You have made the decision to become a teacher. You are passionate about working with children in schools and changing lives. Getting you from this point to becoming an outstanding practitioner is what the Lion Academy Trust specialises in - through our hugely successful Early Career Teacher (ECT) Programme. Running in parallel with your teaching role, in one of our thriving primary academies, the ECT Programme is focused around your individual needs and development areas - delivered in a structured and proven model of whole school improvement.
At the Trust, we seek to meet, interview and appoint ECTs between June and July to start working with our wider teams for a defined period before the next academic year. You’ll start working as a fully paid member of staff right away in one of the Trust's schools - in London, Essex or Wellingborough - and will spend your first weeks with us being supported into building an individual coaching plan for you as a teaching professional, but also learning how our systems and processes work to ensure you hit the ground running in September.
Every ECT who joins the Lion Academy Trust is a true member of the staffing team at their school and is quickly immersed into the daily running of their class, year group and wider school community.
At the Lion Academy Trust, every member of staff is supported to be outstanding - and our ECTs participate in our dedicated programme of mentoring, coaching and support with senior leaders to provide incremental development plans tailored to your professional needs. As a growing Trust, we seek to employ 15-20 ECTs every year - and through our programme structure, ECTs provide collegiate support for each other as well as sharing ideas and practice with our NQT programme leads.
The ECT phase of your journey of being a teacher is a critical one - both in terms of shaping you as a teaching professional, but also to start the process of identifying the career path you are most interested in pursuing. At the Lion Academy Trust, we reward staff who demonstrate the attitude, disposition and ambition to grow their careers within our structures.
We view each employee by their performance - not their age or career stage - and many of our deputy headteachers and aspiring leaders were recent ECTs with us.
Our Lead Practitioner Development programme supports the growth of outstanding teaching practice - broadening their range across more than one setting and across wider groups of teachers, support staff and pupils and to directly contribute to the design and development of our teaching and learning strategies.
The Lion Academy Trust began as a group of head teachers and practitioners with a passion for being able to improve the quality of education that every child, in every setting. We are still run by the same passionate and driven teaching professionals - focusing on providing a tailored primary education for our pupils and the most rewarding workplace for all our dedicated staff.
Contact us today to start your journey into being an outstanding teaching professional.