Careers

People are at the heart of what we do. We recruit bright, committed individuals and support them to fulfil their potential.

The Key team

Our values

The Key could be your opportunity to make a profound difference to the working lives of 125,000 school leaders and governors, and others across the education sector. We are a team of socially conscious, passionate people, who are all motivated to do something incredible. Join our team today and help us make a difference.

Member focus

A commitment to understanding members’ needs and challenges, helping them deliver for their pupils, schools and communities

A growth mindset

A commitment to open thinking and continuous learning, development and innovation

Uncompromising standards

A commitment to knowledge, service, value and delivery

Working together

A commitment to collaboration and teamwork while celebrating our breadth of opinions, perspectives and backgrounds

Group image of staff

Why work for us?

We understand that life isn't just about work and believe that quality time outside the office is vital to our employees' happiness. That's why we offer 25 days annual leave in your first year, increasing to 28 days from your second year, as well as an additional 5 'Key' days a year and the option to buy or sell annual leave.


We also offer a generous parental leave policy, including up to 20 weeks full pay for maternity and adoption leave and 6 weeks full pay for paternity leave, in addition to parental coaching to help new parents navigate this period of change.

The overall wellbeing of our employees is extremely important to us, so we offer a wide range of benefits to support you physically, mentally and financially. These include:
  • Access to Bippit, a financial wellbeing tool to help you feel confident in creating and achieving meaningful financial goals
  • Access to 24/7 practical support and counselling sessions through our EAP
  • Access to BUPA Dental. Dental insurance with a flexible range of cover levels available through your own dentist or over 470 Bupa clinics across the country
  • Free flu jabs
  • Life assurance for the worst case scenario, paid at 3 times your basic annual salary
  • Matched pension contributions up to 5%

We are passionate about professional development and want to make the most of our employees' talents, so we help towards the cost of professional qualifications, training courses, books and anything else that might support your career growth.


We also encourage our employees to become school governors and provide 4 extra annual leave days for governor duties.

We have some amazing employees and want to enjoy each other's company, so we make up some good excuses to have fun together. Our social committee gets creative in organising summer and Christmas socials, sports days, crafting sessions and after-work drinks. We also encourage welcome lunches for teams to get to know their new employees.
Gareth

I love working at The Key, it is great to know that we make such a huge difference to our schools every day. We are also looked after in a way I have never experienced before, the generosity from the company knows no bounds.

Gareth, Member Support Officer

Our recruitment process

Our recruitment process is designed to help make sure that we hire the best people to work at The Key, and to give you an idea of what the role would entail.

CV & cover letter

Once you find a position that you’d like to apply for, we usually ask you to submit your CV and cover letter letting us know why you want to work for The Key and how your experience fits. A member of our team will then review your application.

Telephone interview

We may then contact you to organise a short telephone interview with the line manager. The aim here is for us to find out more about yourself and for you to ask any questions that you may have.

Mission

The mission is a timed written or technical task designed to test your skills and way of thinking and to give you an idea of what you’d be doing day-to-day at The Key. This can be completed at home at a time suitable for you. NB. for some roles the mission may come before the telephone interview.

Face-to-face / video interview

If you’re successful, we’ll invite you to an interview with a panel of around 3 people to talk through your mission and your experience in more depth.

Meet the CEO

As the final stage, our CEO likes to meet all candidates before we make a job offer. This is less formal than the other stages and will give you a chance to ask any further questions.

Job alerts

To keep up to date with all our vacancies, please register for job alerts from us by entering your details in the form bellow