Working in a special school is not always easy, but is highly rewarding. Our students are vulnerable, and can present challenging behaviours when they are distressed. However, if you see beyond those behaviours, and your instinct is to respond with a sense of love, care and kindness to meet their needs head on, then we really need to hear from you.

We are looking to recruit staff who are resilient, robust and nurturing whilst committed to providing children with a first class educational offer. Our core values are based around providing love, allowing our pupils to flourish, providing them with a belief in social justice and giving them a sense of community and identity.

By joining The Ropemakers’ Academy, you are joining a unique family. Our dedication to therapeutic practice and commitment to making our children feel safe provides our learners with some genuine life chances and choices. These approaches are combined with an ethos of collaborative and innovative teaching and provision delivery. Life at Ropemakers is busy, energetic and vibrant. There is a continuous push to ensure that staff are well supported and developed, and that an open and transparent culture exists to maximise the quality of our education. As we are only in our second year, we are still developing aspects of our provision, but this provides our staff an opportunity to help shape our work and be actively involved in setting out our future.

As a Special Needs teacher at the Ropemakers’ Academy, we will ask you to use your newly acquired skills in a flexible and adaptable way, across a range of subjects and age groups. The nature of our setting means that we are not structured like mainstream schools, and we have a mixture of secondary and primary trained staff. If you have trained around a specialist subject, we will use those skills to develop our strategic approach around that subject; if you have trained across a range of subjects, you will fit in equally as well. In return we can offer you the opportunity to set out and implement your vision for teaching, as well as developing many aspects of your special needs and leadership practice. We fully support working alongside our regional ECT support provider, but we also have a dedicated teacher development lead within our own Trust, and also have teaching staff in place who will provide strong development support as well.

You may not be entirely sure if working in a special school should be your first career step, and you may have some unanswered questions. Therefore, you are more than welcome and strongly encouraged to come and visit the school and meet the team, to enable you to see our school in action and find out more about this exciting and unique opportunity to take your career in a new direction.

All applications should be submitted on the Beckmead Trust Staff Application form and completed applications should be sent to [email protected] by the closing date. Please note that we do not accept CVs.

The Beckmead Trust is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of our children and young people so expect all staff and volunteers, as well as those who work on the premises, to share this commitment. As part of our safeguarding commitment, appointment to any post is subject to receipt of satisfactory references, medical clearance to include the ability to participate in Physical Intervention and a satisfactory Enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) Check as well as evidence of the right to live and work in the United Kingdom.