School Operations Manager – GEMS Education

A GEMS school runs on far more than teaching, and this School Operations Manager role is responsible for everything on the non-education side: facilities, administration, procurement, vendor management, and the day-to-day running of the school as a physical and operational entity. It’s a senior operational seat working alongside the school’s academic leadership rather than within it.

The role covers managing budgets and cost efficiency for the school’s operational side, overseeing facilities and maintenance, managing supplier and vendor relationships, and making sure the school’s operations support the quality of the student and staff experience rather than getting in its way. GEMS frames this explicitly around capitalising economic profit and return on capital investment, so there’s a genuine commercial dimension to the role alongside the operational one, all delivered in line with the GEMS Core Values.

It suits an experienced operations or facilities manager who is comfortable owning a budget and a P&L-style mindset, while also understanding that the end customer is a school community of students, parents, and staff rather than a typical commercial client. Background in facilities management, hospitality operations, or school business management is directly relevant.

Based in Dubai, the role sits within GEMS Education’s wider network, giving a School Operations Manager the backing of one of the region’s largest education groups while still carrying real, site-level accountability.

A school's academic reputation is what parents see, but it's the operational side — safe, well-maintained facilities, reliable vendors, sensible cost management — that makes that reputation sustainable day after day. This role is directly accountable for that: a School Operations Manager who runs facilities and procurement well protects the student and staff experience from the kind of disruptions that erode confidence in a school, from maintenance failures to vendor service gaps. The explicit focus on economic profit and return on capital investment also means this role has real financial accountability, not just operational oversight — getting cost efficiency right across a school's non-academic spend has a direct line to the school's overall financial performance within the GEMS network. Because this is one role covering an entire school's operational side, the quality of this one person's judgement and organisation shows up across every part of daily school life that isn't classroom teaching, making it a genuinely high-leverage position within the site.

Running the full operational side of a school site builds a genuinely broad management skill set — budget ownership, vendor negotiation, facilities oversight, and health and safety accountability all come together in one role, which is excellent preparation for a career in business operations, facilities leadership, or school business management more broadly. Because GEMS frames the role around profit and return on capital investment, it also gives operational managers real commercial experience that's often missing from purely facilities-focused roles elsewhere, making this a stronger credential for anyone aiming at a general operations director path later on. Working within one of the region's largest education networks means access to established systems, vendor relationships, and operational best practice that a standalone school or smaller group simply wouldn't have, which accelerates how quickly someone in this role builds genuinely senior-level judgement. The role also builds stakeholder skills specific to an education environment — balancing operational decisions against the needs of academic leadership, parents, and students — that are valuable for anyone who wants their next move to be school business management, multi-site operations, or a wider facilities leadership role within education or another service-driven sector. It also teaches a kind of financial discipline that pure facilities roles rarely demand, which is exactly the gap that separates an operations manager from an operations director.

• Experience in operations, facilities, or business management, ideally within a school or similarly complex site
• Comfortable owning a budget and being accountable for cost efficiency and return on investment
• Strong vendor and supplier management skills
• Practical understanding of facilities, maintenance, and health and safety requirements for a large site
• Clear communicator able to work alongside academic leadership without overstepping it
• Problem-solving mindset for the day-to-day operational issues a school site generates
• Alignment with a values-driven organisational culture