Salary: £24,000 per annum.

Duration: Full time, one year fixed term contract.

Start date: ASAP.

Location: Flexible, required to travel to our London HQ at least once a month, but can work flexibly as per Bite Back 2030’s hybrid working policy. We are particularly interested in applications from the North of England in order to allow for travel to schools in this area, but open to applications across England.

Reporting to: Head of Programmes

Bite Back 2030

Be part of the creative and agile team behind Bite Back 2030’s exceptional teenage activists. Join us as our School Food Champions Executive and contribute to a 10-year journey to help make the food system healthier and fairer and achieve our goal of halving childhood obesity by 2030.

Young people today are up against a flood of unhealthy food, pouring out of our high streets, supermarkets and school canteens. As a result processed foods, snacks, soft drinks and takeaways are playing too big a role in their lives. Junk food is cheap and easy to access at a time when 3.3 million young people under the age of 18 have overweight or obesity. Rates among our poorest are double those of our wealthiest young people.

We believe young people are the key voice in driving this change in our food system, and are growing a movement of young people to raise their voice and drive impact. In the past two years, our National Youth Board — including incredible campaigners like Christina and Dev — have won campaigns to extend free school meals during the holiday, end junk food advertising online and before 9pm on TV, and to improve the quality of school food. 

In 2021, we launched our first Local Youth Boards in London and Birmingham, who are calling on local authorities to end junk food advertising in their cities, and right now 500 pupils are running projects to improve their school food through our School Food Champions programme. In 2022, we are launching Local Youth Boards in Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool and Leeds, and our Community Food Champions programme in six locations across England, seeking to recruit and train an inspiring cohort of young people to drive positive change for child health. It’s a really exciting time to join the organisation.

Purpose of the role

In 2021, we received funding from the #iWill Fund to deliver a brand new social action programme for schools — Bite Back School Food Champions (SFC). SFC is an extra-curricular programme for secondary schools, targeted at Key Stage 3 (11-14 year olds). Each school appoints a lead teacher (trained by Bite Back) who runs weekly sessions with a team of 15 young people in their school. Over the course of the year, each SFC team plans and delivers a social action project to improve their school food. This could be by making nutritious and sustainable food the norm by increasing the flow of healthy options, or it could be by redesigning the school food experience to put healthy options in the spotlight. 

SFC is coming to the end of its first year of delivery, with over 40 schools and 500 young people having taken part so far. We specifically target schools with a high proportion of pupils in receipt of Free School Meals, or in areas with high obesity rates. We have received applications from over 170 schools to deliver SFC in the next academic year. The School Food Champions (SFC) Executive will play a key role supporting our community of schools during their time on the programme. They will also support the design and delivery of SFC to ensure it is a success and can make the greatest possible impact in schools.

The School Food Champions Executive will report to the Head of Programmes, and will work very closely with the Programmes Executive, sharing a caseload of schools. The appointee will also work closely with colleagues from the Digital team as part of the broader Youth and Movement team.

Key responsibilities

Relationship management

● Provide ongoing support to SFC schools throughout their time on the programme

● Regular check ins with all schools, being the first point of contact for the lead teacher in each school

● Support monitoring and evaluation through ensuring completion of baseline and end of year surveys, and analysis of data submitted

Community management

● Share examples of best practice social action projects amongst SFC community

● Visit SFC schools to meet pupils and teachers, lead feedback sessions and focus groups and learn about their social action campaigns

● Support creation of termly newsletters and regular emails to all SFC schools

● Create case studies to share with our media team

● Collate material for our social media channels, working with the Digital team to create content

Systems / operational support

● Co - manage SFC inbox, dealing with enquiries from schools and other partners

● Upload new materials to our TeacherHub platform as required

● Assist in the design and delivery of webinars and events for SFC schools

● Assist in the design of competitions for schools

● Regular reporting on level of engagement of individual SFC schools, flagging concerns and proactively finding ways to mitigate issues to ensure schools remain on the programme

● Management of SFC section of Bite Back CRM system, keeping data up to date and accurate

Application deadline: 9 am, 25 July

Interview date: Interviews will take place online, w/c 1st August

For any questions on the application process, please email us at zainab.akhtar@biteback2030.com