Head of People and Planning (maternity leave cover)

Fixed-term (12 months) | Remote (UK-based) | Full-time or flexible | Salary: Competitive

Do your best work, for the right reasons.

Oak is a fully remote, mission-driven organisation offering high levels of flexibility, autonomy, and purpose. We’re a national not-for-profit working in partnership with teachers to create the highest-quality, sequenced curriculum and lesson resources for pupils across all subjects and age groups.

Our culture has been independently recognised through:

• Flexa verified (93% overall score, including 95% for working hours and 97% for role modelling)

• Escape the City's Top 1% Employers – based on anonymous colleague reviews of culture, development, and impact

• Investors in People Gold - through external accreditation and colleague feedback

💡 About the Role

Oak National Academy is looking for an exceptional Head of People & Planning to join our leadership team on a maternity cover basis.

This pivotal role combines people leadership, governance, and organisational planning. You’ll establish and lead Oak’s people function, building a sustainable HR capability that enables intelligent use of external expertise, ensures compliance, and supports our culture of high performance and care.

You’ll oversee Oak’s internal and external governance, working closely with the Department for Education while helping to shape the organisation for the next phase of its strategy. Leading the People and Planning team and the Leadership Team, you’ll ensure our governance, people practices, and planning all work together to deliver value for money, strong assurance, and a positive, high-performing culture.

We’re looking for someone who can think ahead, make good decisions in complex situations, and deliver practical results. You’ll be confident navigating competing priorities, comfortable working at pace, and able to balance day-to-day problem-solving with longer-term organisational goals.

If you’re excited by the challenge of helping a small, high-performing public body continue to evolve, we’d love to hear from you.

🔧 What You’ll Be Doing

• Establish and lead a people function within the planning team, building a sustainable HR capability, ensuring compliance, and enabling intelligent use of external HR expertise to support organisational needs.

• Responsible for all decisions relating to the performance and function of our internal and external governance (including communications, meetings and whole-org offsites).

• Maintain specialist expertise in the governance of non-departmental public bodies and be the authority across Oak and more widely across the sector.

• Build and maintain an excellent relationship with Oak’s Sponsorship Team and be the main contact for all DfE governance and support.

• Leading, chairing and continuously improving the performance of the Oak Leadership team.

• Manage the internal and external governance budgets (6-figures).

• Recruit, develop and manage a high-performing operations planning team.

• As a member of the Oak Team, you will contribute to the wider success and culture of the organisation and support and role model our five values: create the right environment, be a great colleague, own your role but work for the team, make things happen, and keep getting better.

• Work in cross-functional and product-oriented squads with colleagues from across the organisation, as required.

• Deputise for the Director of Operations and take on other general responsibilities as required.

🌱 What We’re Looking For

• 3+ years holding responsibility for leading organisational governance, people and/or culture functions within a public body. 

• Professional qualification or equivalent experience in UK employment law.

• Extensive experience of working with senior stakeholders.

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to use different channels and media to support successful organisational development and stakeholder engagement

• Experience of recruiting, developing and managing a high-performing team.

• Experience of managing a six-figure budget

The successful candidate will have a desire to contribute in all areas to ensure Oak is successful. You will be comfortable working at pace, with a range of digital systems (including proprietary ones as required) and you will continuously look at ways that the team can keep getting better. You will be excellent at working as part of a remote team, building relationships and managing your time effectively.

💛 Our Benefits

• 25 days annual leave, plus one extra day for each year of service (up to 28)

• Additional Oak closure days over Christmas/New Year

• 11% employer pension contribution (with no minimum employee contribution)

• A 36-hour working week, with half-days on Fridays or every other Friday off

• Fully remote working — we’ll support your home set-up and offer coworking options if preferred

• Twice-yearly in-person offsites to collaborate, connect, and have fun

• A culture that genuinely supports flexibility, autonomy, and trust

🌈 Inclusion and Belonging

We believe diverse teams build better products. We warmly welcome applicants from all backgrounds, particularly those who are underrepresented in the tech and education sectors.

We use the Applied recruitment platform to help reduce bias in our hiring process. 

📌 Key Info

• Location: Remote, but you must be based in the UK with the legal right to work here

• Sponsorship: Unfortunately, we’re unable to offer visa sponsorship at this time

• Closing date: We’ll be reviewing applications as they come in and may close the role early

If this sounds like the kind of role and team where you could do your life’s best work, we’d love to hear from you.

Next steps

You’ll answer some questions related to your day-to-day job. Your answers will go through our sift process: all answers will be anonymised, randomised, and then reviewed by a panel of reviewers (real humans).

If you are shortlisted, we’ll invite you to the next stage, which will take place remotely.

We love giving feedback, so at the end of the application process, we'll share how well you performed.

We aim to begin interviews in December 2025.

We are receiving excellent responses to our job advertisements. This may lead us to close the role early, so if you are considering applying, please submit your application promptly to avoid missing out.

We are an equal opportunities employer.

We are committed to a policy of Equal Employment Opportunity and are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of gender, age, disability, religion, belief, sexual orientation, marital status, or race, or is disadvantaged by conditions or requirements which cannot be shown to be justifiable.