Welcome

Welcome from our Chief Executive

Thank you for your interest in becoming our Executive Director of Evidence.

This is a particularly exciting time to join Foundations, and I am genuinely looking forward to welcoming a new colleague to our Senior Leadership Team.

We have achieved a great deal since Foundations was established in 2022, building our role as the national What Works Centre for Children & Families and bringing together evidence, policy and practice around a clear ambition: improving outcomes for vulnerable children and families. But we are still a relatively young organisation, and there is much more we want to achieve.

The success of our recent funding bid gives us the stability to plan confidently for the future, but also the opportunity to think creatively about what comes next. For the right person, that combination is incredibly exciting. You will inherit strong foundations and an ambitious team, but you will also have significant scope to shape our evidence agenda, influence our organisational direction and help determine how Foundations develops in its next chapter.

We are looking for someone who will relish that challenge. Someone with deep expertise and intellectual curiosity, but who also wants to be an organisational leader: bringing ideas, challenging our thinking and working alongside me and the rest of the leadership team to make Foundations the best organisation it can be.

There are important questions ahead of us. One is how we harness the potential of artificial intelligence. We are at the beginning of our AI journey, and I see real opportunity to explore how it can strengthen evidence generation and synthesis and improve research productivity. Equally, we need to ensure our approach is rigorous, transparent and ethically sound. We want our new Executive Director to be instrumental in shaping that journey.

Beyond Foundations, you will have the opportunity to influence thinking across government, academia, funders and the wider children’s sector, helping us ask the right questions, fill critical evidence gaps and ensure that evidence ultimately leads to better decisions for children and families.

If you are excited by the prospect of joining an organisation with ambition and genuine room to innovate, and you want the challenge of helping shape what comes next, we would love to hear from you.

Dr Jo Casebourne