Title: Programme Director – West Midlands
Reports to: Regional Executive Director
Direct Reports: Programme Managers
Contract type: 12 Months Fixed-Term
Hours: 5 days per week (37.5 Hours) Worked between Monday- Friday
Salary: Grade 1B - £58,916 -£ 63,717 (5% employer pension contribution,
Medicash and group life assurance, 27 days annual leave per annum for FTE plus
bank holidays)
Location: Based in the West Midlands and contracted from one of our Birmingham offices, with some flexibility to work from home, subject to business requirements and line manager approval. Travel across RTS programme delivery as required.
Role Summary
We are seeking a Programme Directors to provide strategic oversight, leadership and management across Right to Succeeds place-based programmes in the West Midlands. The Programme Directors will oversee multi-sector programmes that span various workstreams ranging from education, youth provision, early years, health and wellbeing, family support, community engagement and wider system collaboration. Right to Succeed work to improve outcomes for children, young people and families through collective impact and community-led change.
The Programme Director will ensure that delivery across multiple workstreams is coherent, evidence-informed, and aligned with our organisational methods and values. They will lead a West Midlands team, manage partnerships with local authorities, system leaders, funders, community organisations and service providers, and act as a senior ambassador for Right to Succeed. The role requires strategic design, operational oversight, relationship management and the ability to shape long-term, sustainable impact across whole communities.
How to Apply
To apply for this position, please download and complete the application from our webpage www.righttosucceed.org.uk/careers and email it, along with your CV, to by 9:00am on Friday 4th September 2026.
Key Responsibilities:
- Oversee the successful implementation of Right to Succeed Discovery and Delivery across communities in the West Midlands
- Demonstrate effective leadership and management of a small team, modelling and embedding Right to Succeed values
- Build positive, sustainable partnerships, by effectively managing all key external stakeholders and funders that form part of this initiative
- Represent the programme externally, including engaging with local and national commissioners to consider new approaches to commissioning Right to Succeeds programmes
- Deliver final reports to Right to Succeed Board and any funders/commissioners on conclusions on whether the conditions for a full scale programme are met
- Make recommendations for the delivery processes in the communities and manage this with oversight to support the team through delivery to maximise impact and demonstrate change
- Proactively support and facilitate cross programme collaboration and learning
- Provide key programmatic insight to the wider Senior Executive team as part of a management group shaping organisational strategy and decision-making
- Work with the Regional Director to ensure the discovery and delivery processes are designed effectively and maximises insight, impact and prospective opportunities for future learning and growth
- Oversee the Delivery phases to ensure that we are setting the programmes up for success in terms of planning, timescales, partnerships, interventions, data collection and measurement frameworks
- Ensure that RTS programme cycle materials and training are effectively embedded leading to a consistency of methodology across our programmes and provide clarity around accountability for programme KPIs and key areas of activity
Staff Management and Leadership
- Provide strong leadership of the programmes you are overseeing, setting a clear vision for the discovery and delivery phase and ensuring the team understands its role in delivering this
- Ensure there are clear lines of accountability and responsibility across the team, which foster and maintain effective working relationships
- Lead by example in terms of your work ethic, your commitment to the delivery of results and to demonstrating the values of the organisation (see below) in all that you do
- Invest in the professional development of your team, ensuring that they are growing in their roles and as members of the Right to Succeed staff team.
Build partnerships
- Develop partnerships with best practice deliverers, influencers, schools, services, communities and commissioners in the local area/place, ensuring that they are supported and managed to a high level of quality, reflecting our organisation’s values
- Ensure that memorandum of understanding and contracts with all partners are robust, setting clear expectations about deliverables and the way the partnership is represented publicly
- Ensure that highly efficient processes and procedures are in place for managing all partnerships effectively
- Work to identify partnerships that could open the door to further funding for the charity’s work in this area
- Liaise with the Partnerships and Programme managers to identify local delivery partners with the potential to deliver sustainable impact if provided with our organisational support
- Oversee relationships with stakeholders, community and voluntary groups, agencies and partners, and statutory services locally and regionally, to ensure that we have the right relationships in place and that these are effectively managed
- Formalise and proactively maintain a local steering group of influential local stakeholders focused on developing the collective impact conditions of a common agenda, shared measurement framework, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication and backbone support.
- Provide robust performance management of the programme, ensuring accountability and evidence based learning is captured, shared and used to improve future programme delivery.
Programme development and organisational learning
- Embed a continuous improvement culture for the programmes, ensuring quantitative and qualitative evidence is being used to constantly improve
- Support Executive Regional Directors by contributing significantly to the charity's learning, enabling development of our approach, materials, systems and people
- Work with fellow Programme Directors and other senior leaders to ensure learning is shared between programmes
- Proactively identify opportunities to replicate and scale the programme and ensure that the processes and procedures behind the programme can be scaled wherever required
Communication and representation
- Work with the Programme Design Team and regional contacts to build awareness of both the organisation and programmes you are overseeing at a local and national level, developing messaging and materials that communicate a strong vision for the programme
- Through your work, establish Right to Succeed as a leading, collaborative innovator within the place-based change and education fields
- Act as an ambassador for Right to Succeed, networking widely to build new and existing strategic relationships to the benefit of the programme and organisation more broadly
- Raise the profile of research-informed, locally-led approaches within programmes, by positively amplifying youth and community voice, advocating in relation to impactful work taking place across the places/communities that we serve
Programme strategy development
- Play a key role in formulating programme-related organisational goals based on a combination of academic research and experience of high quality programme delivery in the field
- Work with fellow Programme Directors and Regional Executive Directors to support the development of the Programme Team’s long-term strategy
- Understand how to react to opportunities for expansion/replication of the programmes you are overseeing
- Deliver clear, timely reporting on programme impact and learning to inform Trustee strategic oversight
Please note the critical responsibilities of this role are described above. They may be subject to reasonable changes from time to time in line with business needs.
Person Specification
Experience (essential)
- Proven track record of building, delivering and developing impactful programmes and interventions
- Experience at leadership level of education and/or voluntary sector space focusing on improving outcomes for vulnerable young people
- Experience in building and maintaining relationships with a wide range of stakeholders including
- senior leadership teams in schools, senior strategic local leaders, young people, families and services within a community
- Experience in financial management and budget development
- Experience of representing organisations externally
- Experience of working closely with disadvantaged communities as defined by IMD to bring about locally-led positive social change
- Experience in evaluating programmes and reporting on outcomes
Skills (essential)
- Commitment to the aims and ethos of Right to Succeed and a desire to bring about positive change in relation to societal inequity
- Strong leadership skills and the ability to enthuse, motivate and develop a team and partnerships that deliver results.
- Able to drive key learning and insight from quantitative and qualitative data
- Ability to think strategically and to communicate a compelling strategic vision
- Excellent all round communication skills and relationship management abilities
- Strong organisational and people management skills
- Professional and resourceful, with the ability to work independently and as part of a team.
- Ability to work in a small, but highly ambitious, growing organisation
- Ability to model and instil the Right to Succeed values as outlined below
Qualifications and knowledge (essential)
- In-depth knowledge of education and/or social care/community vol sectors (e.g. education policy and strategic planning, system reform, capacity building, CVSO management and leadership, teacher professional development, curriculum development, school evaluation and accountability, school leadership, assessment, education economics etc.
Qualifications and knowledge (desirable)
- Collective impact and place-based change
Timetable
Applications invited by: 9:00 Friday 4th September 2026
1st interview: Wednesday 9th September 2026
2nd interview & Task: Thursday 17th & Friday 18th September 2026
Successful candidates will be expected to attend in person on 17th September and may also be required to attend on 18th September. Please keep both dates free at this stage. Further details will be provided after the first-stage interviews.
These dates may be subject to change.
Queries
For queries about the role or, for additional information, please contact: [email protected]
Pay: £58,916.00-£63,717.00 per year
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Birmingham
