Director - Quality, Performance, & Impact

Barnardo's is seeking an exceptional Director of Quality, Performance & Impact (QPI) to provide strategic leadership and independent assurance across our Children's Services. This is a critical senior role with responsibility for ensuring that our services are safe, inclusive, inspection-ready, and demonstrably delivering positive outcomes for children and young people.

You will establish and embed clear quality, performance and impact frameworks across services and geographies, creating a strong line of sight between frontline delivery, outcomes, and organisational impact. Working closely with senior leaders, trustees, commissioners and regulators, you will provide credible insight, oversight and challenge to drive continuous improvement at scale.

Managing multi-disciplinary specialist teams and a significant budget, you will play a central role in strengthening safeguarding, quality assurance, performance management, and evidence-based practice across Barnardo's.

Key responsibilities

• Provide strategic leadership for Quality, Performance & Impact across Children's Services, aligned to Barnardo's operating and delivery model.
• Lead and embed a single, consistent QPI framework across services, ensuring inspection readiness, strong safeguarding, and inclusive practice.
• Provide independent assurance and early risk escalation to the Chief Operating Officer and senior leadership teams.
• Oversee robust performance, outcomes, impact and inclusion metrics, producing trusted dashboards and reporting for executives, trustees, commissioners and funders.
• Lead learning and improvement from inspection, audit, research and evaluation, translating insight into service improvement and innovation.
• Act as a senior point of coordination on data quality and performance, working closely with Digital, Data & Technology, Finance and People teams.
• Line manage senior leaders including Heads of Quality and Safeguarding, and develop high-performing specialist QPI teams.
• Represent Barnardo's externally with regulators (e.g. Ofsted, CQC), funders, auditors and sector partners.
• Present key reports and recommendations to Executive Leadership, Board and Committees.

About you

You will be an experienced senior leader with a strong track record in quality, safeguarding, performance, impact or service improvement within children's services or similarly complex public or voluntary sector environments.

You will bring:

• In-depth knowledge of quality assurance, safeguarding and regulatory/inspection frameworks.
• Strong expertise in performance management, outcomes measurement and impact evaluation.
• Experience embedding organisation-wide frameworks across multiple services or regions.
• Proven ability to provide credible assurance and challenge to senior leaders and boards.
• Excellent leadership, influencing and relationship-building skills, with the ability to work collaboratively across functions without direct control.
• Experience leading and developing senior specialist teams and managing significant budgets.
• A commitment to inclusive practice, evidence-led decision-making and continuous improvement.

A recognised management qualification (or equivalent experience) is essential, along with flexibility to travel across the UK and work outside standard hours when required.

Our values

At Barnardo's, our leaders live our values: respecting the unique worth of every person, encouraging people to fulfil their potential, working with hope, and exercising responsible stewardship. You will role-model inclusive, values-led leadership and help create environments where colleagues and services can thrive.

Why Barnardo's?

This is a rare opportunity to shape quality, impact and safeguarding at scale within one of the UK's largest children's charities. You'll have the influence, autonomy and support to make a lasting difference to the lives of children, young people and families across the UK.

We know that our colleagues go above and beyond in delivering our vital work, driven by their passion and commitment to Barnardo's values.  We also know that we can only realise our ambitions and achieve better outcomes for more children, thanks to the talent, hard work and creativity of our people. 

For all these reasons, we are committed to a new approach to pay and reward, to ensure it is fair, attractive and progressive, which was rolled out in April 2023. This is a positive change for the charity, and a part of our People & Culture Strategy. It will assist us in supporting colleagues to belong, thrive and grow in their colleague journey at Barnardo's and in time will offer clear routes of progression for colleagues in both their career and their pay. 

Whilst the full pay band and salary range is advertised, our approach to starting salaries is to appoint between the minimum to mid-point of the pay band – this ensures that pay steps are available to reward our colleagues annually based on their contribution to excellence and alignment to our values and behaviours.  More details on Barnardo's pay framework can be found upon application. 

Workplace Offer: What it means for you

Our hybrid working initiative is based on trust, flexibility and empowerment. We understand our workplace offer means different things to different people, and we encourage those conversations. This may mean working at one of our stores, services, working at home, in the community, at one of our Collaboration Hubs or depending on the role any combination of these. Please read through the advert carefully to understand the remits of hybrid working that will be specific to the role.

Barnardo's require colleagues to be UK residents, based in the UK and to complete their roles from within the UK (with the exception of colleagues providing Barnardo's services in Jersey and colleagues who live in the Republic of Ireland providing services in Northern Ireland)

• Barnardo's believe in creating equality of opportunity in the workplace and supporting people to manage their work-life balance; we are therefore open to offering flexible working arrangements.
• Annual Leave entitlement for full-time colleagues is 26 days per annum, increasing to 27 days per annum, after 3 years Barnardo's service, 29 days per annum, after 5 years Barnardo's service and 30 days per annum, after 7 years Barnardo's service. Those working less than full time are entitled to the same level of holiday pro rata
• The ability to buy up to another 5 days annual leave via our Buy Your Leave scheme
• A host of family friendly leave options including company Maternity Paternity and Adoption pay; together with all family additional leave options
• Service related sick pay from day 1
• Access to a Group Personal Pension with a matched 4% or 6% contribution from Barnardo's. Ability to pay via salary sacrifice to garner both tax and NI savings on your own contribution
• Death in service cover of 4x annual earnings for all staff contributing to our Group Personal Pension
• Cycle2work scheme
• Interest free season ticket loans
• Discounts and cashback from at high street shops including major supermarkets, cinemas, gyms, leisure/theme parks, holidays and much more via our Benefit Portal
• 20% discount at Barnardo's stores
• Opportunity to purchase a health cash plan to claim towards dental, glasses, therapy etc
• Free access to round the clock employee assistance program for advice and support
• Access to Barnardo's Learning and Development offer

*T&C's apply based on contract

We are committed to being an inclusive employer and cultivating a culture where everyone can belong and thrive through inclusion and connectivity. We want our workforce to be reflective of the communities we work with, and for equality, diversity and inclusion to be embedded in everything we do. We are a Disability Confident Leader, are progressing our ambition to be an anti-racist organisation with Anti-Racism Commitments and actions in place and have networks for colleagues who are disabled, LGBT+, Black and Minoritised Ethnic and Women. We particularly encourage applications from Black and Minoritised Ethnic and/or disabled candidates who are currently underrepresented in our workforce. For disabled applicants, we offer reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process.

• Reference number:22832
• Job Title:Director - Quality, Performance, & Impact
• Location:Workplace offer: Hybrid working, Barnardo's hub/office or home address
• Contract type:Permanent
• Hours:36.25
• Salary:£85,713.00 - £89,731.00
• Closing Date:27 April 2026
• Interview Date:7th May in London