Performance Manager

Job Title: Performance Manager
Starting Salary: £42,839 progressing to 47,181 per annum (pro rata for part time)
Hours: 37.0
Location: Countywide
Contract Type: Permanent
Directorate: Childrens Services

About the team

In Hertfordshire, we’re driven by a simple but powerful mission: every child and young person should have the chance to live their best life — one filled with ambition, opportunity, and a true sense of belonging.

We’re looking for someone who can help turn data into insight and action to improve life chances for children with SEND and other vulnerable learners. If you’re passionate about making information and intelligence available to support performance improvement and make better decisions, this role is your chance to make a real difference.

The Intelligence and Insight team supports children and young people across Inclusion & Skills and Education services, ensuring that leaders have access to accurate, timely intelligence that drives better decisions and improved outcomes. Our vision is to create a high‑quality, future‑proof data environment that supports statutory responsibilities, strategic planning, and operational excellence.

We’ve made significant progress in improving our approach to insight and are now looking to strengthen the team’s capacity to sustain this. This role offers significant scope to shape the future direction of our reporting infrastructure and help guide how intelligence is collected, validated, visualised, and shared across the organisation.

You’d be part of a committed team of performance and data analysts and working alongside programme managers and improvement leads, product managers, report writers, and data quality specialists as well as collaborating closely with Education and SEND leaders and service teams.

About the role

You will lead the development and implementation of the next phase of adopting Power BI across the directorate for our operational and strategic performance reporting ensuring that our reporting capability is aligned with organisational priorities. You will also manage the end-to-end delivery of key statutory returns such as SEN2 and data requirements for Ofsted/CQC Area SEND Inspections, provide insight to inform cross-service improvement, and oversee ad hoc and Freedom of Information requests.

The post-holder will:

• Design, build and test Power BI reports, working directly with services to gather requirements, create meaningful visualisations, and deliver insight that supports decision making
• Support the enhancement of the Power BI Semantic Model, working closely with corporate business intelligence colleagues to validate new attributes, conduct testing, identify bugs, and approve releases into UAT
• Drive the adoption of Power BI by providing first‑line support for directorate Power BI users, including troubleshooting, responding to change requests, explaining functionality, and communicating around known issues or refresh failures, supporting other report writers and end‑users to build capability and confidenceand assisting in training and documentation
• Contribute to governance, ensuring Power BI reports, permissions and data stewardship follow best practice; manage access requests and maintain security controls
• Lead on the production and delivery of SEN2 pupil‑level statutory returns, ensuring data is accurate, complete and compliant with DfE requirements
• Manage data quality for SEND and Education datasets, including identifying issues, proposing solutions, and carrying out manual corrections where needed (especially for SEN2 and Ofsted reports)
• Respond to ad‑hoc data requests, including FOIs, operational queries and strategic intelligence needs, ensuring high‑quality analysis and clear presentation of findings
• Contribute to external networks such as the Eastern Region benchmarking, SEN2 Cross‑LA working group, and internal communities of practice

About you

This is a role which will directly influence service performance, statutory compliance and strategic decision‑making, helping leaders and teams to respond to demand, identify risks earlier, and focus effort where it is needed most. As a result, this is a chance to use your skills to help make a tangible difference to improving the experiences of families navigating SEND services.

If you’re looking for a role where you can grow, innovate, and contribute to meaningful change, while building a strong career pathway in data, insight, or service improvement — we’d love to hear from youEssential:

• Designing, writing and testing Power BI reports, including working with stakeholders to gather requirements and improve outputs through iterative development
• Working with a Power BI Semantic Model, including attribute validation, regression testing and bug tracking through Azure DevOps
• Strong track record of using your skills to improve data‑quality, with evidence of identifying issues, proposing solutions, and carrying out corrections — ideally in a Children’s Services/SEND datasets or local authority context
• Ability to analyse and interpret complex data and present findings clearly to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Experience of using recognised performance improvement or outcomes‑focused frameworks or similar approaches to support structured problem‑solving and effective service improvement
• Experience working successfully across multiple teams to deliver reporting, building relationships with strategic leads, operational services, and corporate business intelligence teams and developers
• Strong organisational skills, with the ability to manage deadlines, conflicting priorities and statutory timescales.

Desirable:

• Demonstrable experience delivering SEN2 returns and required Inspection data sets, including validation, correction and submission of pupil‑level data across multiple years
• Ability to gather, refine and translate user stories into clear, structured technical requirements that the corporate Business Intelligence developers can use to enhance and extend the semantic model. This includes working closely with stakeholders to understand their analytical needs and converting business questions into scalable metrics, measures, and data model enhancements
• Experience of managing product backlogs, user stories and bug tracking, ensuring clear prioritisation, transparent workflow management, and effective communication between teams.
• Ability to manage and support Power BI users, including responding to queries, troubleshooting issues and managing access and permissions as well as experience of developing and delivering training and support

Qualifications & Requirements

• Degree‑level education or equivalent experience in data analysis, information management, or a related field.
• Power BI certifications are welcome but not essential.
• Ability to travel for meetings or training where required.

This is a role which will directly influence service performance, statutory compliance and strategic decision‑making, helping leaders and teams to respond to demand, identify risks earlier, and focus effort where it is needed most. As a result, this is a chance to use your skills to help make a tangible difference to improving the experiences of families navigating SEND services.

If you’re looking for a role where you can grow, innovate, and contribute to meaningful change, while building a strong career pathway in data, insight, or service improvement — we’d love to hear from you

We welcome applications from candidates who currently reside in the UK with established proof of right to work documentation. We are not able to offer sponsorship at this time for this role.

This job role is within the Corporate Services, level CORP11 job profile. Please locate this via:

Job profiles - Corporate services

To hear more about this opportunity please contact Laura Barnaby laura.barnaby@hertfordshire.gov.uk or DavidButcherDavid.butcher@hertfordshire.gov.uk

Interview Date: 25th February 2026

Benefits of working for us

How to apply

As part of your application, please upload your most recent CV. Ensure your CV is up to date with your employment history (including any employment gaps), and including any training/qualifications. We encourage you to include examples of where you have demonstrated the requirements/criteria in the advert / job profile to allow the panel to fully recognise your skills and abilities. You will have the opportunity to include a short covering paragraph within your application to give us a little more information about your skills, knowledge, and experiences.

Additional information

Disability Confident
We are proud to be a Disability Confident employer and guarantee an interview to anyone disclosing a disability whose application meets the minimum criteria for the post.

English Fluency
The ability to converse at ease with members of the public and provide advice in accurate spoken English is essential for the post (for those whose language is a signed language the provision of a sign language interpreter who speaks English to the necessary standard of fluency will be required). Further information about the legal requirement can be found here.