Senior Researcher - Early Years Social and Emotional Assessment

Location: Remote (UK based with travel to schools)

Salary: Specialist (£60k to £65k pa equivalent)

Hours: Full Time (1 FTE / 37.5 hours a week)

Contract Type: Fixed-term for up to nine months

Closes: Thursday 12th November at 5pm

Nurtureuk is a charity dedicated to making nurture central to education and removing barriers to learning. Learn more at nurtureuk.org.

We’re looking for a researcher to work on a major innovation project for our charity. You’ll be helping us build a new digital assessment tool for UK primary schools to use. This role is perfect for someone with knowledge and research interest in early years, social and emotional development of children and assessment instruments, and who can work in an iterative way at pace.

Responsibilities of our Senior Researcher

• Reviewing existing measures of young children’s social and emotional development, including the Boxall Profile, and what makes them effective and reliable for teachers to use
• Research and synthesise findings on exemplification materials for early years practitioners

Working with partner schools to develop an effective, practical assessment tool

• Drafting and developing a new way of assessing social and emotional development
• Working with lead and partner schools to ground the tool in classroom practice and observation
• Developing exemplification materials that make the assessment practical and easy to use consistently
• Revising the tool iteratively in response to feedback and test results

Testing and validating the assessment tool

• Designing a practical research and test plan to test the new tool
• Securing ethical approval and handling of children’s data safely, in line with safeguarding and data protection requirements
• Gathering evidence of reliability, including agreement between teachers, and of validity, including comparison with EYFS Profile and the Boxall Profile®
• Establishing age-related norms for interpreting results and ensuring the tool works fairly for different groups of children
• Working with partner schools to test the assessment tool and exemplification materials
• Writing up technical description and validation data into practitioner-friendly forms

What we're looking for:

• A professional with proven experience in the area of work outlined above
• A master’s degree or equivalent (or PhD / professional doctorate) in developmental, educational or child psychology, education or a related field
• Practical research related to child development and grounded in theory and practice
• Developing or validating questionnaires, rating scales and other age-related assessments, including testing their reliability and validity
• Quantitative analysis using statistical software
• Developing practical materials to explain a complex topic to non-specialists
• Knowledge of or experience using assessment instruments / psychometrics for social and emotional development, including the Boxall Profile®
• Experience working with early years practitioners and UK schools

Please ensure you read the Job Description and Person Specification for full details of this role.

What we can offer you:

We offer a supportive environment with fully remote, flexible working, a £500 learning budget along with free LinkedIn Learning, and generous time off starting at 25 days holiday plus free days off for Christmas and your birthday.

How to apply

For more information and to apply, please click on the ‘Apply’ button above.

Please send your application to luke@nurtureuk.org before the deadline on Thursday 12th November at 5pm.

We’re looking to appoint as soon as we find someone suitable, so it could be to your advantage to apply quickly.

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