Associate / Senior Associate

Come and join our team!

Full time role/s available (though we’re open to part time, flexi and job share options)

Who we are looking for

We want to hear from people who have a passion for the education/youth sector and a commitment to improving young people’s lives, with experience of designing and conducting research projects and/or process and impact evaluations. Ideally this will be combined with a desire to work on a range of projects to support organisations across the education and youth sectors. With many of our researchers and leaders coming from practitioner backgrounds your experience could come from either academic and/or professional routes.

 

We foster an inclusive culture at CfEY and are committed to maintaining and building a diverse team. Therefore, we particularly welcome applications from people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, disabled and/or neurodivergent people, and people that have taken non-traditional routes to get where they are today.

About us

The Centre for Education and Youth (CfEY) is dedicated to advancing education by supporting all children and young people to make successful transitions to adulthood. Our vision is of a society that ensures comprehensive support for youth, inspiring institutions, organisations, and practitioners to achieve this vision through practical support.

CfEY advances education by designing, co-designing, and conducting research on formal and informal educational practices and policies, providing insights and recommendations to improve educational outcomes. We collaborate with schools, policymakers, youth organisations, and communities to implement evidence-based strategies that enhance the educational experience and support the development of all children and young people. Additionally, we design and deliver evaluations and provide strategic advice to help educational institutions and charitable organisations improve their services and outcomes for young people.

Unlike many other similar organisations:

• We are grounded, bringing a wealth of professional experience as former teachers, teaching assistants and youth workers.

• We are practical, supporting change by working directly with practitioners and young people.

• We are independent, with no political or party allegiances, and positive relationships with a diverse range of funders who support our work through grants and contracts.

• We are local, getting beyond Westminster to inform policy and practice in specific localities.

 

About the job

You will work closely with the rest of our team, contributing to the delivery of research and evaluation projects for our clients.

This will involve:

• Working with clients to understand their needs for research and evaluation needs

• Designing tools for research project, ensuring you are using methods appropriate to the context and project

• Conducting rapid evidence reviews of available literature within the education and youth space

• Designing monitoring and evaluation tools for clients

• Delivering workshops to support organisations to develop their approach to evaluation and monitoring

• Ensuring you are conducting research and evaluation work in an ethically responsible way according to our ethics, safeguarding and data protection approaches

• Quantitative and qualitative data analysis and write up of research projects

• Creating recommendations for clients based on research/evaluation findings. 

• Presenting research findings to clients in a range of format (written and verbal) 

• Managing projects using effective project management approaches, including: 

  • Monitoring risk

  • Communicating with clients and colleagues

  • Developing timelines for delivery and monitoring slippage

This will require:

• Keeping abreast of developments in social research, including new methodologies, datasets, systems and software and helping the team to understand and deploy these on projects. 

• Developing effective working relationships and partnerships with clients, partner organisations, academics and other researchers.

• Integrating participatory methods into your work, ensuring the voices of those with lived experiences are represented in everything we do.

• Working with colleagues to deliver effective engagement and policy outputs, ensuring our research has wider and deeper impact.

 

We will expect you to:

• Pursue our vision and charitable objectives, embodying our ways of working.

• Be autonomous, with the ability to work independently with minimal supervision.

• Work with us in an enjoyable and productive way, challenging and supporting the rest of the team and making working together fun.

• Work fast but flexibly, managing your own time and producing high quality work.

• Have close, positive and friendly relationships with our clients and network by building rapport and understanding and responding to their needs.

• Be part of our team by embracing our ethos, contributing to meetings, mucking in and having fun.

• Support colleagues responding to tenders, and writing project proposals and bids when appropriate

We offer you:

• Location: You can be located anywhere in the UK. Our office is located in Hackney, London and the team gathers there fortnightly on Mondays. If you live outside of London, CfEY will cover your travel expenses for the fortnightly team meeting. Outside this, you can decide when to come to the office, and when to work from home, although there may be specific events and meetings to attend and these tend to be concentrated in London. You will also have to conduct fieldwork which will involve travel across the country (expenses will be covered).

• Flexibility: We encourage everyone at CfEY to work in a way that fits around their lives and existing commitments. Whether this means starting work later after the school run or taking a longer lunch break to fit in exercise, we encourage you to work in a way that means you can effectively and efficiently complete your work to a high standard. We are open to discussing flexible working patterns such as compressed hours or part-time work with you and a number of our current employees currently work varied patterns. 

• Variety of work: No two days will be the same; you’ll be working with a diverse range of clients and projects - both focused and wide-ranging - delivering a variety of different methodologies and taking different approaches.

• Development opportunities: Our team spends time each month discussing recent trends in education and youth research and policy, and we dedicate time for wider personal and team development alongside learning through delivering our projects.

• Team Culture: We believe that work should be enjoyable and fun. We have lunch together each fortnight when we come together for our team meeting. We celebrate each other’s wins and have an annual overnight away day as a team. Salary: You will be paid between £33,660 to £35,700 FTE dependent on experience. 

• Pension: We offer an employer contribution pension (following a three month probation period)

• Annual leave: We offer 33 days holiday per year (including bank holidays), with a flexible bank holiday policy where you can choose to take your bank holiday entitlement at another time of year if you wish. 

About you

We get that life is complicated. If you've taken an unusual, less travelled path to get to where you are now then get in touch. We're equally keen to hear from you whether you have an undergraduate or postgraduate degree, or you have practical experience within the education or youth sectors.

Characteristics:

-Essential:

• You are 100% committed to and passionate about improving children and young people’s life chances.

• You live and breathe our mission and approach and are determined to build on CfEY’s success.

• You are pragmatic and creative in balancing the need for practicality and rigour in research 

• You build rapport quickly and are energetic and enterprising. Seeing a problem invariably leads you to spot a solution.

• You pride yourself in delivering work of the highest quality for our clients and partners 

• You take a collaborative but ambitious and driven approach.

• You are keen to take on new challenges and have the ability to work autonomously and independently.

-Desirable

• You have an interest in developing innovative approaches to research and evaluation

 

Knowledge and experience

-Essential:

• You know how to design research methodologies to answer research questions or measure impact.

• You have experience of quantitative and qualitative research methods. 

• You have experience of monitoring and evaluation within the education and/or youth sector

• You have a good understanding of the principles behind consent and privacy, and ethical research approaches.

• You have an understanding of how the education and / or youth sectors work, gained through either practical or research experience. 

-Desirable

• You have a detailed understanding of how England’s education system works and are well informed about policies and trends in the education and youth sectors.

• You have direct experience working with young people.

• You understand participatory research methods, particularly with young people with lived experiences

• You have written research reports and/or impact reports

• You have an understanding of impact measurement and theory of change.

 

Skills and competencies

-Essential:

• You write extremely well. You adapt your style to suit different genres including media (traditional and social), blogs, impact, academic and policy reports.

• You are highly competent in Excel and can use it to analyse data and produce data visualisations.

• You have some experience in designing and delivering research projects from start to finish, either as a project lead or supporting the project lead.

• You are comfortable making presentations and speaking to unfamiliar audiences.

• You work flexibly and efficiently. You can work from different places and manage your time creatively, balancing periods of intense work with quieter periods. You are self-motivated and don’t need to be told what to do.

• You can work collaboratively with a wide variety of organisations and people, both internal and external.

-Desirable

• You have project/client management experience.

• You understand how to use key research and evaluation software, eg Alchemer and Mendeley

 

The process

To support equal opportunities and minimise the risk of bias, we are asking candidates NOT to include their name in their CV, covering letter and file names.

1) CV and cover letter

• We are recruiting on a rolling basis, and will be interviewing suitable candidates periodically throughout the application window so please send your application to us as soon as possible.

• To apply, please send a two-page CV tailored to this role (including two referees who we can contact by phone) as well as a one-page cover letter explaining why you think you are suited to this job and why you'd like to work with us.

• The application window will close 11.59pm on 30th August 2024.

2) Shortlisting

• We will inform you if you have been shortlisted via email.

• If you have been shortlisted, we will invite you to complete a task and return the task to us within a mutually agreed time frame.

3) Interview

• If you are successful at the task we will invite you to interview. 

• Interviews will take place in person at our office in Hackney, London.

4) Appointment

• We will inform candidates who have been successful at interview as soon as possible, before contacting referees.

• Appointments will be confirmed once we have received satisfactory references and completed a DBS check. If there is something that you would like to discuss with us regarding your DBS check prior to or during the application process please let us know.

• Ideally we would like someone who can start in September/October 2024, but please talk to us about when you might be able to start, we are open to flexible start dates for the right candidates.