Head of People Experience
37.5hrs per week
Hybrid - 3 days per week office based/ 2 days per week remote
Salary - £75,000 per annum plus £6,000 car allowance
At Partou, childcare is a journey—one that’s driven by people. Behind every great nursery is a team that feels supported, informed and able to focus on what matters most: children and families.
We’re looking for a Head of People Experience to lead and evolve how our People & Culture function shows up every day across the business. This is a pivotal leadership role, sitting on the Extended Leadership Team, where you’ll bring clarity, consistency and connection to the services that underpin colleague experience at scale.
The role:
Reporting to the People & Culture Director, you will lead a broad and highly visible function spanning shared services, payroll, people administration, internal communications, CSR and people support for our Nursery Support Centre.
Your focus will be simple but powerful: make People & Culture feel easy to work with. That means ensuring every interaction, from a payroll query to a leadership conversation, is responsive, clear and adds value.
Working closely with senior leaders across the business, you will play a central role in shaping a joined-up People function that helps leaders stay focused, reduces complexity and builds trust across our teams.
What You’ll Be Doing:
You will lead and develop a team responsible for delivering the everyday touchpoints that shape colleague experience. This includes ensuring that shared services and people support functions operate with clarity, consistency and responsiveness, while continuously improving how services are delivered.
A key part of your role will be identifying what isn’t working and simplifying it. Using data, feedback and insight, you will streamline processes, improve service levels and create systems that genuinely support both nursery teams and central functions.
You’ll also oversee internal communications and engagement, helping ensure that messages are clear, well-timed and aligned to business priorities. By improving how the organisation communicates and listens, you will strengthen engagement and support better decision-making at all levels.
Alongside this, you’ll provide senior oversight of people partnering within the Nursery Support Centre, ensuring leaders receive pragmatic, commercially focused support across performance, engagement and change.
This role is as much about evolution as it is about leadership. You’ll work across functions—including Operations, Finance, Technology and Commercial—to improve how People & Culture operates as a whole.
You’ll play a critical role in shaping service standards, reducing avoidable escalation, and ensuring that people services are efficient without losing the human touch. Your ability to balance pace with care, and consistency with flexibility, will be key to success.
About You
You’re an experienced senior people leader who has led complex, multi-function teams – across shared services, payroll, people partnering and internal communications – and know how to bring them together into one clear, trusted and high-performing service.
You’ve worked in a multi-site, people-intensive environment before – whether that’s childcare, care, retail, education or a similar sector – and you understand the pace, complexity and operational reality that comes with it. You know that team member experience is built in thousands of everyday moments, and that getting the foundations right is what gives leaders the space to focus on what matters most.
You bring genuine expertise in employee experience, reward and retention. You know how to design the moments that matter – from a great onboarding to a meaningful exit – and you understand how a well-crafted reward and benefits framework, combined with a strong listening and recognition culture, drives the kind of engagement and commitment that keeps great people in an organisation.
You bring strong commercial judgement, a sound understanding of employee relations and employment risk, and the confidence to know when to lead directly and when to draw on specialist expertise. You’re equally comfortable shaping service standards and driving continuous improvement as you are navigating a complex people situation with care and good judgement.
Your leadership style is calm, practical and improvement-focused. You use data and insight to identify what isn’t working, simplify it, and build something better – without losing the human touch that makes people services feel worth using.
Why Join Partou?
Partou is a business with ambition, scale and purpose. With over 1,000 nurseries globally and significant UK growth, we are continuing to invest in our people, our systems and our future.
This is a role where your impact will be felt every day—not just in strategy, but in the lived experience of thousands of colleagues across the organisation. You’ll be part of a collaborative leadership team, shaping how People & Culture supports the business now and into the future.
What you’ll get in return:
Why Partou?
Become a Partou team member and join a supportive, caring community where you can enjoy a fulfilling and rewarding career. With access to world-class childcare research, resources, and expertise, we help you develop skills, and empower you to create a positive impact on the development of the next generation, as they lead us into a better future.
Learn more about working at Partou: www.partou.co.uk/careers
Safer Recruitment: All applicants will undergo Enhanced DBS checks and thorough vetting. This role is exempt from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1975.
Partou is proud be a part of the National Partnership in Early Learning and Childcare (NPELC) - a group of 10 of the largest childcare providers across England. Together, we operate over 1,300 childcare settings, employ more than 38,000 people, and take care of over 160,000 children.
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