Pastoral Leader - Travel, Food and Drink, Leeds

Leeds City College are seeking a highly motivated, enthusiastic and learner-focused Pastoral Leader to join our successful and high-performing School of Travel, Food and Drink, based at our Printworks campus. This newly created role has been established to strengthen the pastoral support available across the School and further enhance the experience, wellbeing, and success of our large and diverse learner cohort. As a key member of the team, you will play a central role in ensuring every learner receives the guidance, support, and encouragement they need to thrive both personally and academically.

Working at the forefront of our pastoral provision, you will lead the Pastoral Team in delivering an outstanding learner experience. You will ensure learners receive timely and effective support with wellbeing, safeguarding, financial support, personal development and any barriers that may impact their learning, creating an environment where every learner can achieve their full potential.

Leadership is fundamental to this role. You will provide clear direction and support to the pastoral team, ensuring that all statutory and College compliance requirements are met, pastoral processes are consistently applied, and learners receive a high-quality, responsive service throughout their journey. You will drive improvements in learner attendance by developing and implementing the department's attendance strategy, using proactive monitoring, robust data analysis and early intervention to achieve and exceed the College's 95% attendance target.

This is an exciting opportunity for an inspirational leader who is passionate about learner success, committed to raising aspirations, and dedicated to delivering an exceptional pastoral experience that enables every learner to achieve, progress and succeed.

What You Will Do

• Teach across a range of Fundamental Skills and Skills Builder lessons, ensuring outstanding teaching, learning and assessment takes place and that learners are fully supported to make strong progress.
• Take ownership of attendance across the department, developing and implementing effective strategies to consistently improve attendance and ensure it meets and exceeds the College target of 95%.
• Role model outstanding safeguarding practice across the department, ensuring safeguarding procedures are consistently applied and understood by all staff.
• Be a visible and present member of the pastoral team, providing day-to-day leadership, support and reassurance to staff and learners across the department.
• Lead on the implementation of behaviour policies and the monitoring, analysis and reporting of attendance data, using insights to identify trends, drive early intervention, improve learner engagement, and maintain high standards and consistent expectations across all learning environments.
• Hold regular meetings with Maths, English, vocational and pastoral teams to communicate priorities, share updates, ensure consistency of practice, and support a cohesive learner journey alongside continuous improvement across the department.
• Develop and embed proactive attendance improvement strategies, working closely with curriculum teams, tutors and support services to remove barriers to attendance.
• Develop and support an effective enrichment programme that enhances the learner experience and contributes to personal development, behaviour and attitudes outcomes.
• Attend all Pastoral Lead meetings, actively contributing to the wider Printworks PDBA team and ensuring consistency of practice and shared best practice across the provision.
• Provide leadership for attendance processes relating to Fundamental Skills and Skills Builder provision, ensuring consistent approaches across all learner groups.
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of pastoral systems, processes and interventions to ensure high-quality learner support across the department.

About You

• Holds a Level 3 qualification in relevant area and willing to progress to Level 4/5.
• Experience of developing PSHE within a pastoral role in FE sector.
• A confident, visible and respected leader within the pastoral team, setting high expectations and leading by example through consistently high standards of professionalism, safeguarding practice and behaviour management for both staff and learners.
• A strong track record of improving learner attendance, engagement and personal development outcomes across a large and diverse cohort.
• Passionate about creating a positive and purposeful learning environment where learners feel supported, challenged and able to succeed.
• Able to demonstrate strong leadership, communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to motivate, support and develop pastoral staff while working effectively with curriculum teams, support services and senior leaders to deliver high-quality provision.
• Confident in implementing and monitoring behaviour and safeguarding policies consistently across the department.
• Experienced in leading or contributing to meetings, ensuring clear communication, accountability and consistency of practice across teams.
• Highly organised and committed to continuous improvement, effectively managing priorities while driving high standards across pastoral provision.

Benefits

The group offers a range of excellent benefits, including: Annual leave: Curriculum and Management: 44 days plus.