Paces

Just a bit on the busy side

Managed to meet two deadlines today: got a bid in to Sheffield Rag for children's play space equipment, all a bit tight as the meeting with the supplier, and so getting costings, was only this morning which is why I had to ask Ray to deputise for me on Radio Sheffield with Rony Robinson (and that went well) before we met at a Management Team meeting with a crowded agenda, most of it pointing to how to actually grow a business in the current financial climate, so afterwards had a late working lunch typing up a request from the Lord Lieutenant's office for "gossipy" bullet points about the key people who will be introduced to HRH the Duke of Gloucester next Wednesday (the second deadline as Sharon wanted it 'by close of play today' but sorry, Sharon, I copied some of it from our Free Schools bid CVs so it was probably more formal than you wanted), which was when our Chair of Trustees called to catch up as he'd just got back from holiday, though I couldn't confirm that the woman who is doing the buffet had got back to us with a quote but it will probably be alright, as will the plaque that the Duke will 'unveil' that Gabor (he called me and I had to pop across the building) would rather have up on the wall than on the easel as agreed during the security check visit but Karen said 'I told you so' anyway. And then, more-or-less I went home.

Aside: not a single full-stop ("period"). Much like my day. A good one all in all.

Busy. Busy. Busy

Susie Mallett reminds me in an email that I have not posted in a while. Actually, I've just been so busy - nearly all of it positive and productive. For instance ....

Top priority continues to be the governance changes and the renewed sense of energy and purpose flowing from our new Chair and Trustees. This is massively encouraging.

A close second is our application to become a Free School. Our experience of the process so far is helping is prepare for the new (but delayed) application process for special schools aiming to open in September 2012. We'd love to be able to reach out to parents of children with cerebral palsy all across South Yorkshire, to see what they might think of a new Free School for their children - problem is how!

As I speak, our Headteacher, Gabor Fellner is busy organising the move into our three newly refurbished and magnificent classrooms. I'll post a picture when we get some sunshine. We are hoping the move will be complete by the start of the summer term.

Important conversations are taking place with Sheffield Council about our school  and children's services, but especially about developments we have in mind for our adult services - probably for 2012 rather than this year, but who knows how things change?

We are talking about training and research opportunities, and then there's the SEN Green Paper to prepare a response to .... and so it goes on. 

As always, we'd be glad to hear from anyone asking the same questions, searching for similar solutions.

 

GIGO or Ask the right question ...

Yesterday, to the surprise of some, to the delight of others, I suggested I was looking ahead into 2011 with some optimisim. "Positiveness" might have been a better word but that's a small point.

I ended more-or-less by suggesting that "people like me who are charged with the task [of serving children with disabilities and their families] need to be focusing, not on 'the cuts' but ... creating and uncovering the opportunities and the ways through".

GIGO, "Garbage In Garbage Out", to computer geeks means that, regardless of the correctness of the logic built into the programme, no output ("answer") will be valid if the input ("question") is erroneous.

Already we at Paces - like you possibly - are receiving notifications of conferences/workshops offering to upskill us in the essentials of negotiating/managing/surviving 'the cuts': how to reduce budgets, downsize staff and so on.

For Paces, and maybe for your organisation too, this is the wrong question.

The right question for Paces is something like: how, in a time of evident financial constraint, do we nevertheless continue to expand our service and to promote conductive education?

This is a very different question indeed. Very different. Requiring a quite different mind-set.

Whoever said it would be easy? But we can at least begin with the right question.

 

Top tips for reporting our impact #CondEd

With thanks to @NCVO on twitter:  "Reading: Top tips for reporting your charity’s impact"

"... a recent report from New Philanthropy Capital, Talking About Results, says that charities are much better at talking about what they do than why they do it and what it achieves ..."

I've been trying recently to work out how Paces can make better coordinated use of social networking on the internet to reach out to parents and friends.

I've also been pondering lately how Paces and, more generally, CE can report better what we do.

The 4 'top tips' for talking about results are:

• Bring it back to Why
• Use the voices of the people you support
• Think about how you measure success
• Be honest

I shall now go in search of the New Philanthropy Capital report. You can follow their top tips to the Ask Charity website - one I'd not previously come across and will explore after lunch.

Same coin, maybe - 2 sides, perhaps

Cuts? Or Big Society?

FYI ....

From NCVO:  Lessons for the UK from cutting Canadian VCS and Building a List of Big Society Blogs.

September Song

"September Song": Michael Bywater, in The Independent yesterday, celebrates "the Queen of months", our "most glorious time of year" - an evocative piece.

In Sheffield, the electronic road-signs remind us that September brings the start of a new school year - and to plan our journeys accordingly.

At Paces, we've some substantial longer term business planning to complete by Christmas - which will have the added ingredient of succession planning for the CEO post; there's work on developing our governance frameworks that's becoming imperative; we have reached a challenging moment in our collective ambition to develop the whole Campus, which will require care and imagination; the response to our Free School Proposal, when it comes from DfE, could command our almost exclusive attention; our aspirations for expanding our adult services will continue to be nurtured; and we will need to resolve the part played by fundraising in the charity's incoming resources mix.  Have I missed something, sat here on a Sunday evening in the first weekend of September? No doubt. By Christmas, the 7th World Congress will be over - an occasion that I am greatly looking forward to. So much to look forward to, in fact. 

Do not go grumpy into that last good night

On a personal note ....

"Who's driving that car," I said to no-one in particular, as you do, faced with yet another example of appalling driving behaviour "the dog?" A "Grumpy old man" moment. Is it me or is the world going the dogs? 

The other day, "Look down and back," the friend said, "only to see how high you have climbed, how far you have come. Then turn and look up and forward into the sunshine."  She says things like that.

I now rarely read The Times, neither online nor in printed versions, since Rupert Murdoch put up a paywall.  (And I object to the news this morning about the deal Google's trying to stitch up with the telecoms companies, too.)  But I am aware of often a sentence or a thought, written by a journalist whose trade and living it is, prompts a blog post.  This is one such. This morning an article in the Independent by Terence Blacker, reviewing the life of Jonathan Miller, "Grumpily is no way to grow  old" ends with a ringing statement. And a reminder to me,a personal nudge to work hard at not being a grumpy old man. Well, not all the time, anyway. My sunlit friend would approve of my learning the lesson. I shall quote it in full, with full credit and appreciation to Terence Blacker:

"Do not be hung up on the past. Your greatest triumph, your most shattering disappointment, matters less than what is in the present and the future. The truth is that your contemporaries – for example, the great and good men of the Apostles – may be more solemn and respectable than you are but they are not necessarily leading more worthwhile lives.

Enjoy your successes. Take at least a little pleasure in what you have done or are still doing. No one engaged in creative work feels as appreciated as he should be, but who, in the end, really cares? It is the work that matters. Whingeing about the way it was received makes you, not your critics, seem small and silly.

There are other little lessons. It can get lonely up on Mount Olympus; dismissing others (even journalists) as being intellectually inferior and therefore a waste of time is simply stupid. Not all critics are morons; even the vulgar can be interesting. To be dissatisfied with a life so rich in experience and success is a sort of self-betrayal. By showing a touch of generosity to the outside world, particularly as your grow older, you might just possibly make your world a warmer, more enjoyable place.

"Keep It Real" - Been there. Seen the T-Shirt.

A slogan on a T-shirt worn by someone coming into Paces early this morning gave me the title for this post.

The prompt for the post, however, comes from this morning's Independent newspaper, (previously published in Newsweek, it seems), "Universal Adapter", about Mike Lazaridis, of Blackberry fame. It's an interesting article about innovation, about invention and reinvention, about keeping ahead of the game.

"Innovation is not born of one moment, or one story or even the result of taking risks." Lazaridis says. 

Then, what caught my eye, the prompt for this post, he says: "Really good entrepreneurs only appear to take risks because you don't understand how they made the decision to go from point A to point B."  That resonated with my own experience, not that I am a "really good entrepreneur", but in providing leadership and direction to Paces.

I have on my desk a card by Edward Monkton (check it out in his Gallery), "Where are we going?". I have mentioned it here before. A brief conversation, it ends "Maybe no-one knows" and then, after a pause, "Oh well, I hope it's nice when we get there."

"Understanding" is a two-way communication, of course, with the onus just as much on the speaker or writer to be clear, as on the listener or reader to pay thoughtful attention. The corollary of Lazaridis view, is that often, in my experience, the "entrepreneur" is often not quite sure himself or herself how the "decision to get from point A to point B" was made.  The "entrepreneur" may be clear (unlike the happy souls on Monkton's card) "where we are going", but being clear about the reasoning is not always so easy. There is a risk element, and an intuition, which do not easily lend themselves to hard evidence. And for others to demand that evidence before a decision is taken to set off for Point B, may well destroy the innovative strategy altogether, and, all together, we just wander along with Monkton's happy people.

Take Free Schools, for instance .... and their value to the groups of parents and charities who have come and gone, and some remain, struggling to bring conductive education into the mainstream, so that parents may have some choice in the education of their children with cerebral palsy.  I was recently asked the very reasonable question why Paces was preparing to submit a Proposal to DfE to become a Free School: a question, you might well think, for which a clear, reasoned answer would be straightforward, the case well-made, the benefits and risks assessed and evidenced - before any action is taken. One would think so.

The Proposal form invites those considering an application to "Briefly outline your reasons for wanting to set up a Free School".  That is one sort of answer, one sort of set of reasons: more choice, increased sustainability, greater flexibility and so on, each statement evidenced or able to be evidenced.

But there are other answers and other factors, maybe more important in the process of decision-making, to reaching the conclusion that we should move from Point A to Point B, and some of these reasons may be difficult to explain and evidence and consequently difficult for others easily to understand.

One  'other answer": Mike Chitty has stimulated a discussion "Putting Power in the Hands of Individuals and Communities" about the "Big Society" which for me (I have added a Comment) points to such 'other' answers, less easily set out and grasped perhaps, but to do with the national policy environment in which we in conductive education are trying to bring it into the mainstream, which, as John Popham says in a further Comment, recognising the downside nevertheless "it may also offer the opportunity for people who want to do progressive stuff in education to get things off the ground".  And doing "progressive stuff" is what conductive education and Paces (and others) are about. 

A second "other answer": Tom Legge, New Schools Director at Place Group, who emailed me following my recent posting about Paces' Free School Proposal being submitted, writes of the Free Schools Policy on his LinkedIn Profile, that he is: "Inspired, frustrated and terrified in equal measure with the biggest change in education policy in my lifetime.  Convinced that Free Schools are part of the solution to improve life chances for children and young people". My italics, my opinion exactly.  We are compelled to respond, to seize the opportunity, to create the opportunity if possible by influencing public policy by being part of it. We could, as many are, step back and wait and see. And miss the boat.  

There are more "other answers", equally intangible, to do with our foundation and founding purpose and ambition and searching out our 'place', which are important too. But to return to Mike Lazaridis:

Lazaridis goes on to say that "really good entrepreneurs" make the decisions they do, which seem so full of risk to others, because "they do a tremendous amount of homework".  That resonates with me, too. The decision to put forward a Proposal to create a Free School, comes from "a tremendous amount of homework" over literally years; it is not a step "born of one moment, or one story or even the result of taking risks".  It is a decision, perhaps, less to do with reason than with judgement. And above all, doing everything possible to "Keep It Real".

Been there. Seen the T-shirt!

A surfeit of Governance

A few days or so ago, it was put to me that my managing style as Paces CEO was “too controlling”.  Quite what was meant I’m not at all clear although I don’t think it was a compliment. Actually, I was quite surprised, as I have always thought that not being ‘controlling’, was one of my strengths.

 

Coincidentally, I had been listening when possible to a series on BBC Radio 4 about Democracy. One week, Professor Ali Mazrui (as I recall, it was) expressed the view that whilst Anarchy, at one end of a spectrum, was a perfect absence of Government so Totalitarianism was a perfect surfeit of Government.

 

A fellow-CEO once expressed a similar spectrum in rather more amusing terms.  At times, he said, he was happy to manage by sitting around a table, holding hands and trying to contact the living; at others, he had a Ghengis Khan-like urge to murder and mayhem just to get anything done.  

 

So it is with Governance. This morning I was amused to read Andrew Sutton – writing that governance is “essential” -  saying of me that  “Norman is the only person in the whole of the UK who gives this topic any explicit attention.”

 

Why “amused”? Because whilst I’m sure Andrew intended a compliment, I could just as well by this be thought to be the last lunatic in Bedlam, or Poor Tom wandering the Blasted Heath. There’s more than one person who thinks I spend my time in the La-La-Land of “Vision” rather than the practical realties of what “really matters.”

 

Governance, of course, matters. Following Professor Mazrui, one might say that Gossip, at one end of the spectrum was a perfect absence of Governance; so, at the other – and I struggle for a single equivalent term – the stereotypic Constitution of an association, perhaps, that are so rigid as to give rise, Ealing Comedy style, to endless ‘points of order’, was a perfect surfeit of Governance

 

The trick, it might be said, for any conductive centre, such as Paces, or conductive education in the UK as a whole, is to strike the right balance between the extremes. 

 

Perhaps, when I was advised I was too controlling, it was being said I was “unbalanced” – suffering from a surfeit of governance? That wouldn’t be a first time either: “crazy parent”.

And so, back to it. Fine week away, too.

And so, ever reluctantly, we returned from Pembrokeshire - a 6-hour, 300 mile run with 2 breaks. Sarah loves it there: 3 consecutive days on the beach sheltering from the sun under beach umbrellas; picnics every day; sleeps well at night - and, for "Auntie Sarah", niece Ria and nephew Ryan to look out for. She takes her duties as an Aunt most seriously!

So, back to an important meeting first thing this Monday morning. A tough meeting for all present, I suspect, trying to sort out 'stuff' that's been building up and getting in the way. I'll say no more on that. Tough meetings, though, I don't mind, provided, like this Monday morning's meeting, there's a meeting of minds and a sense of goodwill and people coming together.

An important issue for the meeting - stated and unstated - was "Governance": The systems and processes concerned with ensuring the overall direction, effectiveness,supervision and accountability of an organisation.

Sounds dry and heavy, compared with the 'real work' of delivering conductive education. There's much advice about Governance - just google the word. ("Good Governance: A Code for the Voluntary and Community Sector" still available on the website of the now defunct ChangeUp Governance Hub, is one useful example.)

For the past 15 months (and more, as we took part in the first national BoardsCount™ programme before that) Governance has not been far from my working thoughts: preparing for and then introducing a Board of Governors for Paces School, as a sub-committee of Paces' main Board of Trustees. This has proved a major change that, despite all my engagement with governance, still surprised  me with its impact.

One thought has come to me though: although much is written on Governance, for me, it comes down in its essence to one thing: conversations. Were I allowed one word to define or characterise good governance, that would be it: conversations. And if allowed to expand a little, I would say good governance is about managing formal conversations: who is talking with whom about what, where.

Now take a leap: when it comes to conductive education in the UK who is talking with whom about what, where ?