Assessment Lead

This is a new and exciting role at a significant time of growth for the School for Social Entrepreneurs. In the coming year, SSE is expecting to recruit over 600 social enterprises across a wide range of learning programmes, from new and early stage social enterprises to growing social businesses and charities. We are now seeking someone who can help us further develop and embed effective assessment systems.

We recruit leaders of social enterprises to join our learning programmes, often with an accompanying grant. You will need to understand social enterprises and charities, the issues faced by social entrepreneurs, as well as being able to assess the potential strength of a social enterprise as it grows. In addition to this, you will need to support others to assess social enterprises in a systematic way.

A large number of staff contribute to assessment across the organisation. Your role will be to support them to do this. You will work closely with the Head of Grants and Assessment, who has led the development of this work over the last three years, as well as the Head of Programmes, Programme Managers, a large pool of assessors and interviewers, including staff, freelancers and our wider network of partners and social entrepreneurs.

We are committed to inclusion and have a wide range of applicants from diverse communities, who may experience difficulties in applying for a range of reasons language, confidence, neurodiversity, disability and other barriers. You will support team members to make the application process welcoming and accessible, while maintaining our ability to gather data consistently and appropriately. You will also work with our Impact Lead to gather data to support monitoring and evaluation and to ensure that data is gathered in a way that is GDPR compliant, and with our Tech Team, who manage SSE’s technology infrastructure, including a bespoke Salesforce system, FormAssembly, and Microsoft products. You will help develop workflows and systems that support assessment processes. While this is not an IT development role, an understanding of how these systems can be used to develop better systems and processes will be crucial.

The key focus areas of this role:

• Understanding growing social enterprises, and how to assess them appropriately.
• Developing and maintaining the systems, frameworks, tools, resources, training and guidance that enable SSE’s wider team to carry out high-quality assessment consistently, proportionately, effectively and efficiently.
• Ensuring that systems are accessible, inclusive and support applications from diverse communities.
• Ensuring that data is collected consistently and as accurately as possible, to support our monitoring framework, and is collected in a way that complies with GDPR requirements.
• Working closely with the Tech Team to further develop systems, forms, workflows to support these processes
• Supporting and guiding Programme Managers to design appropriate assessment systems for their individual programmes within a wider framework
• Setting up the individual systems and processes for each programme and supporting the wider team, including the Programme Managers, Project Coordinators, and a range of assessors to use those systems effectively Directly supporting the assessment process, by carrying out assessments, interviews and supporting grants panels.