Foxes Hotel has rave reviews on TripAdvisor
Learners staff every aspect of the hotel
a place of work and an education. Foxes Academy teaches them all they need to exist on their own. Head teacher Tracey Clare-Gray explained the origins of the school to PosAbility: “It was all started at the same time by our two former directors, Sue Jenkins and Maureen Tyler-Moore. They had been in the care business, and they recognised that people with learning disabilities could do more than people were getting them to do. “They started the hotel with one learner back in 1996, and it grew from there. They wanted to do it in the hospitality and catering trade because it’s an industry that lends itself very much to this, and also there’s a need for it.” The hotel is open to the public for 38 weeks a year, falling in line with the college year. The hotel is something Clare-Gray believes is critical to the success of the academy: “Because it’s a working hotel, the learners are gaining work experience all the time, and we reflect the hospitality and catering trade. 56
Our learners are on shift patterns – they don’t do work experience 9 to 5 or 2 to 5 on a Wednesday afternoon. “For the first year, they rotate around each department, then they specialise. They get a real depth of understanding in the area they specialise in. Also in the first two years, they’re training in the hotel two days a week, which we up to three days during the final year. “Plus we do other work experience, for example at community hospitals, at the school in Minehead, Holiday Inn, Sainsbury’s, Norton Manor Marine camp, and they get a wide range of experience and work ethic: the importance of turning up clean and early and on time, ready to work.” The work that the educators and learners put in at Foxes Academy was recently recognised at the TES FE awards, which Clare-Gray called the “Oscars” of their industry – when they took the Overall Specialist Provider award, and the coveted FE Provider of the Year award. While the Overall Specialist Provider award was
special for them, the FE Provider of the Year award marks a real paradigm shift, as far as Clare-Gray is concerned, for how specialist education is viewed in a wider sense. “We were up against places like Derwen College and National Star College which are specialist training colleges for people with disabilities, and we knew the competition was very great because of them, they’re triple outstanding on OFSTED. We were thrilled to win Overall Specialist Provider. That was kind of within our category,” said Clare-Gray. “It’s like, we are the best in our class, and that’s brilliant because it’s a great acknowledgement of the amazing work we do here. “To win the FE Provider of the Year was against all of the other winners in all the colleges, so whether it was mainstream or specialist or not. I think that for me is a real game-changer, because it puts learning disability on a par with mainstream education. “I think it’s also recognition that just because young people have learning disabilities, doesn’t mean they can’t obtain the same as people without disability, and it also means that it takes us out of the shadow
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