Data Manager – Immediate Start – GEMS Education

This Data Manager role, with an immediate start, sits within a GEMS Education school and is responsible for how the school manages, tracks, and protects student and operational data. It’s a distinctly technical-administrative role — less about teaching and more about building the systems and processes that keep a school’s data accurate, accessible, and compliant with regulatory requirements around data protection in education.

The core of the job involves designing and maintaining data tracking tools for different school departments — think attendance, assessment results, behavioral records, and administrative reporting — and making sure those systems are usable by staff who aren’t themselves data specialists. A significant part of the role is also ensuring the school meets GDPR and broader data protection regulation requirements relevant to education, which means understanding not just how to manage data well but how to manage it compliantly and securely.

This suits someone with a genuine interest in data systems and information management who’s also comfortable working within a school environment — understanding what different departments actually need from their data tools, not just building technically elegant systems in isolation. Being immediate start, the role likely needs someone who can get up to speed on existing systems quickly.

Data management in education has become increasingly important as schools handle more sensitive information digitally, and being part of a network the size of GEMS Education means this role has influence that can extend beyond a single campus over time.

Schools handle an enormous amount of sensitive data — attendance, assessment results, safeguarding records, behavioral notes — and getting that data management wrong carries real regulatory and reputational risk, not just operational inconvenience. This Data Manager role exists to make sure that risk is managed properly: building tools that keep data accurate and accessible to the staff who need it, while ensuring the school stays compliant with GDPR and other data protection requirements relevant to education. Done well, this role also has a quieter but significant impact on how efficiently the school runs day to day — when departments can trust their data tools and access what they need without friction, decisions get made faster and more accurately, from identifying students who need extra academic support to tracking whole-school performance trends. Within GEMS Education's wider network, strong data governance at individual school level also protects the group's broader compliance posture, since data protection failures at one campus can carry reputational and regulatory consequences beyond that single school. This is ultimately a trust-building role — parents and regulators both need confidence that sensitive student data is being handled responsibly.

Data management within education is a growing, specialized niche as schools handle increasingly sensitive information digitally and face tighter regulatory scrutiny, which makes this genuinely valuable, differentiated experience for a career in either education administration or data governance more broadly. You'll build real, practical expertise in data protection regulation as it applies specifically to education — a specialization that's in short supply and increasingly sought after as more schools digitize their operations. You'll also develop strong system design skills, learning to build data tools that work for non-technical school staff rather than just technically sophisticated ones, which is a genuinely useful and transferable skill in any organization where data literacy varies widely across departments. Being part of GEMS Education's large network means exposure to data management challenges and systems at real scale — far beyond what a single independent school would offer — and strong performance here can open doors to broader data governance or information systems roles across the network or in the wider education technology sector. For anyone interested in building a career at the intersection of data, compliance, and education, this role offers hands-on, immediately applicable experience rather than a purely theoretical grounding. It's also a strong credential to point to if you later want to move into broader education technology or information governance roles outside a single school.

• Experience in data management, information systems, or a related analytical/administrative role, ideally within education or another regulated sector
• Familiarity with GDPR or equivalent data protection regulation as it applies to sensitive personal data
• Ability to design practical, user-friendly data tracking tools for non-technical staff across different departments
• Strong attention to detail and data accuracy, especially for compliance-sensitive records
• Comfort working with spreadsheets, databases, or school management information systems
• Clear communication skills for working across teaching and administrative departments with different data needs
• Ability to start quickly and get up to speed on existing systems with minimal ramp-up time