**Overview** The English and Examinations Strategic Business Unit (E&E;) is one of three strategic business units in the British Council (the others being Arts and Education & Society) all of which have the remit to build trust for the people of the UK by building relationships through aspects of our language and culture. E&E; achieves this by enabling people across the world to access the life-changing education and work opportunities that are created by learning English or gaining valuable UK qualifications. Promoting the English language also provides a medium for communication, helping break down barriers of misunderstanding or mistrust between cultures. The British Council’s 2020 vision for English & Examinations is to be the world authority in high quality English language teaching, learning and assessment, as well as the International distributor of choice for UK professional and school qualifications. **Role Purpose** The role is the country/cluster lead for business improvement, efficiency and cost management for teaching operations through effective teacher utilization, management of indirect costs and process improvement to improve margins. Accountable for the delivery of in-year efficiency targets. This is a key role in ensuring that the teaching business is sustainable, future focused and delivers the operational performance in line with corporate objectives. **Main accountabilities but not limited to the following**: **Service delivery** - Translates Global and Regional English strategies into 1 -3 year operations plan, and deploys resources efficiently and cost-effectively to deliver the commercial strategy. - Liaises closely with Country/Branch Operations Managers to clarify, agree, and re-negotiate (as necessary) local targets to deliver improvements in margin. - Implements, reviews and re-prioritise the work plans of multiple teams working across a range of business strands (systems, processes, change initiatives) in the light of revised corporate requirements, operational changes and local social/economic or political events. - Ensure the effective and efficient management of logistics (timetabling, stock management etc.). - Drives innovation of the teaching delivery model identifying opportunities to improve delivery efficiencies and effectiveness to best meet customer needs. - Responsible for safeguarding practices, policies, risk management for young learners within the country. **Relationship and Stakeholder management** - Develops and maintains excellent relationships and communication with internal stakeholders across a range of business and geographical areas, to inform and enable medium-term innovation and improvements in the quality of teaching delivery. - Leads and manages relationships with major corporate stakeholders including Tax, Legal, Corporate risk and Information Governance. **Analysis and Reporting** - Accountable for business process improvement, drives improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of delivery across products based on historic, current and projected operational performance data. - Undertakes market scanning to identify potential partners to support the improvement of the delivery model and utilise new delivery channels. - Reviews current management information and reporting protocols, recommending and/or implementing improvements, as necessary, to enable more effective and robust operational planning and decision-making. - Inputs into monthly forecasting for month-end commentary and teacher utilization. **Risk and compliance** - In collaboration with Country/Branch Operations Managers, reviews agreed corporate risk management protocols to determine whether they adequately protect the interests of the British Council in the local operating context. Recommends revision and reform where necessary, basing proposals on evidence-based analysis of current/future risks and research into wider best practice and/or legislative requirements. - Ensures Teaching Centres are compliant and monitors performance. - Leads on internal and external audits from planning to follow up. - Serves as a point of escalation for Branch Operation Managers on significant issues. **Commercial and/or financial management** - Leads the annual resource planning for operational delivery to ensure capacity to deliver demand for products & services. Monitors, analyses and reports variances to plan to enable in-year and medium-term improvements to operational efficiency and business effectiveness. - Sets utilisation targets for teachers & classroom space, monitoring performance & ensuring country Operations Managers are putting in place plans to tackle. - Undertakes a range of financial, productivity and cost/benefit analyses of operational activity in teaching delivery to enable the development of robust medium-term investment decisions. - Actively contributes to premise management decision making and planning. - Assures expenditure, deferred income and cashflow through monthly re