Evaluation and Learning Manager

Location: Hybrid · Brixton, UK. Hybrid working with one regular weekly day at our office space in Brixton, London.

Salary: Starting from £42,500 (GBP)

Seniority: Mid-level

Closing: 11:58pm, 19th Aug 2026 BST

Who we are:

Chefs in Schools is an ambitious charity that’s rapidly growing. Our mission is to improve kids' health through improving school food & food education. We focus our efforts in areas of high socio-economic deprivation, where more than a third of children are entitled to free school meals, and diet-related disease is driving further inequality. We support and train school kitchen teams to serve the best, freshest and tastiest food possible, alongside meaningful food education. We share learning and resources, aiming to inspire and enable others to follow our lead.

About you and the role:

This role comes at a pivotal time for Chefs in Schools and will be key to supporting our vision and ambitions for the next four year strategic period. You will have significant experience in monitoring and evaluating programmes in a charity, non-profit, or social enterprise setting. As this is a standalone role with no direct reports, we are looking for a unique professional who is highly strategic but equally happy to roll up their sleeves and be hands-on. You will lead on high-level impact strategy, and you will also be the person designing surveys, managing databases, and directly analyzing the data.

To thrive in this role, you should be:

• An Analytical Thinker & Practical Doer: You can confidently clean, manage, and analyze quantitative and qualitative data yourself, translating complex numbers into highly visual, easy-to-digest reports for our team and funders.
• An Empathetic & Pragmatic Collaborator: You understand that school kitchens and delivery teams are incredibly busy. You excel at designing evaluation tools that are low-burden for our partners but high-yield for our learning.
• Curious & Improvement-Driven: You don't just collect data to check a box for funders; you are passionate about building a 'learning culture' where findings are actively used to iterate and improve our programmes.

As we work with children and young people, an offer of employment will be subject to satisfactory references and DBS clearance, in line with our safeguarding policy.

Key responsibilities:

• Leading on developing and implementing Chefs in Schools’ evaluation and learning strategy, in line with our Theory of Change.
• Owning and overseeing the impact dashboard.
• Ownership for embedding a learning culture, ensuring that timely and actionable insights are generated and fed back into design and delivery to support continuous improvement.
• Using internal data and external research to identify what works, ensuring these insights are shared internally and across the sector in line with our strategic objectives.
• Support delivery teams to collect quantitative and qualitative data using the evaluation toolkit.
• Ensuring data collection is proportionate and meaningful with high completion rates.
• Support delivery teams to understand how impact data can help to improve and develop programme effectiveness, whilst maintaining quality.
• Lead on the dissemination of findings across the organisation, including presenting at internal meetings and events.
• Translating data into clear, evidence-based recommendations to guide decision-making.
• Work across the organisation to ensure our impact is effectively communicated with external audiences.
• Identify future research, evaluation and learning priorities that could strengthen Chefs in Schools’ programmes and contribute to wider sector understanding of effective approaches to improving school food.
• Work with external academics and researchers to commission external evaluations to develop our evidence base and contribute to national and international studies.

Essential Skills and Experience:

• MEL Experience: Proven experience in a monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) or impact measurement role within a charity, non-profit, or social enterprise setting.
• Evaluation Design: Confidence designing and implementing practical evaluation frameworks, data collection tools, logic models, or Theories of Change.
• Hands-on Data Skills: Strong analytical skills with the ability to independently collect, clean, and analyze both qualitative and quantitative data. You must be highly proficient in Excel/Google Sheets and comfortable managing data platforms.
• Translation of Evidence: A track record of critically appraising evidence and translating findings into actionable, practical recommendations for delivery teams.
• Communication & Reporting: Ability to produce high-quality, highly visual, and engaging reports and presentations tailored to different audiences (e.g., trustees, funders, operational staff).
• Relationship Building: Strong communication and stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to influence and support busy operational teams to value and embed data collection.

Desirable Skills and Experience:

• Sector Knowledge: Knowledge of food systems, school environments, or children and young people’s health and wellbeing.
• External Evaluations: Experience commissioning, managing, or collaborating with external academics and research partners to evaluate programmes.
• Tech & Systems: Familiarity with specific data visualization tools (e.g., PowerBI, Tableau) or CRM databases (ours is Beacon) to streamline data capture and reporting.

You would be joining a friendly, supportive team who work hard, but believe in a healthy work/life balance. We seek a diverse range of perspectives, skills, experience and knowledge. Joining a small, collaborative team means you’ll be able to contribute to, and draw on, a variety of projects and strategic insights. We offer 33 days (pro-rata for part-time positions) of holiday per year, including bank holidays, a Cycle to Work scheme, hybrid working, free access to the CODE app for discounted restaurants & hospitality venues, enhanced parental leave. We are committed to developing our team and will support you with relevant training opportunities including £250 towards elective training and development of your choice. We also offer Bupa Dental Insurance, Income Protection Insurance, as well as access to the AIG Smart Health Platform which offers health benefits including free rapid access online GP appointments, free counselling and wellbeing support.