Senior Research Manager, Toolkit Team

The Youth Endowment Fund

Senior Research Manager (Toolkit)

Reports to: Head of Toolkit

Salary: £52,700

Contract: 2-year fixed term contract

Location: Central London, Hybrid

Closing date: 27th June 2025

About the Youth Endowment Fund

We re here to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence. We do this by finding out what works and building a movement to put this knowledge into practice.

Last year, 244 people in England and Wales tragically died after being assaulted with a knife. Of these, 32 were children. Every child captured in these numbers is an important member of our community and society has a duty to protect them. Even beyond knife crime, we know that the fear of violence has a terrible effect on children s daily lives.

The Youth Endowment Fund exists to try and permanently change things. To succeed, we must build an exceptional body of knowledge about violence affecting young people and how we reduce it. This knowledge has to be both rigorous and highly relevant to those making decisions about how to support vulnerable young people. We need to find out what works and what doesn t through evidence synthesis, data analysis and qualitative research into children s lives. We then need to convert this into highly accessible content on what works, how delivery organisations need to change their practice and how the systems they operate in need to be reformed.

About the Toolkit Team

The Toolkit team is at the heart of our work to spread knowledge of what works to prevent children becoming involved in violence. We want research to lead actual changes in outcomes for children.

Our flagship resource, the Toolkit, is a free, online resource that summarises the best available evidence about the effectiveness of various approaches to preventing children becoming involved in violence. It explains the evidence, how confident we can be about the findings, and provides actionable guidance to help policy makers, commissioners, and practitioners to turn evidence into action. The Toolkit is influencing real world policy and practice: the Home Office requires Violence Reductions Units to allocate at least 30% of their funding to interventions that have an impact rating of high or moderate in the Toolkit. Over half of Youth Justice Services use the Toolkit to align their work with the latest available evidence. Our Change team use the Toolkit to influence systems, policy and practice across children s services, education, health, neighbourhoods, policing, youth services and youth justice.

The Toolkit is a live resource that currently contains 35 approaches to violence prevention, and we will add at least ten updates to the content this year. New research is published every day around the world. We collate relevant studies in our YEF programmes evidence and gap map and YEF systems evidence and gap map, and we collate study results in our Effect Size Database. We are working in partnership with the National Children s Bureau and the EPPI Centre to implement new technology and to use machine learning to create a living platform , that contains relevant studies and their results in one place. This is an exciting development that will significantly speed up our production of systematic reviews and meta-analyses to keep the Toolkit up to date.

Key Responsibilities

The Senior Research Manager will be an essential part of the YEF Toolkit Team and will develop a portfolio of impactful projects. The core of your role will be leading the commissioning of evidence synthesis, using our new methodology, across a range of topics and producing Toolkit content.

You will:

Commission new systematic reviews.

• You will lead the commissioning and management of systematic reviews of the evidence through our Toolkit and Evidence Synthesis Partners: the National Children s Bureau, the EPPI Centre, and the Race Equality Foundation. This will involve scoping and prioritising violence prevention approaches, convening expert advisory groups, reviewing research protocols and technical reports, and ensuring that research products produce actionable insights.

Write accurate and actionable summaries of evidence for the Toolkit.

You will use findings from evidence synthesis to write new summaries for the Toolkit, and to inform YEF s guidance and implementation resources.

You will ensure that Toolkit content is only ever easy-to-understand and written in plain English with incredible clarity.

You will collaborate with our Research team and our Change team to feed insights from the evidence into systems, sector and practice guidance.

Lead Toolkit communications.

Collaborating with the YEF Communications and Public Affairs team, you will produce accurate social media content, blogs, and briefings on new Toolkit content to facilitate accurate journalism and press coverage.

Become an expert on the Toolkit.

You will be an advocate for Toolkit evidence, and you will ensure insights from this evidence are accurately communicated to policy makers and practitioners. You will do this by delivering presentations on Toolkit evidence and providing briefings.

You will also ensure YEF colleagues are up to date on the topics and content in the Toolkit by providing training and updates internally and sharing guidance about how to accurately explain the evidence.

About You

You are this sort of person:

You want to play a significant part in reducing children and young people s involvement in violence. You care about having an impact.

You share our belief that an evidence-based approach is our best hope of preventing violence. You are fascinated by research, but you re not just interested in research for its own sake. You want to achieve actual changes in outcomes for children.

You re a confident reader of research and have strong critical appraisal skills. You know when research can be trusted and when it can t and can confidently articulate your views on the strength of research. You might have gained this expertise through your academic studies, research, or professional experience.

You have a proven track record of commissioning or conducting high-quality evidence synthesis. You have a good understanding of these methods and can discuss the pros and cons of them. You might have gained this expertise through your academic studies, training, research or professional experience. You can scrutinise a budget to ensure it provides value for money.

You have at least three years experience working in a role that required you to think about research. This could include a range of roles in policy, academia, funding, and practice.

You write in a way that people easily understand. You have that rare skill of writing in plain English. You have experience of translating complex research findings into plain writing that everyone can understand.

You have excellent project and time management skills. You can work independently, quickly, and to a high standard.

You are good with people. You are comfortable working with a wide range of people, including senior academics and other research experts, children and their families, practitioners, and policy makers. You re able to provide constructive challenges when required.

You learn fast but remain humble. You like learning. You are very good at synthesising information. You know how much you don't know and that you can always learn more.

You work well in a team. You care more that good things happen than who gets the credit. You support your colleagues to produce excellent work.

You re committed to equality, diversity and inclusion. You believe and act in a way that celebrates and encourages a range of experiences, views and values.

You may have:

A good level of knowledge and understanding of crime or violence. You know the facts, understand the issues, know the key people, and can discuss the theories. You re knowledgeable on this topic and very at ease discussing it with experts. Alternatively, you might have a strong understanding of a relevant area such as education, youth work or social care.

Confident public speaking skills. You re an excellent verbal communicator. You ve delivered dozens of talks on complex topics. You re calm and confident when answering challenging questions.

While it s not a criterion, we re especially interested to hear from applicants who have lived experience of violence.

It s also important to us that the people we hire do not discriminate. We believe in being inclusive and giving everyone an equal chance to succeed. Applications are welcome from all regardless of age, sex, gender identity, disability, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, religion or belief, race, sexual orientation, transgender status or socioeconomic background.

Hybrid Working

The office is based in Central London. Those living in and around London are expected to be in the office for a minimum of 2 days per week. If you live outside of London and work remotely, you ll be expected to work from the London office 2 days per month.

To Apply

To apply, please send a CV and cover letter, and complete the monitoring form click on "Apply for this" button by27th June 2025.

When applying for this role, please ensure that your cover letter can answer, within a maximum of 1000 words . click apply for full job details