Julie Coverwell

• Manage the process to secure over £130m in funding for the Council, fulfilling statutory obligations.
• Authorise payments and ensure service accounts are maintained accurately and handled appropriately by monitoring expenditure against budget for several funding streams.
• Ensure local policies and processes are robust, viable, practicable and meet legislative and business needs.
• Lead a specialist team of 11 to deliver high-quality advice, information and funding on early years entitlements for all stakeholders.
• Foster collaboration within the team, ensuring project deadlines are consistently met.
• Empower team to resolve customer queries promptly and professionally by providing clear guidance and escalation routes.
• Conduct regular performance evaluations, providing constructive feedback and personalised development plans for team members.
• Facilitate weekly team meetings to discuss progress, address challenges, and set actionable goals for upcoming projects.
• Identify and mitigate risks in Early Years funding management, safeguarding compliance and service delivery.
• Prepare and present reports to Director Leadership Team, offering insights and recommendations for strategic decision-making.
• Manage resource allocation effectively, ensuring optimal staffing levels during peak times to maintain service standards.
• Collaborate with HR to manage recruitment, selection, and onboarding processes, building a high-performing team.
• Chair cross-functional meetings, promoting effective communication between departments.
• Champion the adoption of new technology, streamlining processes and enhancing team capability.
• Engage with customers to gather insights, enhancing service delivery and addressing specific needs.

• Accountable for providing specialist information, advice and guidance to families, children and young people accessing local government services.
• Led a specialist support service team of 25 employees, fostering a collaborative environment to meet project deadlines efficiently.
• Conducted regular performance evaluations, offering constructive feedback and tailored development plans to enhance team capabilities.
• Achieved stable staffing by recruiting and hiring staff and enforcing policy consistency.
• Monitored and analysed team performance data, identifying trends and implementing corrective actions to address areas of concern.
• Maintained a safe and healthy work environment by adhering to health and safety guidelines.
• Managed day-to-day delivery of a specialist information, advice and guidance support team, ensuring client needs are met to a consistently high standard.
• Facilitated weekly team meetings to discuss progress, address challenges, and set actionable goals for upcoming projects.
• Established and maintained strong stakeholder relationships, effectively resolving delivery concerns and enhancing service satisfaction.
• Managed budgets for early years funding, equipment, staffing costs and forward planning of service needs.
• Designed and processed customer data, maintaining legal and GDPR compliance throughout.
• Implemented new government funding initiatives, securing necessary resources to support service delivery.
• Contributed to forward planning, development, organisation and objective setting of wider service, systems and procedures.
• Delivered specialist advice and information to stakeholders and coordinated logistics for conferences and events.
• Took the lead and achieved successful outcome following a rigorous internal audit review of early years funding processes.
• Identified misclaimed funding, updated local policies, and recovered over £100k (2019).

• Provided customer focused advice to a wide range of audiences.
• Supported over 700+ private, voluntary and independent early years and childcare businesses within West Sussex to access funding.
• Developed and delivered initiatives aligning with government plans, facilitating events that supported local policy objectives.
• Executed effective marketing, promotion and communication strategies to raise the profile of initiatives at the local level.
• Organised and planned own and teams' work to meet set deadlines.
• Oversaw a £50m budget, ensuring efficient allocation and expenditure of funds. which includes government reporting.
• Resolved client queries and concerns promptly, demonstrating commitment to exceptional customer service.
• Continuously updated professional knowledge through CPD activities, staying ahead of regulatory changes and industry trends.
• Reviewed and interpreted complex statutory guidance to assist clients in making informed decisions.
• Maintained key working relationships with internal customers, team colleagues and external partners/organisations.
• Consistently above government's national average for take up of funding entitlements.
• Spearheaded adoption of new IT systems, enhancing financial management through improved accuracy and streamlined processes.
• Developed and maintained strong relationships with clients through regular, meaningful communication to help build trust.
• In 2015 recognised at WSCC's Celebrating Success awards for exceptional work in supporting vulnerable families access a new government initiative (2 year old funding).
• In 2017 nominated for Living our Values Every Day award by taking the lead in supporting the team to achieve its goals.
• Interpret complex information to produce high-quality documents with minimal guidance.
• Monitor, analyse and interpret information/statistics and contribute to own and team objectives.
• Designed and introduced monthly payments ensuring IT systems in place.
• Devised and implemented audit process for external providers.
• Improved service responses by reviewing query types and simplifying information access.
  Reduced friction for staff by refining how information is presented and found.
  Strengthened engagement by running a “have your say” consultation for leaflet updates.
  Increased parent reach to 15,000 while collecting stakeholder feedback on usefulness.
  Improved parent support materials by applying feedback from leaflet users.

• Organised and monitored team resources in collaboration with Team Manager to enhance service efficiency.
• Supported and developed standards of practice with the assistants to ensure effective service delivery.
• Provided proactive quality assurance and monitoring to support service decisions and planning.
• Improved assistant performance through direct supervision and ongoing mentorship.
• Undertook analysis of data to produce performance reports for managers to review service delivery and action as necessary.
• Handled, processed, and stored confidential information in relation to the service.
• Contributed to projects that challenged existing practices and generated innovative solutions to improve service delivery.
• Worked with managers to identify, develop, document and implement improvement plans.
• Collaborated with partner agencies and customers to gather feedback, driving continuous improvement of the service.

• Reporting to the Business Resource Manager, worked with all stakeholders to proactively coordinate and monitor a £9.7m early years capital grant funding programme within a non-negotiable timeframe.
• Tracked expenditure of 394 projects by establishing monitoring schedules and ensuring timely approvals.
• Established asset register to log assets, determine project retention periods (up to 25 years), and calculate depreciation values.
• Devised system to track and redistribute assets where necessary.
• Supported Business Resource Manager in financial report to the Department for Education.
• Supported West Sussex early years and childcare providers in delivering government's extension to 3- and 4-year-old free offer, focusing on enhancing quality of learning environments and ICT resources.
• Delivered comprehensive technical information to assist customers.
• Promoted the take-up of government funding.

Various roles within editorial teams where I:

• Developed excellent proofreading skills.
• Provided project management and administrative support to assigned account teams.
• Carried out user acceptance testing of PAREXEL's first global collaborative server - providing valuable feedback in preparing for its release to pilot group.
• Co-ordinated training for the company's global portal project by setting up 4-tier, remote training programme; acted as focal point for troubleshooting and co-ordinating all feedback and provided additional, face-to-face local training.
• Maintained comprehensive overview of proposal/project status, serving as central information point for all stakeholders.
• Liaised directly with clients regarding faculty/vendor status and issues including approval of editorial materials.
• Coordinated tasks and prioritised duties within a high-pressure work environment to ensure efficiency.
• Prepared proposals and budgets; established project variance forms linked to budgets to facilitate tracking of project profitability.
• Work with all stakeholders to ensure editorial items are produced and available for publication and/or presented at conferences.
• Set up and maintain editorial work schedules.
• Create and format presentations involving heavy technical data.

• Executed secretarial duties for Technical Director and Technical Department, enhancing workflow through efficient collation of monthly reports.
• Coordinated professional calendars, providing timely reminders and updates to optimise scheduling for meetings and events.
• Captured detailed notes at meetings, ensuring clarity on agenda items, action points, and proposals for follow-up.
• Produced written communications for the Manufacturing Director to facilitate information sharing.