Senior Finance Manager

The Role

We are seeking a strategic and experienced Senior Finance Manager to join our central team, supporting the financial operations of our 11-school Multi Academy Trust (MAT). This is an exciting opportunity to make a significant impact within a growing and ambitious trust, committed to delivering outstanding educational outcomes for every child.

As Senior Finance Manager, you will:

• Lead on Trust-wide financial planning, forecasting, and reporting
• Work closely with the CFO to develop and monitor annual budgets across all academies
• Ensure compliance with the Academies Financial Handbook and other regulatory requirements
• Provide expert financial advice to Headteachers, Local Governing Bodies, senior leaders and Trustees
• Oversee the preparation of year-end accounts and manage external audit processes
• Support financial due diligence on any new schools joining the Trust
• Lead, manage, and develop a small finance team

Why work for the Halliard Trust

Who we are

We educate over 5,000 children and employ 900 teaching and support staff to deliver our vision to ensure every student leaves school with the values, skills, qualities and aptitudes to thrive in society combined with highest possible learning outcomes. Our core values of Respect, Integrity and Optimism underpin everything we do.

Formerly named The Fallibroome Trust, we have engaged with all of our stakeholders to choose a new name and are now called the Halliard Trust and are a school-led multi-academy trust which encourages its schools to work with a high level of autonomy and keep their own ‘personality’ and close ties to their local communities – always underpinned by strong support from the Trust leadership and the school improvement and business teams. We offer a wide-ranging programme of professional development for all employees to support those taking their first steps in education to those working as exceptional leaders.

The people you work with will support and motivate you in achieving your ambitions. Our exceptional teachers, support staff and leaders come from a wide range of backgrounds, but they all share a deeply held commitment to give our students an outstanding education in an inspiring and happy school environment. The Trust has grown organically to three secondary and eight primary schools based in Cheshire. The Trust operates from its head office in Macclesfield, Cheshire where the School Improvement and Business Support teams are based.

Working with the Trust

Everyone who works with us is crucial to the Trust’s success and professional learning plays a vital role in how we work. Successful teams are full of people who not only care but feel cared for and valued and subsequently take care in all they do. encourage and support every individual to develop themselves to achieve their full potential.

Benefits of working with the Trust

• High quality professional learning & development at all stages of your career
• Access to the Teachers’ Pension or Local Government Pension Schemes with a generous employer contribution rate
• Support staff have 26 days holiday entitlement rising to 31 days with service
• Free onsite parking at all sites
• Cycle to work scheme
• Confidential employee counselling helpline

How to Apply

We ask all applicants to apply through SAMpeople Recruit/Face-Ed; our recruitment software. This enables us to efficiently carry out our safer recruitment checks, but we recognise it can take some time for the applicant. The good news is, you will only need to register for Face-Ed once to apply for any role in the Halliard Trust's 11 schools.

We ask all applicants to apply through SAMpeople Recruit/Face-Ed; our recruitment software. This enables us to efficiently carry out our safer recruitment checks, but we recognise it can take some time for the applicant. The good news is, you will only need to register for Face-Ed once to apply for any role in the Halliard Trust's 11 schools.

Our tips for a painless process are as follows:

1. Because SAMpeople Recruit is cloud based software, it is possible for you to experience a break in connection and you won't necessarily know about it straight away. We therefore strongly recommend that you prepare your main application content in a different package like MS Word/Notepad and copy and paste it into your application form in the relevant sections.
2. If you get a message saying "Validation Error" it isn't a software fault. It means you have entered data in a format that wasn't expected and it is causing a problem with saving. This might mean you have entered words in a box that expects numbers, for example.