Operations Coordinator

**Social Innovations after-school centres**

**Organisation background**:Social Innovationsdevelops and manages programmes that complement core public schooling. It does this primarily by operating after-school centres in no-fee public schools across four provinces. These programmes aim to help learners build stronger foundations in literacy and numeracy at points of transition such as from the foundation phase to intermediate phase or from Grade R to Grade 1.

**Role Purpose**: Overall coordination of the after-school programmes on a day-to-day basis.

**Responsibilities**

1. **Set up of projects each year**:After school centres run on a year-to-year basis in line with donor funding commitments. The PC ensures that all contracts are set up, materials have been delivered and everything is in place ahead of the new school year. This includes:

- Liaising with schools, ensuring they are still on board for the new year, ensuring contracts are in place with participating schools.
- Ensuring all teaching and mentorship posts are filled for the new year. Cross checking all salaries for the year based on annual increases etc. Receiving all personal information and ensuring all employment contracts are in place.
- Liaising with academic partners ahead of the new year. Ensuring that academic programmes are ready for the new year and that all academic and other materials are delivered to schools ahead of the start of the programme.
- Working closely with participating schools. Motivating them to ensure 100% learner registration of learners ahead of the start of the programmes for the year.
- Develop and manage the programme calendar to include all required items such as training, coaching visits, delivery dates etc at each school and each cluster.

2. **Project day-to-day management and administration**:There are processes that happened daily, weekly, monthly that the PC drives. These systems have been set up for the PC to follow, but the PC will be asked to contribute to improving how processes are structured and documented. Processes include:

- Manage the weekly and monthly operations of the project in-line with the programme calendar e.g. ensuring deliveries of materials, confirming training and support visits, functions and events, ensure reports are received etc.
- Manage monthly data collection and reporting and log monthly activities and queries from schools and partners. Run weekly progress meetings and monthly report back meetings.
- HR and payroll management. Maintain records of managers, teachers and teacher assistants and track attendance and participation using the dashboard. Prepare a monthly payroll report.
- Prepare weekly schedules of payments and deliveries and a monthly schedule of payments to be loaded to caterers to the after-school programmes.
- Some of our programmes offer incentives to learners for good attendance. Manage the attendance trackers, receive lists from schools and manage the voucher process from the order of voucher to the delivery into the hands of learners.

**3.** **Data management and reporting**
- Manage the programme dashboard, ensure that each of the parties captures required data timeously, ensure reports are received on time.
- Engage with this data weekly/monthly. Identify issues, problems as well as areas where colleagues should be commended for good work.
- Track the programme against key deliverables and respond to delays or problems.

**4.** **Relationship management and support**
- The PC is the human heart of the project. It is up to him/her to maintain good relationship with all parties to the project, to support where needed and to timeously respond to queries and problems. While this role includes only one bullet point in this description, it is a massively important requirement of this position.

**Person profile**

While the PC need not be qualified as a teacher, they are required to have at least five years experience as a coordinator of programmes in no-fee South African primary schools. This should come with an intuitive sense of assessing functional vs dysfunctional schools and knowledge of the social structures within schools

An Honours degree in a related field such as development studies or education is not required but will be an advantage. Ideally we would like to appoint a person with a long term career plan in the education sector. The PC should understand the importance of early grade literacy and numeracy as the foundation of a child’s education and should have a broad understanding of the challenges facing the public schooling sector.

The person should have had experience in project management software and systems and be able to work with Social Innovations to potentially improve project management systems. Excellent working knowledge of MS software including Word, PowerPoint, Excel.

Strong verbal and written communications skills. The PC will be required to write reports that are both technical and narrative. The person should have an exc