Director of People, Finance & Operations

Director of People, Finance & Operations

Reports to: Kiran Gill, CEO

Start date: Asap  

Location: London / Remote with weekly travel to London

Contract: Permanent / FT - or 0.6 hours, with options for flexible working 

Salary: Starting at £65-75k per annum (+6% employer pension contribution and sector-leading parental leave policy shared with all applicants) 

Closing Date for Applications: Midnight Sunday 12th November 2023

The Organisation

The Difference is a young charity founded to improve the lives of vulnerable children by raising the status and expertise of those who teach them. By 2030 The Difference has ambitions to influence school leadership across the country. We will seek new ways to scale our impact through open source publications and policy influencing; and will continue to boost the careers of a new generation of headteachers, with an impact on children nationwide. 

In 2023, The Difference’s work is needed now more than ever. Our teachers tell us that the effects of COVID-19, coupled with the spiralling cost of living, have substantially increased levels of children’s vulnerability. In the next five years, The Difference must grow to meet this challenge. We will deepen the impact of our programmes; learn from them to influence more broadly; and develop the stability and values of our charity - ensuring our income; our team culture and our governance and decision-making fully reflect and facilitate the change we were founded to create. To do this, we need a fourth member of our senior leadership team: A Director of People, Finance & Operations.

The Opportunity

We are excited to be recruiting for a Director of People, Finance & Operations to join The Difference’s Executive Team. The role will focus on People, Finance, Operations and Business Planning across the charity. As a charity that develops leadership, this key role will model the leadership development we want to see across England’s schools: combining compassion and a relentless drive for improved outcomes. Working alongside the CEO, the Director of Programmes and the Director of Research, Impact & Influence, this role offers a brilliant opportunity to grow one of the sector’s most dynamic charities.

As a member of the Leadership Team, this role will be key in finalising and delivering the charity’s new five-year plan to take us from start-up adolescence to a charity with established impact on England’s vulnerable children. The Director of People, Finance & Operations will lead on organisational development, including organisational structure, culture and talent development and evolution of our decision-making and governance processes. The Director of People, Finance & Operations will have overall responsibility for the charity’s finances, HR, legal and governance functions including line-managing a small team and working with a group of pro bono advisers external to the organisation. The Director will report alongside the CEO into our Board of Trustees.

Person Specification

Essential - To apply for this role, you must be:

• A cultural fit, with a natural relational style involving building strong, trusting and communicative relationships; a commitment to anti-racist practice, and embedding asset-based and bias-aware approaches across an organisation (see The Difference’s values below); and a credibility in representing our work internally and externally
• Financially-minded, able to share responsibility for our financial sustainability and strategy, and to model our growth
• A skilled people-developer, with experience developing talent and growing group cultures for effectiveness and distributed leadership
• A strategic thinker, able to grasp detail and assess strategic significance, able to rapidly learn about new topics and develop credible insights 
• A details-orientated designer of processes, with track-record of translating ideas into strategies and strategies into deliverable outcomes
• Experienced in operations / finance, including line-managing or building Operations, Finance, HR or Legal functions in an organisation
• Ambitious to shape a young charity into adulthood; and grow alongside in your own leadership

Desired - In addition you might have:

• Insight through work or life into school experiences of over-excluded young people, including young people with experience of the care system, of mental ill health, of special educational needs, of racism 
• Experience at senior leadership within an organisation, including line managing senior leaders and specialists
• Experience working in the public sector including with/in schoolsand multi-academy trusts

Key Areas of Responsibility

The following areas of responsibility are the core of the role. However, the role is flexible and will vary according to the needs of the team, and the background and experience of the successful applicant. 

Strategy & Charity Leadership

Responsible for:

• Decision-making and governance at the charity, to embed our values through our work. This includes liaising with Charity Commission and Companies House, working with the EA to the Directors on improvements to “Business as usual” governance and working with the Insight group (bringing together trustees, staff and young people) to improve insight-led representation on our board in the coming years 
• Strategic Finance - working cross-organisationally to steer the course of our income generation strategies across fundraising, programme traded income and our research traded income; generating strategic finance insights from our finances; working closely with other Directors to spot opportunities for further growth and collaboration, and to understand The Difference’s market position; managing stakeholders including philanthropic investors, civil servants contracting our work, and multi-academy trusts
• Risk Management - Spotting and communicating the most significant risks to the charity’s success with colleagues in the Directors team; managing shared ownership and mitigation across senior leadership, the wider organisation, and Board of Trustees
• Representing The Difference internally and externally, including covering for other members of the senior leadership team and the CEO as necessary

People & Culture

Responsible for:

• Cross-organisational culture and strategic HR to achieve our charitable aims, including staff development and residential, meetings, line-management, HR policies and processes, Diversity Equality Asset-based approach, working with Operations & HR Manager and EA to the Directors, to embed our values throughout our work
• Talent development including working with the Operations & HR Manager to ensure that we have the right people in the right roles to achieve our strategy
• Cross-organisational process for translating our strategy into key performance indicators and continuous improvement, in collaboration with our Director of Research, Impact & Influence
• Dispute resolution in line with restorative approaches used by our school leaders, and the charity’s complaints process, liaising with pro bono partners with HR specialism

Operations & Finance

Responsible for:

• The charity’s finances, reporting to the Board of Trustees
• The Operations & Finance team: Head of Operations & Finance, Operations & HR Officer, shared management with the CEO of Head of Fundraising and EA to the Directors
• Sharing leadership of income generation and budget management across the team of Directors
• Overseeing facilities, ways of working, premises and IT to reflect our values and underpin impact
• Contracts and legal compliance, overseeing relationship with pro bono partners to ensure we are protected from risk
• Leading sub-contracting and an agile function where necessary

The Difference’s Values

• Purpose-driven - Our work is guided and galvanised by our values and beliefs. We are problem-solvers, and do not wait to act. We are inspired by our purpose to improve life-chances of the most vulnerable young people, and to develop new expertise in the teaching workforce.
• Strong relationships - We prioritise genuine relationships over transactional interactions, and know that this requires deliberaterelational practice and achieves the best outcomes. We see those we work with as people first and theirroles second; and know this greater trust allows us to take more risks, gain more feedback and havegreater impact. Working through a network of relationships allows us to achieve more than we could doalone.
• Internalised locus of control - We work hard to reframe difficult situations to discover what we have within our power in terms of solutions. Wetake it upon ourselves to walk towards challenges and can take a high level of ownership and agency inour work and its continuous improvement. We never shout “fire” without first picking up our own bucket.
• Scientific approach- We take a diagnostic approach to unpicking causes of problems. We are loud and proud of our failures,recognising failing fast and often is key to finding the best solutions. We test solutions and are willing touse data and feedback to make adjustments and choose new directions. We look for a measurable shiftin outcomes before we declare we are having an impact.
• Not squeamish about structural inequalities - We believe patterns of inequality can and should be disrupted. We strive to be clear-eyed about how these inequalities work, and both the individual practice and system-changes required to address them. We push ourselves to overcome awkwardness in talking about this; and to begin with acknowledging our own biases and blind spots. 
• Value voices of dissent and difference -We are brave enough to share our minds with others; and nurture that bravery in our collaborators. We build feedback loops to learn from others’ perceptions – especially if they differ from our own. We don’t mind disagreement, are wary of group-think and seek out different perspectives to make our work stronger. 
• Asset-based- We work hard to avoid deficit thinking and aim to start with what’s strong, not what’s wrong. We are careful not to frame our colleagues and stakeholders - particularly young people and families – as othered victims but instead to recognise their agency and to talk with and about them with empathy and respect. We build relationships with, feedback loops from, and recruit into our teams, people who have the assets of insights into our delivery work and the young people we work with.

How To Apply

To apply, please complete your application no later than Midnight on Sunday 12th November 2023. Please note, the application form will include a series of written answers to three questions, which we recommend you prepare ahead of populating them into the application form. 

Please complete your application by clicking Apply!

Interviews will be held during the week beginning 20th November. Please indicate if you would not be available to attend an interview during this week.

For an informal and confidential discussion about the role prior to application, you can arrange a call with one of our team here by contacting [email removed - click apply for more details].

For any other questions please, please contact [email removed - click apply for more details]

We are committed to building a diverse team and strongly encourage applications from under-represented groups in the charity sector such as people from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, people with experience in the care system, non-graduates and first-in-family graduates.

As part of our commitment to fairer recruitment, all applications will be assessed with names and any protected characteristics redacted.

Recommended Reading 

To understand more about The Difference and what we are trying to achieve, we recommend the following:

• The research which underpins our organisation.
• Our latest Impact Report, sharing our work across the 2021-22 academic year.
• Coverage of our work as told in this BBC Radio 4 show The Spark and this The Economist short film

Details of our most recent work and issues in the sector, as illustrated within our fortnightlybulletin archive.