Fallowmere Academy for Inclusive Learning
Welcome to Fallowmere, where our expectations are high, our resources are finite, and our staff are committed to doing whatever it takes.
Within reason.
Meet the dedicated professionals behind The FAIL Files. Between them, they have several decades of educational experience, an impressive collection of qualifications and an increasingly complicated relationship with the phrase within existing resources.
All are committed to our BEAR values: Belonging, Equity, Ambition and Responsibility.
Particularly Responsibility. There’s quite a lot of that going around.
Miss Leading
Headteacher
Miss Leading has a vision.
Several, in fact. All carefully aligned with the latest national priorities.
A passionate advocate for inclusive education, she believes there is no challenge that cannot be overcome through collaboration, determination and a sufficiently ambitious school improvement plan.
She is particularly proud of Fallowmere’s positive culture and remains confident that the school is moving in the right direction.
Miss Direction is currently checking which direction that is.
Writes about: Leadership, vision, school improvement and turning challenges into exciting opportunities.
Miss Conduct
Behaviour & Standards
Miss Conduct believes in high expectations, consistent boundaries and treating children like human beings.
She has read the behaviour policy. She has also met the children.
Occasionally, these two experiences are difficult to reconcile.
She is particularly interested in the difference between consistency and inflexibility, and why every behaviour initiative seems to promise both improved relationships and an additional spreadsheet.
Writes about: Behaviour, discipline, relationships and rules that sounded perfectly sensible in the meeting.
Miss Direction
Policy & Strategy
Miss Direction is responsible for ensuring that Fallowmere remains compliant with the latest statutory guidance.
She is currently implementing three national strategies, two revised frameworks and something announced at a conference last Tuesday.
She has an excellent grasp of educational policy and an increasingly impressive collection of superseded documents.
Her greatest professional ambition is to finish implementing something before it changes.
Writes about: Government policy, consultations, inspection frameworks and initiatives still awaiting clarification.
Miss Management
Staffing & Resources
Miss Management oversees the academy’s staffing, budgets and operational arrangements.
She is widely regarded as a miracle worker, largely because colleagues keep requesting miracles.
She has repeatedly explained that a 0.6 FTE employee cannot provide full-time coverage, that additional responsibilities require additional time, and that the same teaching assistant cannot support two classrooms simultaneously.
These observations have been noted.
Writes about: Staffing, budgets, workload and the creative interpretation of available capacity.
Miss Conception
Teaching & Learning
Miss Conception has survived enough educational revolutions to recognise several of them from the last time they came around.
She believes in evidence-informed teaching, thoughtful curriculum design and asking awkward questions during professional development.
Her professional interests include cognitive science, assessment and determining whether the latest groundbreaking initiative is simply good teaching with a new acronym.
She is not resistant to change.
She would just quite like to know whether it works.
Writes about: Teaching, learning, educational myths and research that has been enthusiastically misinterpreted.
Miss Placement
SEND & Inclusion
Miss Placement believes passionately in inclusive education.
She also believes it should exist outside PowerPoint presentations.
Her particular expertise lies in translating statutory provision, specialist recommendations and parental expectations into something that can actually happen in a secondary school on a Wednesday afternoon.
She spends much of her time explaining that welcoming a child and meeting their needs are related, but not identical, activities.
Her inbox suggests this distinction has yet to gain widespread acceptance.
Writes about: SEND, EHCPs, inclusion, placements and the increasingly interesting relationship between statutory duties and available resources.
Miss Chief
Staffroom Correspondent
Miss Chief is responsible for documenting the more curious aspects of life at Fallowmere.
She has an exceptional memory for things said in meetings, particularly those subsequently described as having been taken out of context.
She believes school life contains enough genuine absurdity without anyone needing to invent additional material.
Her colleagues are generally pleased to see her.
Until she opens her notebook.
Writes about: Staffroom life, educational nonsense, questionable initiatives and meetings that should never have happened.
A note from the editor
Fallowmere Academy is fictional. So are its staff, their photographs and their professional biographies.
The issues they discuss are inspired by real challenges in English education. Experiences may be altered or combined, and no character represents a particular real-life individual.
The FAIL Files exists to question the systems, policies and decisions shaping our schools, not to ridicule the children, families and professionals navigating them.
We believe in education. We believe in inclusion. We believe in the people doing their best to make both work.
We are less convinced by unfunded action plans.
The FAIL Files
The school is fictional. The problems aren’t.
