Parkside is a highly oversubscribed school with a long history of success and an excellent reputation for innovation in education. We are situated in three sets of buildings, with the main site, overlooking Parker's Piece, opening in 1913. We offer 120 places in each year group and believe deeply in the power of ‘human scale’ education, where every student is very well known and strong relationships help teachers to support their classes to exceptional outcomes.
Our intake is diverse: we have a large proportion of higher attainers on entry; we also have a significant profile of Special Educational Needs. We have many students join us from overseas, with a range of ability in English, both in the main school and in the 6th Form.
United Learning
The Cambridge Cluster joined United Learning in 2019: we are a large, and growing, group of schools aiming to offer a life changing education to children and young people across England.
Our schools work as a team and achieve more by sharing than any single school could. Our Subject Advisors, our group-wide intranet, our own curriculum and our online learning portal all help us share knowledge and resources, helping to simplify work processes and manage workloads for an improved work-life balance.
As a Group, we can reward our staff better: with good career opportunities, better pay, benefits, and ultimately, the satisfaction of helping children to succeed. We invest in our staff wellbeing. We have an ongoing group-wide wellbeing programme. It's an ethos we call ‘the best in everyone’.
Staff Wellbeing
The wellbeing of our staff is of paramount importance to us as it cultivates healthy and motivated staff as well as promoting pupil wellbeing and attainment. School staff juggle a number of different demands and responsibilities every day and it is important that they receive the emotional and practical support that they need to be able to fully support our students. We aim to provide a working environment that promotes the wellbeing of all employees and encourages everyone to have ‘Good Days at Work’.
Reducing Workload
As far as possible, we aim to reduce teacher workload. As part of United Learning we benefit from three additional teacher preparation days to support staff in managing their workload.
Being a part of United Learning and the Cambridge Cluster means we also benefit from the collaborative planning that takes place. This means there are centralised resources that our staff can use as a starting point for their lessons, reducing the time spent on creating lessons from scratch.
Your Wellbeing
Through United Learning we provide advice and resources via our intranet to support staff with:
- Mental Wellbeing - access to Wellbeing Action Plans, toolkits and information from Mind mental health charity.
- Physical Wellbeing - discounted gym memberships, Challenge 2020 scheme, Cyclescheme.
- Confidential Care
- Wellbeing Case Studies - recent and historical case studies on staff wellbeing.
Employee Assistance
As part of the United Learning Cambridge Cluster, all staff can access the Employee Assistance Programme through Zurich. This service offers all staff:
- Counselling
- Family caring services
- Career coaching
- Debt and money management
- Legal information and advice
Perks
Sometimes it is the little things that can make a big difference to your wellbeing. At Parkside we support this by providing staff with tea and coffee at break time and by coming together as a whole staff at different points throughout the year.
Through the Cambridge Cluster we have discounts available to all staff to different venues and facilities in Cambridge. We also have access to Perkbox, providing all of our staff with discount codes and free items and products.