Image: Pexels - Karolina Grabowska

Programme Director - Parenting and Early Years

Reporting to: Chief Executive

Internal: You will be part of the Senior Leadership Team. You will manage a senior grants manager, and oversee the whole Parenting and Early Years team.

External: You will have many external relationships, including with:

  • The leaders of key organisations in the sector.

  • Independent researchers who specialise in the field.

  • Government policy leads on key issues within the field.

  • Grantmakers and policy leads at funders that also support the field.

  • Current and past grantees in the field.

Salary: Circa £80,000 per annum

Location: Our office is in central London and our current employment contracts are office based. However, staff work flexibly, including working from home, and are required to attend our office regularly for defined purposes such as 1-2-1 meetings, team meetings, staff meetings, coaching, training etc.               

Role Purpose

The Programme Director Parenting and Early Years is the leader of the Parenting and Early Years funding priority. You will oversee the team that delivers it, and report back to the CEO and board of the Henry Smith Charity on a regular basis. You will be responsible for growing the impact of this team, and for overseeing the (approximately) £10m annual budget that it will deploy.

This role is fundamentally about driving change. It is about achieving a more relational way of working with people outside our organisational walls, growing our relationships and partnerships. It is about adopting a more ambitious focus on impact. And it is also about changing what we do to help us meet our commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion.

You will directly manage the Senior Grants Manager of the Parenting and Early Years team. You and the Senior Grants Manager will share management responsibility for the Parenting and Early Years team, to ensure that it has the capacity to both focus internally on excellent grant management, and externally on relationships, and on the ever-shifting policy context. As Programme Director you will be more externally focused, the Senior Grants Manager more internally focused. However you will be the ultimate and accountable team leader. 

Crucially, you will be responsible for ensuring that your team works closely and collaboratively with the two other organising themes to prevent silo-working, and ensure that all our work contributes to the same strategy.

Responsibilities

    • Developing, iterating and articulating a vision of the role HSC should play in the Parenting and Early Years sector wider sector.

    • Designing and implementing a portfolio of activities that goes beyond grantmaking, making use of the diverse ways in which HSC can make a positive impact.

    • Ensuring that HSC makes great grants to impactful Parenting and Early Years organisations, through a process that is fair, accessible and respectful of the time and effort that grantseekers put in.

    • Overseeing strategic funding as part of our main grant-making activities within the Parenting and Early Years team.

    • Working on other cross organisational projects as required

    • Providing leadership to the Parenting and Early Years team to ensure that colleagues understand your vision, feel part of it, and understand how it is to be implemented.

    • Designing and promoting cross-team working approaches to ensure that all three of the organising theme teams collaborate effectively and contribute to our overall mission in a joined-up way.

    • Leading the way on diversity, equity and inclusion, making it a constant theme and helping others to include it in their practice.

    • Expecting (and demonstrating) high standards in grantmaking practice, treating grantseekers and grantees like valued partners, and championing flexible and relational approaches in the team’s work.

    • Ensuring that the work of the Parenting and Early Years team is always aligned with HSC’s mission.  

    • Line-managing the Senior Grants Manager to ensure that excellent grantmaking practices are followed, ensuring the Senior Grants Manager has the support to enable them to operationally manage the team ( enabling this role to keep focused on strategy, and on developments and opportunities outside HSC ).

    • Overseeing and promoting a proportionate, research-informed approach to learning from our grants and other interventions, to help us meet our commitment to being a learning organisation. This will involve working closely with the Director of Research, Strategy and External Engagement, as well as other colleagues.

    • Overseeing the full grants function delivery of the Parenting and Early Years priority, which will include working closely with the Director of Grant Operations.

    • Developing and managing budgets and timelines to enable all the above.

    • Helping the senior leadership team of HSC to be a highly productive group.

    • Participating in board meetings and intermediary committees as required.

    • Leading on the development, agreement and management of Parenting and Early Years partnerships between HSC and other organisations.

    • Helping the whole team to maintain an outward focus, learning from others and striking partnerships that help us get close to the world beyond our own organisational walls.

Person Specification

  • Significant experience working in the Parenting and Early Years field.

    An informed understanding of good and bad practices within the Parenting and Early Years field.

    Familiarity with the state of the evidence base relating to interventions within the Parenting and Early Years field.

    An ability to articulate the main research methods used to measure or evaluate initiatives in the Parenting and Early Years field, and the skills required to evaluate and explain the relative merits and limitations of different research approaches.

    A solid understanding of the policy context around the Parenting and Early Years field.

    Demonstrated experience of entrepreneurial activity, either in an organisation you founded, or within an organisation you worked for.

    Experience of managing and leading a team of at least three people.

    Experience of managing projects of some complexity.

  • Experience of grantmaking or having managed active grants and working with funders at a strategic level.

    Experience of policy development or advocacy.

    Experience of having provided leadership within Parenting and Early Years.

    Familiarity with major debates and reform movements in modern philanthropy and grantmaking.

    Experience of managing the performance of teams and individuals.

  • Passionate about improving outcomes in the sector.

    A willingness and desire to learn, innovate and lead on all of the Parenting and Early Years funding strand priorities, particularly in relation to the funding strand priority/ies that you may have less experience of.

    Empathetic to grantseekers and grantees.

    Wary of the power held by grantmakers, and the effects of that power on others.

    A good listener who always values the inputs of others. 

    Able to prioritise, plan and lead independently and collaboratively.

    Able to make decisions when a lack of information or an overwhelmingly complex situation might make it easier to not decide.

    Humble about your own skills and knowledge, and your abilities as a grantmaker.

    Keen to keep learning, and always looking for areas of personal improvement.

    Keen to meet new people and form new relationships. 

    Able to effectively multi-task; to manage and embrace multiple demands, responsibilities and projects.

    Curiosity.