Justin Forsyth will leave Save the Children in February 2016 after five years as the charity’s chief executive.

Save the Children has started looking for his successor and Forsyth will reveal his plans for the future at a later date.

Forsyth said: “It has been an extraordinary privilege to lead this organisation, but after five years I feel that it is the right time for me personally, but also the organisation as we embark on a new and exciting strategy.”

He said he had been thinking about the decision “since the summer”. Save the Children was one of the charities to be criticised over its fundraising practices in the wake of the death of Olive Cooke this summer.

In July the charity announced that it would ban cold calling as part of a new supporter promise. Forsyth appeared before the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee earlier this month as part of its inquiry into fundraising where he admitted that charities were not scrutinising agencies hard enough and called for statutory underpinning of self-regulation.

Forsyth has been chief executive since September 2010, and the charity has grown under his tenure.

Its income for the year ending December 2010 was £291.5m and by December 2014 it was £370.3m – a growth of 27 per cent.

Forsyth added: “When we look back over the last five years it is amazing how far we have come. We have transformed our work on the ground with children, establishing several world class signature programmes to increase the quality and impact of our work. We have done whatever it takes to run brave emergency responses from the Ebola Treatment centre in Kerry Town to our hospital in Syria that have saved so many lives.”

Jasmine Whitbread, chief executive at Save the Children International, is also set to move on after five years in her role, where she was responsible for bringing the 29 national charities together under one umbrella. It has not announced who her successor will be.