We are serious about being the best we can be for the world’s children. That means we place a premium on attracting the best people to work for us and to lead our organisation.
OUR APPROACH TO PAY
We are committed to being a kind, agile and inclusive organisation. Finding and retaining talented people with the right skills and mindset is key to our success.
We believe in paying our colleagues a fair salary that is competitive within the charity sector and proportionate to the complexity and responsibilities of the role they perform. For some years now, we have signed the pledge to Show the Salary on all of our job advertisements. We are accredited by the Living Wage foundation, and have committed to three key principles for pay:
- equality/fairness
- responsible financial management
- market competitiveness in line with the wider charity sector.
We pay all colleagues a living wage of at least £14.80 per hour in London and £13.45 per hour in the rest of the UK. In 2024, we delivered on our commitment to bring all our employees’ salaries to the median of the salary market for the nonprofit sector. In 2025, we moved all colleagues to the median point as part of the Refocus process. This helps us attract and retain talented, committed colleagues, and bring in people with a wider range of experience and perspectives that will help us deliver on our ambitions for children.
We acknowledge that debates over pay – and executive salaries, in particular – are important and reflect genuine public concerns. We are committed to achieving the right balance between recognising these concerns and ensuring our salary levels help attract the talent we need to run an effective and efficient impact-driven multinational organisation. The People Committee oversees our Pay Policy and decides on the salaries of our Chief Executive and executive directors (see our Annual Report).
We publish our approach to pay, including details on our gender pay gap and ethnicity pay gap, in detail on our website. We have also signed the pledge to Show the Salary.
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR REMUNERATION IN 2025
The Trustees delegate the day-to-day running of the organisation to the Executive Directors, who are considered the key management personnel. Executive pay is overseen and approved by the Board.
The Executive Team saw a few changes this year. Along with a new Chief Executive, there were three new appointments to Executive Director roles. As with the rest of the organisation we pay executive colleagues at the median point of the salary range; we benchmark individual roles against the nonprofit sector and ensure comparisons reflect charities of a similar size and turnover. The CEO role was advertised and appointed at the median point of the salary scale for market comparators. In line with our policy approach set by the Board, salaries for remaining Executive Directors were adjusted to the median point at the same time as all colleagues, in September 2025.
