Scotland Growth Consultant

Initial 3–4 month consultancy

Location: Scotland / remote, with some travel within Scotland and occasional time with the SFC team
Duration: Initial 3–4 month project (dependent on scoping)
Time commitment: Flexible, to be agreed with the right person
Start: As soon as practical
Fee: To be agreed based on experience and time commitment

About Smartphone Free Childhood

Smartphone Free Childhood (SFC) is a grassroots movement bringing people together to stand up for healthier, happier childhoods.

Our mission is to change the culture around childhood and technology: helping families delay smartphones and social media, supporting parents to make confident choices throughout their journey with technology, and making it easier for communities and schools to create change together.

At the heart of our collective-action work is the Parent Pact: a simple way for families at the same school to choose to delay smartphones and social media together, so no child has to be the odd one out. Over 200,000 children are now represented on the Pact across the UK, including 9,000+ in Scotland.

SFC has grown extraordinarily quickly since launching in 2024. But that growth hasn't happened evenly – and Scotland represents one of our biggest opportunities.

The opportunity

We want to make SFC a genuinely mainstream, trusted and useful movement for families across Scotland.

There's already an active community of SFC supporters, Regional Leaders and School Organisers across the country who have built real momentum, developed local networks and learned a huge amount about what works. We now want to build on that foundation and reach many more families, schools and communities.

Scotland has its own education system, institutions, communities and political landscape, as well as a growing network of people already working to change the culture around childhood and technology. We believe there are significant opportunities here that we haven't yet fully understood or pursued.

Rather than assume we already know the best way to unlock that potential, we're investing in a dedicated piece of work to explore the opportunities, test new approaches and develop an ambitious plan for the next stage of growth.

We're looking for an experienced, entrepreneurial and growth-minded person to help us do that.

The central question is: what would it take for SFC to become a genuinely mainstream movement among Scottish families – and what should we build, change or do differently to make that happen?

The assignment

We want someone who will get close to the challenge, bring fresh thinking and, above all, get things moving.

You'll work alongside the SFC team and the existing Scottish community, speaking to parents, volunteers, schools and potential partners, exploring the data, understanding the landscape and identifying the biggest opportunities for growth.

We're particularly interested in exploring:

• Understanding the opportunity: What can we learn from how SFC has developed in Scotland so far? Who are we reaching, who aren't we reaching, and where is the greatest potential for growth?
• Reaching more families: How can we make SFC even more accessible, welcoming and useful to Scottish parents and schools? What could we improve about our positioning, communications, Parent Pact and wider experience?
• Building on grassroots momentum: What can we learn from the Regional Leaders, School Organisers and supporters already active across Scotland? How can we build on their work and enable more people and communities to get involved?
• Finding new routes to growth: Could schools, councils, education networks, community organisations or other partnerships help us reach families at much greater scale? Are there opportunities unique to Scotland that we should be pursuing?
• Testing what works: What are the most promising ideas we could put into practice quickly, and what can we learn from trying them?

We don't expect all the answers to come from research. We want someone who is comfortable developing hypotheses, trying things out and learning by doing.

That might mean testing a new approach to reaching schools, experimenting with Parent Pact messaging, developing a partnership, improving a product journey or finding new ways to support and activate local communities. The SFC team will work alongside you to help make experiments happen.

The aim isn't to produce a theoretical strategy. It's to understand what could unlock growth in Scotland, start testing those opportunities and build a practical plan for what comes next.

What we'd like to achieve

By the end of the consultancy, we'd like to have:

• A clear understanding of the biggest opportunities and barriers to growth in Scotland.
• A prioritised view of the audiences, channels and approaches with the greatest potential.
• Evidence and learning from a small number of real-world growth experiments.
• Practical recommendations for what SFC should do differently or invest in.
• An ambitious, achievable 12-month growth plan for Scotland.
• Recommendations for where and how SFC should invest to support the next stage of growth in Scotland.

We don't need a lengthy strategy report. We want a clear, practical plan that we believe in, that builds on what's already happening and that people across the Scottish SFC community can get excited about.

Who we're looking for

We think this could suit someone with significant experience in growth, product, strategy or building and scaling organisations – perhaps from a startup, scaleup, consultancy or entrepreneurial environment – who now wants to apply that experience to an important social challenge.

You'll be comfortable taking a messy, open-ended challenge and creating structure around it. You'll combine strategic thinking with a bias towards action: talking to people, looking at data, developing hypotheses, testing things quickly and changing your mind when the evidence points somewhere else.

You'll need excellent people skills, with the ability to build relationships across different communities, organisations and institutions. You'll be curious, collaborative and a good listener, able to bring people together around shared opportunities and build momentum for change.

You'll also need a strong understanding of Scotland. We don't expect one person to know every community, institution or part of the education system, but understanding the Scottish context – and knowing how to navigate and learn within it – will be essential.

Most importantly, we're looking for someone who gets excited at the thought of cracking this challenge:

SFC has demonstrated that coordinated collective action between families can change the culture around childhood and technology. How do we make that happen at a much greater scale in Scotland?