Hillingdon Council are looking for a Head of School Place Planning & Admissions, Commissioning and Education Capital Delivery.

ROLE PURPOSE:

Leading the Corporate Schools Sufficiency Planning Process and school place planning and commissioning service, meeting statutory targets, and ensuring agreed service plans and performance targets are delivered. Lead all school place planning, commissioning, and decommissioning of schools and education services, in order to provide residents with sufficient high-quality places in all types of school across the borough, and maintain culture of putting our residents first and continuous service improvement. Lead the Council's education admissions function, in line with legislative, statutory, and local policy and delivers the statutory responsibility.

1. People Management

• Manage the School Place Planning Officer and the Education Development and Building Projects Lead, Project officers.
• Work closely with the Data and performance officers, SEN Commissioner and colleagues across the council in Education, Data, Finance, Property and Planning.
• Establish strong working links with relevant DfE officers and project managers in order to progress school improvement projects and new schools across the borough.
• Initiate and respond to school issues - raised by Members, schools; headteachers, governing bodies, Trusts, parents, other stakeholders.
• To be responsible for the selection, development and performance of the School Place Planning and Commissioning service team in line with the Council's HR policies.
• To ensure all team members receive the appropriate level of communication to maintain engagement with the Council's activities.

2. Customer Management

• Work with all schools, their headteachers, governors and Trusts, in reviewing and adjusting sufficiency to meet local needs.
• Prepare bids for funding capital programmes and deliver projects commissioned and funded by the council and DfE to provide extra school places.

• Respond to DfE statutory and other requests for information and data.

3. Operational Service Delivery

• Lead a Corporate Sufficiency Planning Process - Discharge the local authority statutory duty to ensure there are a sufficient number of school places for pupils resident in Hillingdon and that places are planned effectively, and changes implemented. Includes early years/nursery through to primary, secondary, post-16, UTCs and including special - and all types of school governance- Community, VA, Foundation, Academy (SAT & MAT) and the differences that apply. As of January 2022, there were 97 schools with 52,620 pupils.

Practically, this breaks down into:

Continuous review pressure for secondary and special places and surplus primary places.

• Establishing and leading the school places planning process with school partners and practically with teams within the Council to align to the MTFF process for capital resource planning etc. (Business Performance, Finance Capital Lead, Planning Services, Education team leads, Capital projects team etc.)
• Ensure various analytical tools, data presentations are used - e.g. place based mapping
• Review the analysis / forecast and lead service teams to achieve an intelligent, risk-based interpretation of the forecast to balance the statutory duty with ensuring the best use of resources. Prepare recommendations.
• Prepare accessible, risk-based briefings for Senior Managers and Cabinet Members setting out the findings of place planning analysis and recommendations, next steps etc.

School Commissioning, Organisation, and Investment Plan

• Lead on establishing and monitoring a commissioning plan, working with a range of teams within the Council. This will include developing practical plans to achieve the intended provision of places - liaison with Finance, Capital projects team, schools.
• Prepare and update a Hillingdon School Organisation Plan (SOP) annually to reflect changes agreed or being implemented.
• Set out clearly the consultation / approval processes that need to be followed to achieve changes in Published Admission Numbers - liaison with schools etc. This also needs to include monitoring and reporting delivery to support effective governance.
• Track capacity / opportunities in the entire school estate to ensure underused educational assets be re-purposed to align to the wider Education Strategy.