What skills and experience we're looking for
Essential
- 5 GCSEs, including mathematics and English
- Two years’ experience of working in an education setting or health and social care
- Experience of working effectively with young people
- Experience of working effectively with parents / carers
- A degree Desirable
KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS
Essential
- Experience of managing safeguarding in a school or other relevant organisation, including:
• Building relationships with students and their parents/carers, particularly the most vulnerable
• Working and communicating effectively with relevant agencies
• Implementing and encouraging good safeguarding practice throughout a large team of people
• Demonstrable evidence of developing and implementing strategies to help children and their families
• Experience of handling large amounts of sensitive data and upholding the principles of confidentiality
• Expert knowledge of legislation and guidance on safeguarding and working with young people, including knowledge of the responsibilities of schools and other agencies
• Ability to work with a range of people with the aim of ensuring the safety and welfare of children
• Awareness of local and national agencies that provide support for children and their families
• Excellent record keeping skills and attention to detail, in order to produce reports, take minutes of meetings and document safeguarding concerns
• Effective communication and interpersonal skills
• Ability to build effective working relationships with staff and other stakeholders
Desirable
- Successful leadership and management experience in a school or other relevant organisation
- Good IT skills, including previous use of CPOMS or similar systems
- Ability to communicate a vision and inspire others
PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES
Essential
- An enthusiasm for working with young people
- Flexible with a ‘can-do’ approach
- Integrity, empathy and patience
- Able to manage sensitive and confidential situations
- Commitment to ensuring the safety and welfare of students
- Commitment to upholding and promoting the ethos and values of the school
- Commitment to equality
- Able to work under sustained pressure while remaining cheerful and resilient
- Able to react appropriately to problems and unexpected situations, making rapid decisions and taking the initiative
- Able to operate effectively as a member of a team with minimum supervision
- Self-motivated
- Loyal and dependable
- Enthusiasm for working as part of the wider trust Safeguarding Network.
What the school offers its staff
Our offer for all staff joining the LiFE Multi-Academy Trust and our schools
Professional Capital:‘we believe in getting the right people, getting them to work together and getting them to stay’
STRATEGY
DESCRIPTION
Putting Your Trust in Our Trust
We believe in your development. Everything we do is about creating a team of committed professionals who share our ambition for young people. If you believe in this too, we are committed to providing an exciting, enjoyable and rewarding working environment.
Coaching
Coaching is integral to our success. We support colleagues through coaching; enabling deep reflection, which has allowed us to build a bold, creative and aspirational culture, where collaboration with peers and new approaches to practice are encouraged.
Personal Improvement Plan versus Performance Management
Instead of the usual performance management, we encourage our staff to identify aspirational targets through our ‘Personal Improvement Plan’ (PIP) process. With your coach, you will look to make significant progress in a critical area of your practice; we believe in valuing the process of improvement not pass or fail numerical targets.
Health and Wellbeing Strategies
Having happy and healthy staff is key to a successful organisation. The Trust is committed to:
providing employees with a safe, healthy and supportive environment in which to work
recognising that the health and wellbeing of our employees is important
providing a supportive workplace culture where individuals healthy lifestyle choices are valued and encouraged
We are committed to supporting colleagues to overcome the stigma and discrimination of mental health issues within the work place. To show our commitment to this we have publicly signed up to ‘Mindful Employer’ and the ‘Charter for Employers who are Positive about Mental Health’.
We believe it is important that we are role models to our students of how to be a healthy adult. We actively promote the importance of a work life balance, offering support to staff on managing stress and workload, as well as a physical activity programme. Access to coaching, counselling and supervision is also available to all staff.
Equality and Equal Opportunities
Our Trust and its schools are committed to ensuring equality of opportunity in line with the Equality Act 2010. The Trust seeks to reduce disadvantages, discrimination and inequalities of opportunity, and promote diversity in terms of its students, workforce and our wider communities we serve.
Presumed Professionalism
We have a ‘Presumed Professionalism’ ethos across the Trust. Our staff are professional educators and we recognise the need to support staff to enable a healthy work life balance to allow maximum impact whilst working with our young people and each other. We achieve this by allowing staff to sign out during their free periods, as long as professional duties are not affected. See our policy for further details.
Development of Professional Capital and Excellence
As a Trust we always look to invest in our staff and pride ourselves on our ‘home grown talent’. We pride ourselves on this and believe this has the biggest impact on how our staff understand their communities and make a difference to the lives of our young people.
Quite simply, our aim is to employ people who match our ethos and values and enable them to truly collaborate with colleagues across the Trust so that they are satisfied professionally. We provide outstanding training pathways which draw on excellence both within and outside of our Trust to enable you to build your professional capital.
Examples of the many opportunities we encourage staff to take up externally include:
The National Professional Qualification for Senior Leadership (NPQSL)
The National Professional Qualification for Headship (NPQH)
The National Professional Qualification for Middle Leadership (NPQML)
The Outstanding Teacher Programme (OTP)
Initial Teacher Training (ITT)
Pathways are available at apprenticeship level, NQT, aspiring middle leader, Lead Practitioner and aspiring senior leader level. Some of these courses are led by staff within the Trust and others are externally accredited. In addition, the Trust provides the opportunity of becoming an associate SLT member, enabling middle leaders to gain insight and experience of leadership at the highest level within a school.
Support staff have their own Personal Improvement Plan that they use as a tool to create a bespoke professional development plan. All support staff also receive Coaching and training opportunities, in order to help them feel empowered and in charge of their own development.
Across the Trust we pride ourselves on equal opportunities for all staff, irrespective of background, gender, disability, religion, sexual orientation or age.
Great Access to Progression and Leadership Responsibility
Further evidence of our investment in ‘home grown talent’ is that 86% of our TLR holders have been internal appointments. We have clear professional progression pathways within the CPD offered throughout the year at all levels within the Trust.
Commitment to safeguarding
Our organisation is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, young people and vulnerable adults. We expect all staff, volunteers and trustees to share this commitment. Our recruitment process follows the keeping children safe in education guidance. Offers of employment may be subject to the following checks (where relevant): childcare disqualification Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) medical online and social media prohibition from teaching right to work satisfactory references suitability to work with children You must tell us about any unspent conviction, cautions, reprimands or warnings under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975.