HFL1515 Financial Accountant - Academy Finance

HFLRecruitment

Contract: Permanent
Hours: 37 hours or 29.6 hours (4 days) – 52 weeks a year
Salary: Band 6: FTE £44,000 - £47,000 p.a (Pro-rata for reduced hours)
Location: Hybrid working consisting of remote working, with flexibility required to work across educational settings in Hertfordshire and neighbouring counties and for occasional visits to Robertson House, Stevenage.

Are you a finance professional with strong accounting and financial management skills, looking for a rewarding role?

Have you considered utilising your skills to support the education sector?

Do you want a varied role, with flexible, hybrid working arrangements?

If so, you can use your skills and experience to support schools and academy trusts within a changing landscape.

Herts for Learning is the UK’s largest School Company. We operate as a social enterprise on a not-for-profit basis and are a leading provider of school improvement and business support services, training and resources, that enable schools, settings and trusts to deliver a great education.

In this role you will be a trusted adviser working with senior clients in academy trusts, supporting with budget setting and strategic planning, management accounts, year end and one-off projects in order to meet their financial management and reporting responsibilities. In addition to this you will be a part of a team which shares knowledge through peer reviews and regular team meetings.

The ideal candidate will be a finance professional; with proven abilities to work unsupervised and able to utilise your initiative to achieve outcomes. You will be comfortable working with a varied range of clients, understanding their needs and experience to add value through your practitioner guidance and recommendations. You will manage your time and outputs well to deliver against deadlines, and with genuine credibility built through the experience of your current role.

This is an exciting time to join the team. With recent sector announcements you will be well-placed to support the development and delivery of new HfL services to academy trusts, and for assisting schools converting to academies in the future.

Benefits: a competitive salary, a generous employer pension contribution, a generous employer pension contribution, 28 days annual leave plus bank holidays (rising to 31 days after five-years) or the equivalent paid for Term Time employees, family-friendly policies, hybrid working, company performance bonus, professional development opportunities, and benefit schemes for discounts and cashback offers.

Our ‘working from anywhere’ approach provides colleagues the opportunity to work flexibly in line with their role requirements. This consists of working on-site across various schools and settings, remote working and occasional visits to our Head Office in Stevenage, Hertfordshire. The ability to reach different locations by car will be essential for this role. If you drive, then a full driving licence and appropriate car insurance will be required. As there is a permanent home working element to this role, you will need to ensure you are equipped for home working.

This is a great opportunity to join our diverse and successful team, and to have the opportunity to support academy trusts and settings.

Would you like to know some more about this opportunity, please contact via email Jackie Keegan Jackie.keegan@hfleducation.org or Lisa Holroyd lisa.holroyd@hfleducation.org

To apply, email hfl.recruitment@hfleducation.org with a detailed CV along with a cover letter to include responses to the following questions:
1. Please give an example of where you have been responsible for the delivery of a project, with minimal supervision. What was the objective, how did you approach this and what were the outcomes?
2. Describe how you have managed and delivered your role effectively against multiple and conflicting priorities.
3. All academy trusts have the same year end deadline, which can bring a lot of pressure in September. In this scenario, you were due to complete year end at a school on Monday. They did not have the documents ready and asked you to return on Wednesday. However, you are booked into another school for year end on this date and have no flexibility. How would you approach this?
4. Detail how you would build relationships with colleagues in your team, to support areas such as peer reviews and developing new practices and services, when the majority of your work is completed or performed remotely (i.e. off-site).

As part of our move towards eradicating unconscious bias within the recruitment process, we ask that you follow the guidance stated in the application forms.
For recruitment queries, our Central Recruitment Team can also be contacted on the hfl.recruitment email address above.

We would love to hear from you.

This job advert may close as soon as sufficient applications have been received. To make sure you don’t miss out on this great opportunity, please submit your application as soon as you can. Interviews will take place in Stevenage.

We are committed towards becoming an anti-racist organisation, and our recruitment statement is set out below in support of this.

HFL is committed to being an equal opportunities employer. We insist on the equal treatment of all current and prospective colleagues and will never condone discrimination on the basis of age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, or marriage and civil partnership.

HFL is also equally committed to becoming an anti-racist organisation and we encourage you to view our Anti-racist position statement which gives clarity on our anti-racist stance. In our relentless efforts to be an anti-racist organisation, we recognise the negative impacts of under representation and lack of diversity in our organisation, our education system and in all aspects of our society. Therefore, for recruitment into any HFL post, where we have 2 or more candidates of equal merit, candidates with protected characteristics will be given advantage over candidates without such characteristics. This is sometimes referred to as a ‘tie-breaker’ and is referred to as ‘positive action’ in the Equality Act 2010.

To help us meet our high standards and aspirations of a fully diverse and inclusive workplace, we strongly encourage suitably qualified applicants from all backgrounds to apply and to join us.

Please note that if you are invited to interview, we will expect you to be prepared to discuss unconscious bias with us; we find these conversations more than any others give us all a good idea of what working together will be like.