Regional Schools Commissioner

Dedicated to delivering first-class education to children and young people across England, the Department for Education is a stimulating and rewarding place to work.

With over 9000 open academies and free schools, were looking for an outstanding leader with a track record of significant achievement and delivery, commitment to and passion for diversity and inclusion, and a good understanding of the education landscape both nationally and locally.

Working alongside a strong team of Commissioners making important operational decisions on behalf of the Secretary of State for all academies, free schools and sponsors in your region. That means monitoring performance, identifying and driving improvements to schools that are underperforming, encouraging academies that are performing well to become sponsors or set up multi-academy trusts and leading on free school delivery. You will also play a key role in leading a regional team that contributes to wider Department school improvement work. It also means engaging effectively with school leaders and stakeholders, earning respect to support and challenge the wider sector.

Job description

As a Regional Schools Commissioner you will be:

Accountable for core programmes and ministerial priorities as well as managing a team and building and developing key relationships with LAs, Dioceses, Ofsted and others.

A key part of the senior team supporting the National Schools Commissioner in developing the directorate as the departments single delivery operation for schools, being a part of a high performing leadership team with ambition to raise standards and deliver a flexible, joined-up service to all schools in the country.

Driving forward the academies' programme for the region and making decisions informed by advice from headteacher boards. This includes creation of new schools, approving changes and providing advice on the management of contentious academy decisions to Ministers for decision.

Leading work with central policy teams, Regional School Commissioners and other colleagues to ensure effective, consistent and high quality delivery of a policy portfolio across regional teams. This includes helping policy teams with operational intelligence, ensuring robust decisions are made so that regional teams have the right resource, skills and information to deliver.

Responsibilities

Are you an individual who can put our values of honesty, integrity, impartiality and objectivity at the heart of what you do?

Candidates will need to provide evidence of the essential five criteria.

Excellent leadership skills: able to take a leading role in initiating action, making decisions, managing performance and promoting inclusive team working in a large-scale operation, and being part of collective leadership success.

An exceptional ability to build key stakeholder relationships that can demonstrate impact, enabling delivery of improvement to take place through others at regional level.

Highly developed analytical skills, identifying issues and making evidence-based decisions to manage, change and respond to critical events, and monitor success.

Effective communication skills to be a credible advocate of delivery and policy development with senior colleagues internally, exercising sound judgement and challenging assumptions where necessary to ensure that delivery impact and user need are at the core of our policy-making. As part of this, an ability to understand and absorb the implications of policy for delivery challenges.

Experience of delivering system improvement and transformation using performance, financial data and other intelligence to reach decisions about where to target support and initiate programmes of activity, monitoring impact and seeking efficiencies in delivery.

Please see the attached candidate pack for further details about the role and our requirements

Benefits

Applicants currently holding a permanent post in the Civil Service should note that, if successful, their salary on appointment would be determined by the Departments transfer / promotion policies.

As a member of the DfE, you will be entitled to join the highly competitive Civil Service Pension Scheme, which many experts agree is one of the most generous in the UK.

You will have 25 days leave, increasing by 1 day every year to a maximum of 30 days after five years service. In addition, all staff receive the Queens Birthday privilege holiday and 8 days bank and public holidays.

We offer flexible working arrangements, such as job sharing, term-time working, flexi-time and compressed hours.

As an organisation, which exists to support education and lifelong learning, we offer our staff excellent professional development opportunities.