Things that pop up while Googling

I was actually checking on the weather forecast. I noticed that the Google Blog Search tool hadn't up-dated itself and set off poking about to find out why.

Which explains how I came across this charity commission adjudication into the affairs of the Cerebral Palsy Children's Charity, apparently posted on 28 July 2008, but looks dated. (There's a posting on the Charity Commission website too but undated). This led me to "brainpalsy.com" which appears to be a blog but lacks any kind of identification of the author, other than perhaps a picture of her.  Maybe I'm missing something? What's it all about?

From there, I noticed an ad at the top of the page for "Snowdrop" - based in Cullompton, Devon (just up the road, as it were, from where my Dad was born), offering "Neuro-cognitive therapy for cerebral palsy, autism and other developmental problems". Snowdrop's home page states that it's a "private consultancy in child development which provides treatment for cerebral palsy and children who suffer other development difficulties". Aside from the use of the word "suffer" which I shall always object to seeing used in such contexts and the unresolved intellectual muddle between "therapy" and "learning" evidenced in these pages, I also noted the references to and reliance on the theoretical undertandings of Vygotsky to underpin the author's consultancy in neuro-cognitive therapy for cerebral palsy. Maybe I'm just betraying a vast hole in my own knowledge? What's all this about then?

Then I came across The Partridge Trust. Apparently a grant-giving organisation in Andover, Hampshire, helping children access conductive education. However, its "Events" and "News' pages seem to relate only to 2001 and 2002.  I pondered on the Cerebral Palsy Children's Charity calling itself The Yorkshire Conductive Education Centre and under that name, children attending getting funding from The Partridge Trust. Is all this just the detritus of the history of conductive education in the UK? Is Snowdrop and the rest part of a wider attempt to break the education of children with cerebral palsy free from the strangehold of health, therapy and rehabilitation?

For now, I shall dig a little deeper.

Comments

[Andrew Brereton]

I noticed your link to the Snowdrop website via my website statistics passage and just dropped into your blog in order to see what it is all about. How apt that you are based in Sheffield, a city I am very familiar with, - I have family in Beauchief and gained one of my qualifications (PG Dip in language and communication impairments in children).

I hope you do not mind my responding to what you wrote about Snowdrop as I thought it was a little innaccurate. I apologise if our website perhaps doesn't make our theoretical position clear.

Might I begin with your objection to the use of the word 'suffer' in connection with children with cerebral palsy. As a parent of a child with cerebral palsy for sixteen years, I watched my child suffer every day of his life. He suffered every time he experienced an epileptic episode, every time he experienced an abnormal movement, which painfully twisted and contorted his body, every time his anxiety levels raised due to an over-production of noradrenaline, every time he lay, unable to sleep because of this, every time he suffered constipation and every time he choked on his food or his own saliva, the aspiration of which often infected and caused pneumonia. I eventually watched that suffering cause his horrific death, so yes, the suffering of children with cerebral palsy is real and to deny it or attempt to diminish it by arbitrary semantics is to be almost delusional! These are merely some examples of how my own child suffered and I see his suffering reflected in many of the children I see.