IT Service Desk Lead

The Role

Social Work England are the specialist regulator for social work in England, focused on enabling positive change in social work. Every day, social workers support millions of people to improve their chances in life. We are taking a new approach to regulating social workers in their vital roles. We believe in the power of collaboration and share a common goal with those we regulate – to protect the public, enable positive change and ultimately improve people’s lives.

Our IT Service Desk Lead is responsible for the ownership, operation, and continuous improvement of the IT Service Desk and its associated processes, tooling, and user experience.

They act as the primary owner of the Fresh service platform, ensuring incidents, service requests, and changes are handled efficiently, consistently, and in line with ITIL principles and agreed service levels. They identify opportunities to automate and streamline routine processes, improve self-service capability, and reduce avoidable demand on the team.

The role also works closely with other teams in the organisation who use Freshdesk, helping to align processes and enable cross-functional workflows between Fresh service and Freshdesk where this improves service outcomes.

• Own the service desk day-to-day, ensuring requests are logged, prioritised, progressed, and resolved with clear user communication, and taking action to address backlogs, repeat issues, and quality concerns.
• Manage our IT Operations officers, providing technical guidance, sharing knowledge, and supporting their development to build a capable and consistent team. Be the escalation point for the IT Operations team on queries and exceptions.
• Make decisions on ticket prioritisation, workload management, and when to elevate issues beyond first and second line support, ensuring decisions are consistent with agreed procedures and service levels.
• Act as primary contact, administrator and platform owner for Fresh service, maintaining the contract relationship along with configuration, workflow rules, automation triggers, SLA definitions, and reporting.
• Work with teams throughout the organisation that use Freshdesk to identify where integration with Fresh service can improve outcomes, and support the design of clean, traceable cross-functional workflows.
• Design and implement automations for routine processes including joiners, movers leavers (JML), access changes, and standard requests, reducing manual handling and improving consistency.
• Own the JML process end-to-end, using working knowledge of Microsoft 365, including Entra , Exchange Online, and Teams, to design and maintain automated workflows for account provisioning, access changes, device allocation, and licence management. Coordinate with stakeholders to ensure timely and consistent onboarding and offboarding. Ensure all JML activity is handled in line with data protection obligations, with any risks or concerns escalated to the Data Protection Officer or relevant stakeholder.
• Design, build and continuously enhance a knowledge base and self-service catalogue that drives down avoidable contact, improves first contact resolution, and enables a consistent user experience. Proactively identify recurring issues and improvement opportunities, delivering controlled changes that reduce repeat demand and improve the support experience.
• Establish governance, reporting, and feedback loops to measure effectiveness, influence service improvements, and communicate insights, trends, continuous improvement priorities and recommendations to leadership teams and key stakeholders.
• Maintain accurate asset records in Fresh service across the full device lifecycle, supporting reliable reporting on device status, age, and allocation.
• Contribute to IT Operations planning and documentation, including SOPs, workflows, and knowledge base content, helping build a trusted function that is , auditable, and scalable.

• Experience working in a service desk or IT support role, with clear responsibility for managing tickets and support processes. Experience of managing a team is desirable.
• Good working knowledge of Microsoft…