from people of all backgrounds.

We particularly encourage applications from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic candidates and candidates with disabilities as they are underrepresented within Historic England at this level.

Historic England want all of our candidates to shine in the recruitment process. Please tell us what we can do to make sure you can show us your very best self. You can contact us by email at [email protected] if you have any recruitment queries.

At Historic England we use a hiring system called Applied. Applied is a behavioural science-backed recruitment platform that reduces bias, improves quality of hire and increases diversity. We do not use CV application for the majority of our hiring processes. You will answer a selection of questions that allow our hiring teams to test your skills and suitability for the role.

To ensure a fair and inclusive recruitment process for everyone the use of AI or automated tools is not permitted.

Provisional interview 6th (AM) and 9th (PM) October 2025.

Please follow the link for a full copy of the Job Description –

Proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme

Disability Confident

About Disability Confident

A Disability Confident employer will generally offer an interview to any applicant that declares they have a disability and meets the minimum criteria for the job as defined by the employer. It is important to note that in certain recruitment situations such as high-volume, seasonal and high-peak times, the employer may wish to limit the overall numbers of interviews offered to both disabled people and non-disabled people. For more details please go to Disability Confident .