Before you read on, the practical bits. The fee is £1,500 a month, £18,000 a year, and it’s fixed rather than a range, so there’s nothing to negotiate and nobody gets a better number for asking. This is a contractor engagement rather than employment: you invoice us monthly, we pay in pounds, and you handle your own tax and any local registration where you live. We’re open to anyone anywhere who can work our hours and wants the job at that money. If that doesn’t work for you, better to know now than four steps in.
Who we are
IWS Online School is a British online school for students aged 7 to 19. We started in 2021, we teach the Cambridge curriculum with qualified teachers in live lessons, and there are over 600 students with us this year. We’re accredited by Cambridge International and COBIS.
Our families are in the UK, across Europe, in Türkiye and in Brazil. Nine in ten of the people who find us online are looking at a phone screen, which tells you most of what you need to know about how this work has to be built.
The job
You’d be the creative engine of the marketing team. That’s two jobs at once, and we’d rather be straight with you that they pull in different directions.
Most weeks it’s production. Teachers, students, admins and our CEO send us raw footage, some of it shot on a phone, some on a webcam. You turn that into Reels and TikToks with real pace, and into longer films that are calmer and take their time. A lot of it has to go out the same day or the next one. Schools run on term dates and enrolment windows, so a brilliant edit next week is usually worth less than a good one today.
The rest of the time it’s the brand. Our visual identity needs to grow up, in stages, and you’d own that: the colour palette, the typography, the asset libraries. You’d also be the person who says no when something going out doesn’t match, and that authority is real rather than decorative.
You’d work directly with our Marketing and Operations leads, not at the end of a queue of tickets. At the start, Marketing sets the direction and brings you the campaigns and the requests. As you learn this market and where we’re going, we’d expect that to flip, with you bringing us the ideas and then running them.
What you’d actually be doing
- Turning raw footage round fast. Phone and webcam material from the team, out as short-form with pace or as polished long-form. Often same day, often next day.
- Using AI properly, not decoratively. We use Claude Code, Claude Chat, ChatGPT and generative image and video tools every day. You’d use them to work faster and to make B-roll we couldn’t otherwise afford to shoot. If that’s unfamiliar territory, this probably isn’t your job.
- Ads that have to work. Static and motion assets built for Meta and Google, made to earn their budget back rather than to look nice in a folder.
- Owning the brand as it changes. Palette, fonts, styling, and guardianship of everything the public and our parents see.
- Collateral. Documents, decks and digital brochures that look like they came from a school people want to pay for.
What you’ll need
- Premiere Pro and After Effects at expert level. Not familiar with. Expert.
- Photoshop, advanced, plus whatever you use for vector work and retouching.
- Genuine day-to-day AI fluency: Claude Code, Claude Chat, ChatGPT, and generative video and image tools.
- A portfolio with both halves in it, fast cutting and structured brand and layout work. One without the other doesn’t tell us enough.
- An eye you can trust. You know when a cut should be frantic and when it should be quiet, and you can tell the difference without being told.
What this job isn’t
We’d rather say this now than waste an afternoon of yours.
- You won’t write the copy or the scripts.
- You won’t be on camera.
- You won’t have direct reports. You make the work yourself.
- Internal teaching materials aren’t yours. Lesson plans and forms bend to what teachers want. Your brand authority covers what’s external and parent-facing.
What we’re really after
Someone who takes the thing off our hands. Early on that means shipping what’s asked for, quickly and well. Later it means noticing what we haven’t asked for yet, pitching it, and getting on with it.