Job Description
Interim Head of Operations
Job Description and Person Specification Job Title: Head of Operations
Salary: £50-£60K
Contract Type: Ideally, it is full-time, 35 hours per week, although 4 days / flexible hours may be considered. The role may require occasional evening and weekend work.
Working location: Remote with some office visits (London) for team meetings and organisational away days. Ad hoc external visits with suppliers will be required.
Reporting to: Director of Service Delivery
Contract Length: 6-9 months
BACKGROUND
The latest research suggests that the number of children and young people at risk of hunger has rocketed to 2.7 million*, which means that one in five childon'tdon't have enough to eat. When a child is too hungry to learn, when they're aching for something to eat, they can’t concentrate. They can’t absorb information. Big feelings and worries can be impossible to control. They fall behind in their studies.
Magic Breakfast provide a nutritious and filling breakfast to over 200,000 children and young people every school day. We work with schools in areas of high disadvantage, helping staff target the children most in need without barriers or stigma. Magic Breakfast is ambitious to grow our impact and remove hunger as a barrier to learning for all children and young people in the UK.
The government’s children’s Wellbeing Bill, outlined in the King’s Speech includes a requirement for free school breakfast clubs in every English primary school. This is a fantastic start towards ending child morning hunger. Magic Breakfast's influence will be instrumental to ensuring school breakfasts are introduced in a hunger-focused and barrier-free way. In 2021, the Scottish Government pledged a not-yet enacted promise to provide breakfast to primary children.
Thousands of secondary school children are at risk of losing their free school breakfasts from September next year. For many of these students, this is their only opportunity to have a nutritious meal before facing a demanding school day, including taking exams. Solutions across all UK nations still need to be actioned or are severely underserving the current need. Being part of the work of Magic Breakfast is your chance, together with parents, teachers, and people across the UK, to demonstrate the power of school breakfasts and shape the way forward to end morning hunger for good.
*Food Foundation Insecurity Tracker Jan 2024
JOB PURPOSE
Magic Breakfast's mission is to end child morning hunger in the UK now and for good. The Head of Operations will drive the operational performance of our end-to-end supply chain, ensuring the quality and sustainability of our services at scale with the flexibility and continuous improvement required to meet the needs of both national and local communities. They will seamlessly align Operations with the overall Service Delivery operational strategy and, through collaboration with all departments across Magic Breakfast, deliver Charity’s strategic priorities and vision.
KEY DELIVERABLES FOR THE INTERIM PERIOD
• Management of our delivery partner. Critical elements will include ensuring supplier performance management processes are embedded, managing escalated issues with key contacts in the supplier, managing risks, supporting the team to manage the operational problems, escalating where appropriate, and taking responsibility for schools receiving an excellent service from Magic Breakfast.
• Setting up the operations team to manage the complexity of the Early Adopter scheme. This will include overseeing the development of the new menu, ordering mechanism, budget management, forecasting capability, and other operational impacts of providing a government contract.
• In light of the above, and the potential for significant scale many times our current size in 2026, set the strategy and operational way of working for Magic Breakfast operations team. This will include defining the permanent Head of Operations role and appropriate team structure, identifying how the team would flex and respond to scale, ensure processes are fit to scale,
• Upskilling the operations team, utilising your expertise in supply chain and operations to identify areas for growth and sharing knowledge, experience and learnings in a structured way to support the team’s individual and collective development
• Oversight and active management of the food and delivery budget (~£5m)
• Active member of the Core Management Group at Magic Breakfast, being a key contributor to both SD and MB wide work and ensuring Operations doesn't work in a silo'ed way
• Drafting the Operations budget for the 24/25 financial year and drafting the initial strategy and plans for that financial year
• Line management and upholding culture team development
General
• To undertake your role in line with MB values and policies and procedures.
• To take responsibility for the operationalisation of Magic Breakfast's policies and practice in relation to safeguarding, risk management, health and safety and GDPR across the Operations team
• To uphold a culture that keeps children and young people at the heart and encourages our values of openness, collaboration, bravery, compassion and a solutions-focussed approach.
• By undertaking any other duties commensurate with the role.
PERSON SPECIFICATION
Skills and abilities
• Have strategic thinking and insight, with the ability to drop into the operational detail.
• Confidence and ability to significantly scale an operation
• Ability to balance multiple competing priorities in decision-making, and to make good decisions under pressure.
• Mental agility to be able to change course or manage unexpected problems or challenges.
• Be open to change and willing to flex to meet a changing and uncertain external environment.
• Ability to communicate messages confidently, engagingly and with impact across a variety of audiences.
• Have strong organisational skills and able to juggle multiple pieces of work at once.
• Ability to manage and influence both junior and senior stakeholders
• Demonstrate an understanding of the charity and education sector along with a commercial awareness.
• Be a collaborative team player with the confidence to effectively contribute remotely across teams and departments.
• Competent with Microsoft programmes, specifically Excel. Experience with PowerBI would be desirable but not essential.
Knowledge and experience
• Experienced supply chain professional with strong leadership and supplier management skills to oversee outsourced supply chain operations.
• Experience of 3PL oversight and end-to-end supply chain coordination.
• Experience of demand forecasting and planning
• Strong commercial acumen with experience of working in a commercial role.
• Experience of managing a multimillion-pound P&L.
• Experience of working within management roles and building leadership capabilities.
• Managing commercial stakeholders
• Data driven with experience of forecasting and using data to manage performance
Other
• Passion for MBreakfast'sast’s mission of ensuring that no child is too hungry to learn, as well as a shared commitment to our values and active contributor to our enabled and empowered culture
• Share a passion and commitment to Magic Breakfast's aim of alleviating morning hunger as a barrier to learning for children in the UK.
• Embody the charities values, behaviours and ways of working.
• Be willing to travel within the UK for meetings and other events.
• Commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion across your team to drive best in class performance
Please submit your updated CV to simon.pickerell@green-park.co.uk.