Partou Childcare
Head of People Experience - Denton, Manchester
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Head of People Experience - Denton, Manchester
Head of People Experience
Contract type: 37.5 hours per week
Working pattern: Hybrid – 3 days per week in the office, 2 days remotely
Salary: £75,000 per annum plus £6,000 car allowance
About Partou and the Role
At Partou, childcare is a shared passion—dripped every day by people who feel supported, well-informed, and focused on what truly matters: nurturing children and families. We are seeking a Head of People Experience to drive and enhance our People & Culture function across the entire organisation. This essential leadership position sits within the Extended Leadership Team, where your role will deliver clarity, consistency, and meaningful connection across all areas affecting colleague experience—especially at scale.
The Role
Reporting to the People & Culture Director, this critical position will oversee a broad and highly visible People & Culture function, encompassing shared services, payroll, people administration, internal communications, CSR, and people support for Nursery Support Centre.
Your primary objective? To make leading and engaging with People & Culture seamless, impactful, and human-centred.
In practice:
- Answering to senior stakeholders across the business as a trusted strategic partner, ensuring service consistency.
- Strengthening trust and empathy by streamlining processes and removing operational friction.
- Head of service improvement, turning feedback into tangible action.
- Championing workflows where every employee interaction—from a payroll query to a leadership discussion—feels uncomplicated, supportive, and purposeful.
You’ll collaborate closely with operational and commercial leaders to shape a connected People & Culture function that allows senior teams to stay focused, eliminates unnecessary complexity, and empowers the entire workforce to deliver high-quality childcare every day.
What You’ll Deliver
You’ll lead a People & Culture team focused on operational excellence, refining every touchpoint to deliver an outstanding colleague experience. This includes:
- Optimising shared services and people support to ensure clarity, consistency, and responsiveness.
- Continuous improvement of service delivery through data, insights, and employee feedback.
- Simplifying complexity where processes feel unnecessarily cumbersome and inefficient.
- Mending channels of communication – Fine-tune internal engagement strategies to ensure messages are clear, actionable and aligned with business priorities. Strengthen feedback loops to drive better decision-making.
- Providing strategic oversight for People partners within the Nursery Support Centre, ensuring leaders receive commercially astute support on performance, engagement, and change initiatives.
- Driving cross-functional collaboration, uniting People, Operations, Finance, Technology and Commercial functions to elevate the entire People & Culture structure.
- Enforcing and raising service standards, consistently reducing avoidable escalations. Create people-centred processes that feel ‘easy’ to use without losing compassion.
- Balancing pace with care, maintaining consistency and flexibility in high-volume operating environments.
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About You
Experience and Leadership
- A seasoned senior People leader with experience uniting and scaling complex, multi-faceted teams such as shared services, payroll, employee partnering, and internal communication.
- Demonstrable background in a multi-site, people-intensive environment—whether within childcare, care, retail, education, or a similar sector.
- A mastery of employee experience, understanding that great team members are nurtured through daily interactions. Get the foundations right—consideration at delegation, onboarding, exit, and everything in between—so leaders can thrive in their core responsibilities.
- Proven expertise in reward, retention and recognition strategies, including designing meaningful frameworks and celebrating wins that boost engagement.
- Strong commercial acumen and legal awareness, with the ability to align People services with business objectives while mitigating employment risk.
- Confident in leading both through direct initiative and by enabling specialised expertise, understanding when to take ownership and when to collaborate.
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Your Leadership Style
- Practical, calm, and data-driven. Your approach is to spot inefficiencies, simplify, and build without losing sight of the human impact of these services.
- Forging future-proof systems that work efficiently while feeling approachable and empathetic.
- Uniquely capable of balancing detail with empathy, making people’s work feel both rewarding and rewarding to others.
Why Join Partou?
We’re a business with ambition, scale, and purpose. With over 1,000 nurseries globally—and accelerating growth in the UK—we’re deepening our investment in two pillars today:
- Our people, to ensure their potential is fully realised.
- Our systems to support sustainable and transformative growth.
This role isn’t about evolving strategy alone—it’s about shaping the lived experience every colleague encounters. You’ll partner with a collaborative leadership team, influencing how People & Culture supports the business now and in the future.
What You’ll Receive in Return
- A versatile leadership opportunity shaping People experience within a fast-growing, values-driven organisation.
- Real impact: Your work will shift behaviours and outcomes directly.
- Development and progression tied to societal purpose: childcare.
- Competitive total package: £75,000 + £6,000 car allowance.
- Leave allowance: 25 days annual leave + your birthday off.
- Well-being support: Access to our Employee Assistance Programme and healthcare schemes.
- Additional benefits: Enhanced total rewards, including recognition and supplemental offerings.
Setting the Standard for Tomorrow
Help build a future where people and policy align seamlessly—not just in strategy, but in how our colleagues and leaders see, hear, and trust us every day.
Get involved in a mission as meaningful as the children who inspire us: to empower nurturers across settings that inspire and to create positive change at every level.
Find out more and apply at: www.partou.co.uk/careers
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