Head of MFL

Required from:                                             September 2023
Contract:                                         Full Time. Permanent.

Scale:                                TLR 1B (£8,706 FTE this will be inflated by agreed pay award effective from this date)

Closing Date:                                    Thursday 18th May (9AM)
Interview Dates:                              Wednesday 24th May

This vacancy is a rolling vacancy and applications will be reviewed as they are received.  Interviews and appointments may take place prior to the closing date shown.

Job Description and Person Specification

Applicant Information

About Our School

We are a happy and successful High School with a Sixth Form.  We serve the whole community of Droitwich and its surrounding villages, making our intake socio-economically diverse, which our entire staff play up to and thrive upon.  We use our House system alongside our academic work to create a sense of belonging, identity and recognition as well as ambition and optimism.

Our staff are talented and so incredibly supportive of one another.  We have a new Headteacher who is determined to treasure the strengths of the school (we have a ‘Good’ OFSTED rating) as well being ready to address the areas where improvement is needed.  We have adapted our leadership team in order to secure faster progress towards our objectives and we are particularly excited about our plans to make our staff CPD something that other schools are envious of and can learn from.  Our impact on our young people, both scholastically and pastorally, is profound, but we are committed to improving it further.

You are strongly encouraged to read our ‘Information for Prospective Colleagues.’  We expect that it will give you an even deeper feel for the community we serve, our ethos, our culture and what our school is like day to day.

About the Vacancy

Due to the substantive postholder choosing to move to a small, part time position, we need a Head of MFL to start in September.

The successful applicant could be somebody who is relatively early in their career but has a passion for teaching and learning languages and would rise to the challenge of leading a department team successfully with our support.  Alternatively, it may be someone who has experience either as an Assistant Head of Department (or similar) or someone with lots of experience who wants a fresh challenge.

There is, of course, a full job description and person specification available but it is important to stress the selected candidate will need to be a role model in their own classroom, have the credibility to inspire and lead a team and have unwavering commitment to sustaining a culture of ambition, optimism and high performance.  The ability to call upon examples where you have improved the quality of teaching and learning through rigourous self evaluation whilst retaining a supportive, encouraging and developmental atmosphere will be vital.

About our MFL Department

We have a good blend of recently post ECT and experienced staff who are keen to be led to secure a resurgence in language learning in our school.

We have found that our first implementation of the national changes to the MFL curriculum resulted in a dip in numbers for options at KS4.  At present students must choose a language or a humanity (from four options) and its fair to say that humanities are more popular.  We will have two French and two German groups in Year 10 next year (which is a slight resurgence compared to year above) and there is a handful of students who have selected French and German as two of their options.  However, further work on the KS3 experience needs to take place in order to rebuild numbers further without reducing the quality of student outcomes at KS4, which have remained good throughout.

Progression to KS5 has been patchy.  Some years we have had sufficient numbers to run A Level groups in French and in German but this hasn’t always been the case.  Returning to an expectation of a group of each running every year is where we would like to be.

Extra information is available in the ‘Head of MFL – Applicant Information’ document.

How to Apply

Click on Button below to take you back to the Home Page and select the Teaching application form. Download, complete and email completed form to jobs@droitwichspahigh.worcs.sch.uk

If you have any queries please don’t hesitate to get in touch via jobs@droitwichspahigh.worcs.sch.uk

Droitwich Spa High School is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment.