Principal Director; Partnerships and Business Development

Impact Ed Group supports education and purpose-driven organisations to maximise and realise their potential.

We do this by helping our partners to be consistently impactful and operationally sustainable. Drawing on our domain expertise and technical skills in these areas, Impact Ed Group aims to be the first port of call for leaders across the education ecosystem.

This role exists as a senior leader in our Group, and leads the commercial growth of our Evaluation Practice. Impact Ed Evaluation (IEE) works with schools and organisations, analysing the impact of programmes and interventions to help them do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. The practice works with over 1,400 schools and 80 education and youth organisations, serving more than a quarter of million pupils.

This includes helping our partners to design high‑quality research projects, delivering them, and providing systems and tools for data collection, reporting and impact benchmarking.

We are excited to be recruiting for a Principal Director to lead commercial growth within our Evaluation practice. This is a new role within the practice. Reporting to our Group Directors and / or a Managing Director of IEE (subject to future appointment), the Director will work as part of a practice leadership team that will oversee all aspects of the evaluation team’s work, with a focus on leading business development.

Our partnerships encompass education organisations such as charities, edtech organisations and government, and schools and multi‑academy Trusts. Across all our partnerships, we aim to design and deliver high‑quality research and evaluation projects that help our partners make better decisions for children using good evidence.

You will provide strategic leadership, represent the organisation both internally and externally, and be responsible for driving the commercial performance of the practice. This role will sit alongside a Principal Director focused on the delivery of our partnerships, and our Director of Research.

The role will focus on partnerships and business development, ensuring that Impact Ed Evaluation is positioned well as first port of call for schools and social purpose organisations. You will lead a number of sales and marketing campaigns, develop key propositions for our partners, scan and respond to relevant tenders and work closely with a team of evaluation experts to ensure we are able to continue to bring accessible expertise to our work and partners.

The role would be ideal for a candidate with deep understanding of the education sector, a track record in business development, and the ambition to shape the direction of a growing social enterprise.

As a team focused on research and evaluation, we would also expect roles at this level to demonstrate:

• Values and people: Alignment with our values and ability to demonstrate them in your work. You will facilitate conversations about professional development for your direct reports and act as a coach and role model for other members of the team.
• Partnership management: Modelling of excellence in partnership management, particularly on proactive driving of partnerships forward, scope management and stakeholder engagement.
• Scoping, sales and evaluation design: Leadership of business development for consultancy engagements and facilitation of evaluation design processes, including designing Theories of Change and evaluation plans, particularly for high‑value and high‑complexity partnerships, in collaboration with our in‑house evaluation experts.
• Proposition development
  :
  Understanding of our sector and ability to combine that with our offers as a practice to create propositions that can drive partnership and business development opportunities.
• Reporting and improvement: Ability to listen to and synthesize partner needs to tailor evaluation reporting, quality assure others’ outputs, and help partners take action from research findings.

As well as a commitment to the organisations we work with, we have a commitment to our people and developing the next generation of leaders within the social enterprise, education and evaluation sectors.

Our…