Senior Programmes & Policy Manager
Employer: Bite Back
Location: Scotland — Hybrid. You will be required to travel to our London HQ up to once a month; your travel to the London office for team days will be paid. You will need to live within easy travelling distance of Edinburgh or Glasgow. This is a UK-based role; you must have the right to work in the UK to be considered.
This role will require frequent travel within Scotland. We also ask all team members, wherever possible, to be available to support two key youth events each year, including overnight stays.
Working hours: Full time.
Salary: £44,000 FTE gross per annum.
Closing date: 28 July 2025
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Contract: Permanent.
Hours: Full time.
Location: Scotland — Remote / Hybrid.
You will be required to travel to our London HQ up to once a month; your travel to the London office for team days will be paid. You will need to live within easy travelling distance of Edinburgh or Glasgow. This is a UK-based role; you must have the right to work in the UK to be considered.
Salary: £44,000 FTE gross per annum.
Travel: This role will require frequent travel within Scotland. We also ask all team members, wherever possible, to be available to support two key youth events each year, including overnight stays.
Benefits: 30 days annual leave, flexible working environment, enhanced sick pay, 5% employer pension contribution, enhanced family leave.
Reporting to: Head of Programmes.
Please note: Owing to the nature of this role, any offer of employment with Bite Back will be subject to a satisfactory enhanced DBS / Disclosure Scotland check.
Do you want to work with a vibrant, dynamic and youth driven organisation that is committed to creating healthy futures for British children by improving the food system?
Be part of the creative, agile and growing team behind Bite Back 2030’s exceptional teenage activists. Join us as our Senior Programmes & Policy Manager and contribute to our journey to help make the food system healthier and fairer.
At Bite Back, we're committed to ensuring our staff is representative of the diverse world around us. Therefore, we encourage candidates with a range of lived and professional experiences to apply. We particularly welcome applications from people of colour, LGBTQ+ people and disabled people. We will use positive action under the Equality Act 2010 to appoint from these underrepresented groups if two candidates are equally qualified.
About the Role
This exciting and varied role will kick-start Bite Back's work in Scotland. Suiting a self-starter, this new role will lead our schools and local authority programme work in Scotland, whilst also seeking opportunities for young people to influence national food system policy in Scotland.
Responsibilities
The Senior Programmes & Policy Manager is responsible for:
Programme Development and Delivery
Launching our two popular, fully funded, social action programmes in Scotland: Bite Back in Schools and Shape Your Streets, working with and visiting schools and local authorities across Scotland.
Supporting school pupils and communities to drive improvements to their local food environments and school food environments.
Helping facilitate youth-led events, workshops, and campaigns focused on food system change.
Working with our Scottish partners and building strong working relationships with participating schools, local authorities and other stakeholders.
Supporting the monitoring, reporting and evaluation of these two programmes.
Youth Engagement and Voice
Seeking out meaningful opportunities for young people to engage with and influence decision-makers in Scotland.
Ensuring youth voice is embedded across all programmes and policy work.
Policy and Advocacy
Actively seeking out opportunities to champion Scottish policy developments in health, education, and food systems.
Working closely with other organisations via established coalitions and more informal coordination around key issues, working collaboratively with values-aligned organisations to achieve our goals.
Developing briefings, consultation responses, and policy proposals, ensuring they are evidence-based and amplify youth perspectives.
Translating young people’s insights into campaign messaging for policymakers and distilling policy details into key points for young people to engage with and campaign on.
Working with the Senior Public Affairs Manager to conduct stakeholder mapping and build a network of supportive Scottish MPs and MSPs.
Ensuring the Bite Back staff team is kept up to date on the Scottish policy and public affairs context.
Skills and Experience
We recognise that the list below is broad, and we realise that the “ideal candidate” doesn’t really exist. What we will be looking for as we evaluate applications is demonstrable experience in at least some of these, and evidence of capacity to build skills in other areas.
Please don’t be put off applying for one of our jobs because you can’t demonstrate every skill. If you're passionate and excited about working for us and possess the main skills and experience we are looking for, go ahead and apply. You could be just what we are looking for!
The ideal candidate would have the following:
Essential
Proven experience in policy development or influencing, ideally within the Scottish context.
Track record of delivering youth voice, community or school-based programmes.
Experience working with schools or local authority settings in Scotland.
Facilitation and youth engagement skills, with experience in co-creating with young people.
Excellent communication and presentation skills, including the ability to engage policymakers and partners with confidence.
Deep motivation to create a fairer food system and improve outcomes for children and young people.
Knowledge of Scotland’s political and public sector landscape, ideally in health or education.
A self-starter with the ability to work independently and drive new initiatives from the ground up.
A commitment to Bite Back’s values: Fresh, Resilient, Respectful, Energetic, Real.
Desirable
Familiarity with monitoring, evaluation, and impact reporting in programme or policy contexts
Approach to Work
You will be able to show the following qualities:
A bold and open mind — you will be prepared to think differently about issues.
A level head — you will be comfortable working both reactively and proactively.
A sense of humour — we believe work should be fun and that we all perform at our very best when we enjoy what we do.
Creativity — you will come at issues from new and surprising angles.
About Bite Back
We’re surrounded by junk food. From the moment we're born, every second of every day, children are being targeted. Giant companies manipulate them with colourful, cuddly, clever marketing, deceive them with packaging claims and pump products at them that are full of junk. It's become the cultural wallpaper. Now, it risks destroying the health of a generation.
Over a third of 10 to 11-year-olds leave primary school with an increased risk of developing food-related conditions like type 2 diabetes and heart disease in their future.
The good news is, it's totally preventable. And we're biting back.
Bite Back is a youth activist movement challenging a food system that's been set up to fool us all. We do this by:
Calling out the manipulation of the junk food giants.
Demanding higher standards from food marketing and from everyday food itself.
Mobilising and equipping young people in the fight for better food.
We do all this so we can bite back against a global epidemic of food-related ill health.
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