LEADING A STRONG NATIONAL CHARITY

Shared Parenting Scotland (SPS) is the expert voice in Scotland promoting parenting arrangements after separation that benefit children by trying to ensure that both parents remain fully involved in their lives.

Our telephone helpline and support meetings across Scotland help parents to stay involved after separation and provide information and support about all forms of dispute resolution including mediation, legal negotiation and court action. Each support meeting is attended by a family lawyer. Around a thousand parents contact these services every year or make use of our WhatsApp closed group chats which offer support 24/7.

Our training programme delivers two innovative programmes for separated parents.

New Ways For Families® helps parents to avoid high conflict behaviour, strengthens their abilities to make parenting decisions and communicate with their ex-partner and helps them rely less on experts and the courts to make decisions for them and their children. It is licensed by the High Conflict institute to SPS for delivery throughout the UK and we have recruited a team of freelance coaches.

Love, Loss and Living was developed by SPS in partnership with psychotherapist Jan Montgomery. It helps parents who are not seeing their children to understand and manage the grief and stress. It is now being delivered through a mixture of online course material and online or face-to-face group support sessions.

We also work to influence statutory and voluntary organisations to remove barriers to shared parenting and support parents to reach agreement rather than fight each other in court. We meet regularly with civil servants and MSPS across a range of departments and are the secretary to the Cross Party Group on Shared Parenting at the Scottish Parliament We publish a range of guides on different aspects of family law, courts and other shared parenting issues. Every summer we have hosted a student intern who undertakes a project supporting our work, such as a study of the views of young people on how parental separation affected them (Sharing My Parents), a review of developments in family courts in various countries (Learning from Abroad). In 2024 our student has worked on improving the accessibility of information about family court and dispute resolution processes and developed some new information sheets and videos for us.

We have built up links with other shared parenting organisations across the world and presented papers about our work at international conferences of the International Council on Shared Parenting and the Association of Family And Conciliation Courts.

BUILDING ON FIFTEEN YEARS OF GROWTH

The charity has been operating on a volunteer basis in Scotland for a long time, but was formalised as the Scottish project of Families Need Fathers when funding was obtained in 2010 to open a Scottish office. Families Need Fathers Scotland was registered as a separate charity and has operated independently of Families Need Fathers since 2012. The name of the charity was changed to Shared Parenting Scotland in 2020.

The current national manager Ian Maxwell and Policy Manager John Forsyth have both worked for the charity since 2010, during which time the staff has grown to six people. The new chief executive will take on the challenge of maintaining and developing the organisation at a time when the need to support separated parents and their families is even greater than in 2010.

Our vision is a Scotland in which the norm after separation will be equal sharing of responsibilities between parents and more support for children after separation.

This is an exciting time to join SPS and lead on the delivery of our training and support programmes.

The Chief Executive provides leadership for the SPS team, promoting our work to funders and stakeholders, working with other sector leaders, and helping shape developments in the sector and wider political environment.

While being an expert in family law or dispute resolution is not an essential requirement, we are looking for a leader who is interested in organisational learning and development and who cares about the outcomes for separated families.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL

We would like to hear from compelling communicators with excellent team leadership skills and the ability to build and maintain stakeholder relationships. Our ideal candidate will also be experienced in financial and strategic planning with the ability to identify opportunities for SPS to develop, thrive and continue to innovate in the years ahead. Direct experience of one or more of the main areas of work (helpline, training delivery and policy work) is necessary although it does not need to be directly related to co-parenting or family breakdown.

We welcome applicants from a range of backgrounds, including experienced managers who may be considering a CEO role for the first time.

Post Overview

The purpose of the job is to:

• Overall management of the charity, line management of staff and work with trustees.
• While the following points relate to oversight of the various working areas, within a small staff team the chief executive will also be required to take part in service delivery where necessary, to obtain or enhance an understanding of the issues faced by the people using our services.
• Financial oversight: manage existing grant funding and apply for additional grants and other funding. Preparation of annual accounts information for auditor and oversight of ongoing administration of charity income and expenditure.
• Policy oversight: work to advance the policy aims of the charity. These currently include involvement in implementation of parts of the 2020 Children (Scotland) Act, provision of better early support for separating parents including dispute resolution outside court, equality issues affecting separated parents and faster, cheaper and less complex family court processes.
• Training Oversight: manage the staff who are developing and delivering training programmes and the partnership/franchising arrangements with training agencies such as the High Conflict Institute.
• Helpline and Personal Support oversight: oversee the work of the Helpline and Support team members. Ensure that the published and online information produced by the charity is maintained and developed and the appropriate activity and outcome statistics and case studies are maintained.
• Promotion and Publicity oversight: oversee the work of the Digital Marketing and Communication Manager and any external consultants, including review of usage statistics.