Head of Programme Management Office

Build Something That Matters

Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council has made a significant and deliberate investment in children’s services. The Children in Care Sufficiency Strategy 2026-2030 is a Cabinet-approved, four-year programme designed to change how Barnsley plans for, commissions and delivers provision for children in care and children with special educational needs and disabilities. It’s funded, it’s live, and it’s already delivering.

The strategy works across three pillars: reducing avoidable entry into care, stabilising placements for vulnerable adolescents, and strengthening how the Council commissions and directly provides residential and specialist care. The interventions it funds include Reset Home, Mockingbird constellation fostering, a new Vulnerable Adolescent Pathway, a Reunification Fund, a strengthened kinship offer, and Barnsley’s own internal residential homes.

This sits alongside one of the most significant periods of natioal reform in children’s social care and SEND in a generation. Barnsley has chosen to get ahead of that, investing in real change rather than waiting to react.

The workforce that delivers this will grow alongside the programme. The strategy sets out additional staffing capacity across specialist intervention services, the Adolescent Pathway, commissioning and the development and operation of internal residential provision. Some of those roles are in development and will be advertised as the programme progresses.

The five roles we’re recruiting to now are the Programme Management Office: the team that sits at the centre of all three pillars, keeps the programme on track, maintains the evidence base, and provides the governance and assurance infrastructure that makes everything else possible.

If you want to be part of building something that genuinely changes outcomes for children in Barnsley, we’d like to hear from you.

Head of Programme Management Office

This is the senior leadership role, reporting to the Service Director, Quality & Improvement of Children’s Services. You’ll be accountable for the governance, assurance, and benefits realisation of a Cabinet-approved programme backed by recurring revenue investment rising to £5.41 million per annum by Year 3 and a residential capital programme of £1.8 million. Full implementation is forecast to deliver £22.61 million of gross savings and cost avoidance by Year 3.

The programme spans three delivery pillars and includes children in care placement reform, fostering development, residential capital build, commissioning change, and SEND sufficiency infrastructure. Barnsley is also working to draw down High Needs Stability Grant funding, which is conditional on demonstrating credible delivery against its local SEND reform plan. Maintaining that evidence base is part of what this role does, and it matters.

A significant part of this role operates through influence rather than direct authority. Finance, Legal, Procurement, HR, and Assets are all corporate dependencies for this programme, and none of them report to you. Getting the right resource, at the right time, from functions with their own competing pressures requires credibility, strong relationship management and the ability to make the case for prioritisation. If you’ve only ever led programmes where your team owns every workstream, this will be a different experience. If you’ve navigated matrix environments in a large, complex organisation and know how to make cross-functional delivery work without formal authority, that’s exactly what Barnsley needs here.

You’ll lead a small team, represent the PMO at governance forums, and provide the assurance infrastructure that Cabinet, Senior Management Team and the Director of Children’s Services require. The Executive Director’s intention is that the PMO function grows over time to centralise project management resource across Children’s Services, so you’ll be shaping something with a longer-term purpose.

You’ll need extensive experience leading a PMO or complex programme in a local authority or comparable public sector organisation, with direct accountability for governance and assurance at a senior level. Experience in or alongside children’s social care, SEND or commissioning is expected. A programme or project management qualification is desirable. What’s essential is that you have the judgement, credibility and organisational standing to lead at this level.

For further information please visit: https://www.barnsley.gov.uk/services/jobs/childrens-services-roles/