Partnerships Manager - Nottingham

Role: Partnerships Manager

Location: Nottingham (onsite during term time)

Salary: £60,000-80,000k OTE

The Partnerships team builds long-term relationships with Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) Leaders to drive meaningful impact across their schools and ultimately for students in the classroom.

MATs are facing significant challenges: budget pressures, recruiting and retaining high-quality staff, and a rising demand for SEND support. I’m looking for experienced sales professionals who are able to understand the impact of these challenges on schools and advise MATs on solutions that Zen Educate can offer.

Selling to MATs is unique - success requires both trust-level relationships and school-level engagement. This means you should be just as comfortable picking up the phone to do cold school outreach as you are leading strategic conversations with MAT CEOs.

We know that might not be for everyone - but for the right person, it’s one of the most rewarding sales roles which puts you in the room with today’s leaders who are shaping education. If you’re passionate about making a difference, willing to roll your sleeves up for a challenge and thrive on building relationships, we’d love to hear from you.

UK schools spend over £2 billion a year on temporary staff - and hundreds of millions of that goes to traditional recruitment agencies. That’s money that could instead fund teacher pay rises, classroom resources, or student support.

At Zen Educate, we’re fixing that.

We’ve built a platform that connects schools directly with fully vetted teachers and support staff, cutting out agencies and saving schools money.

Our SaaS tools now help schools and MATs manage recruitment, compliance, and workforce planning more efficiently.

Since 2017, we’ve already saved schools over £30 million — and we recently raised $37 million in Series B funding, the largest EdTech round in Europe last year. We’re scaling fast across the UK and US. 🚀

Now we’re expanding our Partnerships team - and we need senior sales professionals who can build long-term MAT relationships, close preferred supplier agreements, and drive adoption of our SaaS tools at scale.

As a Partnerships Manager, you’ll own the full partnership lifecycle: from outreach and negotiation through to activation, expansion, and renewal.

You’ll work with senior stakeholders across MATs - CEOs, CFOs, HRDs - to understand their priorities, design solutions, and show the impact Zen can deliver.

You don’t need to have worked in education before — we’ll teach you that. But you’ll thrive if you’re:

✅ You want to combine serious commercial growth with social impact.

✅ You enjoy strategic selling and influencing senior stakeholders.

✅ You thrive in fast-paced, scaling environments where you can shape the playbook.

We move quickly and keep things simple:

Intro chat – Meet our talent team

Partnerships interview – Let’s talk strategy, outreach, and stakeholder management.

Practical task & role play – Show us how you’d approach a real trust partnership.

Culture chat – Meet the wider team to ensure a great fit both ways.

If it’s a yes, we’ll move fast — no endless waiting around.

We welcome applicants with diverse backgrounds, and different experiences and perspectives - just like the staff who teach through Zen and the children at the schools we work with. We believe in hiring the best people from the widest pool and creating an inclusive atmosphere with a culture where people’s voices are heard and all our team can look forward to coming to work.

We value and respect all differences in all people (seen and unseen). We believe in an environment with equal access to career development opportunities and actively encourage applications from BAME candidates.

If you require any reasonable adjustments during your interview process with us, please do let us know.

Due to the high volume of applications, we regret that we are unable to provide individual feedback on initial submissions.

Please note before applying
This role is based full-time at our Nottingham office and requires onsite attendance five days per week during term time. We encourage applications from candidates who live in or near the local area of this office, or plan on relocating.

🚀 Ready to make a difference?

If you’re excited about building partnerships that transform how schools work — hit Apply. We’d love to chat.