The Service and Team
The SEND Provision and Experience Manager plays a pivotal role in assuring and improving the quality, effectiveness and value for money of SEND education provision across the local area. Leading a specialist team, the postholder brings together data, lived experience and professional insight to understand how provision is experienced by children, young people and families, and to drive system‑wide improvement. Working closely with education, health and commissioning partners, the role provides confident professional challenge, strengthens safeguarding and statutory compliance, and ensures that high‑cost and complex provision delivers positive outcomes. This is a role for a thoughtful, values‑driven leader who combines analytical rigour with empathy, influence and a strong commitment to inclusive practice.
The Role
Are you driven by a deep belief that every child and young person with SEND deserves not just provision, but the right provision delivered well, experienced positively and making a real difference? This is a rare opportunity to step into a pivotal system‑leadership role where insight, empathy and professional challenge come together. As SEND Provision and Experience Manager, you will sit at the heart of the local area SEND partnership, shaping how quality, value for money and lived experience are understood, measured and improved across education, health and care. You will lead intelligence‑led assurance work that listens carefully to children, young people and families, and translates what they tell us; through data, feedback, complaints and outcomes and meaningful system‑wide improvements.
This role is as much about how you lead as what you do. You will be a thoughtful, credible leader who can bring people with you; influencing providers, commissioners and partners through evidence, relationships and shared purpose. Leading a skilled team, you will oversee monitoring activity across mainstream, specialist, alternative provision, ensuring safeguarding, statutory duties and inclusion are embedded throughout. You will be trusted to provide assurance to senior leaders and elected members, to challenge where standards fall short, and to champion good practice wherever it is found. This is a role for someone who is comfortable holding complexity, balancing compassion with accountability, and using professional judgement to protect both outcomes for children and the public purse.
If you bring strong SEND expertise, a background in education, a sharp analytical mind and the emotional intelligence to navigate complex systems with confidence and care, this role offers the chance to make a lasting difference; not just to services, but to experiences and lives.
This position will be subject to an enhanced criminal record disclosure check.
What You'll Need to Succeed
If you bring strong SEND expertise, a background in education, a sharp analytical mind and the emotional intelligence to navigate complex systems with confidence and care, this role offers the chance to make a lasting difference; not just to services, but to experiences and lives.
Working Pattern:
This is a full time, 37 hours per week position.
Please read the role profile for the full details of this role attached below in this advert
What you’ll get in return:
Cornwall Council’s ambition is to be an employer of choice, a high performing Council and a learning organisation. We commit to providing a reward and benefits package to attract, motivate and reward our employees. We offer a range of flexible working options to our staff. This helps provide our employees with a greater work/life balance whilst still ensuring that service needs are met.
Our core employee rewards and benefits include:
Additional Information:
Cornwall Council is unable to offer visa sponsorship or transfer existing sponsorship for this role.
The full role profile is attached here
We recommend saving a copy of this to refer to if you are invited to an interview.
For more information or an informal chat about the role please contact Nick Millward – nick.millward@cornwall.gov.uk
Application Process
Please attach a supporting statement to your application. You can add your Education & Qualifications details manually using the application form timeline or you can upload your CV. Remember to demonstrate why you are suitable against each of the points marked as ‘Application’ on the Role Profile using examples from your experience or transferable skills. This might be through qualifications or descriptive examples from your work / personal experience, which clearly illustrates what you did and the effect it had. Guidance on how to complete your application can be found here – The application process
Please note that applications cannot be edited after they have been submitted, please contact careers@cornwall.gov.uk if you have any queries or require assistance with your application.
Existing employees must apply using their Cornwall Council email address through the Opportunity Marketplace on Oracle.
Cornwall Council deliver services to more than half a million local people and over five million visitors a year. Working here - Cornwall Council
We are happy to talk about flexible working options such as part-time or compressed hours. More examples of our flexible working opportunities can be found here - flexible working options
Fairness and inclusion are at the heart of our vision for Cornwall. In order to best serve our communities, we are striving to achieve a diverse workforce that is inclusive of all backgrounds, cultures and identities; e.g., race, disability, sex, gender reassignment status, age, religion and sexual orientation. We are an equal opportunities and Disability Confident employer, and we will assess applicants on their merits.
Cornwall Council is committed to safeguarding and following safer recruitment principles to help make sure our staff and volunteers are suitable to work with children, young people and adults at risk. It’s a vital part of creating a safe and positive environment and making a commitment to keeping all service users safe from harm.
A unique Council that has secured the UK's first devolution deal for a rural County! We deliver services to more than half a million local people and to over five million visitors a year.
*Cornwall - The Place: http://www.cornwall.gov.uk/jobs-and-careers/work-and-volunteer-for-us/cornwall-the-place/
With its beautiful beaches, stunning countryside and superb community spirit, Cornwall is a great place to live.
*Cornwall - Our Offer: http://www.cornwall.gov.uk/jobs-and-careers/work-and-volunteer-for-us/our-offer/
With a competitive employee reward package that attracts, retains and motivates our employees; open plan working environments in most offices, good business systems and a can do culture where talented people thrive, Cornwall Council is a great place to work.
*Cornwall - Our Job of the Week: http://www.cornwall.gov.uk/joboftheweek
*Cornwall - What we do and how we work: http://www.cornwall.gov.uk/jobs-and-careers/work-and-volunteer-for-us/what-we-do-and-how-we-work/
Services: Care for the elderly, children’s safeguarding, libraries, road maintenance, fire and rescue service, recycling, parks, street cleaning, countryside management, social housing, town planning, tourism support and trading standards.
We deliver these services through our employees who work directly for the Council and through our many other Council owned companies and organisations; CORMAC, Cornwall Housing, Tempus Leisure, Newquay Airport and Cornwall Development Company.
We also have close links with Cornwall’s health organisations, colleges and universities and work closely with the police, town and parish councils and the voluntary sector.
*Cornwall - Council and Democracy: http://www.cornwall.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/
We have 123 elected councillors and as Cornwall is such a large rural area, our councillors and the towns and parishes they represent are grouped into 19 community networks, which are the focus of our local community work.
