Role Title and Department: Senior School Support Officer, School Network
Compensation: Senior Officer Grade
Location and Travel: Western Region – Mbarara with 90% Travel
Reporting to: Head of School Network
Line Management Responsibility: 5 Head Teachers
Budget Holder Responsibility: School budgets plus small discretionary school support budget

WHO WE ARE
PEAS is an international education not-for-profit with the mission to ‘expand access to sustainably delivered, quality secondary education across Africa’.
Since 2008, PEAS has built and operated high quality low-cost not-for-profit secondary schools in close partnership with government in communities where there is urgent unmet demand for secondary education. We currently run 30 secondary schools in Uganda and 4 in Zambia serving over 15,000 students.
After a number of rigorous external studies in recent years, we know that our school model works. In Uganda, PEAS students are from the poorest communities and have worse primary school exam results than average. However, once they enrol in a PEAS school they go on to make faster academic progress than their more privileged peers. Importantly, this is achieved at a lower cost per student than in other school types.
This is a pivotal role at PEAS, as the Senior School Support Officer is the individual who delivers direct support to our schools and is accountable for improving their performance alongside our fantastic school staff. To excel in this role, you will be someone who relishes the opportunity to build relationships with and mentor others. You will have a clear vision for the key ingredients of a great school and a commitment to deliver that for every PEAS student. You should be a credible educator whose opinion is valued by our school staff and communities, and you should not be afraid to take difficult decisions to ensure that the PEAS mission and approach is achieved in every school and classroom.
This is not an office based role so to be successful as a Senior School Support Officer, you should be passionate about being in the field, and doing hands on support to schools.

Measuring impact
As an organisation and individuals, we all have key performance indicators to keep us focussed on our overall objectives. We track these throughout the year and review them annually to make sure they align with what we want to achieve. Senior School Support Officer’s impact will be measured against the following:

• Improve the Access, Quality and Sustainability indicators for the schools in their cluster
  • Improve school leaders’ pulse survey scores
  • Schools are using the school information management system effectively to record, track and submit data for school improvement
  • All schools have the right number of teachers with the right weekly workload (18-24) and 70% are full timers.
  • All school staff have updated job descriptions
  • School performance management cycle implemented and annual performance report shared with other key users.
  • School inspection and school audit scores are improving and implementation of previous report recommendations
• BoGs understand PEAS policies and approaches and are effectively engaged in school oversight
  • Oversee school policy compliance and reporting of policy breaches in line with PEAS guidelines
  • During the year, the Senior School Support Officer supports at least 5 inspections in other schools and receives positive feedback from Senior Inspector

  Roles and Responsibilities
  1. School supervision
  • School impact: Fully accountable for driving performance across Access, Quality and Sustainability in a cluster of 5 PEAS schools, line managing the School Leaders of each school and sharing their goals.
  • School compliance: Ensure that schools are operating in accordance with PEAS and GoU policies.
  • Performance management: Work alongside the Head of School Network to deliver annual performance appraisal of school leaders.

  2. School support
  • Build a strong positive cluster culture where all schools identify and are proud to be part of their cluster, promoting healthy relationships, collaboration and support to one another.

• Deliver high quality coaching to school leaders and training for teachers.
  • Coordinate all support from other teams within PEAS Country Office, ensuring that support is delivered when it is needed but is never a distraction from the key activity of educating our students.
  • Support school leaders to set, review and implement school improvement plans.
  • Support schools with teacher recruitment and deliver high quality teacher inductions
  • Interpret and use school-level data to provide relevant and practical support to schools including how to use the functionalities of their School Information System effectively.
  • Conducting lesson observations alongside school instructional leadership teams and provide high quality feedback and action steps which are routinely followed up.
• Responsible for ensuring key communications are shared between the schools and country offices
  • Serve as the Child Protection Focal Person for their cluster, delivering child protection training at school-level and leading investigations and case management.

  3. Representing PEAS in our schools and communities
  • Attend all BoG meetings for all assigned cluster schools.
  • Identifying, inducting and training BoG members
  • Attend and speak at community and BoG community engagement activities.
  • Support school leaders with community engagement and marketing/enrolment activities
  • Will see as an independent advisor for case management and principal or support investigator wherever a Child Protection, Adult Safeguarding, Anti-Corruption, or Staff Disciplinary concern arises.

  4. Inspections
  • Be seconded for up to 3 weeks each year to another region within Uganda to serve as Junior Inspector during the inspection of up to 5 schools in another cluster.

• Uphold PEAS’ standards through the PEAS inspection process, and act as a confidential and independent quality assurer alongside the Senior Inspector.

  5. Line Management
  • Build a strong team spirit aligned with PEAS values and culture; offering leadership, motivation and support for employee development
  • Set clear goals and high expectations of those that you line manage, hold regular 1-2-1s to discuss progress towards goals and carry out annual progress reviews in line with PEAS annual progress cycle
  • Recognise and encourage strong performance of team members and address poor performance effectively and efficiently

  6. Wider impact
  • Reserve 10% time to work on special projects which can benefit the whole school network (e.g. Livelihood project; pedagogy review project)

• Upon occasion, work with the UK Technical Team to share PEAS expertise with external organisations and/or deliver a project to support a partner organization

  Experience & Qualifications:
  Essential
  • Bachelors in Education
  • Minimum of two years’ experience serving as a school leader
  • Experience in delivering training to school leaders and teachers
  • Background knowledge in Child Protection and Safeguarding practices
  • Experience working in rural communities and passion for work in the field
  • Driving license for car or motorcycle (and willingness to self-drive)

  Desired
  • Strong understanding of school governance structures in Uganda and/or previous experience in school governance
  • Desire to learn and quickly build knowledge of international best practices across pedagogy, assessment, teacher and leader training and development.

  Essential Skills & Personal Attributes:
  • Able to analyse, interpret and use school data to inform school support
  • Adaptable, flexible and resilient
  • Strong communicator, able to motivate and persuade others
  • Able to model excellent teaching and learning
  • Independent self-motivated worker, able to tackle challenging situations with professional maturity
  • Excellent line management skills; and/or commitment to becoming a great line manager
  • Able to be based in rural locations, in close proximity to schools with frequent travel

  Values and approach
  Anyone we hire will be able to demonstrate their alignment with PEAS’ values, which are:
  • Focus on lasting change: Our work should benefit students and communities now and for generations to come and so sustainability is core to everything we do. We take into account the wider consequences of what we do, because what matters is maximum long-term impact across society.
  • Be collaborative not competitive: We put true impact before personal or organizational glory. We collaborate within and beyond the organization to maximize collective impact Be honest Trust and integrity are everything. We are transparent about our impact and programmes. We don’t support corruption. We don’t pay bribes. We don’t receive bribes.
  • Champion empowerment: We hold each other to account. We maximize autonomy by providing high quality support to decision-makers throughout the organization.
  • Be entrepreneurial: PEAS was founded with an entrepreneurial spirit and it is embedded in who we are. We are nimble, ready to respond to new opportunities and challenges. We are not afraid of taking risks and leading the way.
  • Adopt a growth mindset: We continually push ourselves to improve. We appreciate and learn from mistakes which we see as a necessary side effect of striving for ever growing impact.
  • Look at the evidence: Evidence can be scarce in our sector. We strive to make use of the available evidence while also contributing our own. Our decisions are based on research and data combined with our practical experience.

  PEAS is highly committed to keeping children safe from harm and preventing corruption. We therefore take our responsibility to promote safe recruitment practices very seriously, including conducting appropriate reference and background checks. We also operate a zero-tolerance approach to any PEAS employees who breach our Safeguarding and Anti-Corruption Policies, which all employees are required to sign upon induction.