Paces

The woman who changed her brain - in 1978

Coincidentally, another 'brain' piece. (Yesterday, I posted about an Observer article Who's in charge - you or your brain?) This time a piece from the author of the recently published "The woman who changed her brain" (which I haven't read, btw, just this article "Why I wrote 'The Woman who changed her brain'"), Barbara Arrowsmith-Young.

The writer, recounting her own experiences, seems to understand implicitly that her success was 'self-taught', with an emphasis on 'taught', implying teaching and learning, albeit she was both teacher and learner, and yet, in the article, seems more comfortable with the vocabulary of 'exercises' and 'repetition' - just one technique for teaching and learning. One suspects, on the flimsy evidence of this article, there was more to her successful transformation, than 'exercises' and ' repetition'.

This is what she herself writes though:

"I the­o­rized that a per­son could trans­form weak areas of the brain through repet­i­tive and tar­geted cog­ni­tive exer­cises. With much read­ing and an intu­itive under­stand­ing of the brain’s func­tion­ing, I invented a series of cog­ni­tive exer­cises to “fix” my own brain."

This, though, and perhaps quite remarkably, was 1978, when she was a graduate student in psychology. She does well to remind us of "the 1950’s and 60’s when the brain was viewed as unchange­able" and as a consequence she, and others like her, were advised - and expected - to "live with her limitations". 

It is an era that I also grew up in and, like the author, went to school and started teaching, quite assured that our limitations - and our potential - were set by our brains. Not until I met conductive education (to my regret, having, unlike the writer, ignored an introduction to Luria and Vigotsky at postgraduate teacher training college in 1968-9), did I understand something I had begun to suspect - we can learn and we can be taught all our lives.

Anyhow, she writes of 1978, a time, as she writes, "long before the con­cept of “neu­ro­plas­tic­ity” was widely under­stood. At the time, the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity believed this kind of trans­for­ma­tion was impos­si­ble, but the exer­cises did indeed, in my first-hand expe­ri­ence, rad­i­cally improve the func­tion of the weak­ened areas of my brain."

I wonder how differently she might have accounted for, and recounted, her own first-hand experience, had she been, not a pschologist, but a pedagogue?

What is the purpose of schools? asked Anthony Seddon

What is the purpose of schools?

Writing in the Sunday Times (£pay site) a couple of weeks ago (“Think Tank: New Ideas for the 21^st Century”), Anthony Seddon, Master of Wellington College, approved much that Michael Gove has done as Education Secretary, whilst suggesting “If he has a blind spot, however, it is his lack of a vision for the purpose of schools”.

“Gove has let exam passes become the all-important validator of the worth of a school .... Exams, are, of course essential. They allow us to measure the progress of students and school performance. But they are not the whole purpose of schools. The objective that Gove needs to prioritise now is character building.”

Seddon sets out his case by calling on: David Levin, co-founder of the Knowledge is Power Programme, (who realised … “those who possessed character strengths such as resilience and tenacity” were succeeding at university, not necessarily those who had been the top students at their schools); Angela Duckworth, (“a psychologist who showed that self-control could be a more reliable predictor of students’ university success than IQ”) and Martin Seligman (“a pioneer of ‘positive psychology’, who had identified no fewer than 24 character strengths that could be developed in schools”).  With Dominic Randolph, Head of New York private school, Riverdale, David Levin reduced Seligman’s 24 character strengths to 7 “which they made the cornerstones of their respective school’s programmes”:

• self-control
• grit
• zest
• social intelligence
• optimism
• gratitude
• curiosity

Noting “Independent schools, as we all know, major on the development of character”, Seddon points to examples of state schools that are “showing the way”: King Solomon Academy primary school in northwest London; West Kidlington primary school in Oxfordshire; and Kings Langley secondary school in Hertfordshire.

So what is the purpose of schools? Of the purpose of schooling? Or, for that matter, the purpose of Education?

When I read this, I wanted to ask a couple of questions:

What is the purpose of parents?

What of upbringing? Is it even meaningful to talk of the purpose of upbringing?

 

 

 

 

 

Life long learning. Life long play (with thanks to @MaxMckeown) #CondEd

I especially liked the opening of this blog posting "Life long learning. Life long play" from Max Mckeown (@MaxMckeown on Twitter). The whole post is worth a read.

There’s an entrepreneurial art, the ability to see, and the guts to grab opportunities. Like all art, people have different aptitudes, like all art, people can learn. Learning the entrepreneurial art, requires the confidence to bet on yourself. And that confidence can be learned through practice and praise.

If society wants more entrepreneurial growth, then perhaps education should emphasis practice and praise. Instead of stopping the free play at five years old, free play should be encouraged throughout education. Throughout life.

Instead of school sharing out limited opportunities, education can be a way of creating unlimited opportunities. In this way, school stops being an incantation of the possible, and starts being an exhortation to the impossible. Each day, each child can choose to stay within neat, ruthless orthodoxy or decide to explore messy, forgiving unorthodoxy.

If our schools reflected the very best of us, they would be neighborhoods, communities, places of adventure and imagination. School has to do far more than let our children know where they rank on a four point scale.

A fanciful thought, maybe, but does "the confidence to bet on yourself", as Max puts it, sound just a little like what conductive upbringing and pedagogy is all about? Or what Mike Chitty calls "becoming"? Or Dr Hari writing about 'enhancing the quality of intention to achieve'?

Mind you, I remember Helen Pemberton (a conductor who worked with us at Paces a while back) once stressing to me that we do not emphasise enough the importance of play. Anyone for the early years foundation curriculum?

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@ and # are used on twitter as special signs.

Inspire me today? Glenda certainly does.

Glenda Watson-Hyatt has written a great piece at "Inspire me today".

I'll not add anything to what Glenda has written but just let you take a look for yourself.

Except this: it seems to me there are people we meet who understand almost instinctively the transformational potential in and for our lives of learning and doing - and are an inspiration to the rest of us.

Conductive education - education, education, education

"Conductive Education" is not an alternative therapy; it is an alternative education.

"Conductive Education" is a philosophy of education. It is an integrated system and practice of education. It is not about what goes on in hospitals and health centres; it is about what goes on in schools. It is not about what physical therapists do; it is about what teachers do. It is not about the training of physical therapists; it is about the training of teachers. It is not about research into therapeutic interventions; it is about research into learning and teaching.

Now, we can discuss my use of the word "alternative"; we can debate whether "conductive pedagogy" or "conductive upbringing" are better translations into English than "conductive education".

But what should be evident as we read or hear or speak or write the phrase in English "conductive education" is that we are reading or hearing or speaking or writing about education. 

Education. Education. Education.  Not physical therapy. Not "conductive physical therapy". Not "conductive therapy". Not "therapy".

How then, does a philosophy and system of education find itself amongst the following list of physical therapy interventions (tagged by its authors 'Pediatrics' 'Pediatric interventions'?

• adapted seating for children with cerebral palsy
• constraint-induced movement therapy
• lower extremity casting, orthoses and splints for children with neurological disorders
• neurodevelopmental treatment
• partial body weight supported treadmill training
• passive stretching to improve range of motion
• strengthening for children with cerebral palsy
• weight-bearing interventions for children with cerebral palsy

This list is tagged by its authors with the keywords "Pediatrics" and "Pediatric interventions";  it appears in an article "Review of selected physical therapy interventions for school age children with disabilities"; the article appears in a journal entitled "Physical Therapy Reviews".

When I was 60, I decided to learn to play the violin. I was initially surprised to discover what an intensely physical activity playing a violin is.  I was also more pleasantly surprised to discover that learning to play the violin is remarkably therapeutic. 

But I was not intent on music therapy. I was intent on learning to play the violin. 

"Cerebral palsy in the classroom"

At a private gathering yesterday, while waiting for the main guest and speaker, I was inevitably asked what I did, then about the education of children with cerebral palsy and then, of course, what was conductive education.

Generally, I try to shift the last question and come at the answer from a different direction, rather than directly. A remarkable number of people asked, for instance, how they would advise a young relative who wished to train to be a teacher of children with cerebral palsy are astonished to discover that not only is such teacher training not an option in the UK, their young relative cannot train specifically and specially as a teacher of disabled children: thus making the stark contrast with the training of conductors in CE that teachers entering upon a classroom where there are children with cerebral palsy haven't necessarily a clue about CP or how to teach a child with CP. Alternatively, I might ask when the questioner last heard of a national conference on the education of children with cerebral palsy, in order to point out that - unlike with the education of children with other educational disabilities, the mainstream educational world did not find this a subject worthy of time and debate. OR I might suggest to them that if they were to google "cerebral palsy" and "education", they would find little of informative value (other than conductive education) as compared with googling "cerebral palsy" and "therapy" which would produce many 'hits', but with little value to an enquiry about teacher-training, pedagogy and curriculum.

So I was intrigued, a moment ago, whilst checking on the stats for this blog (number of views; source of referrers etc), to notice that some one person on the planet had done a search on bing for "cerebral polcy in the classroom". Wondering what bing had found them, I went to take a look, as you can if you click on the link just above.

The most promising-sounding search results bing offered the searcher were:

How children with cerebral palsy are educated in the regular classroom

and

How to help students with cerebral palsy: teaching kids with limited mobility in the regular classroom

Both offer standard medical explanations of CP. 

The first then reduces the role of the educator to not much more than an arranger of furniture: "Teaching children with cerebral palsy is often an unfamiliar circumstance for a regular education instructor, but with assistance from therapeutic programs and access to modifications in the classroom, students with CP can thrive in a general setting alongside their non-disabled peers."

The second then has a 14-point plan for the teacher, which puts preparing the other pupils as its first three points (think - this only works if the incoming alien with CP is the very first into this classroom) as the priority ahead of being an arranger of furniture (which comes in at only the 4th point) but helpfully proposes as 5th and 6th points that the teacher should "keep the floor clean" and "use antibacterial cleaners". 

I wonder what my bing searcher made of this? Did they find the pages helpful? Did they learn something of the subject they were researching? Was the searcher a trainee teacher and the need for antibacterial wipes when including pupils with CP in the regular classroom end up in a coursework essay - and what grade was it awarded? Or was the searcher a Mum or Dad, seeking re-assurance about a school placement recommended by their child's local education authority?

How depressingly little it all has, as I said earlier, to do with teacher-training, pedagogy and curriculum. Or, how little to do with the notion that I mentioned in a previous posting, that education is a transformational process and purpose that might inspire the minds of teacher and pupil alike, together. Even those with cerebral palsy.

What kind of human beings?

This evening, 22 November, Mike Chitty tweeted two short quotes from Rowan Williams’ Keynote Address “Human Well-Being and Economic Decision-Making” at the TUC Economics Conference in London on Monday 16 November 2009:

“We need to be able to say what kind of human beings we hope to be ourselves and to encourage our children to be.”

and

 “To decide what sort of change we want, we need a vigorous sense of what a human life well-lived looks like”.

Here are some longer extracts from Rowan Williams address:

Economy' (Rowan Williams begins) is simply the Greek word for 'housekeeping'. Remembering this is a useful way of getting things in proportion, so that we don't lose sight of the fact that economics is primarily about the decisions we make so as to create a habitat that we can actually live in ….

 …. we have to ask what an economy would look like if it were genuinely focused on making and sustaining a home – a social environment that offered security for citizens, including those who could not contribute in obvious ways to productive and profit-making business, an environment in which we felt free to forego the tempting fantasies of unlimited growth in exchange for the knowledge that we could hand on to our children and grandchildren a world, a social and material nexus of relations that would go on nourishing proper three-dimensional human beings – people whose family bonds, imaginative lives and capacity for mutual understanding and sympathy were regarded as every bit as important as their material prosperity ….

 Human beings all begin their lives in a state of dependence. They need to learn how to speak, how to trust, how to negotiate a world that isn't always friendly. They need an environment in which the background is secure enough for them to take the necessary risks of learning – where they know that there are some relationships that don't depend on getting things right, but are just unconditional ….

 I also mentioned people's imaginative lives. We are not only dependent creatures, we are also beings who take in more than we can easily process from the world around; we know more than we realise, and that helps us to become self-questioning persons, who are always aware that things could be different. We learn this as children through fantasy and play, we keep it alive as adults through all sorts of 'unproductive' activity, from sport to poetry to cookery or dancing or mathematical physics. It is the extra things that make us human; simply meeting what we think are our material needs, making a living, is not uniquely human, just a more complicated version of ants in the anthill ….

I was reminded of conductive education. I had just recently re-read Rony Schenker's Google knoll:

Conductive Education is based on the belief in the capacity of individuals for change. This is an expression of a philosophy that claims that individuals can learn and individuals can change if they learn. Conductive Education recognizes that learning is not dependent upon inherent abilities, but that new abilities are created as a result of learning.

 Rony begins her knoll on conductive education with a tellingly relevant quote from Carl Rogers:

"If I accept the other person as something fixed, already diagnosed and classified, already shaped by his past, then I am doing my part to confirm this limited hypothesis. If I accept him as a process of becoming, then I am doing what I can to confirm or make real his potentialities."

The something else I had re-read recently came to mind too. In a paper “Conductive Education ... Emphases For Educational Research” presented at the European Conference on Educational Research in Ljubljana, Slovenia 17 - 20 September 1998, Andrew Sutton said:

“Conductive Education is a cognitive education and asserts that the course and rate of children's development can be changed in both its affective and its intellective aspects. [CE is ...]

•       the philosophy that children and adults can and will learn ways to do things that they could not do before, as long as they are taught in a way that creates in them the determination to do so;
•       a range of techniques and teaching methods appropriate to the task, including emotional bonding between teacher and learner through shared tasks, internalisation of external verbalisation, strong emphasis on rhythm and economy of restraint and physical aids;
•        appropriate organisational arrangements to optimise the efforts and effectiveness of teacher and learner.

 In New York, 3 years later, in March 2001, Andrew said:

“Conductive education is a cognitive education …. an educational process which does not exploit what is there mentally; it creates what is there mentally. It transforms thinking, human learning, human personality – unashamedly, determinedly – and I would say, successfully.”

 

Throughout all that I have quoted here, there is a belief, a conviction, an assertion that the Hope of change, transformation, “becoming” is not only possible, but most of all it is a matter of choice.  

Rowan Williams is talking about economic choices and ‘the social environment’. He could has well have been talking about choices for education and ‘the educational environment’ – in particular, for the education of those citizens he is careful to include “who could not contribute in obvious ways to productive and profit-making business”.  

At the Peto Institute, in Budapest, in 1992, as a former schoolteacher, conductive education challenged me to re-assess all that I had assumed to be so about the process of learning and teaching.  As a parent, conductive education confronted me with a simple choice: what did I want for my child from her education?  More of the same? Or something different?

 

Pedagogic nihilism

In a great posting today, "The good news ... and the same old dreary mixture", Andrew Sutton has come up with the truly wonderful phrase "pedagogic nihilism". It's just got to be an invention of Andrew's. It might be the first time the phrase has ever been seen in print. A search on Google produces zero results. In the whole world of the internet, the only occurrence of the phrase is today, on Andrew's blog.

And what a wonderful, illuminating, phrase. Intellectually satisfying. Amusing even. A phrase to roll around the mind and along the corridors of power. A phrase that sums up in just two words, everything that I see conductive education as being opposed to: that nothing much is to be done because nothing is much better than anything that is being done and anyway nothing is much better than anything else. And then I remembered as a parent the first time I was told that I should not get my hopes up too much.  

I thought I'd check out "nihilism" on Wikipedia and it went something like this:

Nihilism (from the Latin nihil, nothing) is the philosophical position that values do not exist but rather are falsely invented. Existential nihilists argue that Life itself is without meaning, purpose or value. Moral nihilists assert that morality does not exist and so there are no moral values by which we can live our lives.

Then I found mereological nihilism. (No, don't stop reading. Bear with me a minute). That's one I hadn't even heard before so I took a look. Mereological nihilists argue that "objects with proper parts do not exist" so that "world we see and experience as full of objects with parts is a product of human misperception (i.e., if we could see clearly, we would not perceive compositive objects)." 

Perhaps we're getting in a bit deep here. Let's get back to "the real world" and Andrew quoting The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which in turn quotes Dori Ortman, Program Coordinator for UCP Kids:

It's important to key on what's best for the child, rather than trying to determine whether one therapy or approach might be better than another.
'"What we [at UCP Kids] try to focus on is what we believe: That the best outcomes come from kids' involvement in the community. How can we change the community to accept that child for who they are?"

Put aside the confusion between 'education', 'therapy' and 'approaches'. The "best outcomes", assert the pedagogic nihilists come not from preferring this system of education over that system of education but from rejecting education altogether in favour of "involvement in the community" and getting the community "to accept the child for who they are".  The trained and experienced medical professional who told me not to get my hopes up too high for my daughter would have understood perfectly. Accept her as she is and get everyone else to do the same. Don't get your hopes up. False hopes.  (Didn't Andrew once say or write that the opposite of "false hope" was not "true hope" but despair? But let's not get too far diverted from nihilism, else we might lose track of what's real and what is not :-) 

So the mereological nihilists gang up with the pedagogic nihilists against me and it's not that my daughter has any problems, it's that the others have problems of perception; if the others could only see clearly, my daughter wouldn't have a disability! Just sort out the others and everything is fine.

As my late dear friend, Michael Gray, used to say when asked how he was: "I'm fine. It's the others."

Instead, I chose the transformational power of education. And began my journey into conductive education. What else was there? Nothing.  Nihil ex nihilo fit.  Nothing will come of nothing. 

"Nothing", by the way, along with the metaphor of blindness, are two of the great themes of Shakespeare's "King Lear".  I read "King Lear" in the Sixth Form. About the same time I first saw "West Side Story". "Gee Officer Krupke", sings Riff, "I got a social disease. I'm depraved on account I'm deprived".  It's nothing to do with Riff. In Michael Gray's words: "It's the others", the community.  Nihilism, like Love, is all around.   (I was a Troggs fan, sorry.)

"Pedagogic nihilism". Wonderful, Andrew. Thanks for amusing me for most of the evening.

Talking about the education of children with cerebral palsy

The following article appears in Issue 37 Nov/Dec 2008 of SEN: The Journal for Special Needs. Comments on the issues raised in the article are most welcome.

Talking about the Education of Children with Cerebral Palsy

“The problem, Norman,” said the Education Officer (SEN), “is that we do not agree with your view of cerebral palsy, so we do not see that conductive education has anything to offer us.”

She added that in making placements at schools, her LEA relied on assessments by paediatricians and therapists. I did not at all find that reliance surprising as there is, as far as I can tell, little or no national debate among education professionals about the education of children with cerebral palsy nor about the criteria, based in any theory of learning, that determines school placements: as with schools, so with children’s centres. At bottom, the Education Officer was content that we have the education of children with cerebral palsy about right, no further discussion being necessary.

In the July/August edition of this journal, two articles were specifically relevant to the education of children with cerebral palsy. The first “Cerebral Palsy” (p30) presented an almost entirely medical view. Only towards the end was the education of a child with cerebral palsy obliquely addressed: “Teachers should be aware that learning difficulties may be present but this is not the rule.” The second article “Inclusion and Special Education” (p74) made a similar point, but largely ignored questions about the education of children with cerebral palsy, instead making a series of rather general points about the benefits of inclusion as ‘the absolute key to true equality and tolerance”. 

This may well be true. Certainly, my Education Officer would have felt entirely comfortable with and justified by these two articles: the view presented of cerebral palsy and the education issues limited to setting out the pro-inclusion case, as if that was all that mattered.

What else matters, for all children, are important questions about teaching and learning and about how we know what works: the quality of training of their teachers, the curriculum and pedagogy, that together define children’s learning experience.  As for children with cerebral palsy, such discussions have been largely absent from the national educational debate, at least since the 1980s, when, for me, SEN became personal and professional.

Recently, demand has rightly increased for evidence-led policy and practice in education, as in medicine. However, the OECD [Fn.1]  has this warning: “Education is not an autonomous discipline. Like medicine or architecture, it relies on other disciplines for its theoretical foundation. But unlike architecture or medicine, education is still in a primitive stage of development. It is an art, not a science” and “We do not understand sufficiently well how children and adults learn to dare to offer an educational or training guarantee”.  If true, where does that leave my Education Officer and her certainty in her view of the education of children with cerebral palsy?

Conductive Education offers an alternative perspective: an integrated system and practice of education that addresses simultaneously, the cognitive, emotional and physical development and learning of the child. Conductive Education recognises that cerebral palsy is an injury to the developing brain and that whilst the primary problem is physical and non-progressive, asserts that the effect upon all areas of development may be constantly changing and may result in a generalised dysfunction that can and should be addressed as problems of learning. Conductive education welcomes the contribution of professional colleagues in the education of the child, yet does not require multi-professional teams, rather, as with the teacher in any other classroom, giving the prime role to the conductor; a professional with four years theoretical and practical training. Conductive education, therefore, not only provides a different viewpoint about the nature of cerebral palsy, it has something to say about the training of those charged with the education of children with cerebral palsy and about the structured environment (including pedagogy and curriculum) in which their learning takes place. 

Let’s start talking .

Norman Perrin [Fn.2]

Footnotes
Fn.1 Understanding the Brain: Towards a new learning science. Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2002.  Readers might also be interested in Understanding the Brain: The Birth of a Learning Science and Evidence in Education: Linking Research and Policy, both also published by the OECD 2007.
Fn.2 Norman qualified as a teacher in 1968, afterwards working in Kenya and the UK. In 1990, following the birth of a daughter with cerebral palsy, he learned of conductive education. In 1997, helped by Sheffield Council, he co-founded Paces School and Campus. In 2007, a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship, enabled him to research innovation in the education and training of children and adults with cerebral palsy in Canada and America.

Is this not a species of insanity?

I have asked before on this blog, when and where the debate on the education of children with motor disorders such as cerebral palsy is taking place.  I was interested then to read in an email I received this week, the announcement of a "Cerebral Palsy Feature in the July/August issue of SEN magazine" and inviting Paces to buy advertising or advertorial. "The lead editorial will be produced in conjunction with Scope," the email informed me.

It's not often cerebral palsy features in any educational context, so I responded by enquiring about the content and "angle" of the lead editorial. Impressively quickly, I received the following reply: "The lead editorial in the Cerebral Palsy feature will provide an overview of the condition. It will then go into detail about how the educational sector will cope now that more and more children with disabilities, especially those with cerebral palsy, are going into mainstream schools."

This is all I have and it would not only foolish but also quite wrong to prejudge the content before it is published. Nevertheless, I am not encouraged.

Why so?  Firstly, because a professional journal that was proposing to do more than re-hash the traditional "overview of the condition" would be promoting itself by trumpeting "a challenge to traditional views of cerebral palsy in education". That it is not doing so, makes me fear yet another re-hash.  Secondly, "it will then go into detail about ....". About what?  There are some extremely important questions that need addressing:  Why do we in the UK & NI not require our teachers of children with almost any disability, to gain an understanding of the disability before they set foot in the classroom?  Why do we reject the need for pedagogies specific to specific disabilities? Ditto curricula? What can neuroscience teach us? Where is the research? One could go on. These are questions of national and even international importance if we are to bring about necessary change in the education, schooling and upbringing of children with cerebral palsy. These are questions of importance to the children themselves and their families.  Instead, it seems SEN Magazine is proposing to give over rare and valuable space to focus on  ... problems experienced by teachers in mainstream schools; on "how the educational sector will cope now that more and more children with disabilities, especially those with cerebral palsy, are going into mainstream schools". In other words, having blithely followed the yellow brick road of 'inclusion', the only thing it seems worth talking about is what to do with the children now we have got them there. Shouldn't we have thought about this first?

I am not opposed to the inclusion of everyone in all the opportunities open to us all. I am opposed to the notion of "one size fits all, local schooling", (though, of course, now that certain sections of the Labour Party are busily adopting  lotteries as an answer to allocating school places , it is logically impossible for them to advocate all children inclusively attending their local school).  I am opposed to compulsion in education. I am in favour of a definition of "inclusion" that does not argue for compelling sameness, but recognises our diversities (were there not diversity, you would not need to argue for inclusion), puts parents' wishes first and promotes alternatives and choice.

A local primary school is faced with its first pupil with cerebral palsy. They will admit, privately, that they have not a clue how to teach this child (learning difficulties, a touch of autism maybe, some visual impairment, weak fine motor control - but able to manage an electric wheelchair). Sheffield is heading towards the closure of its only specialist school for children with physical disabilities. Barnsley did so some years ago. Doncaster is, I believe, doing so this year. Rotherham I know not of. And all of this is happening before we have any debate on training or pedagogy or curriculum .... and with the result that SEN Magazine can think it appropriate, even important, to have a special feature, not on the needs of these children, not on the wishes of their parents for alternatives nor on the latest research into the education and upbringing of children with cerebral palsy but on "how the educational sector will cope".

Is this not a species of insanity?