Head of Student Success at Valenture Institute

Head of Student Success

Valenture is an exciting new start-up in the online education space. Our mission is to evolve what it means to “go” to school by transforming physical limitations into digital opportunities. We do this by providing students worldwide with a fully supported, global online high school experience, steeped in academic excellence and rooted in sustainable practices. We believe in providing more than just a quality online education – we’re dedicated to building and empowering a purpose-driven, global student body and equipping them to make the best of both their individual and collective futures.

The Head of Student Success is responsible for leading and managing the Student Success team, consisting of Student Success Mentors and Technical Support Officers. This team is accountable for retaining students and keeping them on track for academic success, and the Head of Student Success is tasked with leading all activities that align with this primary goal, including managing at-risk indicators, providing targeted student and parent support, and ensuring that the learning model is well understood and supported. 

Day-to-day responsibilities include: 

• Managing the performance of the Student Success team, including setting and monitoring KPIs and reporting on these on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. These include all proxies for at-risk status: attendance, non-submission, extension requests and grade average. 
• Excellent workforce management to ensure that tickets are triaged and responded to within the defined first-time response and resolution SLAs. 
• Speccing in reports and working with the Technology team to ensure that the team is enabled with appropriate data and student information to perform their roles effectively. 
• Ensuring that the Student Success team is appropriately trained to provide high-touch support in relation to the learning model, Online Campus touchpoints, assessment policies and all other rules and procedures covered in the Student Handbooks. 
• Enabling the Student Success team to utilise all levers of retention, including individual support plans, catch up plans and leave of absences. 
• Managing the pastoral care responsibilities through the Learning Compass Programme in a way that allows for scale, focussing on group coaching, targeted strategies for very at-risk students and utilising referral networks where appropriate. 
• Managing student and parent communication plans in a targeted way that ensures that parents remain active contributors in their child’s schooling. 
• Drafting policies and processes that manage the intersections between the various teams, specifically Faculty. 
• Work with Faculty to channel trends and barriers into actionable support plans and support resources, both procedural and technical. 
• Actively contributing to the CRM roadmap and managing the use of the CRM by the Success Team.
• Work with Operations on the management of capacity within the team. 
• Manage the Knowledge Base and ensure that all common trends are informing the development of appropriate support resources.
• Set the Student Success budget with sign off from the Chief Academic Officer and manage spend in line with budget. 
• Hiring and onboarding of all new placements in the Student Success team.
• Being the first point of escalation for parents and overall case management. 

Requirements for the role: 

• A minimum of 3 to 5 years of experience at a management level, ideally in a customer-focussed capacity. Demonstrated leadership skills essential. 
• A Bachelor's degree, education or counselling focus preferred but not essential. 
• An excellent grasp of operations and workforce management, ideally with exposure to CRM management. 
• A passion for customer service and education. 

Realities of the role:

• Valenture is a start up, and things change on a daily basis rather than annually. You should ideally find change thrilling and feel comfortable to adapt and change with the needs of the business. 
• Given the unique focus of the team, you should occupy a customer service mindset and feel comfortable applying these principles in an academic environment. This requires finesse, a high degree of emotional intelligence and a good grasp of how policy informs and enables good processes. 
• Valenture is not a traditional school. The traditional role of a teacher has been delineated into teams that have different inputs: curriculum design, learning technology, teaching and learning and student support. You should approach your own experience of the schooling system with a sense of curiosity and skepticism and have an intense focus on the levers of quality and scale. 
• In this role, your job is to empower a team of very capable Mentors and Tech Support Officers. Your core focus needs to be on removing barriers and you should have a service mindset in everything you do.