Lead Teacher of PE

We are seeking an enthusiastic and committed Lead Teacher of Physical Education to join our team at AGFS. This is an excellent opportunity for a passionate educator to inspire scholars to develop a lifelong interest in physical activity, health, and wellbeing.

You will be part of a professional community and promote outstanding teaching and learning and a strong school culture within a nurturing, respectful and academically rigorous environment. The successful candidate will be capable of adding further value to a traditionally strong subject at the school. A passion for your subject and a commitment to extra-curricular activities including competitive sport is essential.

We invest heavily in our exciting PE department; dedicating 2 hours a week to PE for every scholar in KS3 and 1 hour at KS4 for core PE. While we do not offer GCSE PE, our curriculum places strong emphasis on enjoyment, fitness, and broad exposure to a range of sports and activities. Scholars are involved with several high-quality extracurricular clubs including basketball, netball, athletics, cross country and football. Staff from other departments actively contribute to the PE extra-curricular programme.

This post would suit an ambitious, research-informed, subject specialist who is driven to develop a department that becomes a beacon of PE provision in the UK.

• Salaries 2.5% higher than main pay scale.
• Twice as many training days as standard.
• Generous pension scheme.
• Access to Ark rewards – a scheme offering savings from over 3,000 major retailers
• Interest-free loans – up to £5,000 available for season ticket or to buy a bicycle.
• Gym discounts – offering up to 40%.
• Access to Employee Assistance Programme – providing free, confidential counselling, legal advice and a range of different support.

How is Ark Greenwich different?

• We are part of the Ark family of schools and benefit accordingly from outstanding networking and career opportunities and first-class CPD. 
• Staff wellbeing is one of our main priorities. We provide breakfast for staff each morning, lunch for early careers staff and have a 6pm/weekend work-related communication cut off. We do not do knee jerk reactions, fads or last-minute deadlines. Our systems and processes for communication, marking and feedback and assessment are streamlined and the approaches we take are research led and based on our local context. We offer a WFH day to HoDs for curriculum design and also offer external marking of scripts to support workload. Our full approach to staff wellbeing/workload can be found here. 
• This is a small school model (600 scholars aged 11-16) because we believe that our close-knit family community provides the optimum conditions for success.   
• Scholar behaviour is exceptional with clearly defined and embedded routines. This means our teachers can focus their time on the things that matter – planning and delivering brilliant lessons for our scholars. 
• This is a strict no excuses, no mobile phone school. Phones are not permitted onsite at all. Scholars wear business dress to prepare them for a professional career.
• Our curriculum is traditional and academic, and we do not take shortcuts to seek to boost our position in school league tables – we do not, for example, offer equivalencies such as Btecs or Vcerts..
• We put high-quality teaching at the heart of what we do. We are committed to providing staff with weekly high-quality training. We run coaching for staff who want to see rapid progress in their discipline. Live coaching and current best practice in the field of education is central to our approach. 
• We don’t grade individual lessons or ask for lesson plans but we do place a primacy on curriculum design, independent learning and formative assessment.
• Our scholars enjoy a compulsory co-curricular program on a Wednesday afternoon which includes a strong focus on community volunteering and we facilitate 6 drop-down days per academic year ensuring scholars benefit from a range of life-enriching experiences.