General Counsel
Posted by: Office For Students
Employed By: Office For Students
Job Title: General Counsel
Salary: c £130,000 (and £3,566 London weighting where relevant). Generous Civil Service defined benefit pension. defined benefit pension
Contract: Full-time
Location: Bristol/London
Application Deadline: 6 May 2025 at 5pm
The OfS is the statutory regulator for higher education in England. We are currently consulting on a new strategy to ensure that students from all backgrounds benefit from high quality higher education, delivered by a diverse, sustainable sector that continues to improve. We regulate a complex and diverse sector operating in a challenging environment. Our work is wide-ranging: we set regulatory standards and are increasingly using our regulatory tools, including where providers are responding to significant financial pressures and facing insolvency. To continue to protect the interests of students in this difficult context our approach to regulation needs to be confident and agile.
An exciting opportunity now arises to join us in the newly shaped role of General Counsel. Reporting to the CEO, you will be the chief legal adviser to the executive committee and OfS board, responsible for shaping our understanding of the legal framework within which we work and providing legal advice across the full remit of our activity. Your strategic counsel will be critical in ensuring our risk appetite reflects our ambitions, and in providing the risk-based options and analysis required to enable effective decision making. You will be responsible for the thirty strong legal team in the organisation, working closely with our Deputy and Assistant Heads of Legal to enhance a collaborative and enabling culture, building close partnerships between the legal team and all parts of the organisation.
You will be a qualified solicitor or barrister with significant post-qualification experience dealing with many legal practice areas related to the application of UK public and regulatory law. You will have a track record of providing risk-based advice at the most senior levels of organisations that heeds and takes due consideration of the wider strategic context. You will be comfortable making complex risk-based decisions, often in untested and ambiguous circumstances, and will be able to quickly grasp the regulatory and legal frameworks under which the OfS carries out its duties. As a leader of people, you will be able to demonstrate how you have developed legal teams in a way that has supported and enabled decision making throughout organisations. How we do things is as important to us as what we do and your approach will be underpinned by our values of Ambition, Openness, Learning and Diversity.
This role provides something few others can: the opportunity to engage with real intellectual stimulation in novel and complex legal matters, which will require you to provide thought leadership, and deliver genuine impact in driving positive outcomes for students across England. For a confidential discussion about this role and your suitability, please contact our recruitment partner, GatenbySanderson, via Matt Malone matt.malone@gatenbysanderson.com.