Department: Quality

Location: Home based, UK 

Reports to: Head of Quality

Hours: 37.5  per week

Salary: (Depending on experience) 

Role Overview

The Learner Support Lead takes ownership and coordinates the support required for the end-to-end learner journey to support the academic performance for all learners with barriers to learning. This includes socio-economic disadvantaged backgrounds, individuals known to social care, ESOL, wellbeing needs, and learners returning to education, youth justice, carer leavers, SEND and or/ other. 

With a primary focus on Pastoral and Wellbeing as a specialism, this role shifts from simply providing advice to delivering robust operational oversight and delivery. You will triage learners facing barriers, conduct initial and ongoing support sessions, and manage support quality across the provision. Inclusion must not be siloed; your mission is to embed it directly into the coaching team. This role works in partnership with the Learner Support Lead (SEND) to ensure holistic care.

Key Responsibilities

Learner Triage & Caseload Management

• Triage & Assessment: Conduct initial learner support calls to assess, triage, and identify individuals facing any inclusion barrier.
• Register management: Take ownership and manage the performance of the company Wellbeing Register, Wellbeing Support Plans, and wider barriers to learning as well as ongoing SEND Hub updating and reporting.
• Ongoing learner support: Deliver tailored, ongoing support sessions based directly upon each learner’s individualised learner support plan to ensure academic performance is maintained

• Coach & Mentor governance: Provide guidance and oversight for the wider coaching and mentoring team, ensuring that learner wellbeing support is delivered consistently, safely, and in alignment with internal quality standards.
• Quality assurance of support: Perform regular deep dive quality reviews on coaching, mentoring and teaching interventions to ensure support provided to learners with barriers is effective, well-documented, and impactful.
• Capacity building & CPD: Lead a community of exceptional practice for coaches and mentors, upskilling them to identify early warning signs of learner distress and to deliver Tier 1 support effectively before escalating to specialist intervention. Design and implement inspirational CPD opportunities to upskill internal staff in best practices.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

• Funding compliance & audit readiness: Ensure Learning Support Fund (LSF) integrity, ensuring that every claim is substantiated by an auditable trail of assess, plan, do, review (APDR) evidence. Ensure strict compliance with Apprenticeship framework documentation.
• Impact reporting: Translate data into meaningful impact reports that demonstrate the correlation between support interventions, funding utilisation, and learner retention/achievement

• Subject Matter Expert: be able to confidently articulate the intent, implementation, and impact of your support model to internal and external stakeholders
• Governance & accountability: Maintain a robust oversight mechanism for the Wellbeing Register and LSF allocations, ensuring that all provision is legally compliant with the Equality Act 2010 and the SEND Code of Practice.
• Safeguarding: Safeguard learners from harm, uphold British Values, and report concerns in strict accordance with Cambridge Spark policies. Stay at the forefront of legislative, mental health, and wellbeing best practice changes.​​​​​​​

1. Collaborative support: Collaborate and support as required with learners identified as having Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), working closely with the Learner Support Lead (SEND).​​​​​​​

• Support with any ad-hoc duties or requests that may be reasonably required to successfully carry out the role or to support the wider business.

• Strong ability to evaluate quality and analyse delivery data reliably within the post-16 training/government funded sector.
• Proven experience in coaching, training, and/or assessing, with a deep understanding of what constitutes high-quality teaching, learning and assessment.
• Proven experience, or willingness to upskill and develop, in internal quality assurance practices. This is likely to include holding, or being willing to work towards gaining, an IQA qualification. 
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to engage positively with internal staff and external stakeholders.

Candidate Specification

• Holds , or is willing to undertake, a Mental Health First Aider qualification
• A SEND qualification (Level 2 upwards)
• Experience of working within pastoral, wellbeing and inclusion based roles
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Strong organisational skills with the ability to manage multiple priorities and deadlines.
• Ability to analyse and interpret data to inform quality enhancement.

• Experience of working with Ofsted and DfE regulations
• Qualifications in supporting SEND in an education setting
• Knowledge of, and experience within, apprenticeship or work-based FE/HE provision.

Company Benefits: 

• Pension with 4% matched contributions, opportunity to opt into salary sacrifice scheme
• 25 days holiday + Flexi bank holidays + 1 day off on your birthday
• A day for volunteering
• Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave 
• Health & Wellbeing allowance of up to £30 per month
• Annual Summer and Xmas events
• Company socials including everything from Cambridge College formals, pub nights to team building events
• CPD Allowance alongside quarterly reflections to ring fence time for development and growth
• Private medical insurance and cash plan
• Holiday buy back scheme (up to 10 days p/a)
• Employee Assistance Programme with a dedicated company counsellor

Background to our Organisation

We are an education technology company that enables corporate and government organisations to achieve their business goals by educating their workforce with critical digital transformation skills to succeed in the AI era.

We deliver unique and innovative professional education that is accelerating the digital transformation of our clients, advancing the careers of their employees, helping people get into work and closing the digital skills gap. We are in a sector that is crucial to the economy and workforce, with a lot of opportunity for change and innovation. We are at the cutting edge of teaching applied data and digital skills, with our unique patented learning platform EDUKATE.AI offering our clients and learners a unique learning experience. EDUKATE.AI was developed with support from Innovate UK and provides all of our learners with 24/7 immediate feedback on their work, helping accelerate the learning process and providing a sandbox environment to experiment on real world datasets.

Since 2016, we have supported more than 15,000 learners across four continents with nearly 550,000 pieces of code submitted for feedback on EDUKATE.AI. We are trusted by some of the most recognisable brands in the world to educate their workforce, including Microsoft, the NHS, GSK, easyJet, the BBC and John Lewis. Our focus on applied learning to create business impact sets us apart - individual learners have reported applying their skills at work to generate recorded value of up to £40m. 
 

Our Values

At the centre of the way we work together and inspire each other to achieve success are these core values:

Entrepreneurial

We take initiative and show entrepreneurial spirit which fuels innovation at Cambridge Spark. This includes identifying opportunities for improvement, taking ownership for implementing solutions effectively and driving improvement by using proof of concepts to demonstrate the feasibility and value of their work.

Team Spirit

Everyone is part of building an open and transparent culture, communicating effectively to raise issues, discuss improvements and share the evidence used to make decisions.

Customer-focused

Our customers are at the centre of everything we do, inspiring us to create great work. We strive to build friendly, professional and lasting relationships with them to better understand and anticipate their needs.

Gold Standard

We are experts in our field and are constantly developing our technology and offering. We set the benchmark in our industry: both in what we offer customers and in how we deliver it.

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Cambridge Spark is an Equal Opportunities Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind.  Cambridge Spark is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunities for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at Cambridge Spark are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, colour or ethnicity, ability or disability, gender or gender reassignment, sexual orientation, marital status, religion, age or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Cambridge Spark will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. Cambridge Spark encourages applicants of all ages.