Paces

First report of Labour SEN review - and actually there was something interesting

Special Needs Jungle reports "Special needs experts offer views for Labour's SEN plicy review". There are no surprises, but there was indeed one something worth a moment's attention which I copy below. First, the event itself - as Andrew Sutton recently wrote on Facebook 

"UK: SEN CHEWING OVER THE SAME OLD NOURISHMENT-FREE GRISTLE
The Labour Party is holding yet another weary review of 'special educational needs'. Look at its agenda, if you can bear to: http://www.nasen.org.uk/latestnews/?news=109

Not a hint that the system has no idea of what it is doing, employs 'teachers' with no training in pedagogy, and does not even grasp that this results in the fundamental problem of children's not being taught.

Just to reinforce the point, Andrew then added the Comment:

Why are they doing this anyway. The Government surely is about to publish a White Paper. The old agendas are all trampled flat, nobody has anything to say. Haven't people anything better to do to fill their (highly) paid time?

So it's good to find a nugget of something interesting - and not just because I too am a Churchill Fellow - recipient in 2007 of a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust travel fellowship (and yes, you should check it out). Here it is: an inspirational mother and daughter:

One inspirational mother and daughter team are Nadia Clark and her mother, Katie. Nadia has cerebral palsy and is deaf. She uses a vocal synthesiser to speak, but her indefatigable spirit and intelligence shines through and she soon hopes to go to University. She is the recipient of a Winston Churchill Foundation grant to research alternative methods of communication.

Her mother, Katie, is a woman of great determination and she has worked tirelessly to support her daughter. She spent two years looking for a school that would take Nadia, moving her family across the country to do so. She later formed the parent-carer forum, One Voice Communicating Together and believes the future for SEN & disability services should be about “looking at things differently and more creatively”. She stressed, and I thoroughly agree with this, the need for good emotional support for families in the early years, saying supporting parents’ self-esteem is vital if they are to be able to be strong for their children.

Each will find their own inspiration and interest in their story. As one who has just seen his daughter aged 29 years move out of the family home, I can assure anyone that "good emotional support" is essential for parents (... and grandparents ... and siblings) well beyond "the early years".

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You can find Special Needs Jungle's ever interesting updates on SEN on twitter as @SpcialNdsJungle and also on Facebook, though I haven't checked the link.

BTW I don't know how to link to Andrew's specific Status update on Facebook, but if you go searching for it, it was on Monday this week.

 

WCMT open for 2012 Travel Fellowship applications

In 2007 I was delighted and honoured to be awarded a Travel Fellowship by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. A fully-funded 4 weeks enabled me to visit people and projects associated with cerebral palsy in Canada, America - and the CE World Congress in Sweden.

Applications have now opened for Travel Fellowships for 2012. Check out the WCMT website.

Jamie Balfour, Director General of the WCMT, writes:

Would experience overseas enhance your effectiveness in your career or field of interest?

Are you in a position to disseminate the new knowledge and examples of best practice that you will observe, for the wider benefit of your community and the UK?

If the answer is 'yes', check your eligibility, see examples of previous projects and apply for a Travelling Fellowship. 

Fellows receive a travel grant to cover return and internal travelling, daily living and insurance within the countries visited. For 2011 Fellowships were for 4 to 8 weeks.

To travel in 2012 apply now with a relevant overseas project. No qualifications are required.

Really and truly, if you are a UK citizen, if you have an idea that could benefit you and through you others, this is an opportunity you should not miss. I have never ever applied for anything to such friendly and helpful people.  Go on! Give it a go! Click the WCMT link and have the chance to fulfil a travel dream.

(BTW - age is no barrier. I was over 60!)

Winston Churchill Memorial Trust - travel fellowships deadline

The deadline is fast approaching for applications for travel fellowships in 2011. 12th October, I think.

"Travel to make a difference .... this could be your chance of a lifetime" the Trust website declares.

It was for me in 2007 when I travelled in Canada and America - finishing with a week at the World Congress of Conductive Education in Goteborg.  And it was for my colleague Neil Morris in 2008, travelling in New Zealand and Australia.

"Would experience overseas enhance your effectiveness in your career or field of interest?" Fellows receive a travel grant to cover all travel, accommodation and daily living expenses - the average grant in 2010 being £5600 for between 4 and 12 weeks travel.

No qualifications are required whatsoever. Check out the website, click on one of 10 categories of project and apply now.  I promise you, the selection process is the friendliest you will ever have been through - and you might get the chance of a lifetime.

By the way:  with our own expenses paid, both Neil and I felt able to pay for our wives to enjoy the experience with us.

CE2.0 a personal journey on a public road

Elliot Clifton has contributed a long and challenging reflection on the relationship between conductive education and the internet (in a Comment to an earlier posting of mine). At one point Elliot writes: “As a community CE hasn't really grasped the possibilities of Web 1.0 (static web pages), never mind the community-building social possibilities offered by 2.0.” Without fundamentally disagreeing with all that Elliot writes, I find myself perhaps a little more optimistic.

For over 30 years I have been a family historian. My earliest records are on file cards, carefully copied from my handwritten transcripts of census records and from parish registers held in libraries and record offices. A day or so ago, I recorded on my Facebook page that I was “contemplating a photograph taken in 1914, in Pudsey, Yorkshire of a woman born in 1824, at Rousham in Oxfordshire, who died shortly after it was taken: how different the reference points of her world and ours.”

That woman was the elder sister of my Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandmother. The digital photograph came to me by email, from an American woman I had never before met or knew, who had seen the family history website set up by my son and realized that we were related.  It turns out we are in fact fourth cousins.  She writes: “I am still in awe of this technology that I can take a scan of a photograph almost 100 years old and it's in your hands within seconds.”

A couple of years ago, I was fortunate enough to be awarded a Travel Fellowship by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. Needing to complete my itinerary, I did a search on Google. I found and emailed Glenda Watson-Hyatt in Vancouver. My later meeting with her and her husband Darrell inspires me even now. I visit her website and have her as a friend on Facebook. She recently attended BlogWorld New Media Expo2009 in Las Vegas, where she was a speaker at WordCamp. When I say ‘speaks’ you need to know that Glenda speaks what she calls ‘Glenda-ish’; she’s a person with cerebral palsy who uses an electric wheelchair (as does Darrell); who describes herself as ‘the left-thumb blogger’. In fact, it would just be easier if you’d take a moment to visit her blog – her report “Fresh from WordCamp Las Vegas” would be a good place to start. Oh and Glenda uses hashtags too (#bwe09 for Blog World Expo 2009 on Twitter).  As if all that is not enough, an expert in web accessibility, she has just produced an eBook of her presentation at Wordcamp “How POUR is Your Blog? Tips for Increasing Your Blog Accessibility”.

 For the Travel Fellowship, I booked all my flights and hotel reservations online.  I now use online banking; paid a bill online just today in fact. The book I’m reading at the moment cost me £15 all-in from Amazon.com instead of £25 from Waterstones in Sheffield. Last July my Dad was taking a break on his own at his house in Pembrokeshire; injured himself, stayed longer than he intended, couldn’t get about to get food in, didn’t eat well and made himself ill.  Next time he takes a holiday there, I’m going to order some groceries online for him and get them delivered. Haven’t done that before.

On the way, I set up this blog, used Netvibes to set up Conductive Web, joined Facebook and this past month I’ve been getting into Twitter (PacesCEO) - mostly just to see how they worked. I've never yet uploaded video to YouTube, but its only a matter of time - when I can afford an iPhone maybe! (I have used videos from YouTube though: there's one coming up in the next link here). I now use wikis on wikispaces for all sorts of writing, mostly for putting grant-funding applications together and writing job descriptions, strategic plans and such with colleagues for Paces. It works well and saves effort all round. We are slowly becoming quite proficient. Gabor Fellner, Headteacher of Paces School, has set up an online messaging system that generates text messages and emails for communicating with parents using ParentMail. It works well. (He’s just now trying to persuade our new Board of Governors to adopt it for communicating among themselves.)  I have explored using NING to set up a private social network for Sheffield parents of children with disabilities and special needs and another for Paces' staff. The latter didn’t work so well – some things just don’t.

Yesterday, from a community learning centre in Royston, Barnsley, just up the road from us at Paces, Martha Lane Fox, Government Digital Inclusion Champion, launched National Get Online Day (note sound is low). The CEO of ‘the Digital Region’ earlier in the week announced that broadband will be brought to the front door of every home and business in South Yorkshire within 3 years.

All of which is to say that loads of ordinary people are using the internet in loads of ways, to do things in their ordinary lives as people.

In other words, it’s not because I’m Paces CEO or because I’m passionate about conductive education that I use the internet. It’s the opposite way round. Because I’ve slowly found all sorts of ways in my life to use the internet, I now ask how I can use it to benefit conductive education. So it happens, over the past few weeks, I’ve been wondering how the 7^th World Congress could be enriched if the organisers adopted social networking tools. I don’t say they should. I offer only that it would be interesting if they experimented. It’s all a journey. We are all explorers.

Here are two new experimentings, on the journey: (1) Andrew Sutton has asked whether a facebook group might be set up to discuss conductive education and social networking. We have just done that. (2) In response to Andrew’s request for help writing an article about CE, I have set up a wiki for anyone to respond. Will either be used? Will either be useful? Who knows? If people find them useful, I suppose. The important thing is, we have tried. Somewhere down the road, I've no doubt, people will find this all very ordinary. My grandchildren have no awe at all that a photograph taken in 1914 of their 6x-Great-Aunt should have been sent from America and printed from Grandad's computer.

One of the memorable moments in my life was attending the Peto Institute with Sarah, our daughter, for her very first assessment.  We were asked by the senior conductor assessing her (I wish I could remember her name. We’ve so much to thank her for.) if Sarah could do various tasks: roll, get to her feet using a ladderback chair, tie her shoe laces and so on. To most questions we answered, “Not yet, but she does try”.  Asked to demonstrate, Sarah did so - with wonderful theatricality, I should add. Thus was cemented in my brain my very first association with conductors and conductive education: they liked children who tried; conductive education was not about playing it safe, it was about risk and effort, about being motivated to try.

Slowly, like everyone else, conductors and all others working in and for conductive education, will eventually find reasons to use the internet in their own personal lives – and sometimes for conductive education purposes, too. I find that a cause for optimism.

Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship

In 2007, I had the great good fortune to be awarded a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship. This enabled me to travel in Canada, America and to attend the World Congress of Conductive Education in Sweden. I travelled in total for some 4 weeks, all expenses paid. I met some terrific people working to improve the lot of those with cerebral palsy and their families. Great memories.

Fellows rightly report that the experience of the Fellowship is life-changing. That's it. Who wouldn't want a grant for an all expenses paid journey of a lifetime?

You need to be British to apply here in Britain. Yes there's an interview if you get short-listed. But you couldn't want to be interviewed by a kinder or more encouraging group of people. Spread the word. Applications are open for 2010.  

Would experience overseas enhance your effectiveness in your career or field of interest? Could this bring real benefits and positive change to your community, the UK and yourself? If the answer is 'yes', check your eligibility, see examplesof previous projects and apply for a Travelling Fellowship.

Fellows receive a travel grant to cover return and internal travelling, daily living and insurance within the countries visited. For 2009 the average grant is £5500, covering overseas visits of between 4 & 8 weeks. To travel in 2010, click on one of the 10 categories below and apply now with a relevant overseas project. No qualifications are required.

Cerebral palsy and menopause

One of the delights of Glenda Watson-Hyatt's blog is that Glenda goes places where no-one else does. Her latest posting is all about the lack of information - even on Google - on cerebral palsy and menopause.

Can anyone help? Best read Glenda's blog first.

Something that I've reckoned would be really helpful, ever since I came across (a) Partners in Policymaking many years ago and their practice of bringing together parents and adults with a learning disability, and (b) more recently, meeting people at UCP in Washingtom during my Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship in 2007, was how useful it would be to have a network of adults with cerebral palsy who would be mentors (or some such title) for (a) parents like me caring for adult children with cerebral palsy (Dads and periods - don't even got there!) and for (b) young adults with cerebral palsy.

Had I time and money to set it up, Glenda would be top of my list to persuade to become a mentor.

(Could be a new online enterprise, too). 

State-run community centres?

The media have been having fun. "Don't use the S-word. This is a place of learning, not a school", thundered The Times: and gave over a main news item from Education Editor Alexandra Freen and a Third Leader "School's Out - Rebranding a primary school 'a place for learning' is a euphemism too far" . The Yorkshire Post reports that "campaigners for both education and plain speaking" derided the decision as "laughable". The Sun goes for blunt-and-to-the point: "School bans the word 'school'"

The story concerns the new, £4.2m Watercliffe Meadow primary school in Sheffield which has dropped the word 'school' from its name in favour of 'a place of learning'. The Headteacher apparently said that one reason for the decision was that "many of the parents had very negative connotations of school".

The mirth has spread to the blogosphere, attracted comment on the Sheffield Forum and has already merited an entry in Wikipedia. 

You may already yourself have joined in the amusement at the excesses of political correctness - which is how the story has been presented.

Yet, wait a moment. Read a little deeper. Dig below the trivia and the mocking. This is The Times, lower down the Alexandra Frean article:

"However, Watercliffe Meadow is not alone. Barnsley is in the process of replacing its 13 secondary schools with nine new “advanced learning centres”.

A spokesman said that it was part of a programme called Remaking Learning aimed at regenerating the area by “embracing all ages of learning” from preschool children to adults.

Under the Government’s plans for extended services, all schools have until next year to ensure that child-care from 8am to 6pm is available to all pupils all year round

They can either provide it on their own premises or link up with a nearby voluntary, state or private provider. Schools are also under pressure to open their facilities to adult learners in the evenings and holidays.

David Fann, of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: “This kind of change reflects the fact that schools are now expected to exploit their premises to the full 24/7, 365 days a year.”

Child care services; early years services; out-of-school clubs; adult-and-community learning: all of these have traditionally been service strengths of the voluntary sector in the UK, often in "community centres".  

If these traditional voluntary sector services are, as now seems, to be delivered by the State, in "Children's Centres" and "Extended Schools" and "Advanced Learning Centres" and "places of learning" like Watercliffe Meadow, how are these places any different from State-run Community Centres? 

There are huge issues of governance and funding here which are being neglected - not least by the 'third sector' umbrella bodies locally and nationally. Has anyone asked the communities if they want the State - like a modern Sheriff of Nottingham - to so control local services?

These are huge structural changes within which we must operate who aspire to provide conductive education services to the very young, to pre-school and school age children, to young people and to adults, as well as to their parents and families. Once the 'credit crunch' is over as, being a temporary albeit compelling phenomenon, it surely will be, we in conductive education in the UK (or just in England, maybe) are likely to find ourselves in a much more permanently changed landscape, one changed by national Government policy.

I was listening just before Christmas to an experienced and respected adult education tutor and community worker. His perspective was that in Barnsley, these traditional voluntary sector services areas (child-care, out-of-school, adult learning) were severely retracting and that it was impossible to initiate effective dialogue with Barnsley Council. Certainly, Paces expereince of Barnsley Education Department is that officers have no interest in talking about services for children with cerebral palsy and their families. 

In 2007, I had the great good-fortune to be awarded a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship which took me, among other places, to California. There, I learned of the Lanterman Developmental Disabilities Act. In particular, I was struck by this specific provision:

Section 4501 of the Lanterman Act states: "The State of California accepts a responsibility for persons with developmental disabilities and an obligation to them which it must discharge. Affecting hundreds of thousands of children and adults directly, and having an important impact on the lives of their families, neighbors and whole communities, developmental disabilities present social, medical, economic and legal problems of extreme importance."

Section 4620 states "In order for the state to carry out many of its responsibilities as established in this division, the state shall contract with appropriate agencies to provide fixed points of contact in the community for persons with developmental disabilities and their families, to the end that such persons may have access to the facilities and services best suited to them throughout their lifetime. It is the intent of this division that the network of regional centers for persons with developmental disabilities and their families be accessible to every family in need of regional center services.
The Legislature finds that the services provided to individuals and their families by regional centers is of such a special and unique nature that is cannot be satisfactorily provided by state agencies. Therefore, private nonprofit community agencies shall be utilized by the state for the purpose of operating regional centers."

If, over here, these new State-run, State-funded 'places of learning' Community Centres cater for everyone, what room will there be for us 'non-profits' in CE, where will we find that room and, crucially, who will fund CE and how will it be funded? 

How, in that environment, we choose to advocate for conductive education will, I venture to suggest, have more impact than any other factor, including the state of the economy, on the future of CE in the UK.  The choice is ours. 

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.

An orthofunctional organisation?

On Saturday, I found myself in much the same situation as Jane, "Student Conductor" blogger at Birmingham, pondering answers to the question "what is conductive education".

I was attending the spring meeting of the East Pennine Association of Churchill Fellows at Leeming, an association of which I am member as a result of being awarded a Travel fellowship by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. (You can register now to receive information when the Trust opens for applications for the 2009 travel grants on 2nd June.) 

As it was the first meeting I had attended since completing the Fellowship, people naturally asked about it .... which led inevitably to conductive education and the "What is .... ? question."

Of course, it's a question I have now been asked many times (though I do not have a rehearsed and simple answer).  Earlier on Saturday I had read Jane's blog and added a comment, hopefully encouraging. I pointed her to an article by Dr Hari "Conductive Education. Occasional Papers 2. Orthofunction - A conceptual analysis."

I wrote: "In my own mind, I fall back on my version of something Dr Hari wrote. It's a bit of a polysyllabic mouthful but it keeps my head on the right lines: 'Conductive education is about enhancing the quality of intention to achieve'. You can peel that apart, onion-like, layer upon layer of meaning."

What Dr Hari actually wrote was: " ....conductive education enables individuals to build up a new quality of life and a new quality of intention to achieve higher levels of co-ordination and some increase in coherence and power .... For the everyday course of life this means that the individual is able to establish aims (intentions, to retain them, to monitor progress towards them, to resist failure and to overcome obstacles to their achievement."

Since Saturday, this last bit put me in mind of a thought my colleague, Karen Hague, once asked: was it possible for management to be conductive? I recall we spent some time pondering this. Dr Hari is writing about the individual and orthofunction: "establish aims ....  retain them .... monitor progress .... resist failure .... overcome obstacles .... achievement" - a near perfect description of how to carry out strategic planning for an organisation.  Which suggests that organisations, as well as individuals, can be orthofunctional.  With the flipside that if organisations can be orthofunctional, they can just as well be dysfunctional - all parts pulling in different directions.  I wonder how far Paces is an orthofunctional organisation?

 

Exercise Training Program Benefits Children With Cerebral Palsy

Coincidentally with my earlier posting, "Exercise Builds Strong Brains", this evening I came across a report published 13 November 2007:

"An exercise training program improves physical fitness, participation level, and quality of life in children with cerebral palsy when added to standard care," the study authors write. "Limited exercise and sport opportunities in their neighborhoods might impede transfer of the gains in fitness into extra participation in regular physical activities. Supervised training programs at schools or in the community might provide fitness training for children and adolescents with CP."

I note the benefit is from an exercise training programme and not just exercise and that lack of local opportunities might be a barrier to benefits.

More pointers towards what is needed in public provision, maybe.