Headteacher

Contract Type: 1.0FTE

Contract Term: Permanent

Salary: ISR L16 to L22

Actual Salary: £68,400 to £79,112 (plus a recruitment bonus for the right candidate)

Start Date: September 2024

Closing Date: Wednesday 17 April 2024

The School

Woodlands is an exciting, inclusive, and effective two-form entry (2-11) Primary School, serving a vibrant and mixed community in southeast Sheffield. We are privileged to be responsible for a wonderful group of confident, curious, and enthusiastic children, who love their school and are passionate about being the best they can be.

Woodlands has a distinctive identity both in its local community and the wider city and is widely recognised to be very effective. In recent years it’s gained an excellent reputation for its practice and positive culture and has a talented and exceptionally committed leadership and staff team. Graded as Good by Ofsted in 2022, it has continued to go from strength to strength ever since.

Our membership of the successful, forward-thinking, and growing 2-18+ Mercia Learning Trust has been a major factor in the rapid progress we’ve made in the past few years. The Trust couldn’t be more supportive of our mission, and we know we can continue to rely on it in the future.

As a governing body, we know what effective practice and exceptional commitment look like, and we are ambitious to achieve even more for the children and the community we serve. Our next Headteacher will join us at a very important point in our journey and will lead the school through the next phase of its development. We are looking forward to meeting candidates with demonstrable energy, vision, and resilience, who will thrive in an environment with high levels of support and challenge.

The Role

Our outgoing Head leaves a wonderful legacy of strong culture, shared vision, and collaborative practice, so her successor will be building on very secure foundations. Our primary objective is to secure children’s personal and academic success – not least helping them make the best possible transition to secondary school – so we want to develop even greater consistency and embed a culture of high expectations.

You’ll be a highly skilled classroom practitioner, with a sophisticated and ambitious approach to curriculum development and the stamina to see your vision through. A demonstrably ethical leader, you’ll model positive and collaborative behaviours at every turn. Exemplifying an open mindset, and a skilled listener, you’ll quickly build a high-trust, high-accountability culture which nurtures an innovative, ‘what works’ approach.

As the school’s strategic leader, you’ll direct and oversee a comprehensive school improvement programme that develops all aspects of school effectiveness and inclusion. This must be balanced with a highly visible style, and a sustained focus on the smooth management of the school’s daily operations. Strong candidates will bring experience of managing complex development projects alongside other school priorities. It’s essential that you can understand budgets, workforce planning and management, and system-level partnership working, and you must be an instinctive horizon-scanner, who can identify and adopt emerging good practice.

We’re not dogmatic about your experience to date and would welcome interest from both strong candidates who are looking for their first Headship, or experienced Headteachers looking for a new challenge within a great trust. If you haven’t yet led a school, you must have held extensive SLT responsibility and / or acted up for a period. Alongside your open, optimistic mindset and profound sense of moral purpose, you’ll be an inspiring leader, who can both articulate and drive a strong culture of continuous self-improvement towards excellence. Emotional intelligence is essential, and you must have a track record of impact beyond the school gates. We are a professionally curious team, and you will share our deep interest in research and best practice – in particular, how to maintain our rapid trajectory of improvement.

The Candidate

Candidates will bring strong moral purpose and will share our profound belief that a high-quality education is the route to flourishing both for the individual child, and for the society they will grow to shape. You must be an inspirational leader, with personal credibility and an outstanding ability to communicate with everyone you meet. It’s vital that you can build exceptional, high-trust relationships with pupils, parents / carers, and colleagues, and this will be critical in developing confidence in your stewardship of the school.