Summary

We are the public body that looks after England’s historic environment. We champion historic places, helping people understand, value and care for them.

Historic England have a fantastic opportunity for you to join us as our Participation Programmes Manager.

This role will embed the Active Participation strand of Historic England’s future strategy across the organisation.  It will assist colleagues, and HE’s partners, to deliver participatory activity to encourage more people to engage with the historic environment.  Working with the Head of Participation Programmes to create exciting programmes of activity that help people connect to and act for the historic environment, contributing to their overall wellbeing, and social impact and supporting our commitment to inclusion and diversity.  The role will also build skills and capacity within the organisation to embed participation in our processes.

The location of this role is National where we offer hybrid working, you will be based in one of our following offices and from home - Newcastle, York, Manchester, Birmingham, Swindon, Bristol, Portsmouth and Cambridge. 

What you will be doing

As an integral part of the Participation Programmes Team, devise and deliver participatory programmes and projects that help Historic England reach broad and diverse audiences.  Working with colleagues across the organisation to ensure programmes are insight led, well designed and managed, delivered on time and to budget, reach our target audiences and are evaluated to continuously improve and develop our participatory programmes.

Working with the Head of Participation Programmes team, act as the programme lead for grant funded programmes of participatory public engagement activity.  The grants programmes will help to create participatory activity that increases the organisation’s social impact and broadens audiences.

Working in partnership with the Historic England Grants Team to lead the delivery of specific grant funded programmes that fund organisations to respond to our corporate priorities, and help Historic England develop its Active Participation approach.  This includes working with artists and creatives or community groups and organisations.  You will also work to monitor, and act as a Project Assurance Officer for funded projects to ensure quality outputs and outcomes.

Working in partnership with the Grants Team, create application guidance and ensure grant selection processes are carried out fairly and efficiently for participation led grant programmes. 

Create and deliver programmes that contribute to the research and development of new ways of engaging the public through active participation, with a focus on local, place-based activity that helps people connect to place.

Where appropriate, work with teams across the organisation to feed into funding applications and business cases for future work that involves participatory activity such as large-scale cultural programmes.

Work with teams across the Participation and Learning department to create and support programmes that demonstrate best participatory practice to the heritage sector and introduce the wellbeing and social impact benefits of heritage to other sectors such as youth, arts and culture, and communities all underpinned by inclusive practice.

Drawing on advice from colleagues in Policy & Evidence, be responsible for creating and monitoring theories of change, evaluation models and frameworks, and ways of working that help Historic England to advocate for the wellbeing social impact benefits of heritage.

Act as a source of knowledge and insight on culture led regeneration initiatives to support wider programmes of work that in turn support our Thriving Places pillar in the future strategy.

Identify, secure and manage partnerships that deliver participatory programmes and its objectives.  Work with the Head of Participation Programmes and other relevant colleagues to secure partnerships.

Manage allocated budgets, and associated suppliers, to support participatory activity.

Line manage the Participation Programmes Officer role and any temporary staff that may support specific programmes and projects, placements or apprentices.

Act as a source of knowledge and insight regarding up-to-date inclusive participatory practice and grants.

Represent Historic England’s work in participatory activity to external audiences.

As a manager, ensure our legal obligations and the expectations set out in our policies are met, including health & safety, equality & diversity, finance, procurement, information security and managing people.

Who we are looking for

• experience of effectively creating and delivering participation led grant programmes

• experience of partnership working to deliver programmes of activity

• experience and knowledge of evaluation models and gathering evidence to demonstrate best practice

• experience in delivering community-led, co-created practice

• experience of programme and budget management

We are an equal opportunity employer which values diversity and inclusion. If you have a disability or neurodiversity, we would be happy to discuss reasonable adjustments to the job with you. Having just won the Gold Award from MIND, we also recognise the importance of a healthy work-life balance.

We are an inclusive employer and believe that flexible working options are for everyone. We want to make sure our working arrangements don’t prevent anyone from joining us because of their personal circumstances. We also want to provide you with the best balance in your home and work life that we can.

We are open to considering options including job sharing, part-time working, compressed hours working and different working locations, including hybrid working. Please visit our jobs pages or contact us to find out more.

Why work for Historic England

We offer a wide benefits package including a competitive pension scheme starting at 28% contributions, a generous 28 days holiday, corporate discounts, free entry into English Heritage sites across the country and development opportunities to ensure you achieve your goals.

We are committed to promoting equality of opportunity for everyone. Diversity helps us to perform better and attract more people to support our work. We welcome and encourage job applications from people of all backgrounds.

We particularly encourage applications from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic candidates and candidates with disabilities as they are underrepresented within Historic England at this level.

Historic England want all of our candidates to shine in the recruitment process. Please tell us what we can do to make sure you can show us your very best self. You can contact us by email at recruitmentTeam@Historicengland.org.uk if you have any recruitment queries. 

To ensure a fair and inclusive recruitment process for everyone the use of AI or automated tools is not permitted.

Interview dates: 13th May 2024 - MS Teams

Please follow the link for a full copy of the Job Description –

https://historicengland.org.uk/media/1yeiczv3/participation-programmes-manager.odt