For a while now, I've found myself taking a passing interest in statements from the Green Party. Particularly noticeable has been the Greens' move, under the leadership of Caroline Lucas, MEP and parliamentary candidate for Brighton Pavillion in the coming election, from being a broadly single issue party campaigning on the environment to taking wider political positions.
For instance, the other day, I chanced upon a report in Third Sector magazine that the Green Party would take away charitable status from private schools. Somewhat mischievously, I commented on this on the Facebook page of my colleague Steve Barnard: "Less Green, more pinko-liberal-lefty"? Steve is the Green Party candidate for Sheffield Hallam, the constituency of Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg.
Steve's reply was to ask me: "Would Paces not want to be assimilated into the state sector?" His question deserved a better response than the rather hasty, embarrassing thought I was able to put together - which I'll leave you to track down for yourself if you care to.
But the question has stayed with me. It's a good question. Not just for Paces' people to answer about Paces School but for all of us in conductive education.
The work on the courtyard at the centre of Paces Campus is now almost completed: the nursery play space is surrounded by a removable picket-style fence. I must say, it does look much better than I thought it would. Its aesthetic appeal matters little; nor does the fence serve any practical play purpose. But the children are seen to be safeguarded from predatory adults and those to whom the regulation applies can look forward with a little more confidence to their Ofsted inspections. One might say that the fence protects them too.
Like other bloggers, I make notes from time to time about possible blog post subjects. Unusually, I didn't make a note of the source of this observation that since about 1990 successive British governments have made more than 400 regulatory pronouncements relating to children and young people: 98 Acts of Parliament, 82 strategies and 77 initiatives.
Whether or not one agrees with the Greens, I think it's fair to say that their perspective or standpoint on the environment is a radical and future-orientated one. (You might think it all or in part rather wrong-headed. That's as may be. My point is that the Greens challenge us all to think about the sort of planet, the sort of environment, in which we wish our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren to grow up.)
This is not the case, however, when it comes to their foray into Education policy. If the best they can do, if their headline policy, is to remove charitable status of private schools, then they are not demanding of themselves, not demanding of us, the sort of radical challenge to their own thinking, and ours, that they demand on environmental policy.
How radical? Well try this: read the following question and listen carefully to your reaction on reading it: "Would it matter if we did away with compulsory schools and schooling?" Are you shocked or liberated?
In part, my answer to Steve Barnard's question is that, yes, I want to see conductive education and upbringing as part of the mainstream, so that all children who can benefit do so. Can I foresee a radically different mainstream from the compulsory state sector school provision available to most children and their parents that we have on offer today? Yes - but it won't be easy. Can I foresee a radically different mainstream provision for children with cerebral palsy than is on offer now in the mainstream? That is a much easier question to answer - Yes, absolutely. Conductive education and upbringing.
We are where we are. As I write, BBC TV news is reporting that the National Association of Headteachers is planning to boycott SATs tests this summer: part of the regulatory framework that now dominates schools and schooling imposed by successive governments. Time for change?
