By Miss Chief | Staffroom Correspondent
At 8.07 on Monday morning, Miss Leading announced that Fallowmere Academy was entering an exciting new phase of development.
This came as something of a surprise to the staff, who had been under the impression that we were still completing the previous exciting phase of development.
Miss Direction assured us that the two were entirely compatible.
Miss Management asked whether either was funded.
We moved swiftly on.
Welcome to Fallowmere Academy for Inclusive Learning. A fictional school with high expectations, an impressive commitment to inclusion and a growing collection of plans explaining how we intend to achieve both.
Resources permitting, naturally.
Our Headteacher, Miss Leading, is a woman of considerable vision. Her assemblies are uplifting, her improvement plans ambitious, and her ability to identify an opportunity for professional growth in an impending disaster is genuinely impressive.
She believes every child can succeed, every challenge can be overcome and every member of staff has the capacity to go above and beyond.
Miss Management has been trying to establish precisely where above and beyond appears in the directed-time calendar.
So far, without success.
A staffroom of specialists
Fallowmere is fortunate to have an exceptionally dedicated team.
Miss Conduct oversees behaviour and standards. She believes in clear boundaries, consistent expectations and the radical proposition that policies should occasionally take account of actual children.
She’s been told that consistency is essential. She’s also been told that every case must be considered individually.
She’s asked for clarification.
Miss Conception leads teaching and learning. She’s been in education long enough to have survived several revolutions in pedagogy, three of which appear to have brought us back to where we started.
She’s not resistant to change. She’d just like to finish evaluating the last initiative before we buy the training package for its replacement.
Miss Direction manages policy and strategy. Her office contains an impressive collection of statutory guidance, consultation documents and implementation plans, several of which were accurate when she printed them.
She’s currently trying to reconcile two requirements that appear to contradict one another.
Both are compulsory.
Neither comes with funding.
Miss Management oversees staffing, budgets and resources. She has the increasingly unpopular job of explaining why something that sounds perfectly reasonable in a meeting may be considerably less reasonable when someone has to timetable it.
She has, for example, pointed out that the same teaching assistant cannot be in three classrooms at once.
This has been recorded as a potential barrier to implementation.
And then there’s Miss Placement, our Head of SEND and Inclusion.
Miss Placement believes passionately that every child deserves to belong, participate and achieve.
She is less convinced that this can be accomplished by adding another column to a spreadsheet.
She also has the unfortunate habit of reading the actual statutory requirements before agreeing that something is deliverable.
It can make meetings rather awkward.
As for me? I’m Miss Chief.
I keep an eye on what’s happening, write things down and occasionally ask whether anyone else has noticed that we’ve just scheduled a meeting about reducing meetings.
Apparently, this is not always helpful.
Our values are at the heart of everything we do
At Fallowmere, we’re enormously proud of our BEAR values.
Belonging. Equity. Ambition. Responsibility.
They’re displayed throughout the academy, referenced in assemblies and carefully woven into our policies.
We are particularly good at Responsibility.
It’s astonishing how much of it can be distributed across an organisation without any corresponding movement of resources.
Equity is proving slightly trickier.
We understand the principle perfectly well. Different children need different things to achieve their potential.
The difficulty comes when those things involve specialist expertise, additional adults, suitable space or actual money.
We’re frequently encouraged to be creative and flexible.
Both excellent qualities in a teacher.
Neither is an adequate substitute for an educational psychologist, a teaching assistant or a quiet room that isn’t currently being used for something else.
Miss Management has raised this at the budget meeting.
I believe the response involved the word challenging.
A school that gets on with it
Now, before anyone gets the wrong impression, Fallowmere is a good school.
Our pupils achieve remarkable things. Staff know their children, adapt their teaching, celebrate the small victories and come back the next morning, even when the previous day has been something of an ordeal.
There are colleagues here who routinely make things work that have absolutely no business working. They’re experienced, resourceful and extraordinarily good at finding solutions. Sometimes those solutions involve staying late, missing lunch or doing something at home because there simply wasn’t time during the school day.
And there are moments that make it worthwhile.
The child who finally puts their hand up. The reluctant reader who asks for another book. The parent who tells us that, for the first time in years, their child is happy to come to school.
I wouldn’t swap those moments for anything.
I would, however, quite happily swap some of the paperwork.
The trouble is that schools have become so good at finding ways to cope that somebody, somewhere, seems to have mistaken coping for having sufficient capacity.
They’re not the same thing.
If a school manages to deliver something through the goodwill and unpaid hours of its staff, that doesn’t mean the provision was adequately resourced.
It means the staff made it happen anyway.
And the next time the same demand is made, that extraordinary effort has quietly become the expected standard.
There’s a familiar pattern to all this.
The ambition is announced nationally, usually accompanied by a reassuring statement about what every child deserves.
Schools are then left to work out how to deliver it, preferably within existing resources.
And when the promised improvement fails to materialise, there will almost certainly be a review to establish what the school could have done differently.
Possibly followed by a toolkit.
We do like a toolkit.
The view from the staffroom
So that’s Fallowmere.
A school full of people who believe in education, care about children and would quite like the system to stop making their jobs unnecessarily difficult.
Through these files, we’ll be sharing some of the more curious aspects of life in English education.
The policy announcements that sound wonderful until someone reads the small print.
The workload reduction initiatives that require staff to complete additional monitoring.
The consultations in which schools are invited to give their professional judgement, provided it arrives at the preferred conclusion.
And those meetings where everyone agrees something must be done, followed by a long silence when someone asks who will do it.
We’ll also be asking some rather less comfortable questions.
About the gap between the provision promised to children and the provision schools can actually deliver. About the decisions made by people who won’t have to implement them. And about why the people closest to the problem are so often expected to solve it with the least control over the resources.
We won’t always agree with one another.
Miss Leading will remain optimistic.
Miss Direction will seek clarification.
Miss Conception will ask for evidence.
Miss Conduct will challenge the process.
Miss Placement will read Section F.
Miss Management will ask who’s paying.
And I’ll be taking notes.
Not because I have all the answers, but because somebody ought to keep a record of how we got here.
Behind the cheerful policy announcements are teachers staying late to finish paperwork, teaching assistants being stretched between pupils who need them, families waiting for support that has already been agreed, and school leaders trying to balance budgets that were never going to balance.
That’s not particularly funny.
What is faintly ridiculous is the belief that another guidance document will somehow make it all work.
We believe every child matters. We believe in inclusion, high expectations and giving children the support they need.
We wouldn’t still be here if we didn’t.
But there’s a limit to what commitment can compensate for, and I think we’ve been rather reluctant to admit that.
Fallowmere will carry on. The staff will turn up on Monday, the children will come through the doors, and Miss Leading will probably have another exciting opportunity to share with us.
Someone will find a way to make it work.
They usually do.
The question is whether we should keep having to.
Welcome to The FAIL Files.
The school is fictional. The problems aren’t.
Miss Chief
Staffroom Correspondent
Fallowmere Academy for Inclusive Learning
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