This unique opportunity allows you to work alongside committed school staff in a range of schools across the Trust in the communities we serve.  We aim to deliver an outstanding school experience to children with special educational needs and disabilities  and their families. Many of our communities are the most deprived in the North of England.

The majority of your role will be focusing on pupils in our mainstream primary schools. Your core responsibility will be to develop our staff to improve experiences for children with a range of communication needs, as well as offering assessment and therapy sessions. This would mean working alongside Speech and Language Therapy provision already in place in schools eg. NHS and privately based  when required to ensure we maximise capacity that already happens in our schools. We want you to support the ongoing daily work, build capacity and expertise with your input to support SLCN within schools, including communication friendly environments as well as more specialist input in terms of assessment and intervention. This would involve working across 3 levels of input, incorporating Universal, Targeted and Specialist levels. . We want our provision for SEN pupils to improve across the Trust developing into outstanding experiences and our Speech and Language Therapists will help greatly with this key target. Professional supervision will be provided.

You will have the opportunity to work collaboratively with the already established therapist based in West Yorkshire. You would be required to work across Stoke, Manchester and the Wirral with a range of pupils and staff and help to improve the practice of this key area across the Trust. You will be working with a dedicated team of SENDCO’s based in our schools and belong to a team of Directors of SEND who also work across the Trust. The network of SENDCOs which you would belong to is led by our SEND lead across the Trust, Jan Gough. Virtual work from home is also possible for online meetings with colleagues, report writing and developing programmes to allow for flexible working with the pattern to be determined in dialogue with your line manager. There will be travelling within your region between schools and hub offices.

Working for the Coop in all what we do is underpinned by being a morale and values based organisation. We strongly believe in networks of schools working collaboratively and cooperatively together to improve pupil daily experiences and making our schools great places to work for our staff. Join an organisation determined to make a difference but also doing it in the right way.

Essential Criteria

●        A qualified Speech and Language Therapist with a motivation for working with children with special educational needs and disabilities and their families.

●        Experience working with children with complex needs such as ADHD, ASC and Developmental Language Disorder

●        Training and experience working with children with challenging behaviours.

●        Good communication and interpersonal skills.

●        Knowledge and understanding of working within a culturally diverse community.

●        Ability to develop effective strategies to engage hard-to-reach families.

●        Experienced in delivering training to professionals.

●        Experience of liaising effectively with relevant agencies, including health professionals.

●        Experience of monitoring and evaluating for improvement.

●        Current member of the HCPC and eligible for membership to the RCSLT. 

Desirable but not essential:

Be familiar with and or trained in;

●        ELKLAN (Supporting Children with SLD or similar)

We can offer the right candidate continued access to high quality professional development opportunities within a vibrant, friendly and dedicated school community.