Trust Safeguarding & Attendance Lead - Enhance Academy Trust

Start date:

As soon as possible

Enhance Academy Trust is seeking to appoint a Trust Safeguarding & Attendance Lead to join our established team, supporting our primary academies across Barnsley, Kirklees, and Wakefield. We are a successful and growing Church of England Multi-Academy Trust, currently comprising 17 primary academies and a Post-16 Creative and Performing Arts free school. This is a unique opportunity to shape and establish a newly created strategic Trust leadership role.

You will have the opportunity to influence Trust strategy, build professional networks and develop sector-leading practice across our academies, making a lasting difference to children, young people and school leaders across Enhance.

As Trust Safeguarding & Attendance Lead, you will oversee the Trust’s safeguarding functions, ensuring they are robust, effective and compliant with statutory safeguarding and child protection requirements. Working closely with Designated Safeguarding Leads, Headteachers, SENCOs and external agencies, you will help ensure that children who are at risk receive timely, high-quality and well-coordinated support.

You will also play a key role in establishing a strong culture of attendance across all schools within the Trust. The role will involve both supporting and constructively challenging schools to develop and implement effective processes that address and overcome barriers to attendance faced by pupils and their families. This is a highly visible and influential role, requiring someone who can combine specialist safeguarding knowledge with strong professional judgement, constructive challenge and the ability to build trusted relationships across the Trust and with local safeguarding partners.

This role will involve a blend of operational and strategic responsibilities. The postholder will work directly with school staff to improve attendance and promote strong safeguarding practice, while also leading on strategic initiatives and engaging in high-level discussions and coordinated actions with external agencies. If you feel you have the experience, skills, and qualities to be successful in this role, we would be delighted to hear from you.

Closing Date:
Friday 18th September

• Lead safeguarding provision across the Trust, ensuring support meets the identified needs of children and families, including regular feedback and updates to the Trust’s Executive Team on safeguarding and child protection matters.
• Ensure academies comply with statutory safeguarding and child protection obligations, are held to account for effective practice, and that child protection policies and procedures are understood and implemented correctly by staff across the Trust.
• Maintain a sound understanding of education, safeguarding and child protection legislation, including Keeping Children Safe in Education. Provide specialist knowledge, skills and judgement to support child-centered decision making.
• Lead annual safeguarding reviews and due diligence checks across the Trust, providing constructive feedback to Headteachers and Safeguarding Leads.

• Support on all statutory functions in relation to prosecutions for non-attendance, Attendance Order Proceedings for children missing education (CME) and Fixed Penalty Notices (FPNs)
• Support and or produce, analyse, and report attendance data across the Trust.
• Keep abreast of changes in legislation and relevant DfE guidance.
• Develop and monitor policy and planning in relation to attendance, including the Trust’s long-term objectives and common minimum standards.
• Support schools in developing positive relationships with parents, carers and pupils to help ensure any plans in place are tailored to individual needs and…