Senior User Researcher

Right now, we are recruiting 3 Senior User Researchers to join our friendly Digital Delivery for Schools and Education Estates portfolio. We have 1 role in each of our Education Estates, School Technology Services, and DfE Connect programmes.Education Estates supports safe, sustainable, and engaging learning environments that enable excellent educational outcomes for children in schools. The Education Estates Division is currently undergoing a transformation, putting user-centred approaches at the core of designing and building new and improved services.School Technology Services supports schools to create strategic plans for digital infrastructure improvements, which are implemented across a long-lived and complex end-to-end journey, often overlapping with multiple other DFE services. This is an expanding service, with user insights also supporting the development of the service in line with a new 3 year strategy.DfE Connect is establishing an improved way for schools to engage with DfE. It is an expanding service, supporting staff in schools by delivering the most relevant digital services, information and initiatives from DfE to each user, and enabling users to tell us things once - so that information is used across our different systems and services.In each programme, the Senior User Researcher will play a critical role supporting and collaborating with the programme's user researchers and Senior research colleagues across the portfolio to deliver impactful user research, and a sustainable approach to understanding, identifying and analysing a growing range of user needs across this complex space.As a senior user researcher, you will be an experienced practitioner who can plan and lead user research activities in larger teams and across programmes of work and more complex services.Job Responsibilities:Deliver user research in complex subject areas, and supervise and develop other user researchers to assure and improve research practice, ensuring that research is high quality, ethical and safe.Build user-centred practices in teams in your programme area, supervising other user researchers. Help teams to research inclusively with a wide range of users, including those with additional needs and other hard-to-reach groups.Be a service assessor, assessing DfE services against the government service standard. Effectively communicate user research findings to the team and the wider organisation, to influence decision making. Take an active role in the DfE user research community, helping develop and improve our practice across the department.As a Senior User Researcher in our Education Estates digital programme, you will have the chance to work on impactful services that support schools to create safe, sustainable, and inspiring learning environments, breaking down barriers to opportunity, and giving every child the best start in life. If youre an experienced researcher and youre passionate about making a difference, wed love to hear from you.Read more about user research at Department for Education