Research and Evaluation Consultancy Lead

At The Brilliant Club, we mobilise the PhD community to support students from less advantaged backgrounds to access the most competitive universities and succeed when they get there. We work with students who, because of their family income, parental history or the postcode they live in, are at risk of missing out on the life-changing opportunities linked to higher education.

We are excited to be recruiting a Research and Evaluation Consultancy Lead to join The Brilliant Club. The role will help deliver the goals set out in Join The Club, our ambitious strategy for 2021-26, by growing the charity’s research and evaluation consultancy work via Brilliant Consulting. 

The Consultancy Lead will provide research and evaluation services to universities and other education organisations working in the university access and student success space. This role will work alongside a Senior Research and Evaluation Officer to deliver high-quality consultancy projects and will report to the charity’s Chief Impact and Strategy Officer. The role will involve collaborating with different teams from across the organisation and will include coordinating and managing colleagues on consultancy activities.  The role will also contribute significantly to business development work to support the charity’s income generation. 

The consultancy team is part of the charity’s wider research and impact team, who collectively have two areas of responsibility: evaluating and reporting the impact of the charity’s programmes and providing research and evaluation consultancy and strategy support to education organisations. 

The successful candidate will have strong quantitative research skills and have a proven track record of delivering evaluation projects in education or a related field. They will be highly experienced with managing stakeholder relationships and delivering concurrent projects and, ideally, will have also contributed to bid writing and/or other income-generation activities. While this role can be based at any of our offices throughout the UK, some travel will be required (mainly to London) to attend in-person meetings.

About you
The role will best suit someone who

• has advanced quantitative research skills and knowledge of evaluation methodologies, with experience of constructing comparison groups and running statistical models to understand impact.
• has excellent written and verbal communication skills, ideally with experience of bid writing. 
• has experience managing multiple projects concurrently, including managing and quality assuring other colleagues’ work. 
• has the ability to manage and analyse datasets using software packages (e.g., Excel, SPSS, R).
• has knowledge of the UK education landscape, including higher education. 
• has experience working in an evaluation/research consultancy environment.
• will adhere to information security policies included in the charity’s ISO 27001 manual and complete information security training.
• has a demonstrable passion for furthering The Brilliant Club’s mission.