Programme Performance Manager – Apprenticeship Units

Department: Funded Learning

Location: Hybrid, UK (with some travel to client sites for in-person delivery)

Reports to: Head of Programme Performance

Hours: 37.5  per week

Salary:(Depending on experience) 

A quick note before you apply: We are only able to accept applications from candidates who are currently based in the UK and hold the legal right to work here.

Role Overview 
We are looking for a customer-focussed Programme Performance Manager who will take full accountability for the delivery of our Apprenticeship Units across the Cambridge Spark portfolio.  You will play a critical role to deliver tangible impact for our learners and clients, ensuring that each cohort is delivered to a “Gold Standard”.  You will act as the primary bridge between our clients and internal teams, managing the life cycle of each cohort and ensuring learner satisfaction.

Key responsibilities:

Team Leadership and Programme Management

• Receive each cohort from Sales, Admissions and Scheduling and confirm it is ready to deliver: Facilitator allocated, schedule agreed, and learners enrolled with signed training plans.
• Partner with Sales and Product to understand client needs, ensuring the programme is set up and implemented to specification.
• Set the delivery standard and hold the Facilitator team to it. Facilitators own the day-to-day learner relationship; you are the escalation point. Take decisive action to ensure agreed outputs are consistently met.
• Monitor attendance and delivery hours against plan across all live cohorts, and act early where a learner is at risk of falling short.
• Oversee the skills test process: timely issue, marking, feedback and resits within the funded window.
• Line manage the Facilitator team (objectives, 1:1s, performance, wellbeing and workload), plan capacity with Scheduling, and contribute to recruitment as the team grows.
• Secure training plan sign-off from the learner, employer and Cambridge Spark, confirming delivery in full and the skills test passed. Confirm actual delivery hours per learner, pass complete, accurate records to the teams that report outcomes, and work with Compliance to maximise funding claims.
• Manage the withdrawal process with Compliance, including extensions, breaks and the learner's record of training completed.

Quality Assurance and Learner Experience

• Review learner and Facilitator feedback from every session, identify friction points and spot patterns, working immediately with the Product Manager, Facilitators and other teams to iterate content, format or logistics
• Act as the escalation point for learners, ensuring queries and support needs are resolved in a timely way
• Work with the Head of Quality on observations, quality standards and CPD
• Work with the Head of Training to ensure Teaching standards and CPD are aligned
• Work with Product teams to produce Cohort Impact statements and understand programme impact.

• Collaborate across Operations, Product, Sales, Tech and Compliance to ensure seamless service delivery that drives revenue and captures the ROI for the client
• Own and improve the operational processes for the programme, working with Systems and Product teams so processes run reliably and produce the data the business needs

Candidate Specification

Essential

• Line management of delivery staff (trainers, coaches or mentors), including performance and workload management.
• Experience running many concurrent programmes, cohorts or projects to fixed deadlines without dropping detail.
• Understanding of funded training in England, enough to know what good delivery evidence looks like.
• A systems mindset: works with systems to build the processes and get the data they need, rather than around them.
• Uses feedback and data to drive improvements, working across teams to get changes made.
• Confident with employer and learner stakeholders, including handling escalations and complaints.

Desirable

• Experience of short-course, bootcamp or apprenticeship delivery.
• Familiarity with Ofsted's further education and skills inspection approach.
• Interest in data and AI, sufficient to credibly lead technical Facilitators.
• Experience of using AI tools to automate admin and reporting.