EXPIRED

This 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

Excellent CPD

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.

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About Chapel-en-le-Frith High School

School type
Local authority maintained school, ages 11 to 16
Education phase
View all Secondaryjobs
School size
951 pupils enrolled
Age range
11 to 16
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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