Person Specification

The Difference is looking for someone who can lead the team’s impact function as the charity goes through a really exciting period of growth and development. You’ll be refining our monitoring and evaluation work to drive continuous improvement across the charity, and shape future programme design. You’ll feed into the development of new tools for use by schools to better understand and respond to their own inclusion data. You’ll also play a key role in helping The Difference and its partner schools to understand the mechanisms for change in our programmes, as well as identifying what supports and hinders change. Our programmes work with schools as they become more inclusive, support all of their students to succeed, and reduce the amount of learning lost to exclusions and absence.

You will have real ownership over your area of work, be happiest in a flexible and ambitious environment, and enjoy testing out new ideas. You will have experience in working on programme evaluation, impact measurement or applied research, and will combine strong data and project-management skills.

Essential knowledge, experience and skills

• Experience of designing and carrying out both formative and summative evaluation understanding how to appropriately design, collect and analyse quantitative and qualitative data.
• Organisation & project management skills, demonstrable through past work whether this was delivering a project independently or coordinating a team. You feel confident planning multiple workstreams, working to timelines and juggling deadlines.
• Strategic communication – Confident in organising ideas and information to highlight the more salient and strategically significant elements, with internal and external audiences. Experienced in communicating with stakeholders from different backgrounds, from CEOs to service-users or young people.
• Experience in contributing to organisational change processes - working with senior leadership to utilise insights from programme evaluation to support the evolution of programme design and using evaluation to identify areas for continuous improvement.
• Values – A career (or voluntary experiences) which evidence shared values with The Difference - see these values below - plus a personal commitment to our mission to improve life outcomes for vulnerable young people.
• Self-directed – Evidenced capacity to take high levels of ownership in your work and over your own development, proactively diagnosing skills and information gaps, and making use of others’ expertise.
• Agile & solutions-focused – Ability to thrive in a fast-paced start-up environment, comfortable with making decisions in ambiguous contexts and casting a critical eye on systems, processes and practice.

Desired knowledge, experience and skills

• Knowledge of the education sector, whether from working in the classroom, research, policy, or non-profits.
• Experience in the start-up or small charity sector - An understanding of the fast-paced nature of start-ups and or small charities.
• Quantitative data analysis skills: Experience using software to analyse large datasets (e.g. R, SPSS, Stata), and ability to interpret results, plus confidence in using Excel and other programmes to present this.
• Insight through work or life into school experiences of over-excluded young people, including young people with experience of the care system, of mental ill health, of special educational needs, or racism.

Why Work for The Difference?

Schooling isn’t working for the children who need it most. Every week in England 109 children – equivalent to three full classrooms – are permanently excluded from school. This is just the tip of the iceberg with thousands more children losing out on learning. Since the pandemic, school suspensions have risen significantly, as has severe and persistent absenteeism. 1 in 5 children are missing more than 10% of their time in school.

Children who are excluded or persistently absent are much more likely to already be experiencing vulnerability or disadvantage. They are more likely to live in poverty, have learning needs, be suffering mental health challenges, or experience a lack of safety outside school. Certain identities and ethnicities are also disproportionately affected, notably Gypsy Roma Traveller and black Caribbean children.

Exclusion and high rates of absence can have a dramatic effect on life chances. These young people are more likely to drop out of education, employment or training, become vulnerable to long-term serious and mental ill health, or be at risk of criminal exploitation.

The Difference believes that children and young people deserve better and that the education system has to change.

Our Organisation

The Difference is a young education charity, founded to change the story on lost learning. By 2030, we want rates of exclusion and absence to be falling nationally and for schools to be better equipped to support all children, including those who may be vulnerable.

The Difference was born out of a year’s research into school exclusions, with think-tank IPPR in 2017. This research identified a lack of inclusion expertise in schools and proposed a new school leadership development programme to fill this gap. Our founder – Kiran – gave up her job on the commitment of a small handful of funders to support this work. In 2018, she hired the founding team who took The Difference from concept to reality and began work with our first teachers and schools.

The Difference is now a 22-strong team, delivering multiple school leadership programmes, alongside a growing research and policy arm. Our work is needed more than ever. Effects of COVID-19, coupled with the spiralling cost of living, have substantially increased levels of vulnerability. Schools serving excluded pupils face under-funding. The Difference has had excellent early impact but there is work ahead to capture this, share learning with schools and policy-makers, and grow our capacity to lower exclusions across England.

The Task Ahead: Head of Impact

In 2022, The Difference established a Research, Impact and Influencing Directorate, indicating the growing importance of this work to our mission. We’re doing more to understand (and evidence) how the school leaders who take part in our programmes are driving impactful inclusion in their schools. We have also started to do wider research, looking into inclusive practice in schools nationwide and using our learnings to contribute to guidance for schools and recommendations for policymakers. Improving our understanding of the impact of inclusion is going to be at the heart of successfully changing the story for students who are currently struggling in schools.

Key Tasks for this role include:

• To strengthen and further develop our monitoring, evaluation and impact collection systems: using methods that are both qualitative (interviews, case-studies, roundtables) and quantitative (staff and student surveys, school data tracking)
• Collate and analyse our data to diagnose successes, challenges and opportunities within our various work streams.
• Act as an internal consultant with the team: bringing stakeholder feedback together in clear presentations for other staff members and acting as a “critical friend” during delivery and strategy planning.
• Identify insights that point to continuous improvement of our programmes and work with Programme Team to utilise insights.
• Plan a programme of user-research with our school partners to better identify their data needs when it comes to inclusion metrics. Use these findings in the development of new impact tools that will play a crucial role in wider sector-influencing.
• Build a longer-term strategy around the external evaluation of our work and the external research we do with our partner organisations.

Our Values

• High Expectations - We are ambitious for excellence from young people, colleagues and ourselves. We don’t believe in writing off someone’s potential because of their identity or experience of crisis.
• Strong Relationships - We prioritise genuine relationships over transactional interactions, and know that this requires deliberate relational practice. We see colleagues and partners as people first and their roles second; and know this greater trust allows us to take more risks, gain more feedback and have greater impact.
• Internalised Locus of Control - We work hard to reframe difficult situations to discover what we have within our power in terms of solutions. We take it upon ourselves to walk towards challenges and can take a high level of ownership and agency in our work/
• Pragmatism - We believe leadership means recognising current limitations and striving for improvements within and beyond them. We develop consensus and chart new ways forward, challenging false and extreme positions like “zero exclusions” or “no excuses”.

• Scientific approach - We take a diagnostic approach to unpicking causes of problems. We are loud and proud of our failures, recognising failing fast and often is key to finding the best solutions. We test solutions and are willing to use data and feedback to make adjustments and choose new directions.
• Not Squeamish about Structural Inequality - We believe patterns of inequality can and should be disrupted. We strive to be clear-eyed about these inequalities, and both the individual practice and system-changes required to address them. We push ourselves to overcome awkwardness in talking about this; and begin by acknowledging our own biases and blind spots.
• Asset-based - We work hard to avoid deficit thinking and aim to start with what’s strong, not what’s wrong. We are careful not to frame our colleagues and stakeholders - particularly young people and families – as victims but instead to recognise their agency.
• Wise selves - To both enjoy work and do their best, we want to make decisions and work with others in our “wise” - or regulated - selves. We also want to bring our compassionate self to those we work with, externally and internally, to support one another through challenging times.

Recommended Reading

If you’d like to understand more about The Difference and what we are trying to achieve, we would recommend the following:

• The research which underpins our organisation.
• Our latest Impact Report, sharing our work in 2023.