Work for Us

We want you to make the right decision in applying for your new role, during these unprecedented times, we understand that this could be difficult and we want to help you to see what we’re about before you make the choice.

At The Oldham Academy North, we are moving all of our recruitment online for the period of school closures. Hopefully, this information will give you a good understanding of what to expect from us as an Academy and employer.

We are an expanding Academy, we will have approximately 1330 students on site when we return with our largest ever cohort of Year 7 at 330 students. In September 2019, we opened a new building on-site with state-of-the-art facilities for learning, FA standard changing facilities and a fantastic lecture theatre.

We are relentlessly focused on striving for academic excellence in all that we do and we are guided by our mission statement and core values.

Through being a strong TEAM, made up of students, staff and all members of our community, we strive for academic excellence in all that we do. TEAM TOAN has extremely high expectations and demands only the very best performance from everyone, allowing our students to leave us ready to succeed in the challenging and competitive world around us.

Our curriculum is rigorous and challenging and, whilst we have lots of opportunities for students to study the arts, PE and other foundation subjects, we focus on all students getting the best opportunities when they leave by following the English Baccalaureate suite of qualifications at Key Stage 4. We are guided by our curriculum principles and we know that what we do works well, students are ready to leave us ready to succeed at university or a career of their choosing.

We feel confident that we can still find the right candidates, who are well-aligned to our Academy values: Trust, Endurance, Autonomy and Mastery. We know you will have the potential to be an exceptional teacher or leader – but of course we will be doing things a little bit differently than usual.

Pre-application:

Have a look at our website, do your research, find out about us. Our most recent inspection was in March 2020 but unfortunately, owing to the pause in reports being published, will now not be published until schools re-open. However, we were very pleased with the outcome and we have undertaken a lot of work in a short space of time to create the foundations of the next part of our journey.

If you have any questions, please email me directly: TOAN.headteacher@e-act.org.uk if you want to discuss a role or the selection process.

Application form:

Your application should be as it would during any usual recruitment process – make sure you can show us who you are, what you have achieved and why you think you are well-suited to TEAM TOAN. Why us? What makes you think you would be a good fit? How do your educational values align to ours at TOAN?

Interview:

Prepare for the interview as you would with a real interview, but be prepared to talk in-depth about your teaching practise. We will discuss the classes that you have taught recently, how you go about planning your lessons, and what we would see if we were to watch you teaching. We will talk to you about curriculum planning, the position of your subject within the wider curriculum and how you can impact on the wider cultural capital that our students deserve.

The interview will be conducted through a Microsoft Teams call, which we will send you a calendar link for – you don’t need any specialist software and you can do this through any smart phone but we would advise logging on beforehand so there are no technical issues when you are on the call.

We will not ask you to teach a lesson but we may ask you to talk to us in more depth about your educational philosophy and who you are as a teacher. We may send you some work to give feedback on which we will ask you about in the interview. It may feel odd but this will give us a good idea of how you might usually interact with your students and your approach to feedback.

There will be plenty of opportunities to ask questions at the end of the interview itself and we will spend a lot of time discussing and unpicking your answers. Please be prepared to share anything you’d like, anything that isn’t covered, or any questions that we have been unable to answer – no question is a ridiculous question when it’s related to your job!

We are part of the E-ACT Multi-Academy Trust who support us in many ways, including having access to a national team of experts in a wide-variety of fields:

www.e-act.org.uk

• All staff have an induction to E-ACT and the Academy to support your understanding of any processes, information or needs that you have.
• There is no performance related appraisal. All teaching staff automatically move up the pay scale each year*
• Trust-wide survey twice every year to gauge staff voice and raise concerns directly with the CEO and Executive Leadership Team.
• Residentials for Leadership teams across the Trust to network and support development
• Curriculum Champions meetings across the Trust to support knowledge and pedagogy and support development of curriculum for all staff through dissemination and training sessions
• ELT roadshow to support staff voice / Q and A – CEO individual meetings with staff
• Mentoring for heads: ELT / RED
• All staff have a Career Development plans to support you in moving forward in your career. We want to grow our own leaders, whether it be curriculum, teaching and learning, pastoral or otherwise, we want to develop our own staff to be the leaders of the future.
• All staff have access to the Employee Assistance Programme. A free advice and guidance programme which can give information about anything you are struggling with at the Academy or within your own personal life, including housing / wellbeing / healthcare advice and guidance
• We follow the E-ACT Mastery Rubric – our own in-house language of teaching and learning, devised to support you as a practitioner and develop your teaching and learning to Mastery and beyond.
• The Trust are committed to training all staff as Mental Health First Aiders. We have 45+ staff trained within TOAN to support staff and student mental health.

Within the Academy, our main focus for you as a teacher is on your professional development:

• Every year, we hold a new staff induction day – staff are invited in, we spend a full day getting you acquainted with the building, our values, processes and the students. In the afternoon, we take you out around the locality so that you can see where our students live, some years we have been invited to take part in evening prayers at our local Mosque, followed by an evening CPD session to support understanding of context and get to know the team
• We have weekly CPD opportunities for all staff through our morning ‘Brush Up’ sessions on a range of specific topics, designed for you as part of your own personalised feedback through the Mastery Rubric, but these could be based on modelling, feedback, questioning, SEND scaffolding and support.
• Opportunities for professional development take place for all staff once every half term, following the E-ACT principles.
• We have an excellent in-house NQT programme with additional CPD weekly for staff from our trained coaches and Lead Professional Mentor. In addition to Trust-wide CPD opportunities and networking for all NQTs to get together across the year – a real opportunity to meet other like-minded teachers to share ideas and collaborate.
• The Trust also offer free CPD with NPQML/SL/H to develop as leaders, with trained coaches in-house to run and support leadership qualifications.
• All staff have the opportunity to complete the Trust-wide Mental Health First Aid training to support staff and students
• External CPD requests are provided and paid for (from QTS to courses to support subject knowledge enhancement / Exam provider training) – if there is something you want to complete and know that it will have a positive impact for the Academy, we will support this for you.
• We have a very well-resourced CPD library for all staff to access to borrow books to develop their curriculum knowledge, pedagogy and practice as well as leadership skills and other aspects of teaching.
• We have had a number of high-profile experts visiting us this academic year to deliver CPD and sessions for our staff, including Tom Bennet, David Didau, Ross Morrison McGill
• We have seven Level 2 trained coaches across the academy and a dedicated ‘Coaching Room’ for you to meet with your coach, watch any of your lessons and provide you with feedback to develop your practise.

Academy Support

• We have a flexible approach to leave of absences, please speak to your line manager or Headteacher
• We have a centralised behaviour system because we want you do the job that you spent a long time achieving your qualifications for – we want you to teach!
• We have varying levels of support for students including an on-site student counsellor, our Woodlands facility, reflection room and our own on-site alternative provision to support the most challenging students who attend our Academy.
• Lates detentions are run by the Headteacher on Friday evenings to ensure consistency and support smooth start of lessons – every single day
• Open door policy / active ‘on-call’ system run by SLT to support behaviour and provide praise
• All staff have access to high quality curriculum planning: long term and medium term plans are in place across every subject to support autonomous daily planning – in addition to shared planning and departmental collaboration

Other support:

• We run half-termly wellbeing options that are not compulsory, e.g. Yoga / Mindfulness / Staff trips (we went rafting last year)
• If you want to sign up, you can have a wellbeing in the next part of your journey.hard work throughout your time with us will see you succeed different to what you were expecting, we’re sure that your students, and although the next few months look very We had to say a hasty farewell to our wonderful year 11    – staff secretly leave gifts / notes / drinks / motivational bits for you to support you daily / weekly
• All staff have access to free breakfast and tea and coffee throughout the day from the staff room
• If you want to support the smooth running of lunch time, staff who undertake a duty get a free lunch in return
• We hold an end of year staff BBQ cooked by SLT to say thanks for all of your hard work and we have a Christmas dinner for all staff together once all the students have left for Christmas break
• We have introduced a 100% club with certificates and prizes for staff who have excellent attendance
• There is a great staff library and book swap events throughout the year

We have really high expectations of all of our staff because we live by our mission statement and values, day in, day out. Sometimes teaching and working in a school can be hard but we will support you every singe day because we know that the difference you are making to our students is invaluable. If you are willing to go the extra mile, so are we.

Sounds like a good match?  Get in touch: TOAN.Headteacher@e-act.org.uk

Explore our current vacancies below. If you don’t see any vacancies listed, be sure to check back periodically or you can click here for vacancies across E-ACT.

Please send Job Applications to: NorthernHRenquiries@e-act.org.uk