This vacancy has now closed

Top job! Participation and Practice Lead

  • Full time
  • £45,000 – £50,000
  • Edinburgh/Home Based
  • Closing 15th November 2023


  • Advertised from 25th October 2023
  • Permanent. Full time (flexible working options available).
  • 6528

Role

Save the Children UK has an exciting opportunity for a collaborative and empowering individual with extensive leadership experience to join us as our Participation and Practice Lead – Scotland where you will work on growing and embedding our participation function and strategy.

About Us

Save the Children UK believes every child deserves a future. In Scotland, the UK and around the world, we work every day to give children a healthy start in life, the opportunity to learn and protection from harm. When crisis strikes, and children are most vulnerable, we are always among the first to respond and the last to leave. We ensure children's unique needs are met and their voices are heard. We deliver lasting results for millions of children, including those hardest to reach.

About the role

As Participation and Practice Lead, you will get to set the direction and ensure successful delivery of our participation and practice development functions to achieve policy and practice change for children living in poverty in Scotland. You'll lead and empower a dynamic team helping develop their knowledge and skills and embedding best practice across these functions; lead on key programmes of work; oversee and develop a portfolio of projects; and proactively secure strategic partnerships and influential relationships at both national and local level to support our work.

In this role, you will:

  • Provide strategic leadership across our participation and practice development functions to deliver our strategy in Scotland
  • Oversee the development and delivery of our approach to working with community partners in local areas
  • Oversee the successful creation and delivery of a portfolio of national and local projects and partnerships to deliver our goals
  • Proactively forge new and innovative strategic partnerships and maintain influential relationships with key stakeholders at national and local level to achieve our goals
  • Lead, support and develop the participation and practice team to successfully deliver our mission and plans, supporting excellent practice by promoting and supporting staff wellbeing, and opportunities for staff development.

About you

To be successful, it is important that you have:

  • Significant experience of strategic and operational leadership within a small to medium sized team
  • Skills and experience in designing, setting up and overseeing successful participation and practice functions
  • Excellent interpersonal, communication and presentation skills, with the ability to build lasting relationships, and to influence and gain support from a variety of senior internal and external stakeholders
  • An excellent working knowledge and understanding of best practice (and policy) approaches to participation and engagement and how to embed this in different types of projects and activities including policy and campaigns and innovation projects
  • Experience of building and sustaining relationships, partnerships and networks with a range of stakeholders across national, local and community organisations, that result in securing new opportunities to deliver results
  • Commitment to Save the Children's vision, mission and values.

What we offer you:

Working for a charity provides one of the best benefits there is – a sense of purpose and reward for helping others. However, we understand the importance of giving back to our employees to ensure a happy and healthy working environment and work/life balance.

  • We focus on flexibility, inclusion, collaboration, health and wellbeing both in and outside of work.
  • We provide a wide range of benefits which will reward your hard work, motivate you, and inspire you to work to improve the lives of children every day.

Application notes

To apply, please visit our website.

Closing date: Wednesday 15th November 2023.

Please note:

To avoid disappointment, you are advised to submit your application as soon as possible as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if a high volume of applications are received. This is to ensure that we can manage application levels whilst maintaining a positive candidate experience. Unfortunately, once a vacancy has closed, we are unable to consider further applications.

Ways of Working:

Remote First – The majority of our roles can be performed remotely, however you may work from the office as often as you wish. Whilst you will be predominantly working from home, we may at times require you to come to your contracted office (up to 2-4 days per month or 6-8 days per quarter). Note: This will be agreed with your Line Manager and team. This is intended to be time spent on collaborating with colleagues and relationship building.

On-site – There are certain roles that cannot be performed remotely and so your role will be based in an office location and you may occasionally be able to work from home.

Flexible Working - We are happy to discuss flexible working options at interview.

Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion:

Save the Children UK believes in a world that is fair, inclusive and equitable where all children have the opportunity to change their world. We apply this to our workforce and we are committed to developing and supporting a diverse, equitable, and inclusive organisation where all employees have a sense of belonging and feel that they can be "Free to Be Me". We are not looking for just one type of person - we want to recruit people who can add fresh perspectives, innovative ideas or challenge that disrupts the risk of group think.

We are especially interested in people whose childhood experiences - of life on a low income, of migration, of being in a racialised community, of the care system, of being LGBT+ or in an LGBT+ family or living with (or with someone with) a disability - help us to see things we might otherwise miss. Whatever your story is we want to hear it because we know that different voices, ideas, perspectives and knowledge, working together will enable us to better the lives of children around the world. This is the reason why we are all here.