E&E Finance Business Partner

Role Overview

This is a commercial finance partner post working alongside the English & Exams business, and the day-to-day reality is a mix of modelling and conversation: building the forecasts, business cases and scenarios, then sitting down with market leads and delivery teams to explain what the numbers are saying and what should happen next. It matters because exam and teaching operations carry long planning horizons — decisions about property, pricing and how programmes are delivered lock in cost and margin positions for years, and someone has to test those trade-offs before they are committed to. The person in this seat is the finance voice in those discussions, ensuring growth ambitions are checked against realistic revenue, cost and risk assumptions rather than optimism.

Key Responsibilities

• Act as a day-to-day finance contact for Finance Directors, market leads and programme managers — converting their plans into financial terms, and converting financial results back into language operational colleagues can act on.
• Build business cases and investment appraisals covering teaching centres, alternative delivery models, market expansion, property changes and similar proposals, including cost-benefit, ROI and payback calculations.
• Develop operational and commercial models that test pricing structures, capacity utilisation and the balance between delivery channels, so recommendations rest on quantified trade-offs.
• Run scenario and sensitivity modelling against regulatory, tax and structural change, feeding multi-year revenue, margin and cost projections into the planning cycle.
• Consolidate budget, forecast and reforecast inputs from business units and regions, checking that assumptions stay consistent, approved and correctly applied across the piece.
• Produce management reporting, KPI dashboards and variance analysis across both Exams and Teaching, drawing out trends, underlying drivers and any early signals that performance is slipping away from plan.
• Support non-finance colleagues with budget queries and expenditure tracking, giving them clear guidance on process and on where their numbers are heading.
• Deliver ad hoc analysis for performance reviews and leadership requests, triaging a portfolio of competing asks by risk, materiality and urgency, and working with central reporting and CoE teams to keep source data reliable.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Intermediate-level experience in financial management, FP&A or management accounting — the kind that comes from having owned planning, forecasting or reporting outputs yourself rather than only contributing to them.
• Confident financial modelling and forecasting skills, including building models from a blank sheet and stress-testing them when assumptions move.
• Strong data literacy, with practical experience creating dashboards and interpreting data in Power BI.
• A track record of providing finance support to operational teams, with evidence that those stakeholders valued the input.
• The ability to explain financials to non-finance audiences — narrative-led, data-backed storytelling rather than technical jargon.
• Comfort managing a portfolio of activities against multiple, sometimes colliding, deadlines.
• Desirable: exposure to exams, teaching, education or another commercial service environment.
• Desirable: hands-on use of SAP or a comparable ERP, and Anaplan or a comparable EPM platform — ideally across both the planning and reporting sides of the system.
• Usual background for a role at this level: a degree in finance, accounting, economics or a related discipline, or a professional accounting qualification such as ACA, ACCA or CIMA.
• Written and verbal English proficiency is required, as systems and global processes operate in English.