Paces

A depressingly, narrowly, medical account of CP from Contact-a-Family

A depressing account. Coming up to half-time in the Barcelona-Paris St Germain Champions' League quarter final second leg - and I should not have started fiddling with Twitter.

Had I not done so, I would not have linked to the Contact a Family's website, to "Read all about our enquiry service for professionals who work with families with disabled children", nor would I have checked out what they had to say about Conductive Education (nothing), nor would I then have checked out their link to cerebral palsy, the advice they offer, and I would not have found the following:

Most children with CP will have a normal life, jobs and families, but seven per cent are so disabled they require around-the-clock care and assistance with daily tasks, such as feeding and washing.

Sounds great "most .... normal life, jobs and families". But is it true? Can anyone confirm this from actual figures? I'm sure it must be; as no less than a Professor of Paediatric Neurosurgery, Michael Vloeberghs of Nottingham University Hospital, is apparently credited with it.

Looking further down the page, I thought I'd check out what Contact a Family and Professor Vloeberghs has to say about "treatment" and read this:

As CP is a brain injury, there are only treatments for the physical symptoms and at the moment no cure is available for the condition.

What a depressing statement this is! Is it any wonder that parents are left feelong hopeless - without Hope? There's more. The medical profession can offer:

Treatments can consist of oral medication to relieve the muscle tightness, surgery to avoid deformity of joints because of the muscle tightness and injections of botox in selected muscles, which provides relief from spasticity. Severe spasticity can be relieved with an implanted drug pump that injects baclofen (a muscle relaxant and anti-spastic agent) into the spine, with good results for the general care of the child.

Drugs, surgery and implants. And just in case you have any doubt at all that the medical people have got all this sussed, be warned: 

There are many unconventional treatment programmes ....  None of these treatments are endorsed by healthcare providers and aside from being very expensive they can be dangerous or even fatal.

None of these "treatments" (sic) "are endorsed by healthcare providers" ... "dangerous or even fatal".  So if feeling hope-less is not enough, parents should now feel fearful - or even guilty, for looking elsewhere than the "healthcare providers" on whom they are now so dependent. 

What if we look beyond the "healthcare providers"? Contact a Family's "enquiry service" has nothing at all, nothing at all, to offer the  "professionals who work with families with disabled children" for whom the service is provided, never mind the parents, when it comes to learning development, learning, teaching, and most of all education and upbringing of a child with cerebral palsy.

Why not? Why not? Conductive Education has been available in the UK for years. Contact a Family has been around the block a good few times, too. To purvey such a throughly medical account is no longer acceptable or good enough. No excuse. Hopeless. Depressing. A disservice.

Back to Barcelona.

 

 

 

 

The Conductive Web R.I.P.

The Conductive Web is no more. 

This morning I deleted the Netvibes account for The Conductive Web. The Conductive Web was one of the first attempts - maybe even the very first - to attempt to aggregate links to all conductive education blogs in one place.

The Conductive Post, introduced in 2009, proved itself a much more attractive solution in every way and I ceased to maintain The Conductive Web.   This morning, I visited The Conductive Web Netvibes pages, a veritable graveyard of dead links and long since not-updated blogs. I did the only decent thing and closed it down.

Time to move on. And if you've not recently dropped in to The Conductive Post, do so soon. 

The Economist on early years' education, an international trend

Over the years, I have often found myself making the case for the conductive education of very young children with cerebral palsy, in the face of doubt, disbelief or downright dismissal that education has anything to offer. Surgery? Yes. Drug treatments? Yes. Therapy? Of course.

But education? I am not aware of any mainstream schools or nurseries that offer specialist education programmes, led by specifically trained teachers, for the very young with cerebral palsy. Perhaps somewhere there is but I am not aware of it.

Surgery, drugs and therapy are the "givens" of "intervention" for very young children with cerebral palsy. That the case still has to be made that such children need teaching seems to me to speak volumes about the failure of mainstream provision for these children and their families - and why making the case is such an uphill struggle.

However, there is, apparently, an international trend to a focus on the early years education of the very young. It's not just confined to Liz Truss, Minister for Education and Childcare, it seems.  The Economist today publishes an article "Learning for the very young: Little Steps" which considers this international trend. Even in America:

BARACK OBAMA likes to call education “the currency for the information age”. His presidency has brought a big shift in America’s priorities, devoting more effort and resources—and an extra $2 billion—to children who have not yet started their formal schooling.

I wonder this: if, all over the world, politicians are focusing on "children who have not yet started their formal schooling", might this be the time to make the case for children with cerebral palsy to have their specialist (conductive education) share?  

Evidence in Education: Research and Policy (2)

Once again, the question of evidence and conductive education arises as, indeed, it seems to periodically.

In August and September, 2008, I wrote three posts on the subject of "Evidence-based practice & education" which, on re-reading them today, I feel no reason to amend. I would, however, like to quote from the second of these postings, itself a quotation from the Executive Summary to Understanding the Brain: Towards a New Learning Science,  published in 2002, by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD):

"The science of learning, a branch of human psychology, is still in its infancy. The theory of learning is pre-scientific – in the sense that it lacks as yet either predictive or explanatory power. We do not understand sufficiently well how children and adults learn to dare to offer an educational or training guarantee."

What works and what does not?

That last sentence: "We do not understand sufficiently well how children and adults learn to dare to offer an educational or training guarantee".  struck me then with particular force, and does so still today. I commented then, "In other words, when it comes to Education, we do not know 'what works and what does not' in the sense that we are quite unable to predict outcomes of applying this or that method or whatever in the classroom - at least, according to the OECD".

This seems to me unquestionably true. Were it not so, would we countenance

• 1-in-5 “school-leavers [being] so illiterate and innumerate they struggle to cope with challenges of everyday life” Guardian/University of Sheffield 2010
• 1-in-7 “schools [are] failing to make sure that at least 30% of their pupils achieve five good GCSEs (A*-C) including English and maths.  Metro/DCSF 2009
• 1-in-5 local authorities (9 out of 47) inspected this year were inadequate, "meaning children were at risk". BBC News/Ofsted Nov 2011.
• 1-in4 “primary school boys 'have special educational needs'” Guardian/DfE 2010

This, mark you, in a national education system 140 years on from its founding 1870 Elementary Education Act, nearly 70 years on from the 1944 Education Act and some 35 or more years on from the expansion of comprehensive secondary education in the late 60s and early 70s.

Put bluntly: an independent commentator, faced with the extent of this systemic failure, might reasonably have expected considerably more humility than is generally expressed.

Education is not like medicine.  This drug or that surgical procedure can be predicted with confidence to produce such-and-such an outcome in thus per cent of cases.  So speaks the GP, the paediatrician, the oncologist.  Not so the teacher, nor the Advisor, nor the Inspector, nor even the Secretary of State for Education. None "understand sufficiently well how children and adults learn to dare to offer an educational or training guarantee". 

In this climate, this environment, what evidence could be demanded of, might reasonably be expected about, should be produced by conductive education to prove what works?

To be continued.

 

Being great is rarely a product of not giving a damn

Tom Bennett's latest post "Twilight of the GCSEs; new balls, please" came to me via Twitter and was such an amusing read on a serious subject that I stopped to read others of Tom's posts.

That's how I came to read his post on 5th August Lessons from the Olympics 2: Wanting the World is not enough

Here's how you inspire a child:

Part 1: You tell them they are capable of just about anything
Part 2: You tell them how hard it can be to achieve it.
Part 3: You show them how others have achieved it. No bullshit. No pretending it's easy.
Part 4: You tell them they can do it. Then you pass it to them.

His last sentence is: "It is also our duty to inform them that being great is rarely a product of not giving a damn."

What was it Dr Hari said of conductive education: it being about 'enhancing the quality of intention to achieve'?

The whole post is worth a few minutes of your time. 

The blog design is great, too. Have a play with the tab on the far left of the black menu bar. Or the thin, almost hidden vertical black strip on the far right. How does all that work? And it's not even Wordpress or TypePad but Blogger!

Thanks, Tom.

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Tom Bennett is on twitter as @tombennett71

 

New term. New Free Schools. Time for new schools' politics?

This past week [I began this post on 8^th Sept], as children returned to school, some of them did so for the first time at one of the 55 new Free Schools opening this autumn term. 

Also this week, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Biteback Publishing published "Education, Education, Education: Reforming England's Schools" by former Labour Education Minister, Andrew Adonis. One theme of the book was presaged in an article written by Andrew Adonis for the New Statesman back in March this year: that the roots of current Government Academies and Free Schools policy lie in the work of previous Labour governments.  

The opening of those new Free Schools this term and Adonis's March article were greeted (in the press, on twitter, for instance) with the now familiar arguments that Free Schools are elitist and divisive, drain other schools of funding, threaten standards at other existing local schools, reduce local democratic control and so on.   Here, of course, are important issues of principle and of public policy to be debated and contested.  

What is, perhaps, somewhat surprising is the position taken by some in the Labour Party since the 2010 election: opposing out of government what the Labour Party promoted in government and ceding all credit for the Academies programme and for Free Schools to the present Coalition Government.

I met Andrew Adonis in his office at Sanctuary Buildings in February 2006 thanks to, and accompanied by, our MP Angela Smith. By then, the first Academies had been created and just a few months before, in October 2005, the then Secretary of State for Education Ruth Kelly had published the Schools White Paper, inter alia setting out how parents would be encouraged to bring forward proposals to set up new schools – ‘Free Schools’ in all but name.  (Higher Standards, better schools "This White Paper will create independent state schools, with the freedom to innovate and succeed, backed by new not-for-profit Trusts). Incidentally, at last years’ NASS AGM and Conference, I mentioned, to our conference guest speaker and Shadow Minister for Education with responsibility for SEN, Sharon Hodgson MP, that Free Schools were first proposed by the previous Labour Government.  Shortly afterwards, I sent her a brief letter on the matter.

The encouragement that Paces took from the meeting with Andrew Adonis is captured in an email that I sent a week later to the late, highly respected, Jan Wilson, then Leader of Sheffield Council:

Hello

A brief and encouraging up-date on Paces Campus' news:

Last week, accompanied by Angela Smith, we met with the Minister for Education (SEN) Andrew Adonis. He was clearly interested in what he had heard and read of Paces Campus and expressed an intention to visit to see for himself.  He seemed well-informed. A date for the visit is being arranged with his office.

(As a warmly amusing aside, we were surprising to be welcomed to Sanctuary Buildings by the very member of the Minister's staff who, when in a previous post, had been the woman who had processed Karen Hague's nomination for an MBE.)

Coincidentally, I heard on the same day from the Labour Party Policy Commission (with whom we have been in correspondence for over a year now) that members of the Education Policy Commission would like to visit Paces Campus on either 16th or 30th March. We are to expect between 4-6 people, possibly including Ministers and TUC-nominated members.

In both cases, we are seeking to present the Campus as an innovative model (a "Regional Achievement Centre") within the Government’s strategy 'Removing Barriers to Achievement' which set out a plan to create 'Regional Centres of Expertise'.  ….

We were all very pleased that Jonathan Crossley-Holland [Note: Director, Children and Young People Directorate, Sheffield] recently took time out on what was clearly a very busy day to visit Paces Campus. He asked for us at Paces Campus to do three things which we are very pleased to do (a) to further our local community work with children and families through active support for the Service District pilot (b) to progress the specialist city-wide work with children with disabilities and their families through [Note: name deleted] (c) to attempt to assess, for him, the demand for conductive education in the city.  We in turn hope Jonathan left with the strong message of support from all Campus-group managers for the C&YP Directorate and our willing readiness as a Campus to be an active partner.

Finally, although I am no longer directly involved in the lease negotiation, this having been taken over by High Green Development Trust as you know (and led by Ray Kohn as the Chair), I think it is fair to report that there is an all-round shared sense of guarded optimism as a result of recent conversation with Evelyn Milne.

It is very cheering to be able to make every single report here a positive one!

My regards

That proved to be a high-water mark.  To our great disappointment, Andrew Adonis never did visit Paces Campus despite Angela Smith’s strenuous further efforts. Nor did the visit take place from members of the Education Policy Commission - we never did find out why, our point of contact at the Commission having retired. Time passed: Tony Blair stepped down as Prime Minister, to be replaced by Gordon Brown; Brown moved Andrew Adonis from Education to Transport; Jonathan Crossley-Holland departed Sheffield Council to join Tribal Group; signing off the lease took a further, seemingly interminable, 2 years, until February 2009.

And so, during 2009, with an election looming that looked to most political commentators in the media one that Labour could not win, I as Paces CEO, began to take note of statements by Michael Gove, tipped to be Education Secretary. I already knew of American Charter Schools; now I learned of Swedish ‘Free Schools’.

Becoming evident to myself and others at Paces was that, as far as Free Schools were concerned, a potential change of government was beginning to look much more likely to be a continuation than a reversal of policy and that we should be ready to apply for Paces School to become a Free Special School. 

There are undoubtedly differences between the political parties on how Academies and Free Schools have, and might otherwise have, developed depending on the political party in Government.  However, in The Guardian on Thursday 13^th September, Martin Kettle wrote:

“The single most striking thing about Adonis's insider's account of the launch of academy schools by the Blair government, and of their linear development in Michael Gove's free schools since the coalition took office in 2010, is that it describes what has now become a fait accompli.” 

Neither Adonis or Gove, nor their advisors and civil servants seem to have expected that there might be parents coming forward to propose Special Free Schools.  Repeatedly, both have described Free Schools as “all-ability” schools, as if the main concern was to forestall any notion that Free Schools could be selective schools. (Indeed, the DfE website still does so.) What’s more, I suspect, too, that the rules governing applications for Special Free Schools have still not yet been thoroughly thought through from first principles. Indeed, we may have to wait until the changes proposed in the Green Paper on SEN, now set out in Draft Legislation, are completed, such are the hurdles that face would-be proposers. 

Children coming to Paces School at the start of this term might have been coming to one of the first Special Free Schools ever to open. However, despite being short-listed, our application was not, at the last, approved.  

Martin Kettle continues “It is a mere decade since the first academy schools – independent state schools managed by private sponsors and accountable to national rather than local government – were established. Yet last week, at the start of the new school year, the Department for Education was able to announce that there are now 2,309 of them, representing more than half of the secondary schools in England. More than 2,000 of the total have been opened since 2010.”

These Academies and Free Schools represent a monumental change in the arrangements for schooling in England that is difficult to exaggerate; a change that, in my experience of talking to many people not professionally engaged in education (and, indeed, quite a few who are), has hardly been noticed. Furthermore (and although the complete – and later regretted - removal of Direct Grant Schools from the English system by the early Blair Government stands as a caveat to the contrary), it would seem to be a change that will not be reversed, not, at least for another generation.

What then for those managing, even perhaps struggling to manage, conductive education settings? Paces is considering a fresh application. Others, in my view, should do so. In the 1990s, when most current CE settings were founded, doors were very firmly shut to proponents of new special schools, unless they did so in the private sector, Paces School being one of the very few.

What now? Is there relevance for conductive education? In my view, becoming a Special Free School is an option that all conductive education settings should at least consider, as an aspiration for themselves: with this reservation, that it is not by any means an easy option, undertaken alone. For that reason, I would advocate all and any CE settings who are considering the option of applying to become a Special Free School of coming together and considering the benefits of doing so collaboratively with others of like mind.

Time, perhaps, to ditch old politics and look to the future?

 

Belated farewell to Dr Sonia Sharp - heading down under to Victoria

Sometimes news travels very slowly. We have only just learned of Dr Sonia Sharp's move from Sheffield to Victoria, Australia. Are there parents and conductors active in Victoria?

This is from the City Council website in March 2012.

"Dr Sonia Sharp is leaving Sheffield City Council after being personally asked to lead on services for young children for the State of Victoria, Australia - a more senior role than the one she currently holds.

She was appointed to this senior government role because of the innovative work she has done here at Sheffield City Council for the last four years, in particular the work done to create integrated services for early childhood development.

One of her first tasks will be to establish Multi Agency Support Teams (MAST) similar to ones she has been instrumental in setting up here and which have significantly improved child safety, health and early learning across Sheffield.

Four years ago the Australian government passed legislation to make its children’s services integrated and while good work has been undertaken, there is still significant opportunity for improvement.. Dr Sharp was singled out as the person to lead this work following a global search across countries including Canada, America, New Zealand and the UK.

An announcement will be made at a future date about establishing any replacement for the role of the Executive Director of Children, Young People and Families. "

Read more on the City Council website Children's leader to head up services down under

The Sheffield Telegraph reported the story on 23rd March, though the headline writer's ignorance of her role (Executive Director -  Children, Young People and Families) does not reassure:  "Education chief heads to Australia".

The Autism Education Trust - impressed, I want one for #CondEd

The Autism Education Trust: I'm impressed with what can be achieved, though since it was set up in 2007, I suspect I should have known of them. Is this what we need for Conductive Education in the UK?

"The AET was launched in parliament in November 2007 with support and funding from the government. It is the only umbrella organisation working specifically on autism education across the voluntary, public and private sectors.

The Autism Education Trust (AET) is funded by the Department of Education (DfE) and was founded by Ambitious about Autism (formally TreeHouse), The Council for Disabled Children (CDC) and The National Autistic Society (NAS).
The AET is a partnership of organisations with an interest in autism and works to improve education for children with autism. It is hosted on behalf of the partnership by the NAS.

The AET helps raise awareness of the importance of appropriate educational provision for children and young people on the autism spectrum through a range of dedicated events, information sharing conferences, web based resources and ongoing research and project work.

The AET is governed by a Programme Board made up of professionals, parents and people on the autism spectrum. Its work is informed by a voluntary Expert Reference Group and Youth Council (young people on the autism spectrum and their siblings).

Hanif Kureishi can't skip .... but he is an artist of his own life #CondEd

Here's an article I think most of us in Conductive Education will understand. Unfortunately, it's in yesterday's Sunday Times Magazine section, behind Rupert's paywall: Think and You'll Miss It by writer Hanif Kureishi.

He begins with an amusing admission that, having recently tried, he cannot skip with a rope; his 13-year old son, on the other hand, to whom he handed the rope, "did the whole thing backwards, singing a Beatles song".

Which leads him shortly to:

"My son who can skip and sing, found it difficult for a long time, to read and write at the level of others his age. At primary school he was castigated, even insulted and punished for his inability. After the experts were called in, he was investigated and berated some more, and finally labelled dyslexic and dyspraxic.

"There is, at least, some relief in diagnosis. One is not alone, joining a community of others who have, it appears, a similar condition. But can the inability to do a particular thing be described as a "condition" at all. Would the fact that I can't do the tango, read music or speak Russian be considered a "condition"? Is it a failure of my development? Am I ill?"

He then considers that he was "not much impressed by the imagination and curiosity of the experts" who used an "awkward, objectifying language" and quickly began to talk "fashionably, about brains and chemicals", observing that "Biological determinism is one of psychology's ugliest evasions, removing the poetic human from any issue." ... "What I'm talking about here, I believe, is the attempted standardisation of a human being, and of a notion of achievement that is limited, prescriptive and bullying".

I doubt I can do justice to the main part of his article, but here goes. An 18-year old known to Kureishi, mentioned having been given Ritalin to help him focus, "his mind, he said, kept going off in numerous directions". Rejecting Kureishi's suggestions for alternative causes, the young man, says Kureishi asked himi if "given the choice, I wouldn't prefer to focus at will". This leads Kureishi to consider his own teenage years when "I wanted to be good at things, but, like the Ritalin boy, I fell badly behind at school, finding myself not only unable to learn but at the bottom of my class".

He then goes on to make a powerful case for the value of distraction, provided that the individual be able to "distinguish between creative and destructive distractions by the sort of taste they leave ... and this can only work if he is, as much as possible, in good communication with himself - if he is, as it were, on his own side, caring for himself imaginatively, an artist of his own life."

"There might be more to our distractions than we realised we knew. We might need to be irresponsible. But to follow a distraction requires independence and disobedience; there will be anxiety in not finishing something, in looking away, or in not looking where others prefer you."

It's a challenging thought.

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All the italics here are mine.

 

All human beings are transformable. Last Year in Hong Kong. #CondEd

I’ve not recently been doing as much leisure reading as usual. Half-read is my ‘Christmas book’ “Charles Dickens: a Life” by Claire Tomalin.

Also half-finished is a  book I started ‘before the fire’ Trevor Royle’s “Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms 1638-1660”.

Nearly finished, though something quite else, is “The Hungry Cyclist: Pedalling The Americas In Search Of The Perfect Meal” by Tom Kevill-Davies.

One book I  bought just a few days ago and am now reading for the third time, although admittedly a rather slim volume, is “Last Year in Hong Kong:  Four presentations to the 7th World Congress on Conductive Education, Hong Kong, December 2010” by Andrew Sutton, with a Foreword by Ivan Su, Corporate Programme Coordinator at SAHK.

Here are four snippets on the theme of transformability:

“This ambitious [research] programme that I was following – part psychological, part pedagogical, part philosophical, - some of it practical, some academic – was directed to understanding and demonstrating the transformability of human beings as a product of their social experience”.  p.17

Makarenko – Vygotskii -  Luriya – Feuerstein – Zazzo and Wallon “…. all bore the same central message: the development of  human beings is not fixed, they are not destined to be as they are – they are all transformable.” p.18

[But] “…. there is no coherent concept of pedagogy, upbringing, education that is transformative”. p.18

[conductive education] “… demonstrating yet again that the development of human beings can be transformed by properly structured social intervention”. p.18

“Exposure to Conductive Education had introduced the notion that disabled children’s development can be transformed by disciplined, optimistic, determined and organised educational experiences, in the family and at home”. p.34

Highly recommended to anyone who cares about the future of conductive education wherever you are.

Footnote: on the day I sat down to write this post, DfE published data that, according to BBC News, showed that "Struggling pupils don't catch up". BBC reports:

Just one in 15 (6.5%) pupils starting secondary school in England "behind" for their age goes on to get five good GCSEs including English and maths, official data shows.

The government data published as part of secondary school league tables suggests the majority of schools are failing struggling pupils.

The Comments make depressing, and sometimes cheering, reading.  In the context of "transformability" make of it what you will. I know what I think.