Lead, Programme Management

Location: London, Manchester, Oxford or Rotherham

Workplace: Hybrid

Contract: Permanent, full-time

Reports to:

Executive Partner, Assessment

This is a lead role at the heart of Pearson's Government contract delivery programme. You'll bring together multiple work streams and their teams to create one clear, end-to-end view of delivery, ensuring dependencies are understood, risks are addressed early and everyone is working towards the same outcomes.

You'll combine deep delivery expertise with strong people skills, helping colleagues work openly and transparently while constructively challenging plans, timescales and assumptions. You'll also represent Pearson with the Standards and Testing Agency (STA), building confidence through clear, credible and customer-focused communication.

Your early impact will be to establish strong programme rhythms, connect activity across work streams and give leaders a reliable view of readiness, risk and progress across complex assessment delivery.

Create and maintain the integrated delivery view across the programme, connecting workstream plans, milestones and dependencies.

Translate strategic priorities and contractual commitments into clear, executable delivery plans.

Use your experience and judgement to challenge assumptions, identify emerging risks and drive timely action before delivery is affected.

Provide clear assurance, risk management and performance reporting to senior governance forums.

Bring together Marking, Operations and Customer Support so they operate as one coordinated assessment-delivery service.

Lead readiness, capacity and contingency planning across assessment cycles, with particular focus on peak delivery periods.

Coordinate incident response, service recovery and lessons learned, turning insight into measurable improvements.

Strengthen operational controls, scalability, service resilience and continuous improvement across the programme.

Create an environment where workstream leads and teams collaborate openly, share information early and remain accountable for shared outcomes.

Motivate and influence multidisciplinary teams, navigating competing priorities and holding constructive conversations when plans need to change.

Build trusted relationships with senior stakeholders, suppliers and the STA, communicating progress, risks and decisions with clarity.

Keep the needs of schools, educators and learners at the centre of operational decisions and customer communications.

You're an experienced delivery professional who is comfortable operating across complex, multi-workstream programmes  combine strong organisation and attention to detail with the confidence to bring people together, ask the right questions and make clear decisions in high-pressure situations.

Proven experience leading large-scale operational, programme or service delivery in a complex, multifaceted environment.

A strong track record of integrating plans, managing dependencies and using risk, issue and readiness management to protect delivery.

Excellent stakeholder-management, influencing and client-facing skills, with the credibility to engage senior leaders and external partners.

A data-led approach to performance, governance and continuous improvement.

Strong people skills and the ability to motivate teams, encourage transparency and navigate challenging conversations.

The ability to remain calm, decisive and customer-focused when priorities shift or issues emerge.

Experience working with nationally significant services or programmes involving multiple delivery…