Teaching Assistant
Chapel-en-le-Frith High School, High Peak, Derbyshire, SK23 0TQThis job expired on 18 April 2024 – see similar jobs
Start date details
As soon as possible
Closing date
18 April 2024 at 12pm (midday)
Date listed
28 March 2024
Job details
Job role
- Teaching assistant
Visa sponsorship
- Visas cannot be sponsored
Key stage
- Key stage 3, Key stage 4
Working pattern
- Full time: 31 hrs & 50 mins per week Term time only
Contract type
- Fixed term - Approximately 1 year - Maternity or parental leave cover
Pay scale
- Grade 7, pts 8 - 11 - £18,385 - £19,795 actual salary
What skills and experience we're looking for
Person Specification
Essential
Experience of working with a wide range of people
Excellent communication skills
Ability to work flexibly and be approachable
Commitment to working as a member of a team
Sense of humour and sense of perspective
Ability to explain students’ needs and advocate possible solutions to a range of colleagues
Good numeracy and literacy skills
Basic ICT skills in order to support learning and perform effectively in role
Ability to self-evaluate learning needs and actively seek learning opportunities
Ability to develop and share good practice
Ability to relate well to children and adults
Work constructively as part of a team
Ability to maintain confidentiality
Desirable:
Experience of working with young people
Experience of working with people with learning difficulties
Experience of working with young people with challenging behaviour
Work in a school environment
Understanding of a range of special educational needs and disabilities
General understanding of barriers to learning
General understanding of 11-16 curriculum demands
Interest in further professional development in the field of SEND
What the school offers its staff
Employer pension scheme
Free onsite parking
Further details about the role
We are looking to appoint two enthusiastic and committed teaching assistants, one is permanent and the other is a maternity cover position. Our school is a mainstream secondary school that also hosts a large provision for students with moderate to severe special educational needs.
Teaching assistants take on a wide range of roles in school, from academic support in lessons, to behaviour support and personal care. We would be interested in candidates who can contribute in any of these areas. Some specialist teaching assistant roles in school will bring with them an increase in salary.
The posts would suit candidates seeking a career as a teaching assistant, or recent graduates wanting school experience before undertaking teacher training.
Commitment to safeguarding
The school uses robust safer recruitment procedures that meet the requirements of KCSiE . These processes are designed to deter and prevent people who are unsuitable to work with children from applying for or securing employment or volunteering opportunities in the school.
Our processes form a vital part of our whole school approach to safeguarding and are an essential part of creating a safe environment for our learners. Further details on the safer recruitment of staff in school can be found in our Child Protection and Safeguarding policy.
Upload additional documents
If you need these documents in an accessible format, please contact the school.
About Chapel-en-le-Frith High School
- School type
- Local authority maintained school, ages 11 to 16
- Education phase
- Secondary
- School size
- 951 pupils enrolled
- Age range
- 11 to 16
- Ofsted report
- View Ofsted report (opens in new tab)
- Email address
- dhibbert@chapelhigh.org.uk
- Phone number
- 01298813118
An introduction to our school
Our school is an 11-16 mixed, community, comprehensive school of around 950 students. We are lucky to be based in a relatively new building, with great facilities, on a beautiful site at the edge of the Peak District market town of Chapel-en-le-Frith. The Peak District National Park is quite literally on the school’s doorstep and provides endless opportunities for walkers, cyclists, mountain bikers, climbers, cavers and other outdoor enthusiasts.
The nearest big towns to the school are Buxton and Stockport but good transport links mean that the school’s staff travel from a wide area with many commuting from Manchester, Sheffield, Chesterfield and the towns of East Cheshire. A sizable contingent of staff live in the villages of the Peak District. For anyone considering relocating it is a wonderful area in which to live, with a good mix of housing, decent schools, easy commutes and a good quality of life.
We believe that our school is unusual in many ways. Perhaps the most obvious of these, which may even make us unique, is structural. The current school was formed by merging, in a new building, the local area special school with the existing high school. The special school became the current 35 place enhanced resourced SEND provision, always referred to simply as ‘Learning Support’ in school. To meet the moderate to severe special educational needs of its cohort, Learning Support operates as a ‘school within a school’. The Learning Support department runs a full independent curriculum with significant dedicated SEND trained staffing. Whilst Learning Support can provide an independent, tailored, learning experience for students, in every other way this cohort is fully integrated into the life of the school. This arrangement makes for a wonderfully inclusive school with young people who are very accepting of difference. Our inclusive approach spreads more widely too and we often buck local and national trends by accepting students with difficult and complex backgrounds.
This inclusivity does however make the school’s published data rather tricky to interpret. The DfE data effectively merges the results of an average sized comprehensive school with that of a special school. In short, though we think our 2023 performance table outcomes look quite respectable, we are rather better than the raw numbers make us look. Some years ago, we set ourselves a challenge; “to achieve results ranking alongside the best schools nationally; whilst remaining a highly inclusive, friendly, community school”. We have not achieved this yet, but it is a mantra that has guided us since. Undoubtedly, the balance between inclusivity and excellence is a difficult one, but both governors and staff are fully committed to making it work, despite its undoubted challenges in the current educational environment.
We think that we are different in other ways too. Our governors value the arts and creative subjects and we retain high uptake in these areas. We are not a top-down organisation; we are a team, and we work together to do the best we can for the young people in our care. If you join us, you can become involved in developing the future of our school community. Perhaps most importantly, we recognise that happy, committed staff make for a successful school; we work really hard to look after and develop our staff.
Visitors to our school notice these differences. People frequently comment on the sense of community, the calm atmosphere, and the fact that our staff smile, joke and enjoy what they do. At the start of our most recent Ofsted inspection the lead inspector commented, after meeting the staff in briefing, that he had never met such a welcoming, smiley and relaxed staff team at the start of an inspection. The report from that inspection, in May 2019, gives a very good picture of the organisation that we are.
Like most schools, we have our strengths and weaknesses. We are proud of the work we have done recently on curriculum development, on teaching and learning and on research-based practice, with many staff now engaged with research and further professional qualifications. Our challenges remain those of many rural schools, getting our results to be clearly above average requires that we better engage disadvantaged students and that we raise aspirations of some boys in particular.
We are in the minority of secondary schools that remain local authority run. This is by choice after careful research and consideration. We are not, however, an isolated school. We have good links with other local schools, with local further education providers and with universities. We are a member of the Peak Edge Group of local primary and secondary schools.
Arranging a visit to Chapel-en-le-Frith High School
To arrange a visit and increase the chance of a successful application email dhibbert@chapelhigh.org.uk.
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