Peter Inson

Peter Inson comments on life

State-funded public schools for all children

Dear Mr Gove,
I am a former state school head who has also taught in the independent and international sectors. I write and broadcast on education and related matters.

I am an examiner for the IB and am currently writing an IGCSE English language text book for a major publisher. I have also supported home-schoolers..
While your approach to school reform is very encouraging I think that while you are still “shadowing” you might consider something more radical.
With best wishes,
Peter Inson

My concern is that I have spent a lifetime listening to central governments announcing a turning of the educational corner or the appearance of light at the end of the educational channel. I am anxious that you should not prove another link in this flawed and destructive chain.
In the late fifties, when I was ten, I first became aware that all was not well with state-funded schools. The leader of my scout patrol suddenly appeared in church; he explained that his parents were keen to get him into the best local secondary modern school, a well-regarded and over-subscribed church school. Like many parents, their main aim was to avoid sink schools rather than find educational virtue. This has not changed.
In the sixties comprehensive schools were introduced. All children were going to receive the sort of effective attention from which people like me had benefitted in grammar schools. Nothing was said about providing the support and encouragement that our parents had provided, before and after our eleven-plus exams.
In the seventies, the school leaving age was raised and CSE exams were introduced, a sop to those who could not manage O-levels. It was an attempt to motivate children whose interests were not academic and was later subsumed into the GCSE.
In the eighties, a national curriculum was imposed and there was more centralised direction. Testing regimes were imposed on schools, but not on parents, whose influence on children is far greater. A system of grant-maintained schools was introduced, half-heartedly. Had schools been required to opt out of GM status, rather than opt in, I think the system would have established itself more robustly and would have endured. All the GM heads I knew were very reluctant to yield that status in 1997.
In the nineties competition between schools and a market place for education were much talked about. Competition poisoned work between schools and there was insufficient provision for a market to work. Still nothing was done for children whose parents were indifferent to the goods on offer.
Since the millennia a desperate enthusiasm for academies and partnerships with the world of commerce and private finance has proved very divisive. There has been a de facto raising of the school-leaving age, a widely acknowledged decline in educational standards and an increasing number of NEETs. Still no one asks what we expect when we force ill-motivated or resentful adolescents to spend time corralled together in schools; no one asks whether they might begin to grow up better if they were occupied away from home and other teenagers.
All my life governments have tinkered in the hope of providing schools or types of schools that will provide adequately for all children and will cope adequately with all children. They have done nothing for children whose parents are indifferent or hostile to the demands and disciplines of effective child raising and good schooling, and it is illegal for anyone outside the education system, other than parents, to try.
[I dealt with this in a piece about truancy which I wrote for The Guardian. November 15th 2006 Read the article here ]

Schools which are independent, academically selective, faith-based or located in leafy suburbs are far less likely to find themselves troubled by such children whose families have not prepared them for school. Little is achieved for the children of these families which tend to produce their own victims and which are unlikely to have access to these untroubled schools.
At their heart good schools are able to insist that parents support the school and that their children behave and work and do nothing to undermine the work and behaviour of other pupils. It is the kind of relationship once insisted upon at the London Oratory School, where the parents of prospective pupils were interviewed by the governors who made it clear that the interview was the most important part of the admissions process. You will remember that, after his sons had left this school, Tony Blair removed these important powers, a sop to his left wing.

I observe in schools nowadays both the bad and the good.

I am fearful for there are schools where:

meetings displace extra-curricular activity
teachers are obliged to look over their shoulder at powerful intruders
many senior teachers no longer teach
the finances collapse just before public exams in some privately funded establishments
heads and their colleagues have “intercepted” enormous donations
teachers impose upon children the very tests which they condemn.

I am impressed by:

continuing overseas demand for British education, mostly boarding, mostly independent
public schools sprouting offshoots abroad
international exams, International O-levels and IGCSE, which are not permitted in state schools, but which flourish on the basis of the demand for them
TEFL as an international service industry
Education Otherwise which encourages home schooling where the dynamics of learning and enhanced relationships between the generations can yield considerable benefits
Independents schools’ ability and determination to maintain a sustained interest in and focus upon children and teaching rather than social engineering or child-minding

It will not be lost on you that these things that impress me, and many other people, are all, effectively, outside the remit of government.
Like public schools – originally locally established charities entrusted with the education of local children, but taken over now by the wealthy because they are in limited supply and are seen as markedly better than much of what the state has to provide.
How then could the supply of public school places be increased sufficiently to cope with demand, and what of those families who are indifferent or hostile to education?
First the families, the most significant influence on most children. Changes are required across the broad range of their relationships and connections with the community and the state. We must recognise that the making of a home for children requires time, energy, encouragement, a little luck, a little talent and a good deal of commitment and determination, and this is very much a prerequisite of education. We must support families, by material and other provision which will allow for these requirements, and expect more of families, to help and encourage them to do more themselves for their children and to derive satisfaction and self-respect from helping their children achieve at least a modicum of success.
Away from school, expectations of parents should extend to their appearance in court when their children are summoned, to explain their stewardship as parents and to indicate how better they intend to discharge their role in the future. If volunteers who work with children are to be CRB checked then so should adults whom parents invite into a household shared with children. At the margins, we should ask ourselves why parents who would never be considered suitable to foster or adopt other people’s children are allowed to do as they please with their own. Raised expectations will help parents to achieve more, for the sake of their children, the community and themselves.
Then the schools. Public schools, like the other favoured schools mentioned above, do not have to suffer children whose parents have failed to prepare them for school. State schools need to be allowed to make the same demands of parents. State schools should therefore be part of a two-pronged approach, of encouragement and expectation on the part of state agencies. State schools should be handed to the communities they serve and become state-funded public schools, charities entrusted to the local community and governed by a balance of interested parties, some of who would be parents selected by compulsory ballot, like jurors. Parents would be obliged to submit to this process as part of a minimal commitment to their child’s school.
The dynamics of such an arrangement would transform state education:

By obliging parents to take more responsibility for their children
By helping communities to take responsibility for their schools rather than rely on others to do that for them.
By helping and encouraging parents to learn that they can do more for their children
By enabling communities to understand better what is required for their children to be educated
By rewarding parental enthusiasm and enterprise
By encouraging self-reliance and civic virtue
By bringing home to all parents the need for communal action for the benefit of their children
By engaging parental concerns and energy in the running of schools
By engendering a sense of ownership and a commitment to protect civic assets and nurture social virtue.

It is political dynamite but is that not what schools and children urgently deserve? Is that not what your party achieved with the right to buy council houses?
Imagine state schools transformed in the way that many council houses have been transformed, along with the culture that once spawned expensive, and unnecessary and demeaning dependence on others.
Please don’t become embroiled in arguments about building more grammar schools: like other good schools they are simply establishments where the indifference and hostility of some parents is not allowed to impede or handicap the education of other people’s children. The only way to open this sort of school to all children is to ensure that all parents support schools. When parents fail to support their children’s school, that is the point at which to address their neglect of their children, not when the latter have disrupted a school sufficiently to be excluded, for then it is too late.
My experience across the sectors, and evidence from other teachers and elsewhere, convinces me that the culture of the independent sector is markedly different from that in much of the maintained sector. Independent school culture and its achievements are sought by many parents and teachers but maintained schools suffer over-regulation and a requirement that, when required, they become child-minding institutions for indifferent or hostile families. This latter requirement, of course, undermines any moral basis for requiring children to attend such schools. My proposals would remove both these handicaps from the maintained sector, would allow schools to control their full share of the education budget and provide for a more coherent and timely intervention where necessary in the lives of families where child rearing is inadequate or worse.
Education requires positive attitudes and action on the part of families and schools. It does not happen by default, a belief which has long been encouraged by the state’s attempts to ignore inadequate parenting whilst looking for miracle cures within the school system.

I hope that you will consider steps such as these to mobilize talent and energy on behalf of all children and move us away from the notion that throwing money at education is a substitute for positive attitudes and support from parents.
Liberation for education, along the lines of the right to buy, would engender parental energy and commitment that would transform maintained education. At the same time much of the education budget that is spent away from the classroom could be saved and the damage, both social and economic, brought about by failure at school would be much reduced.
Finally, if you can find the time to visit Summerhill School in Suffolk, you will find a small, independent school which, strapped for cash, saw off David Blunkett’s attempt to shut them down because they stood by their view of their pupils’ best interests. Wonderful!

09 Jan 2010 Return to top of page

Underage drinking

Trading Standards Institute survey show one in four underage drinkers consume in excess of 20 units per week

A few mornings ago I met a young man in our village shop. He was still the worse for celebrating his birthday the night before and it was his girlfriend who spoke for him as he was insufficiently recovered to be able to speak. One arm was in a sling, there were cuts on his face and his eyes and lips were swollen.

The previous evening he had called into the shop and said he was going to get hammered. Later, drunk, he fell through the side of glasshouse and over 200 stitches had been required before he was discharged from casualty. The girl’s description of this part of the escapade was almost a boast. Now he had lost the seasonal job for which he had just disqualified himself and they were setting off, somewhere.

Clearly this young man was incapable of restraining himself; how long was it since his parents, or anyone else had tried to encourage him to act more responsibly? Had anyone ever tried to teach him to behave with more consideration for himself as well as for others during his childhood?

Should we not require parents to share the inconvenience, embarrassment and expense when their children’s behaviour indicates parental failure and before their children can inflict such misery upon themselves and others?

And should we not outlaw broadcasting or other material likely to encourage or incite the mis-use of alcohol or drugs?

02 Jul 2009 Return to top of page

Report cards for parents

Ed Balls is to propose a single ranking grade for schools

Parents will be able to see, at a glance, which are the better schools. But will they be able to gain access to them? What will they be able to do if good schools are over–subscribed, or too far away, or academically selective, or charge fees? What good will all this information do for children should their parents ignore it, or be unaware of it?

If, by some strange chemistry, provision for children will be improved by these measures, why do we not provide a ranking grade for parents who are far more influential than schools? Just as parents require information about schools before they decide where to send their children, so ought children to have information about parents before they form attachments to them, attachments which later are difficult to break despite neglect and abuse.

It would not be difficult. We know the virtues that we look for in schools, and those we seek in parents are not difficult to discern: something like care, control, commitment and consistency. By the time the child is born we could have answered questions such as:

Are both parents still involved in the life of this child?

What steps have they taken to ensure that they are well informed about the demands of parenthood and can meet those demands?

Would either parent be given serious consideration as a potential foster or adoptive parent?

Of course the new-born child will not be able to make use of this information, but those who have to act on its behalf might. Should someone other than the parents need to act on the child’s behalf then they should exercise choice on behalf of the child and find them good parents. This would match Mr. Balls’ proposals to enable all parents to find places in good schools, and all children would be brought up by good parents.

30 Jun 2009 Return to top of page

Are Comprehensives Failing?

BBC Radio 4 - The Moral Maze Thursday, 18 June, 2009

Richard Pringle spoke of giving every young person reasonable opportunities. Like many people he sees this as an imperative for the school system, rather than for parents whose influence is far greater. When there is the possibility that a significant proportion of children in a school come from families that are indifferent or hostile to the need to prepare their children for school, it is one thing for the school to seek to compensate for this neglect, it is another to expect caring parents to entrust such schools with their children.

Where schools can expect and receive the support of the majority of families, in Wales and Scotland by the sound of things, and elsewhere, comprehensive schools can flourish. This factor allowed Chris Howard to assert his preference for the comprehensive system in Wales, but it would not apply in other areas where anxious parents will hope for places in grammar schools, independents or church schools. The children of indifferent or hostile parents do not attend such schools which can teach rather than undertake forms of social work, free from the anti-achievement ethos to which Robert McCartney referred.

There is a worrying assumption that, because some comprehensive schools were successful, the comprehensive system would yield improvements for all children. The crucial factor that is ignored here is the background of a school’s children; we forget that there were very successful and well regarded secondary modern schools.

Some of the first comprehensive schools were set up in Cambridge and taught the children of academic families – very different from comprehensives in other areas, but a very convenient basis for matching an education system to political preference.

Michael Portillo’s contribution about the need for intellectual stimulus was an important reminder of what good schools can achieve, grammar schools automatically through academic selection and effective comprehensives by pooling sufficiently able and well motivated children with opportunities to interact in the same way. His concern was that able kids from “deprived” backgrounds need the sort of stimulus that he and Clive Anderson enjoyed as contemporaries at a grammar school in Harrow. He could have followed this a little further to ask what happens to bright teenagers whose talents and energy are not channelled constructively as they grow up.

The exchange between Melanie Philips and James Park was instructive. Melanie was right about the need to teach with knowledge content and the emptiness of teaching without it. James’s concerns about relevance and children’s interests are met in any good academic teaching. I believe that demean young people when we fail to challenge them with demanding academic content in our teaching.

Towards the end of the programme Chris Howard spoke of Wales having a culture of support for schools in a way that suggested that this was universal there. We do not have anything like this in many parts of England. Culture is initially formed by parents in the home. Until politicians are prepared to address more thoroughly our expectations of parents, in this and other areas, then attempts to investigate systems of secondary education will continue to distract us from what really matters – parents preparing children to make the best of education.

I am not surprised, but perhaps a little disappointed, that governments have never pursued the logic of testing pupils in order to assess the effectiveness of their parents. A simple test of rising fives – do they understand yes and no, yours and mine? Can they dress themselves and use the toilet unaided? – would allow us to assess parenting, but of course would be far too late.

18 Jun 2009 Return to top of page

Judge calls for commission on family breakdown

Mr Justice Coleridge, a Family Division judge, has called for the creation of a national commission to tackle the "epidemic" of family breakdown and has said that the consequences of family break-up for the wider society are now so great it can no longer be treated as a purely private matter. [PA 17

Firstly, any commission would need to recognise that babies are unwilling conscripts. Those of us who deliberately or otherwise force life upon them must recognise that effective parenting is a minimum sentence of twenty years and that if we fall down on the job the cost for other people, and the wider community, is likely to be far, far greater and prospects for the child far, far less.

What might such a commission address?

Our expectations of parents; at present we expect more of pet owners.

Whether, given the decline of religious and other influences on families, we should concern ourselves solely people who produce children and impose a marriage, a commitment to support one another and the children, on those who breed.

The pressure on lone parents to seek work outside the home, when the most important role for a parent is to be at the service of the child.

The speed with which a child at risk from ineffective or risk-burdened parenting can be fostered or adopted.

Effective ways of disseminating the attitudes, skills, knowledge and understandings that form the repertoire of good parents.

The question is, have we sufficient strength to impose on ourselves and each other sufficient discipline to see that children are brought into the world by parents with stable, sustainable relationships who are committed to their children and the other parent first and to their own rights, needs and fancies second.

Or will the current de-skilling of parents and pressure on families continue until family life is so chaotic that we reach the next step in all this and establish a commission to decide who, and in what circumstances, will be allowed to have babies?

As a community it is time we grew up and put the needs of tomorrow’s grown-ups first.

17 Jun 2009 Return to top of page

Blair for Presidency of the EU?

The man cannot answer simple questions about his own Parliamentary expenses. Why on earth should he be put in charge of an institution that costs this country alone £40 million a day and has never been able to account for its spending?

17 Jun 2009 Return to top of page

Lords Reform

Here is an opportunity for the Established Church to set an example, and justify its status and influence, by offering some of its bishops' seats to other established faiths so that a member of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the Chief Rabbi and the chairman of the Free Church Council, for example, could be raised to the peerage, initially ex-officio.

This would demonstrate the value of independent peers, dependent not on party approval, but on their value as representatives of important interest groups who deserve an opportunity to know that their interests and views are represented in Parliament.

15 Jun 2009 Return to top of page

MPs' salaries and expenses

I have just listened to the Prime Minister outlining proposals to reform the system by which MPs claim expenses and allowances.

Parliament is to divest itself of responsibility for the manner in which members remunerate themselves and leave these matters to an outside body. Two questions come immediately to mind.

Firstly, why should our politicians not undertake this responsibility, which we now appreciate only too well can provide a clear and transparent indication of character, when they are expected to legislate in respect of far more serious matters?

Secondly, why should the public accept this blatant attempt to set up another scapegoat to which public attention can be deflected should the public again become concerned about parliamentary greed?

19 May 2009 Return to top of page

Payout for Essex home schoolers

Last year, six families from the Clacton area of Essex chose schools for their eleven year-olds having heard politicians trumpet the wonders of parental choice.

However, despite their preferences for four other schools, there were places only in the one local school they were anxious to avoid. There was no choice and, despite protests about the lack of choice, and explanations about catchment areas and about admissions procedures in different schools and despite appeals made by the parents, nothing changed.

Then the suspicion grew that the children, who had all performed well at primary school, had been allocated to a failing school to help boost its performance. So, reluctantly, hoping that the matter would be resolved before the autumn half-term, these families took on the responsibility for their children’s education, teaching them at home, and employing properly qualified teachers on a part-time basis to help out.

Bishops Park College, the one school with places for their children, stood second from bottom in Essex last year, with a paltry 15% of its pupils gaining five or more GCSEs. When some of the parents visited the school they were alarmed by the deputy head who pointed to her mobile phone and explained, as if to reassure them, that any teacher with problems with a class could contact her instantly. When I visited the school, I watched the head use a swipe card to let himself in and out of each section of corridor. His pupils all had similar cards, to ensure good order and enable the staff to see that each pupil is in the lesson which they are expected to attend, I was told. All this simply reminded me of visits to prisons and young offender institutions. What sort of parent would even consider such a school?

Soon it became apparent that there was little prospect of the local education authority resolving the matter. The families contacted the media and appeared on BBC TV’s Look East. Having been a headteacher and a deputy in oversubscribed schools I appreciated only too well the anxiety and stress that parents suffer; I could see the effect of all this bullying on these families so I offered my support. The MPs for the two constituencies became involved, Tories Douglas Carswell and Bernard Jenkin who made his concern abundantly clear - it is unreasonable to expect parents to send their children to a school in which they have no confidence. This is the clearest statement I have heard from a politician, acknowledging the right of parents to be able to reject inadequate state schools.

In December 2008 the two MPs arranged a meeting in the House of Lords with Lord Hanningfield, leader of Essex County Council, who undertook to ask the education authority to take a more constructive interest in these children. No suitable school places were offered but in January there was a meeting with the Director of Schools for Essex, Terry Reynolds, at which an offer of financial support was discussed; it was explained that funding to support parents who have requested the setting up of a new school can be provided in this way. At a subsequent meeting with Graham Pocock who is responsible for monitoring home tuition in Essex, the parents agreed that the authority should pursue on their behalf the possibility of establishing a new school in the area so that they would be eligible for this financial support. The level of support reflected the costs that the parents had met at this stage, some £10,000.

Since news of this payment became known, hopes that may well turn out to be false have been raised; Education Otherwise, the charity that supports home schooling has received a number of enquiries from parents anxious to obtain funding, and parents in a neighbouring area of Essex where there are difficulties over secondary provision are planning to withdraw their children from school this September. Is this what the Essex County Council wanted?

Good has come out of this – excellent relationships between children and adults, and parents who are far more knowledgeable now about what they can do for their children, and far more confident in their dealing with the nightmare that educational bureaucracy can become. For parents to discover that they can do far more for their children than they had expected, and enjoy doing so, increases the pool of talent that is available to support children and drives another nail into the coffin of politicians’ control of state-funded education.

27 Apr 2009 Return to top of page

Young Olympic diver withdrawn from school bullies

Tom Daley, the 14 year-old Olympic diver has been withdrawn from school as a result of bullying which, his parents claim, involved an assault on him.

"Immature" students at the school have been disciplined.

There are many reasons why individuals are singled out for bullying, some of their own making, but violence and threats of violence, and anything that prevents a pupil making good use of his or her time in school in inexcusable.

Bullies often operate from the security of the support of a group; why are they not the first to be excluded rather than the victim? When serious bullying is not dealt with seriously how can a headteacher expect any parents to entrust their children to the school?

Some schools are reluctant to exclude bullies because they do not want them to be "socially excluded," when of course to tolerate violent bullies is to exclude them from learning about reasonable conduct.

Then, in a sense, they too become victims, bereft of the lessons that a civilised community must pass on to new generations.

24 Apr 2009 Return to top of page

Classroom Bouncers

Kids will take advantage of teachers who cannot cope, especially supply teachers. They would be very boring pupils if they did not.

Children corralled, as they are in school, are a potential hazard if not properly occupied.

Having obliged children to attend, schools are under a powerful moral obligation to parents, as well as to their pupils, to ensure that they can supervise children adequately.

How then might schools respond to a proactive bouncer? What price a no touching policy? Three years ago I took hold of a provocative thirteen year-old's wrist to retrieve papers he refused to give back. Indignant, he took himself off to a deputy head who worked herself into a state of panic because I had touched him.

Supply teachers are here today and gone tomorrow, unavailable to explain things to parents but conveniently available to be blamed by head teachers when things go wrong.

Schools would do better to hire the school bullies to undertake this work; they might even be able to award them a GNVQ in social care or entertainment management. And it would be cheaper.

13 Apr 2009 Return to top of page

A terrible day for children’s news

Four troubling items in this morning’s news.

The arrest of a ten year-old and an eleven year-old following a vicious attack on two other children, complaints from teaching associations about increasingly violent children and aggressive parents in school, a call from the chief executive of the NSPCC for more children to be taken into care and a letter in The Times from an adoptive parent who discovered the harm done to a child passed from pillar to post while in the care of the local authority.

A report of the arrest of the parents of these two boys, because the boys were suspected of acts of serious violence, might help to locate responsibility for difficult young people where it should start, with those who bring them into the world.

Children are too precious, too easily harmed for us to leave them in the hands of natural parents once they have been neglected, harmed or abused. These parents would never be allowed to foster or adopt children; why should their own children not be protected from them and settled as early as possible with adults who are capable of loving and caring effectively?

06 Apr 2009 Return to top of page

Suffer the little children

Horrific news yesterday of a young adult with a history of sexual offending being admitted into a foster home where he assaulted two young children.

Then there was a delightful picture of a sixty year-old man picking up a little girl quite spontaneously and giving her a hug. Many of us wish that all adults could respond so easily to children’s needs, but most of us are not the heir to the throne.

We abuse the children of this nation when we deprive them of the warmth and kindness, and criticism and warning that we have been persuaded is now inappropriate, or inadvisable or downright dangerous.

The Scout and Guide Associations for example can only cope with half the young people who would like to join because many adults fear involving themselves with children.

A few years ago a report on the lack of rehabilitation facilities in the prison service revealed the capacity of paedophiles to persist in their efforts to abuse and harm children, to support one another in and out of prison and to exchange information about vulnerable targets such as the children of single mothers.

Yet we release these walking risks back into the community. Someone I once knew, released from a prison sentence, revealed the ugly reality of all this risk, telling me that the rest of the world still failed to understand him. I met him outside the door of our church’s choir vestry, one of the locations that he was supposed to avoid.

Instead of referring these offenders to social agencies we should report them to the Health and Safety executive who seem to take a very different if over-cautious approach to risk.

Then the suffering would be inflicted on those who inflict suffering rather than their victims, and the rest of the nation’s children.

04 Mar 2009 Return to top of page

The British Diaspora

Yesterday I enjoyed working in a school with teachers from Canada and Jamaica.

Recently I have been able to listen to a Kiwi on the Jeremy Vine Show confronting excessively indigenous Brits, seen tv footage of the Australian Parliament at prayer while bushfires raged, read Archbishop John Septamu’s strictures on fellow African Robert Mugabe and Imran Khan’s views of the state of security in Pakistan.

All of them are people who share significant chunks of our culture and who remind us of important home truths, bits of Britishness if you like, tried and tested overseas then brought home to reinvigorate our culture.

This week has also seen the Prime Minister attempting to claim special ties with the States. Being a good friend depends on honesty and loyalty; during the Bush administration we failed our friends in the States because home truths would not have been welcomed and now our sycophancy has reduced our ability to speak out.

Commonwealth Day next Monday will provide a reminder of this country’s good fortune in having friends around the world who are happy to share good times but will also tell speak their minds. We spend pounds per head of the population to belong to NATO, the UN and the EU. The Commonwealth costs each of us 20p. I think I know where best value lies.

In Germany I was once invited to explain The Commonwealth to sixth-form politics students. As soon as I explained that it had not been The British Commonwealth for some time, that it was founded on shared experience rather than dominance by one large partner and, in particular it saw itself as a family, their suspicion of the UK as a European partner with an eye elsewhere melted away.

04 Mar 2009 Return to top of page

School Places

The allocation of secondary school places this week will have generated more real anxiety than The Post Office, bankers’ pensions and the fates of sports managers and coaches put together.

And it has done so for generations now.

According to one report [The Independent] last year only one child in five got a place in their first choice of school. I have been supporting six families who failed even to get their fourth choice and have opted for home tuition. I have seen the very real anxiety of parents from the other side; as deputy and then as a head of over-subscribed schools I have listened to parents who felt that they had to plead. The process both saddened and angered me.

I have heard of nothing like it in visits to schools in four continents.

This process is a national scandal; it is so embedded in the national consciousness that the possibility of considerably reducing its impact, if not of eliminating it, seems not to occur to anyone. Government, local and national, seems capable only of tinkering. Hence the review, already, of the use of lotteries to allocate places.

As long as there are children and families who are indifferent or hostile to the discipline required if education is to take place, and as long as these children are gathered together anywhere in significant numbers, then other parents will see it as their duty to avoid the schools to which these children are sent.

This is the truth that must first be faced by the country. Then we might decide how we might attempt to educate those children whose parents cannot or will not prepare them to receive an education, the other victims. And we could do so without alarming the parents of other children whose support is so crucial; a place in any state-funded school would then be welcomed by the most concerned of parents.

02 Mar 2009 Return to top of page

Home-Bred Victims

Yet again last night the panel on BBC TV's "Question Time" discussed the continuing increase in under-age pregnancies in the UK.

Why bother with this debate that has gone on for two generations but which now seems unable to generate new understanding or effective action?

Unless it is to suggest something new, such as:

Considering first the baby and its likely future

Considering what we expect of potential foster and adoptive parents

Asking why these babies do not merit similar consideration

Asking whether we would want children from our own families fostered by under-age mothers

Why do we never ask why these innocent victims should be left with mothers whose pregnancies are so clearly indicative of family failure?

27 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Academies and other means

The key thing for any school, independent or state funded, is a school culture where a significant majority of students are prepared to engage in the work and life of the school.

This can be achieved in a number of ways, in independent schools which control admissions, and in state-funded schools by other criteria: academic, religious, house price, and, until recently, by interview.

It is to cater for the children who fall outside these nets that academies are intended, children who, assembled together are not easily persuaded to engage with school.

Where academies succeed they should be welcomed for a positive contribution to the children’s needs. But they are not a cure-all and there will be areas where they cannot work their magic. Finding further sponsors may not be easy in the present economic climate, and in any case, we should not stop looking for other means to meet the needs of all children.

Sometimes virtue has to be imposed so that its worth can be appreciated. If more parents were obliged and helped to share in the responsibility for their children’s schools they might learn that supporting their children, and other people’s, can be rewarding. Parents wanting to send their children to a particular school should be prepared to submit to a ballot for a limited number of places on its governing body. Other parents would know that they had a voice and a vote and they would learn and could achieve a great deal.

A growing number of parents are keeping their children away from schools and teaching them at home. They do so reluctantly, fearfully at first, then discover their own capacity at least to set up a good learning environment. This discovery should be put to wider use, to empower parents and to energise the educational dynamics of this country. It might also prove cheaper.

26 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Come-uppance for criminals

The government is considering publicising criminal convictions as publicity is seen as a potential deterrent. [Today’s Guardian] Leaflets about convictions would be distributed in the areas where criminals live.

You can imagine the mess.

Why not simply affix a court notice to the offender’s dwelling, identifying the offenced, the offence, the sentence and any conditions, such as curfew hours?

Burglars could have to live without a front door so that they experienced the worry and uncertainty of their victims. Anti-social neighbours could face reporting every few hours to a local police station and cars for which there is no insurance or MOT should be confiscated when they are discovered on public roads.

The public would see criminals more directly confronted with their shortcomings, with punishments more closely fitting crimes, and criminals would have greater reason to consider others as well as themselves.

25 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Can state education heal itself?

Libby Purves summed up yesterday the effect of twenty years of political meddling in state education.

Since returning four years ago from teaching in Switzerland, I have tried supply teaching in state schools and seen for myself.

Where will we find teachers who will protect children from all this? Many of the current crop are either compliant or have been inducted into a politicised teaching culture.

This week The General Teaching Council for England - an ersatz professional body, set up by the government, not by teachers – is making matters worse. Its proposed code of conduct will enable it to take steps against teachers whose conduct out of school is regarded as incompatible with their status, even when matters have been dealt with in the courts.

Hope resides, not in codes of conduct, but in homes where increasing numbers of wary parents are learning to teach their own children, to good effect. The more parents learn, the more they will be able to protect them from the government inspired stupidities that their teachers seem unable to resist.

24 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Inhuman Resources

A friend’s new employer insisted that she spend a day being trained in the safe use of a small step ladder, not out of concern for her safety, but to protect themselves legally should she suffer an accident.

Her daughter has worked for some years for the same employer who insists on random searches of its staff and I ask myself: why employ staff whose competence or honesty you do not trust?

I suspect the culture of human resources, in which one group of people have to be managed on behalf of another group, is to blame.

Have we now legislated away our capacity for trust and mutual support in employment beyond the range of our thinking?

When employers believe that there is a need for intrusive surveillance why do they not offer a sweetener to those who are found to be innocent, who by complying are helping with security but also risking humiliation and suspicion?

Isn’t that how we show contrition when we have entertained unwarranted suspicions of our fellow beings?

With economic woe around us, a little mutual consideration and support might well enhance economic performance.

23 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Fixed penalties for careless driving

Three years ago the Met refused to take action against a driver who drove across my path, knocking me off my bike, and then complained that I had dented the bonnet of her car as I landed.

Naturally, I am intrigued by the proposal that police officers should be able to impose fixed penalties for careless driving.

Fifty years ago my parents first allowed me to ride to school, along the A12 into London. I have ridden in and around London ever since. The fact that I am still here would suggest that I have learnt something about road safety.

Careless driving is easily recognised but difficult to demonstrate and increasing police powers in this respect is likely to worsen relationships with younger motorists in these less deferential times.

Careless driving is exacerbated by a driver’s feeling of personal safety or detachment from other road users. Drivers need to be sensitized to their capacity for harming others.

Two remedies come to mind; requiring the passing of a cycling proficiency test as a condition of issuing a provisional driving licence, and an insistence that drivers who drive carelessly are restricted to using a moped, for some considerable time.

Motorists need to be reminded of other, much safer means of travel – trains and boats and planes; whenever there is a mishap those involved are likely to be suspended until an enquiry shows that they were not at fault. Applied to the roads such a system really would improve our driving.

20 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Trapped in their own testosterone

Watch, copy, ask and understand. Isn’t this how we learn from other people how practical things are done?

This is how I learnt to keep bees and how I pass on what I have learnt, the essential confidence which rubs off from beekeeper to apprentice. Best on a one to one basis.

What about growing up, that most essential of practical activities? Especially for boys, a third of whom have no adult role model at home, at an age when resentment of female authority can easily develop.

Youth organisations, such as the Scout Movement provide for only half the boys who would like to join because rules and regulations and suspicion hamper the recruitment of leaders.

The result? Boys left to struggle with other boys in a sea of their own testosterone, feeding off each other’s waywardness, prey to the Fagins of the twenty-first century and now even further trapped by new laws to keep them longer in “education or training.”

Forget global training for a moment and find some jobs for the boys where they can rub shoulders with men.

19 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Orwell was right about pigs and politicians

Not for nothing were the leaders of Animal Farm porcine.

From the special pleading about brain work, and the putting aside of the apple harvest on this account, to the drunken feasts with former enemies, the story certainly matches popular perception of our political masters and mistresses.

This perception is bad for it taints so much of what politicians attempt, for good as well as ill.

The answer of course is in their hands. To encourage a greater interest in their trade, and to make their work easier they should put their remuneration on a new footing.

Their salaries for the life of a Parliament should be fixed by its predecessor as it leaves office and its arrangements for expenses should be simplified and also be fixed in the same way.

Should this result in a dearth of candidates, I would be very surprised.

18 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Paternity – something for the ego

An acquaintance once boasted that when he had been faced with court action over paternity he had found ten friends who were prepared to claim that they too had had sex with the girl.

It was an outrageous thing to do, before easy medical tests and at a time when shame and embarrassment were still effective. The case was never brought.

Today we learn that a paternity test has been arranged for the thirteen year-old who claims to be the father of a fifteen year-old’s child. Two other boys have joined in, claiming to have slept with the girl, and one of them says that if the child is his, he wants to know. Are these boys anxious to support the girl and her daughter or is this their chance of a moment of fame, interviewed and videoed and made much of by our celebrity culture?

What might these poor creatures have achieved? Little more than rabbits, those transformers of grass into food for other animals, higher up the food chain. But we should not be surprised. Look higher up the chain of celebrity and right, you remember a former cabinet minister, anxious to establish his paternity of the son of someone else’s wife.

David Blunkett was the Secretary of State for education who told teachers to teach the sanctity of marriage and family life. He is at the opposite end of the same socially destructive phenomena as these boys; adults like him destroy what these boys could not even begin to build.

17 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Have a nice day – terms and conditions apply

Forty years ago pyramid selling arrived here – everyone would gain. There were to be no losers.

It was based on persistent salesmanship, selective statistics and calculation, carefully crafted endorsement and an appeal to our greed.

More recently, a member of my family was pleased to give up a job in a bank because she had to finish every transaction with an attempt to wheedle more business from the customer, her enquiry about ways of increasing the cost of banking disguised as a consultation, an offer of help, evidence of the bank’s concern for its customers or its duty to care for them.

Having suppressed our linguistic instincts, we have lowered our guard and are vulnerable. Railway passengers have become customers, easier to cherish, in words, but I don’t want to buy a train. I simply want to pay for a service.

And in subjects such as English and media studies we teach children how these things are done, not to safeguard their ability to see through commercial manipulation, but to prepare them to join in and crank up the machinery of presentation and advertising to even more grotesque heights.

And we talk still about free markets.

17 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Adopted Children and Natural Parents

Any adoptive or foster parent normally takes on the children of other people only when there are good reasons for doing so. They know that the natural parents still exist and might well wish and hope to be reunited with their children. If the reasons for removing the children from their natural parents are found to be unsound, as in this case then, subject perhaps to the views of the children, there are clear grounds for restoring the children to their natural parents. People deemed capable of acting as foster or adoptive parents should appreciate this, however much they may be hurt when it comes to giving up the children.

17 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

No more schools on the never never

The Government may have to bail out the Private Finance Initiative to the tune of £4 billion to safeguard infrastructure projects such as schools and hospitals.

There has been speculation recently that the recession is making private sector investment more difficult. I have visited two state of the art school buildings recently. One houses one of the government’s flag-ship schools, an academy that replaced a failing school run by the local authority and was built as a PFI arrangement. A family friend was relieved to quit her teaching post there and is happily settled now in an independent school where she works harder but has rediscovered job satisfaction.

Locally I have seen something of another wonderful building, opened by Tony Blair some seven years ago, a building that stands out head and shoulders over its four immediate neighbours, older, more traditional buildings that house schools with which the institution housed in this architectural masterpiece fails to compete; while its neighbours are all packed full, a third of the places in this educational palace stand empty.

Most of the schools with which state schools have to compete, the schools which a majority of parents would love to be able to afford, and which more and more teachers are joining from the state sector are housed in old buildings, which may catch the eye, but which contain relics and adaptations from earlier times or where money may have been saved by not bothering to plaster interior walls for example.

In the case of schools at least, parents have the sense to realise that it is what goes on inside these buildings that really matters, not the plaques on the wall or features in glossy architects’ magazines.

If the government wants to impress it should provide only buildings that we can afford and pay a great more attention to what can be achieved inside.

16 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Children should sue parents

Last night it was BBC TV’s Look East that fell for it; large family, small dwelling. What is the council doing about it?

The answer, nothing, because the one suitable house that became vacant last year was pursued by seventy-eight would-be tenants. The local council estimate that it will be at least five years before things change.

Five children in residence, plus two half-brothers at weekends and holidays, in a two-bedroom flat, sharing bunks and changing sleeping arrangements regularly. The eldest, a girl of about fourteen, full of her rights which were being ignored. Whoever had taught her about rights seems to have omitted responsibilities and notions such as prudence and foresight.

In case their parents ever win the lottery, or achieve some sort of celebrity status children like this girl should be prepared so that they are ready to sue them. It should be explained to her that she should have a good case so long as she can point out that the flat was small long before Dad started getting his leg over and that that would have been the time for concern about its capacity.

Ask her; who was responsible for the size of the flat and who was responsible for the size of the family.

15 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Teenage Parents

Imagine an accident wiping out all the adults in your immediate family.

Then imagine your children or grandchildren being adopted by a thirteen year-old boy who has promised to be a good father, and his fifteen year-old “partner.” An impossible nightmare. So why should their daughter suffer their inflicting themselves upon her?

In truth these two juveniles whose misfortune has caused much indignation, are as much victims as their daughter.

First, there are their own parents and their failure to instil in their children an awareness of the enormity of bringing up children who are to stand some chance of a successful and happy life and be able to pay their way and contribute to the common good.

Secondly there is the wider community which knows all too well the difficulties and likely costs, and not just the material costs, of this child over the next twenty or more years, but has failed to protect the victims of irresponsible reproduction, parents as well as offspring, and knows too the importance of early intervention when a child is in danger.

Forget this particular story – it is not difficult to find others – and consider how we are to prevent people breeding their own victims, whether they are to be neglected, kidnapped, tortured, abused, forced into incestuous parenthood, or simply used as living dolls. Think of the socila milieu in which these tragedies occur, look at the tabloid treatment that teenage mums oftern receive.

This latest pair may turn out to be better parents than expected; they might even be an improvement on the parents who brought them into the world. But do we really want to wait and see, until perhaps it is too late? How long should we allow their daughter to wait to find out whether her parents are an improvement on her grandparents?

14 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

A quick fix, just like a quick apology

So Prince Harry is to take part in a racism awareness training. Erring motorists are sometimes sent on similar courses.

Like apologies, such activity is, I suspect, nothing more than an empty gesture by which we persuade ourselves that something has been done.

I was once on the receiving end of racist abuse – the older brother of a pupil who wanted admission to a school concert without a ticket. In was another pupil, also black, who came to my rescue. It was being told by another black teenager that without a ticket he was not coming in that completely undercut his hurtful rant against me.

As for speed awareness, I have cycled in and around London for fifty years and the Hangar Lane Gyratory holds no fears for me. Requiring aspiring motorists to pass a cycling proficiency test would teach them all they need to know about speed, risk and vulnerability.

And now the government has made another gesture which of course has backfired and a Dutch MP has gained publicity and public attention out of all proportion and the British public, with its appetite for satire, has been told that it could not possibly cope with racist nonsense and has been denied an opportunity to laugh this man out of the realms of political seriousness.

13 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

What’s in a Marriage?

The decline in the number of couples getting married continues and newspaper columns and web sites show adults young and old attempting to embark on new relationships in and out of which some of them seem able to glide effortlessly.

Whether any children involved manage all this as easily is open to doubt; increasing numbers are being raised in reformed or reconstituted families and this, as the Mathews case recently made clear, can make lines of responsibility difficult to trace and monitor. One useful thing about marriage is that it provides a formal record of a relationship that exists or has existed.

Perhaps it is time for the state no longer to trouble itself about the domestic arrangements of consulting adults and to focus on innocent and vulnerable parties to relationships between men and women, their children.

Instead recording a couple’s public promises to one another, the state should stay its hand until a child arrives and then insist that it is the bringing of a child into the world that commits the parents to one another. Should they then fail or refuse to honour that commitment to one another, then we would have to ask whether they were entitled to inflict themselves as parents onto a child, like the thirteen year-old father reported today.

13 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Teachers’ increasing reluctance to counter violence in schools.

Teachers are reluctant to intervene in school violence, for fear of litigation and in fear of being hurt.

Parents who care are increasingly desperate to avoid difficult schools and the moral imperative to send a child to school has been undermined.

Pupils are now well versed in using claims of inappropriate touching as a weapon and for teachers the notion of caring for the children of parents who trust you has become a joke.

We lock up increasing numbers of parents who fail to send their children to school but do nothing about their failure to prepare children for school before dumping them at the school gates. Why?

13 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Another round of apologies

I was roused after lunch yesterday by the phone: “This is a free automated call from your utilities companies.”

Disappointed, I put down the phone, frustrated by my inability to extract an apology and by my forgetting to leave the phone off the hook in the hope that I would stymie their operations for a while.

Why do these companies exist? No doubt they would claim that they serve the needs of their customers, of the community. But they have also to serve the needs of other interest groups, shareholders and itinerant, “professional,” directors.

Like the “professional” bankers who we saw on Tuesday as the chickens came home to roost.

I cannot be alone in sensing political twitching here as we watch big business, embraced in recent years by a government which has also got too big for its boots, and their corollaries, advertising, marketing and life-style coaching. These interest groups too have happily served the needs of mammon, of those, like bankers and business leaders, who proclaim the virtues of free markets but would run a mile if faced with one.

This is the group from which we should expect the next round of apologies, the sort of people who are quite happy to cold-call, to pretend that they are advancing our interests when they are advancing their own.

And the twitching? Well that’s the sound of people about to ask where the Labour Party was in all this? Up to its neck I suppose would be the answer.

And, just in case the utilities companies are listening, further afternoon calls will be welcomed, so long as they are not recorded and include a small donation to my favourite charity, and an apology.

12 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Scrapping of compulsory modern languages

The scrapping of compulsory modern languages in England's secondary schools was a consequence of truancy crackdowns, the BBC has learnt.

Former education secretary Estelle Morris, who took the decision in 2002, says the aim was a flexible curriculum for teenagers brought back into school.

As a head in 1997 when the previous government insisted that languages should be compulsory up to the age of sixteen I had to help deal with difficult students who resented this. Such legislation is based on wishful thinking and changes at the behest of politicians whose attention span is shorter than required for the rearing and educating of children.

Look at arguments about testing, about exclusion and now a proposal that boarding places should be made available for some state school pupils; ten years ago I was supporting state-funded boarding schools that were eventually closed. The arguments for their retention are now cited for re-establishing them.

In our culture the dice are loaded against modern languages, whereas in Switzerland, where I taught for five years, I saw fourteen year-olds demand to be taught subjects such as maths and geography in English.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families continued: "As recommended in that review, we are making languages compulsory in primary schools from 2011 - this will help instil an early love of languages that they can carry through to secondary school."

How on earth can you compel an early love of languages? If ever more evidence was required of the government’s failure to persuade, convince or enthuse parents, children and teachers here it is.

As with state boarding provision, we have been through all this before; in the early sixties a colleague was taught French at primary school, very effectively, as part of a Nuffield scheme to counter our linguistic lassitude. Whatever did politicians do with that success?

It’s as well they don’t take it upon themselves to furnish children with clothes, food, housing and loving care.

12 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Sorry but this word has been withdrawn and is no longer available.

What would have happened had Jack the Ripper been apprehended and offered his most sincere apologies?

He would have swung, along with anyone who had suggested that his apology was sufficient amends. Had Tory minister, John Profumo not resigned in the nineteen sixties and kept away from public life following the Christine Keeler affair his apology would have impressed no one. It was his subsequent self-effacement and dedication to charitable work which impressed and for which he was eventually awarded a CBE.

From football managers at post-match interview to airline officials after some delay, from coroners’ hearings into the death of children to broadcasters and difficulties with their presenters we hear the word sorry endlessly. We have become inured to misuse and abuse of the word which for some time has been denuded of any effective meaning. Now it has been stolen from us. Those of us who wish to continue to deploy the word to express regret, concern for an injured party and culpability have been robbed.

So far the four bankers grilled by the Commons select committee yesterday have done no more than utter their carefully prepared forms of words, which included the word but which seem to have convinced no one. They may have seemed a bit down, but they are far from being out on the street and are certainly not down on their luck. Where are their plans for restitution, for helping others to cope with the mess they made of their savings and jobs, for getting their institutions back on their feet?

It can be done. When an Italian friend, an hotelier encounters guest who wish to complain he takes them straight to the bar, puts a drink in front of them, then sits down and listens. Should he decide that restitution is called for, he ensures that it is sufficient to impress. He errs on the side of generosity so that there is no doubt that when he says sorry he means it. His business has grown from a small pensione to include three of Rome’s better known hotels.

When bank cards were first introduced they were used to provide retailers with a guarantee that customers’ cheques would be honoured, that the words on the cheques meant something. Like cheques which sometimes bounce, the word sorry is in need of something to accompany it, to demonstrate not only regret but an intention to share damage, expense and inconvenience, if not directly, then by some other contribution to the common good, like John Profumo cleaning out toilets provided for down and outs, or my hotelier friend’s proffered drinks.

When the word is used in future we must be resolute and ignore it unless it is accompanied by other words, words that clearly recognise fault and that commit the speaker to make restitution where possible or to accept a share of suffering, inconvenience and expense.

As it is the poor word has its back to the wall and may never recover but there is hope, for footballers, even with their professional fouls and their amusing histrionics, manage things better, with a hand to a floored opponent, or a pat on the back, far more convincing than the apologies that we saw conceded on Tuesday.

Yesterday’s appearance before the select committee would have been far more convincing had these four bankers’ words of apology been accompanied by additional words to explain, for example, how they were going to re-mortgage their own properties as a first step to help others recover theirs.

11 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Row over separate Muslim assemblies [2]

Distinguish assemblies from acts of worship

An assembly requires the whole of a community but need not be religious or spiritual in nature whereas an act of worship requires members of a faith or faiths to worship together.

The law requires a daily act of collective act of worship in schools, from which parents may withdraw their children. In this case this activity is not collective. Staff as well as parents can exercise their conscience and refuse to take part or supervise children.

This law is asinine, in that it cannot be enforced and many schools ignore it anyway. It is morally repulsive in that worship cannot be enforced and attempts to do so are an affront to both the children and the particular faith involved.

It would seem that in the present case of a Sheffield primary school, the head was trying to enforce this law and was opposed by some Muslim parents who wanted proper acts of worship for their children. By separating their children these parents are probably providing opportunities for their children to worship in school, but are merely using the premises for that purpose.

Sadly teachers have never thought to make plain the stupidity of this law which lays duties upon them but which most of them ignore, for good reasons. They should refuse on the grounds of conscience to supervise children in any compulsory worship in non-religious schools.

11 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Head ousted over separate assemblies

The head of a state school who wanted to ban separate assemblies for Muslim children has resigned.

She was trying to enforce the law which requires a daily act of collective worship in schools.

The difficulty is that for an act of worship to take place adherents to a faith or faiths are required, otherwise the result is likely to be a travesty of worship, especially when children are involved.

In one secular state school I exercised my right, on grounds of conscience, not to supervise children attending a Christian assembly where children of other faiths and of none were required to sing Christian hymns.

The particular law here is asinine for although it requires an act of worship to take place, it cannot impose the requirement on any individual to lead such an act. It conveniently ignores the matter of the validity of compulsory worship.

In all probability, the only valid worship in this school were the separate Muslim assemblies which were led by a Muslim parent and to which the head objected.

10 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

The Immortal Squealer

We are still beset with attempts at explaining Ed Balls remarks about the worst depression for a hundred years while the explanations of Gordon Brown’s reference to a depression echo with us.

And it’s not only Labour politicians who need experts to tidy up their pronouncements – try asking a Tory politician what is going to happen to grammar schools should they be returned to power. Will more of them be built? Will the remaining ones be replaced with comprehensives?

In face to face conversation, failure to get over a point is usually obvious and both parties can direct questions as they need to. In most writing, the aim should be sufficient clarity so that a reader does not feel the need to seek clarification.

Public speaking and pronouncement can be misused. The apparent openness of apparent conversation in words that are spoken disguises the fixed nature of what is said, like the message that is conveyed in writing. Writing of course keeps the recipient at bay; how often do we choose between sending an email or picking up the phone.

All these interposers, between speaker and audience resemble “Chinese whispers” which is confusing enough when the words are spoken. Imagine a game in which the players read other people’s hastily scribble messages then wrote out their own interpretation on a scrap of paper before despatching them in an envelope.

And still the political game is played. Orwell was right; the Squealers of this world still they shift from one leg to another, watching carefully to see the reaction of his audience. When those who seek our trust flirt thus with the truth, especially concerning matters of great importance, then the rest of us are entitled to hold back.

10 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Swiss vote on immigration

Being a foreign worker in CH – what is demanded and provided and the political maturity of their voting process

So the Swiss voters have ignored the blandishments of the right wing and voted resoundingly to extend the right of EU citizens to work there. For five years I was a foreign worker in Switzerland and learnt a great deal about the way in which foreigners are received and treated there. I taught in an international boarding school which employed many teachers from overseas as well as domestic and maintenance staff from other countries. Some had arrived ten years before, refugees from conflicts in eastern Europe. Some of them worked very hard for modest wages, but that was not the end of the story.

It was not the Portuguese of the Yugoslavs who drove large Mercedes, but they did have cars and they were secure. Their children attended good schools – few Swiss bother with independent schools because state education is both appreciated and well-regarded. Later, their children will have access to Swiss universities and, after six year’s residence they will be eligible to apply for Swiss citizenship. [Normally the requirement is eleven years, but a year’s education in Switzerland counts double.] Health care is excellent, funded by compulsory insurance and there are state pensions – in return for contributions based on three years part-time, modestly paid employment my wife receives nearly sixty pounds per month.

Some of the newcomers start businesses, sometimes as artisans, sometimes as entrepreneurs; one of my acquaintances had a good line in exporting cars that had failed the strict Swiss MOT back to his home in eastern Europe.

Swiss workers also have access to employment in the EU. A few years ago Chiltern Railways wanted to employ some Swiss railway managers but the company’s contract with the government was not sufficiently long to allow for a contract that would entice the Swiss over here and the idea was shelved.

When my wife and I arrived in Switzerland the local police could not understand that we were unable to provide them with a document from the Met stating that we did not have criminal records. These were required, not because we were going to work with children, but simply because we were foreign workers. In the end we had to provide sworn affidavits at the consulate. This was not some means for keeping undesirables out; Swiss citizens who want to move from one commune to anther have to show that they have no criminal record and can support themselves in their new abode. It is important to realize that the Swiss are as good at accepting discipline as they are at handing it out; women colleagues, and girls in the school could travel anywhere in the country at any time night or day and not have to concern themselves for their personal safety.

Had we stayed long enough to apply for Swiss citizenship we would have needed to demonstrate competence in one of the national languages as well as a knowledge and understanding of the country’s history and constitution. Our application would then have been considered by the local commune, by the canton and by the federal government.

A few years ago there was an earlier referendum on the question of immigration. The federal government had proposed slashing drastically the number of foreign workers allowed into Switzerland each year, but, in a referendum, the people of Switzerland changed the arrangements to halve the proposed reduction. At the same time they voted to reject a government proposal to shut down the country’s only nuclear power plant – it was felt that having established experience and expertise in this field the country should not throw it to one side. In both cases it was the people’s vote that counted. It is said that the possibility of referenda restrains Swiss politicians for they can be challenged in two ways, either by a challenge to government legislation or a proposal to initiate legislation. A hundred thousand signatures will trigger such challenges.

Living with the consequences of their sovereignty, it is said, encourages the Swiss to take more interest in everyday political life. No doubt it would be claimed that this result shows the greater political maturity of a people whose economic interests rely upon good relationships and trade with their neighbours, rather than the sort of zenophobia with depicts foreign workers as black sheep trying to make themselves at home in flocks of white sheep. There is a national scepticism that rejects the top-down control of a European community and also prides itself on its sturdy independence, but these are factors to be considered, not imperatives to be insisted upon. Forty years of Europe is contrasted with seven hundred years of the Confederatio Helvetica.

I would like to imagine a referendum in the UK this week, on banking and bonuses.

09 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Camerons to use state schools.

Well, we all know there are state schools and state schools for other people’s children.

For three generations state schools have largely been in the hands of local government, directed by central government. It is time for a change, but why trust other vested interests, commercial interests who sponsor schools and who provide politicians with a short tem financial fix when it comes to re-branding poor schools?

Why not learn to trust and empower those whose interest in good schools is greatest – parents. Rather like public schools, trusts which no individual can get their hands on, from which no one can take profits or dividends, whose only function is to provide education , state-funded public schools could be the answer. Parents would be obliged to support such schools as a condition of sending their children, and could learn and achieve a great deal as a result.

For Cameron to commit his children to the state system seems a huge commitment, possibly a hostage to fortune that he will come to regret. Crucially, will he simply do what many other parents do when it comes to using state secondary schools, use academic selection, residence in a leafy suburb or church allegiance to ensure that his children are not disadvantaged by his political gesture?

I’m afraid that until he comes up with clear proposals to break away from the monstrous political shame of the way politicians provide for other people’s children I will remain very sceptical indeed. For unless there are very radical changes things will not improve for children who have no option but to attend schools from which the political classes take care to protect their own children.

David Cameron acknowledges his debt to a public school education; his mission should be to turn all state-funded schools into public schools. Then there would be a chance of ending the scandal of schools for other people’s children.

09 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Tornado – the first steam loco built in Britain for fifty years

I wept when I saw the video clip on the BBC;

in the nineteen fifties drivers at Kings Cross would let keen train spotters try their hands at shovelling coal into fireboxes. Then I wept for all that we have not done since the loco was built.

Nostalgia, remembering national achievement when much of the current news is so appallingly bad is understandable but, like last week’s national indulgence in the snow and ice, it needs to be tempered with realism.

Tornado ran “under the wires,” the visible expression of the system of railway electrification developed by the French in the nineteen fifties, since adopted as a world standard and extended to exciting new rail projects across the world. Last week plans for a high speed rail link from London as far as Manchester were under discussion in the same self-congratulatory tones as were adopted when double-deck commuter trains were recently suggested as an exciting innovation. Bulleid’s double-deck commuter trains ran in and out of Waterloo from the 1940s to the 1970s; nothing new there. The Dockland Railway was announced with similar fanfares. It is completely incompatible with all the other rail systems around it, as it was discovered when an extension to Bank was in prospect; Dockland trains use electricity at a different voltage, collect it by a different system, are too big to share conventional tube tunnels and the curves on the system are too sharp for other trains.

We destroyed two thirds of the rail network in the sixties. When Stanstead was first chosen as London’s third airport the line past the site was in ruins and soon disappeared. When airport staff recently suggested its restoration as part of the up-grading of the main roads that serve the airport they were ignored. Only in Scotland is the government, the Scottish government, trying to put things to rights.

In France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland major rail projects are extending greener travel. In the mid-eighties a friend saw an ad on Preston station announcing that British Rail was to run through trains from Edinburgh to Paris. When he enquired about tickets the staff laughed at him. Twenty years on our railways are still a joke.

09 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Golliwog and other words

Tell me a word that you’ve often heard, Yet if you see it in print it makes you squint.

In Conundrums, D.H.Lawrence reminds us of the power of words to turn our reason. Sometimes this power has turned states or faiths against reason and unsettled the compilers of dictionaries.

Ms Thatcher’s use of the word golliwog has done the same and for days the media have echoed with the childish clamouring of claim and counter claim, redolent of the school playground where name calling can develop into something more than unpleasantness. There we have learnt not to punish the caller of names for as soon as teacher’s back is turned the name-calling can so easily be resumed. Now we embark on the more difficult task of helping children to understand one another better, to realise that we can easily give offence and that, by our reactions to offence, we can make matters worse.

One of my proudest moments as a teacher involved watching a sixteen year-old black refugee from Apartheid era South Africa decide what to do when confronted by the National Front. In front of him was a skinhead in black leathers handing out leaflets at Barking Station in east London during the rush hour. The leaflets called for blacks to be sent “back home.” The skinhead was struggling to reach all the commuters at the foot of a stairway.

“Let me give you a hand.” Before he could object, or appreciate the situation, the skinhead found a tall, black teenager standing next to him giving out racist rubbish and, by doing so, destroying it.

Couldn’t we grown-ups try something as good as this?

08 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Craven Foreign Secretary Milliband and the Special Relationship

Barack Obama has a shorter and more direct link to Britain's imperial shortcomings than most Americans - through his Kenyan father - so his attitude towards the UK should be of particular interest.

For the moment he has the British Foreign Secretary trying to cover his back over sensitive security data without his asking and there is no sign yet of the re-appearance of the mutual respect and even-handed dealing that is expected between long-standing friends.

Here there are echoes of 1942, the fine words presented to every US serviceman on his way to the UK and the secret deal between Roosevelt and Churchill, that unlike our Commonwealth allies, American troops would not have to face British courts if they fell foul of British law. More recently we have seen the one-sided application of an extradition treaty and the refusal of a US Attorney General to answer questions from British reporters about the possibility that British airfields were used to transport prisoners for Special Rendition.

Before last month's inauguration we were encouraged to hope for a better relationship with the White House. Now there is the shadow of a doubt and we should ask whether this new president expects both an obliging silence from the High Court in London and additional British troops in Afghanistan. Will my American friends resume, in say three year's time, the flow of press cuttings, not long curtailed, telling me of moves to impeach the president

06 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Selfish Parents

There are two steps we could consider in order to encourage better care for children.

They involve putting children before adults and take into account our inability to oblige anyone to provide for someone else’s child the care and self-sacrificial love that effective parents are prepared to give.

Firstly we should ask why a woman should keep a child whose father she cannot or will not name. Why should the child be denied contact with and support from the father, why should the father be denied an opportunity to support and care for mother and child, why should a child start life with a father who has to be excluded from his or her live? Fostering and adopting early in a child’s life, we should remember, is far easier and more likely to succeed.

Secondly, when minors appear in court, why do we not insist that both parents appear alongside their offspring? Why should they not be asked to give an account of their stewardship of the child they brought into the world? Absentee parents could be asked why they left the child, what support they have provided since. Then there could be the matter of apportioning of blame, between child and parents, then the matter of restitution and punishment, and the giving of assurances about the support and the supervision the parents will each provide until the child is an independent adult.

Not easy, but essential if we are to put children first and break cycles of deprivation.

03 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

Schools urged to teach good parenting skills

However sympathetic our response to The Children’s Society’s concern about parenting skills we cannot take seriously its call for these to be taught in school.

Firstly, one has to ask whether schools could effectively take up yet another social concern, assuming that they are teachable in the sense that the 3Rs are teachable. [Remember Mr Blunkett’s call in 2000 for schools to teach the sanctity of marriage.]

Secondly we have to acknowledge that this call involves a woeful simplification of what it takes to succeed as a parent, a practical activity that involves attitudes, which are cannot be taught, as well as skills which can.

Being a parent is the most important job in the world yet we ignore the time and effort required to provide a home and, even now, parents who have to do this alone are being hounded into returning to other, less important work, almost, it seems, before the umbilical cord has been cut.

02 Feb 2009 Return to top of page

State schools fail gifted and talented

For a whole generation successive governments have undermined the trust between schools and families that is required for schools to succeed.

It has also set itself up as the micro-manager of education.

In state schools much of the ability and willingness of teachers to investigate and pursue what is best for all their charges, including the “gifted and talented,” has been undermined by excessive inspection, hamfisted direction, the frequent shifting of targets, and the turmoil of reorganisation and re-branding of schools. In the meantime nothing has been done to raise expectations of parents.

In the independent sector any one of these handicaps could spell disaster for a school. One of the most noticeable differences between an independent school and ones maintained by the state is the ability of teachers in independent schools to teach, coach, organise and enthuse beyond the call of duty, and enjoy the intrinsic rewards of so doing.

It could be thus in all state schools, but only if we can learn again to trust them and this would not be easy. Listen if you can to Edna Healey describe how the headmaster of an isolated village school realised that at the age of fourteen she was “gifted and talented” and worked hard to get her into Oxford.

30 Jan 2009 Return to top of page

Teachers strike over academies.

The NUT’s decision to oppose academies in this way is evidence of their tendency to bully.

The response to bullying must be to ensure that bullying is ineffective or, better still, counter-productive.

There are reasons for rejecting academies but the opposition of just one teaching union is not one.

In its haste to show that it can manage education, the government has introduced some variety of provision.

Two responses to this are required. Firstly to prevent monopoly control of education, whether by government, trade unions or business interests and secondly, to see that parents an families are encouraged and empowered to fulfil their largely untapped potential for good.

There is probably as much chance of the NUT sponsoring an academy to show everyone else just how things should be done as there was of Arthur Scargill and the NUM taking over a failing coal mine.

Until it is prepared to take responsibility for a school and its pupils the NUT should remember that it is but part of the educational process, not the whole.

28 Jan 2009 Return to top of page

Schools and consultations with parents

Last week protesting parents and pupils caused a day’s closure of a school in Cumbria.

One of the parents’ complaints concerned the head’s failure to consult them.

In some ways this in unfair to schools which are no longer allowed a proper start to consultation with parents, before a child is offered a place; such interviews were outlawed two years ago.

For schools to be successful, homes and families need to trust one another. This trust is hindered by imposing children on schools without such a discussion and a meeting of minds.

Did these parents who want now want a consultation seek a discussion, before sending their children, to ensure help establish a good working relationship between home and school?

26 Jan 2009 Return to top of page

Home tutoring – cover for abuse?

Last week Baroness Morgan the children’s minister angered parents by suggesting that teaching children at home was potential cover for abuse and neglect, and one local school, Bishops Park College, was denounced as the worst in the country. Last night I attended a meeting between parents who are teaching their children at home, rather than send them to this school, and the Director of Schools and Learning who is responsible for that school.

The parents explained one of their objections. When they visited the school they found that the deputy head who showed them around carried a phone in her hand throughout the tour lest a colleague in trouble with a class needed to speed dial her. As they moved around the corridors, doors had to be unlocked to let them through and then relocked behind them. I too have visited the school and seen this; it reminded me of the young offender Institutions and prisons that I have visited.

Like staff at the school, the Director explained that doors were locked in this way, “to ensure that pupils were in class and behaved there.”

And there you have it. There was no response to my suggestions, that it is appalling that eleven year olds could not be relied upon to attend class and behave, that caring parents should be appalled at the idea of their children being locked up with children who cannot behave reasonably, and that I for one would not want to “teach” in such circumstances.

Situations like this are morally repugnant for they reinforce the notion that children cannot be expected to behave properly and they trap children who want to behave and work with others who do not, physically as well as socially. In our attempts to include difficult children we exclude even larger numbers from civilised society.

For generations politicians have required state schools to cope with parental shortcomings. This is the result.

23 Jan 2009 Return to top of page

Ofsted to blitz boring teachers

So Ofsted is going to “blitz” boring teachers.

It says much about Ofsted that they think that this obvious truth, that boring teachers bring about poor behaviour, needs to be stated. But then Ofsted inspectors, like school advisors and education officials are at best ex-teachers.

Teaching is a practical activity, professionally conducted. In other professions, the best practitioners tend to engage with the more demanding aspects of their work, becoming consultants or judges. In education they leave the classroom and leave the most important aspect of education to those at the lower end of the professional pile, and join a different interest group.

The solution; teachers who are worthy of promotion should continue with a modest commitment to regular teaching. Those who give up should, like a professional pilot, should lose their qualification and be disqualified from advising or inspecting.

05 Jan 2009 Return to top of page

US troops may appear before Iraqi courts

The governments of the US and Iraqi have agreed that, in certain circumstances, US troops will appear in front of Iraqi courts should they fall foul of Iraqi law while off duty.

Americans have a great wariness of foreign courts, and there is a British a tendency to cave in to US pressure – the Enron Three come to mind, and, of course, there was Churchill’s secret wartime agreement with Roosevelt that US troops would not have to appear before British courts.

So, what chance is there of US military personnel ever appearing before an Iraqi court?

There may be straws in the wind. In Dreams from my Father – published in 2004, the president elect, a lawyer, wrote of his mother, “She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad.” More recently, last May, he was reported as saying that the special relationship required recalibration and that partners should listen to one another and each be prepared to follow the other.

In the UK we should welcome and encourage the new president if this fresh viewpoint is sustained and strengthens what our governments have undermined in recent years.

05 Jan 2009 Return to top of page

Risk of further test fiasco in schools

There is a risk that last year's school test fiasco will be repeated says the Qualifiations and Curriculum Authority, for there is no time to test the new system.

The government now has a choice; risk stressing and disappointing pupils again or at least suspending the tests for one year.

Will the government deny itself the statistics it needs, or will it spare pupils? Of course, pupils will have to suffer.

Parents could keep their children at home, but it is difficult for them to act in a concerted manner and to support one another.

However, when teachers want something for themselves, they manage to act in a concerted manner and support one another. Why don’t teachers protect their charges from a system which they have condemned by refusing to run these tests?

Such altruism might help them regain public trust and self-esteem, a welcome boost for their morale.

31 Dec 2008 Return to top of page

Journalist warned for releasing a hamster

Unwanted or injured pets.

A discussion yesterday on The Jeremy Vine Show centred on James’Delingpole’s admission that he had released a redundant hamster in his local park after it had bitten his children a number of times and the shop from which he had purchased it did not want to take it off his hands.

The RSPCA warned him that he could face criminal proceedings and animal lovers rang in to tell him what an awful man he was, but no one told him how to dispose of an unwanted pet.

What should any pet owner do when confronted with a creature that is sick, injured or a threat to human safety, especially at this time of year when local vets may be on holiday or simply a long way away?

I was appalled that no one suggested that pet owners’ duty of care should extend to ensuring that they are capable of putting down, humanely, any animal for which they are responsible.

It can be done; at agricultural college I was taught the basic principles which I apply from time to time.

All pet owners should understand what should be done.

Unwanted or injured pets. A discussion yesterday on The Jeremy Vine Show centred on James’ Delingpole’s admission that he had released a redundant hamster in his local park after it had bitten his children a number of times and the shop from which he had purchased it did not want to take it off his hands.

The RSPCA warned him that he could face criminal proceedings and animal lovers rang in to tell him what an awful man he was, and environmentalists joined in DETAILS but no one told him how to dispose of an unwanted pet.

What should any pet owner do when confronted with a creature that is sick, injured or a threat to human safety, especially at this time of year when local vets may be on holiday or simply a long way away?

I was appalled that no one suggested that pet owners’ duty of care should extend to ensuring that they are capable of putting down, humanely, any animal for which they are responsible. Why not? There are times when assistance is not available, when we are a long way off the beaten track, when vets are on holiday or off duty; they are unburdened by a Hippocratic oath and can and do point out that an animal is the sole responsibility of its owner, the situation in which James Delingpole found himself.

Unfortunately, I suspect, it is human sentimentality that is allowed to take precedence over our responsibility for animals. Fewer people than ever have dealings with animals in the natural surrounding or on the basis of more than a cursory visit, as passive onlookers, shielded from the realities of the animal world by screens, glass cages and “experts.”

DETAIL
A few years ago, just after the New Year, I listened to a woman tell of the stress and worry from which she had suffered over the holiday period. Her Alsatian had been hit by a car late on Christmas Eve. Its spine appeared to have been broken; it had no control or movement in its hind legs. The woman told of her efforts to load the dog single-handedly into the back of her car and of her frantically seeking a vet who would attend to the dog. She had spent much of the holiday, increasingly weary and desperate, loading and unloading the dog as she sought a vet. Eventually, at the end of the holiday, she found a vet who provided the dog with a merciful end. I would have liked to see her in court, charged with causing cruelty.

Pet owners can be taught what to do. At agricultural college a vet taught us the basic principles which I apply from time to time.

All pet owners need to understand what should be done. DETAIL inc dangerous or frightened animals

This is not about an act of heartlessness or cruelty. Neither is it about putting to one side one’s own feelings for a faithful friend, indeed it is out of love for a helpless and dependent friend that we should make sure that we know what to do when confronted by the sort of emergency that tested the owner of that Alsatian. During the First World War, it was known that among some soldiers at least there was a code, an understanding that you did not leave a badly injured comrade to drown in his own blood, or in the mud of the trenches. Indeed you had a responsibility that you were expected to exercise on behalf of your mates; it simply required you to provide them with a quick release from unbelievable suffering and pain.

30 Dec 2008 Return to top of page

Advertising in school teaching materials.

Children and young people are particularly vulnerable to advertising and persuasion and generally we recognise their need for protection from those who would take advantage of this.

If, as your editorial suggests today, [Monday 29th December] those entrusted with our children are incapable of filtering out advertising material included in teaching materials then we should at least ask whether some teachers cannot understand whatever it is they are supposed to be teaching.

Advertising pays; if it did not we would not be troubled by it. Its ability to influence adult behaviour has been revealed particularly clearly in the recently burst housing bubble; how much more keener should we be to shield our children from its clutches? And shouldn’t teachers of subjects such as media studies be in the forefront of promoting a clear understanding of advertising’s purposes and function?

Cultural acceptance of advertising and promotions

A manipulated market in which the poorest seem to pay most

29 Dec 2008 Return to top of page

Children failing to speak

I recently heard of primary schools which employ speech therapists to help normal children who have not learnt to speak before beginning school.

Two questions: what can parents do for their children during their first few years of life? What should parents do for their children during their first few years of life?

Most reasonable parents seem to bring about the following: Speech
Listening and communication skills
The ability to recognise and respond to instructions, information and advice
Toilet training
The ability to address and undress themselves
Consideration for others and the basics of good manners – Ps and Qs
An interest in other people and the world around them

If this is what most parents are able to encourage or bring about in their children, then this would seem a reasonable expectation of all parents.

Children’s potential remains that unless released – the achievements listed above will not come about spontaneously, but as a result of efforts by parents.

If this is what most parents are able to encourage or bring about in their children, then this would seem a reasonable expectation of all parents.

Children’s potential remains that, unless released – the achievements listed above will not come about spontaneously, but as a result of cultivation, of challenge, of insistence and persistence, of encouragement and because the parents believe that these achievements are attainable and see it as their duty to do their best to see that their children try very hard to reach these goals. Unless parents are prepared to make such an effort they will let down their children and the rest of us.

Look at the parents of children with, for example, Downe’s Syndrome or forms of mental or physical disability and note how many of them simple get on with this business of parenting for as long as it is necessary. Such parents can be humbling and astounding examples of good and determined parenting.

This is a love which finds it difficult to limit the demands it makes of itself and does not easily yield these responsibilities to others. It certainly makes as few demands on others as it possibly can.

29 Dec 2008 Return to top of page

Academies not taking their share of disruptive pupils.

Well, there’s a surprise; they are supposed to be more independent and that’s what independent schools have to do.

Neighbouring schools which take on these children will be the new sink schools, the grotty sec mods of yesteryear.

Recent visited one such state of the art school building to which concerned parents will not send their children whom they teach at home. They are right to do this.

Where academies succeed, the ambitious middle classes take them over and the miracle they are suppose to work, the transformation of unruly and unmotivated children, will again be delayed.

No system of state schooling tried in my lifetime has addressed the problem of providing all children, not with an education, but with parents who care about education, parents who will support their children whether or not the states does.

26 Dec 2008 Return to top of page

Deadbeat fathers

It was announced yesterday that the government proposes powers to suspend the driving licences and passports of absentee parents who fail to meet their financial commitments to their children.

In some respects this is to be welcomed, but in other, more important respects it is too late.

When there are families that would adopt or foster babies, why should babies be left at the mercy of parents who cannot provide or whose relationship has broken down before the birth.

Why do we not consider requiring at the registration of a birth that the mother shows:
a. The identity of the father
b. Evidence that the father is already providing for any children for whom he is already responsible
c. A stable relationship with a father who is willing and able to support her and the child.

This would release babies from relationships that had failed before they were born and send a much stronger message that the interests of babies and children will be put before those of their natural parents .

26 Dec 2008 Return to top of page

Schools and consultations with parents

Last week protesting parents and pupils caused a day’s closure of a school in Cumbria. One of the parents’ complaints concerned the head’s failure to consult them.

In some ways this in unfair to schools which are no longer allowed a proper start to consultation with parents, before a child is offered a place; such interviews were outlawed two years ago.

For schools to be successful, homes and families need to trust one another. This trust is hindered by imposing children on schools without such a discussion and a meeting of minds.

Did these parents who want now want a consultation seek a discussion, before sending their children, to ensure help establish a good working relationship between home and school?

26 Dec 2008 Return to top of page

Dog breeders and parents face different expectations

Two horrific news items from earlier this month bring home yet again the vast and unbelievable disparity between the expectations of the breeders of dogs and breeders of children:

the attack by two Rottweiler’s on a postman whose arm was almost severed in an attack, and the conviction of a teenage gang who raped and tormented a lone girl.

In the first case, the dogs were attacked by a passer-by using an iron bar and then a van. The dogs were both destroyed, the passer-by has been praised for his bravery and the owners of the dogs face the possibility of fines and imprisonment. Speculation about their responsibility for keeping and housing the dogs securely is already under discussion.

In the second case, some of the parents of those convicted may have been in court, but they will not have been in the dock, nor would they have been expected to give an account of their stewardship of another human life.

Dangerous dogs are predictable, controllable and can easily be disposed of; we require due diligence of these who breed them and those who control them. If they are abandoned, turned loose on the streets there is an outcry.

Dangerous teenagers are terrifying in comparison, calculating, manipulating, capable of subterfuge and insidious in the dealings with friend and foe, devious and dishonest and with all the capacity for destructiveness and deceitfulness of which humankind is capable, and, in the end, victims of their own anti-social tendencies; when do we ever have a chance to question publically those who bring them into the world and, supposedly, control them?

The dogs have been destroyed and the owners face the possibility of fines, imprisonment and a ban o keeping dogs. Speculation about their role in all this is already under discussion. These dogs will do no further harm.

In the second case, no parent was in the dock, to face questions about the discharge of their responsibilities as parents. It will cost around £100,000 pa to keep their children in care, £50,000 pa to keep them in prison. What sort of future is their likely lot once they are released?

Are dogs or human beings most easily controlled?
Which is it more important to control, children or dogs?
Why do we expect more of dog owners than of parents?

26 Dec 2008 Return to top of page

Children as litter.

Dropping litter can attract a fine of up to £2,500. Although litter is unsightly, troublesome and expensive to clear, it is rarely dangerous. It is simply a mess, abandoned for others to tackle.

Children who are abandoned to their own devices, neglected or abused are a danger to themselves as well as to others.

Clearing up litter is expensive but this pales into insignificance in comparison with the cost of abandoned children. How much, in purely financial terms, will the six teenagers convicted last week of gang rape have cost us? Will their parents find themselves in court, charged perhaps under the Litter Act?

Of course not. But how many of us would choose to confront aggressive youngsters rather than a pile of inert refuse?

Dropping litter can attract a fine of up to £2,500. Although litter is unsightly, troublesome and expensive to clear, it is rarely dangerous. It is simply a mess, abandoned for others to tackle.

Children who are abandoned to their own devices, neglected or abused are a danger to themselves as well as to others. Our attempts to educate them cost over £7,500 each, per year; £80,000 pa for each one taken into care.

Leaving litter can result of a fine of up to £2,500 and clearing it costs millions but this pales into insignificance in comparison with the cost of abandoned children.
How much, in purely financial terms, will the six teenagers convicted last week of gang rape have cost us? Will their parents find themselves in court, charged perhaps under the Litter Act?

Of course not. But how many of us would willingly confront aggressive youngsters rather than a pile of inert refuse?

15 Dec 2008 Return to top of page

Vandals understood.

What could be better, a brand new, state of the art school building in which you are confined against your will.

Old buildings, shabby buildings are just not the same for they absorb abuse in a way that is impossible with bright paint, large plastic panels and huge panes of glass that are transformed so easily spoilt with a touch of a spray can or a lighter.

Recently I visited a local school to which some families I know are refusing to send their children, despite its being housed in a brand new building with an “executive head” parachuted in from a neighbouring school. With a television reporter I followed the head round a state of the art building. At each door we stopped while the head inserted a swipe card. Each child carries a card – the system can reveal each child’s location at any time. Later I learnt of the cost of repairs to the door locks; children who lose their cards and are impeded simply kick the mechanism into submission.

Only days before my visit another executive head in the same authority had advised me to see this head and all that he was doing for this school which had never started to succeed.

This is part of the belief in academies – throw money at a problem school and you will transform the attitudes of the families and the children it tries to serve. But this is to put the cart before the horse.

This school was neither a place where I would wish to work not one to which I would send anybody’s children.

In my outrage I recalled my last act of vandalism in school; a junior colleague had no power in his classroom for audio apparatus and a heater. For eighteen months we had asked for this dead solitary power point to be repaired. I said that I would see to the matter. Alone, I smashed the useless point until a wire protruded. A told my colleague that the point had been vandalized and we isolated it and reported the matter. Within hours it was repaired.

For me there were memories of visits to young offenders’ institutions and prisons. What about the pupils housed in this school? They do not want to be there and are treated humiliatingly. What levers do we have under them? Why should they not object to entrapment at school, especially when children in care may not be confined and wander out into street life unsupervised?

15 Dec 2008 Return to top of page

Pet owners – the ultimate responsibility

The one expectation of anyone who becomes a pet owner, in my opinion, is that they should be able and willing to put it down, humanely, should that prove necessary.

DEFRA’s new recommendations for owners of horses, dogs and cats do not do that. They concern micro-management of domestic animals without any common sense awareness that animals, their owners and their circumstances are infinitely varied and that the onus on owners should be to familiarise themselves with a particular type of animal before acquiring one, and to recognise the limits of their expertise.

The most outrageous pet owner I ever met told a heart-rending tale of the trouble and frustration she suffered as she spent Christmas taking an Alsatian with a broken back round the local veterinary practices only to find them all closed for the holiday.

Vets do not take a Hippocratic oath and can tell us that our pet, however ill or badly injured, is our responsibility. We must turn on its head the love we claim to have for our pets, and not indulge our mawkish sentimentality at their expense. If we do not love our pets enough to guarantee them a humane ending, at our own hands if necessary, then we should not take them on.

What, I ask myself, would DEFRA have to say to the woman with the Alsatian?

15 Dec 2008 Return to top of page

Brave parents who break the mould – home tutoring

Yesterday’s announcement of another set of changes in the primary school curriculum has caused yet another upheaval for parents and teachers.

Teachers despair of the failure to tackle the matter of testing and older teachers to whom I have spoken ask whether the powers that be are leading schools backwards to some sort of future; working in themes and topics that brought “subjects” into the primary school classroom was a commonplace forty years ago. The changes will be a further burden for those who actually teach and have to give an account of their stewardship of other people’s children, not in some dispassionate, third-person report that has been scrutinised and spun, but face to face, one concerned human being addressing another.

Control of what we do for children seems to rest in fewer hands: regulatory frameworks for school admissions, the curriculum, health and safety. And there are the restraints that appear calculated to discourage teachers from giving up time and energy to take pupils out on trips lest a finger of accusation be pointed flowing a minor mishap. Only yesterday a teacher in Devon who grasped a girl’s hand when she was at risk of an accident in a workshop was cleared of assault. No one asked what might have been the reaction of her parents had an accident occurred because the teacher had not intervened. Meanwhile the Guide Association can only take on half the girls who would like to join because the regulatory regime under which they have to operate discourages adults from volunteering their help.

To where will innovation and discovery proceed if we insist on being so risk averse? How will we make new and useful discoveries if we continue our quest to eliminate risk? What are we doing to encourage younger generations to soar on the wings of youthful energy and enthusiasm?

I have very recently seen at close hand the compilation of an A-level course and it was most instructive to see what was expected of able sixth-formers by this syllabus - there’s a naughty word, straight away, it’s a specification silly. And immediately we are into the world of industrial planning for inanimate objects – a three-cylinder diesel engine, transversely mounted and coupled by a fluid fly-wheel to a four-wheel drive configuration. There they are, set out in rows, emerging from the artificial light of the factory and blinking in the light of day. And as for our children, they are to ask themselves whether a piece of work satisfies a whole list of criteria which are part of that specification that is intended to guarantee what? It certainly won’t be the sort of poem in which a woman gleefully anticipates old age and walking along the pavement dragging her stick noisily along someone’s garden railings.

I hope younger poets will go on writing in that vein, to counter their fellows in a risk averse generation which has succumbed to misleading but well intentioned legislation and propaganda from central government. Think of the food that is wasted because of the system of sell-by dates that could only be inflicted on an uninformed and unthinking population; I am now expected to label the honey from my garden in this absurd way – honey contains natural preservatives and has a shelf-life of thousands of years. Another, more dramatic example, part of the attack on drinking and driving, has been the information that a third of road accidents no less are caused by drink drivers.

No one is outraged that two thirds of road accidents are caused by sober drivers, who may well be drugged, tired, inattentive, easily distracted, ill-tempered, careless or merely indifferent to the safety of others. But it’s the drinking they’ll get you for, or speeding, and we become an anxious people that spends too much time looking over its shoulders – for the traffic police, no win-no fee lawyers, the man from the Health and Safety Executive or Ofsted inspectors.

Yet despite our surveillance society Haringey has managed to break the mould while a child was systematically broken, and those clever people from Ofsted failed to check the data. Or were they too simply ticking boxes? In Dewsbury, Karen Mathews has bred her own victims and the rest of us are threatened with more assurances and better surveillance.

All is not lost, however. In fact it is far from lost, but we do go out of our way to frustrate those who try to travel hopefully. Today [Wednesday December 10th] I am visiting the Lords with six families who are home-schooling their children. Like an increasing number of parents, they are prepared to break the mould, in this case because their local authority only offers them places in a failing school and a lot of promises. They are brave and determined parents, doing an important job well. But all that officialdom is able to do is to raise doubts about what they are doing, when they should be applauded and encouraged. When I was running a school I would have welcomed them with open arms, but I would only have done so had I been confident that my school had something substantial to offer.

These parents were offered support that has never materialised and have been threatened with prosecution for failing to send their children to school while they were officially registered as home-schoolers. Now there are conflicting messages about the possibility of places in one of the four schools in the area which they find acceptable. One head has told them that he could admit their children, and is keen to do so, but is forbidden to do so by the local authority.

An increasing number of parents are adding to their responsibilities as parents the burden, financial, emotional, social and intellectual of ensuring that their children are taught well. We should be prepared to help and encourage them for they are helping to break the grip of the nanny state, matching their sense of responsibility with a burden that they place on their own shoulders.

09 Dec 2008 Return to top of page

State school teachers flee to independents

The news from the Westminster Education Forum on Wednesday that large numbers of experienced teachers are moving to independent schools should surprise no one. After over twenty years in state schools I found myself in the independent sector.

It was clear in the minds of anybody connected with these schools that their purpose was education, not child-minding or social work. We worked hard, but at things that were obviously worthwhile and not imposed for political or ideological reasons.There there was time for good manners and consideration for other people.

It is no wonder that more parents than can afford places would like to send their children.

For all the talk by politicians of introducing independent school practices into state schools, as long as parents are not obliged to prepare their children for school, parents who do care will not want their children in schools that are unduly troubled by indifferent parenting.

And until politicians grasp that nettle, parents who care, and teachers who care, will tend to go where education stands a chance. Certainly, no one I ever met, who had transferred from state to independent schools, had any intention of returning.

28 Nov 2008 Return to top of page

Encouraging cycling

Cycling is said to be booming, and there are calls for greater use of the bicycle. There are good reasons for this.

But many people are not heeding this call and remain in their cars where they feel safer.

Passing a cycling proficiency test should be made a requirement for able-bodied applicants applying for provisional driving licences.

Motorists then would become more appreciative of the dangers faced by non-motorists, protective parents of younger teenagers who were obliged to use a bike on the road would strengthen demands to tackle dangerous driving and more people would come to appreciate that the bike is often the quickest mode of transport in towns and cities.

In fifty years of cycling in and around London the only serious discouragement has been the refusal of the police to take action against a motorist who knocked me off my bike then complained to them that I had dented the bonnet of the car.

22 Nov 2008 Return to top of page

Justice and Safety on the roads

I am about to go to court, for the third time, to plead mitigating circumstances rather than pay a fixed penalty fine and incur penalty points about being caught in a speed trap.

My previous pleadings have yielded reduced fines and seen the imposition of penalty points overturned. Most people cannot afford time off as I can and this is unjust. I find the system of fixed penalty fines a cynical calculation that people will not be able to afford to ask the courts to consider properly the nature of their offences.

My sense of outrage is compounded by the response of the Met - "Working together to make London safer" - when a driver who had pulled out from a side road and knocked me from my bike complained to the police that I had dented the bonnet of her BMW. When I showed the police further evidence they claimed that there were no grounds for steps to be taken against her.

This is further evidence that speed camera systems have far more to do with generating revenue than with road safety, the grounds on which speed limits are imposed.

17 Nov 2008 Return to top of page

Adults and “feral” children

Barnado's report should surprise no one but should shame the adult community.

Adult insensitivity and ignorance concerning young people, and reluctance to demand more of themselves as parents makes this inevitable.

Many adults set appalling examples to young people then condemn young people for what are really the shortcomings of their parents' and the wider community.

There are ways to approach and deal with young people that can be very successful and I have encountered many youngsters who have benefitted from kindness and consideration at the hands of adults.

If there are feral children infesting our streets then the adult community should look first at what it expects of itself before turning on its victims.

17 Nov 2008 Return to top of page

Troubled by other people’s children

Somewhere, Baby P and Sharon Mathews each has a father.

Usually in dealing with tragedies and disasters all relevant factors are considered and those responsible named if not shamed. But not in cases such as theirs.

So neither father will be asked to explain his abandoning a child with a mother who seems to have been far worse than inadequate.

At the outset of a child’s life there are many good reasons for knowing the identity of the father. If the mother will not, or cannot identify him, do we need any further evidence of the parents’ inability to form a partnership able to take on the challenges and demands of bringing up a child?

How then can we justify leaving an infant child to take the chances that accompany such a start in life?

The child’s interests should be far higher up our agenda and, in such situations, babies should be made available for fostering or adoption and those who bring them into the world for others to trouble themselves with should make the one contribution they are most likely to understand; a reduction in benefits or a surcharge on their tax bill.

14 Nov 2008 Return to top of page

The latest James Bond

Greeted today by a tie-less Daniel Craig and a girl who resembles the neigbour's granddaughter who used to play in our garden.

Is this an ageist plot to steal James Bond, driven by the obsession with youth?

With our increased life expectation we over-sixties require our heroes to match our longevity. We also have the growing grey pound which will not be handed over in exchange for Harry Potter without acne.

Sean Connery should stride out again, with a suitable plot and a wily and sophisticated companion; I can think of several. Then we could sell our shares in Viagra.

30 Oct 2008 Return to top of page

Why should we be allowed to breed our own victims?

Last week I listened as a mother spoke to me of her fifteen year-old's pregnancy, as if she were regretting a change in the weather.

Suddenly the girl has acquired trappings of adulthood and is expecting due recognition. The mother feels sorry for herself; expected to provide for her troublesome daughter and the baby's father. He is also fifteen and his parents are not at all interested.

Would you ever want your child or grandchild fostered or adopted by this household?

Why then should this pair of failures be allowed to inflict themselves on this potential victim?

28 Oct 2008 Return to top of page

Church of England and Lords Reform

The Times report today, Church will be stripped of its special status, is a useful reminder, in the context of attempts to reform The Lords, of the Church of England's failure to use its influence in that regard. Perhaps it is not too late.

There are other denominations and other faiths that play a significant role in the lives of many people and whose leaders are well-regarded. The Chief Rabbi, The Archbishop of Westminster and the Chairman of the Free Church Council come to mind. Their congregations are as much deserving of representation in the Lords as a political party driven by expediency to parachute in an unelected government minister.

Were the established Church to offer to trade a limited number of bishops' seats for other faith representatives its courage and purpose would be widely acknowledged and would substantiate its claim that the whole community benefits from establishment.

22 Oct 2008 Return to top of page

Attempts to ban smacking

Smacking is not assault or corporal punishment, or violence.

It lies somewhere between insisting on changing the nappy of a resentful infant and the shrugging of one's shoulders when adult offspring embark upon some youthful folly. It usually occurs within a home and within a family, private areas where control and evidence gathering are difficult and where all sorts of neglect and abuse are possible.

Moves to outlaw smacking are ill-considered and will further confuse and discourage parents whose role becomes more and more demanding. Politicians and others who seek to interfere in this way are never expected to pick up the pieces when things go wrong. If we are to remain free to bring children into the world, we must be trusted until there are grounds for withdrawing that trust if we are to cary out effectively the most important job in the world. Otherwise, we will continue to move closer to a licensing system for those who want to have children.

08 Oct 2008 Return to top of page

Head’s feeble call for the abolition of SATs

Parents should not rely on the call by John Dunford, the headteachers' leader, to bring about the end of SAT tests in schools.

They should remind themselves that, despite their condemnation of the tests, teachers have continued to impose them on students.

Parents of ten year-olds should not send them back to school with an apple for the teacher this term, but with a note explaining that from May 11th -15th next year they will be at the dentists, or receiving special private tuition, or visiting frail grandparents who live far away. This is the best way to protect kids from the unnecessary stress of SAT tests. Teachers would appreciate parents' support and would acknowledge that no harm will occur to children as a result of their missing the tests. A good push now by parents could finish off this ludicrous and discredited nonsense.

05 Sep 2008 Return to top of page

Police tactics and troublesome teens

There are indications of an increased determination by the police to tackle anti-social teenagers.

Last week BBC's Look East showed two officers pursuing two miscreants. One complained repeatedly that he was being harrassed. His demeanour reminded me of troublesome youngsters with whom I dealt as a headmaster. He was immature and self-pitying and I realised that, in his circumstances, he was entitled to resent this torment for he was effectively alone, and being held responsible for his own waywardness while his parents were not.

Treatment such as this will secure his belief that he has a grudge against the rest of us. Is this what we want?

31 Aug 2008 Return to top of page

Camouflage for the likes of Gary Glitter

We watch the sad antics of Garrie Glitter, warily, concerned that he will manage to disappear again off the radar.

Many others, whose infamy is not accompanied by faded fame, would also make our flesh creep.

Back in the community they use the rest of us as camouflage and the result of all this – the difficulties we now have assuming the innocence and good intentions of other people.

There would, for example, be double the number of Guides and Scouts in the country were it not for the humiliating, laborious and expensive business through which potential leaders of young people’s organisations have to put themselves.

It is the Garrie Glitters of this world who should be treated with continuing suspicion for it is their capacity and willingness to assault and abuse young people and their duplicity that are established beyond reasonable doubt. While they are free, the innocence of the rest of us is challenged and children lose out.

21 Aug 2008 Return to top of page

Bothering teenagers is useless without bothering their parents

Gangs replace parents
NZ police not allowed to publish a photo of a known 16 year-old burglar
UK police pursue teenage troublemakers - curfews in Cornwall and Operation Leopard in Essex.
But where are the parents? We pursue the owners of dangerous dogs but not the parents of dangerous teenagers, and some teenagers are far more dangerous.

Why?

As a headteacher I was able to insist on dealing with parents of difficult and anti-social teenagers. Why are other parts of the community, police, the courts denied this essential right?

10 Aug 2008 Return to top of page

Lads’ mags, Mama Mia and fatherhood

Last week I was enjoying the glitzy music of Mama Mia and its attempt at a romantic story-line.

For a while it re-called “Hair” and the celebration of the sexual revolution which encouraged us to take a liberal view of the private lives of our fellow beings. Then something began to worry at me and the storyline, such as it was, fell apart.

Michael Gove’s attack this week on lads’ mags and their depiction of women as continually available is a timely reminder of how badly part of the sexual revolution has become derailed. It has also filled a gap for me, and for many others I am sure, the gap between a liberalising of ideas about personal conduct and the liberalising of notions of responsibility, about consequences for others.
Two generations ago we were told that consenting adults could do more or less as they pleased, so long as they knew what they were doing and no one else was unduly affected. And the cry was, anything goes!

But in the midst of all this some important things have also gone and the liberated, rational mindset that undermined Victorian censoriousness has not found substitutes for self-restraint and a concern for others; we still need to match that rational for self-indulgence with the means to protect others from our self-indulgence.

Our offspring are not conceived as consenting adults and cannot consent to anything, meaningfully, for years afterwards. If we implicate ourselves in the existence of another human being we sacrifice our rights to self-indulgence. Temporarily at least, we have to de-liberalise ourselves for the sake of those whose dependence we have created, those whom we have brought into existence. If we do not take up this who else should?

This is the terrible truth that is ignored until it surfaces in places like Dewsbury where neighbours wait to see the extent to which they were duped into searching for a poor little girl whose mother, it seems, allowed her to be imprisoned by an “uncle.”

The twenty year-old daughter at the heart of Mama Mia is about to be married and learns that her mother – played by Meryl Streep – does not know which of three lovers is her father. The girl contrives to see that all three receive invitations, unbeknown to her mother. All three turn up and the plot turns around one of them, supposedly the real father, falling in love again with the girl’s mother.

Yes, it’s another planet.

I started writing because at schools where I taught, and elsewhere, I encountered and tried to help a number of boys whose fathers had walked out of their lives or had not been part of them for more than a few minutes. Last autumn four girls at a school in Gloucester where I had been talking about my writing reminded me that it was not just boys who suffered without Dad. Girls suffer in different ways – not knowing what it is like to live with a male under the same roof and fighting lone mothers who want to stifle their daughters’ first attempts to find out about the enemy.

Irresponsible attitudes towards parenthood on the part of boys are the part of the sexual revolution that has never been on track and simply tears up the social rails on which it tries to run; the Tories as making an important point about the unsustainable nature of such attitudes. Lads’s mags, they claim, serve to liberate boys from the restraints and responsibilities of potential parenthood. I would like to know how would these magazines would liberate babies and children from the scourge of irresponsible fatherhood? Why do they not ask their teenage readers questions such as:

What chance for the child if the girl you impregnate is a drug-user?

What happens if the child requires spare part surgery later in its life and you are a good match?

What would you say to a dangerously disturbed teenage son who asks you why you never bothered?

How would react if you were expected to contribute to the £80,000 pa it is costing to keep in care a son or daughter you abandoned?

Any bloke can become a father it seems but where are we going to find the men who are man enough to be Dads?

So, back on her idyllic Greek island, it is easy for Meryll Streep’s screen daughter to ask the questions that are asked by children who do not know their fathers.

Who is my father?

Where is he?

Does he know I exist?

What has he ever done for me?

Why does he no longer cooperate with Mum?

In the swinging sixties a fellow-student boasted of a friend who, faced by a suit for paternity in the local court, arrived with ten friends who all claimed that they had slept with the girl whose claim for maintenance was thrown out. Not only was the court unable to protect the mother, it was unable to protect the child from irresponsible parents.

This “lad” culture which encourages male irresponsibility as if it were a series of jokes or pranks that have gone wrong does not exist on its own and could not function without its feminine counterparts. Look at the covers aimed at the lads’ sisters, which are as unspeakably awful as their brothers’ reading. On television last night a woman displayed a pair of engorged and discoloured breasts in a lifestyle programme about “enhancement.” - I must confess here to experience in veterinary nursing and some success in once helping my wife to get over a bout of mastitis. What viewers were being encouraged to see as some sort of improvement I would not have touched with the proverbial barge pole for fear of catching something nasty and out of concern not to cause the woman further discomfort.

The victim’s coyness in lowering her top was a tribute to the grasp that part of the media have over the minds of many of us, including teenage boys, in an age of ersatz celebrity and self-promotion. Put this alongside the cult of instant gratification, and supermarket sex and worse will result; if you are entitled to select unwilling partners you must remember that others have the same right to select you.

Finally, a question for anyone concerned about standards of parenting.

When you see irresponsible parents insisting upon their rights to keep children for whom they cannot provide in all the different ways that parents need to provide for children, so that they become happy, healthy, useful, well-adjusted young people, ask yourselves whether, should your own young children become orphans, you would want these people to take them on?

Then ask yourself the question lifestyle magazines will never ask boys or girls, young men or young women. Why should we allow children to suffer at the hands of ineffective parents who breed casually and irresponsibly?

05 Aug 2008 Return to top of page

A Ban on Books - the only way to get boys reading?

When I reached the age when many boys seem to give up reading the Attorney General threw me a life-line. He prosecuted Penguin Books.

Re-reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover now I can see what it was that encouraged me later to read much of Lawrence and to widen my taste to other well-known writers, George Elliot, Graeme Greene, William Golding, Susan Hill, Thomas Hardy, Neville Shute – his non-fiction proved fascinating and important, and there were others, less well-known now, including AG Street, a farmer turned writer and broadcaster, a hero of mine.

Reading was an important part of my leisure, certainly while I was at junior school where we had ready access to a well-stocked class library. There I first discovered Nicholas Montserrat’s Cruel Sea, one of the books to which I return regularly. While on holiday in Devon at the age of about nine, I found a copy of Lorna Doone and imagined myself pursued by Doones up and down their valley just a few miles away.

Although the prosecution of Penguin Books failed this did not mean that Lady Chatterley was immediately regarded as suitable for teenagers whose jaded appetites for reading were in need of revival. Rather the opposite. Janet, the girl who supplied me with my first copy outside Gants Hill tube station, had first to wait for her classmates at Ilford County High School for Girls to finish the book before delivering it inside a worn, brown paper cover on which someone had written, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. There was also a book mark, decorated by female hand, listing certain pages, a thoughtful consideration. To be caught in possession then by parents or teachers of what was now a legally sanctioned edition would have caused embarrassment and outrage that today would be so far off the scale that teenagers could scarcely imagine or understand.

Not long before I encountered Lady C, a friend and I had recorded our repertoire of what was then considered unacceptable, foul, blasphemous and outrageous in the English language. The recording was made on the sort of reel-to-reel tape recorder that is seen nowadays only in black and white films. The next day I could hear my father on the phone. I wondered why he was talking to Mike’s father then remembered that we had forgotten to wipe the tape; Mike’s parents were appalled by what we had left behind and so were my parents. For Mike and I it was a most embarrassing time, to be reprimanded by fathers who were very, very angry in front of grim-faced, tight-lipped mothers. Worse, we had then continue to live under the same roof with parents who seemed only too willing to take up again the matter of this outrage and whose every action and judgement for days seemed poisoned by our adolescent crime.

Surely, reading for teenage boys cannot possibly become as attractive again as Lady C was for us unless and until it moves underground and upsets and disturbs the adult world. Now, for a teenage boy to admit to a friend that he reads is uncool. Telling friends in the early sixties that you had read Lady C was a boast, like telling them nowadays that a friend’s mother had handed you a beer and told you it was time you discovered sex.

Reading now is so uncool that teenagers who do read will tend to do so clandestinely. A young adult friend of mine moved fairly recently to London. One of the reasons for his leaving the area where he had grown up and had friends was that some of them had sneered at him when they found him reading a book in his local. For young people, going against the tide is particularly difficult, especially at school with young people coerced if not obliged to stay on longer. There, independently-minded youngsters will find it harder to prevail amidst disaffected peers who will ridicule anyone who dares to pick up a book and be different.

In some ways it really is a pity that, from the start of secondary school say, boys cannot be kept away from reading books, or taught without any books, or be punished if found to be in possession of a book. Then of course there would be no stopping them.

“What’s this in your bag, young man? Not a book is it? Just stand outside my office while I send for the police.”

Later, on his way home, the boy will boast to his friends that, although he had been forced to hand over a copy of something by Terry Pratchet, he still had a cache of Ian Flemings and Michael Malpurgos in his grandad’s allotment shed. And later still, in defiance of their mothers’ warnings, the lads will gather over on the allotments and will read and read and read, and the men digging on the other plots, the generation of older boys, will laugh and remind each other that boys will be boys.

No. Not for boys the delights of Arthur Ransome’s children’s titles, or Neville Shute’s Slide Rule (A clear explanation of his views on nationalised industry) or all the modern titles that are pushed and shoved in their direction, for we dare not let boys find out these things for themselves, like a younger boy in the seventies, who arrived at Dartington Hall, the progressive boarding school, to be told that if he wanted to go to lessons he had to sign up the week before. Sign up for lessons, he asked himself, you must be joking.

On the afternoon of his first day he spent a little time outside the classroom where the other kids were busily working away, and he watched them, slightly curious. Next morning he was turned away and told that if he wanted to be taught the next week he should make sure that he signed up on Friday. Wednesday morning found him in tears, begging to be allowed into the classroom, but the teacher was resolute and the boy spent the rest of the week outside the classroom learning an important lesson, about learning and about himself.

Unfortunately there are few if any signs of adults being able to understand all this and the more that teenage boys sense that we are worried that they are not reading, the less likely they are to read. Before they get anywhere near their teens all children need to find themselves able to read and in a situation, in class, or when other work is finished or at home, where the only option is to read. We adults need to rediscover the confidence to say, that’s it boys and girls, you can choose what you will read, but you will read. Then they would stand a chance of finding fiction or non-fiction that will amuse, entertain, inform or enthral them and become trapped in the wonderful business of a good read.

Then, when they reached their teens they would get on with finding something else to be awkward about but we adults would have won this crucial battle.

31 Jul 2008 Return to top of page

Government, teenagers and parents who never bother

It is a measure of the government’s desperation to find some novelty, that will reassure the public that something is at last to be done about unruly teenagers and the current spate of knife killing, that it has engendered a sense of panic, at least in Westminster. Limited measures, due as part of a wider package of legislation aimed at unruly young people have hurriedly been announced, and then suddenly withdrawn, only a matter of a few days before the scheduled launch of this wider package.

This should surprise no one. This national crisis of confidence has been growing since the parents and grandparents of these teenagers were themselves growing up and going to school. This loss of confidence is about what we expect of parents and what we expect of young people and is reflected in the words last Friday of a government advisor on education. Sir Alan Steer, head of Seven Kings High School and knighted for his services to education said:

You can pass moral judgments on families, but the reality is that they are in that situation. Our job as schools is to educate children. We're places of learning or nothing. But sometimes we have to help bring up children as well. We need to give them tough, intelligent love.

We do need to pass judgements on families, especially if we are to help in the way that Sir Alan and many others teachers want to. When the business of trying to stand in for ineffective parents conflicts with educating the children of parents who have prepared them for school we begin to see the nature of this wider matter of confidence in our ability as adults to insist on care and education for all children.

Parents of other children do make these judgements, about whom it is that their children, vulnerable sometimes, dependent too, will play with, go to school with and, as teenagers, begin their apprenticeship into adulthood. At home, at school, in organised activities and young people’s organisations, and on street corners.

Most parents are aware of some simple facts of life which seem to pass by politicians and their advisors, that we do not arrive in this life as teenagers, ready to trouble the older generation. We spend several years, vulnerable, dependent on others initially for our every need and infinitely receptive to ideas, influences, to learning, our language, a culture, even a culture of neglect. And this is what we do until we emerge on the threshold of adult life and come to the attention of the rest of society, some of us noisily, most of us awkwardly and a few of us aggressively, resentfully.

Can any thinking person really believe that legislation will change a generation of aggressive young people any more that recent legislation to compel 14-16 year-olds to study a modern language has increased applications to read modern languages at university? And why apply such legislation only to violent teenagers and not to any violent criminal?

Of course it won’t change things. Teenage habits and attitudes formed over twelve years will not yield easily to legislation because legislation aimed at undesirable behaviour on the part of groups will draw in the innocent and inoffensive and will cause more problems than it solves; recent proposals to curfew sixteen year-olds in Cornwall for instance have revealed that.

Targeting young people with legislation will be especially difficult for two reasons. Firstly, the target is particularly resistant to legislation. Put aside their resentment at being instructed when they have no say, no democratic voice in legislation aimed at them. An important part of growing up is being able to decide what to do, to ignore pressure or suggestion or advice from somebody else and make up your own mind. Targeting young people who have just discovered this freedom, or had it thrust at them by advertisers or gang leaders, will prove far, far more difficult than changing adult attitudes towards smoking and excessive drinking, for example; it is teenage drinking and smoking that is seen as a greater cause for concern now than that of more pliant generations.

It has proved far easier for governments to test schools and teachers than to test parents and this has become a hugely wasteful distraction, a sustained piece of political cowardice. It is parents who have far more influence over children that ever schools can. Children spend eighty per-cent of their waking hours under the influence, at least nominally, of their parents. However, it is not until their offspring become a public nuisance and achieve the greater visibility that is the lot of many teenagers that it dawns on politicians that parents might be part of the problem.

Who can take these politicians seriously unless they are prepared to inflict tough love on parents:

When children are born; are the parents still able to cooperate with one another?

When children reach five; can they distinguish Yes from No, Yours from Mine?

When children and young people appear in court; will they insist that both parents attend, to explain their stewardship of their child, to offer assurances about their future commitment to the child and to make restitution to victims?

If governments cannot take the long-term view here, for bringing up and supporting children is a minimum sentence of twenty years and the effects of neglect endure a lot longer, then we will do nothing to improve things. Nothing, certainly not for the current crop of teenagers, but neither for their nephews and nieces and their own children who are already arriving.

If we cannot find the confidence necessary to inflict this tough love on parents, because we love their children perhaps in ways they do not, then we will increase the resentment of teenagers at our confusion and uncertainty about them. We will also undermine the moral basis for compelling children to attend those schools where a major source of influence is children whose parents never bother. Is this what we want for our grandchildren?

15 Jul 2008 Return to top of page

The CBI raises doubts about new school diplomas;

The CBI should put its money where its mouth is.

So, even before pressurised teachers in pressurised schools begin to teach for the new diplomas, they are presented with serious doubts about the value of these new qualifications. No doubt the diplomas will have been marketed determinedly to a cohort of students which will in any case be wary about new courses to which they are expected to commit themselves. They will be only too aware of the talk of dumbing down of educational qualifications in which their elders and betters have indulged themselves in recent years. Like others before them, they will hear siren voices crying, “Trust us,” and wonder whether they dare do that. Many of them will be students for whom the system of GCSE examinations controlled by the government has failed, who are already unsure about ways of improving their lot amidst public concern and outcry about the state of young people. These are the very young people who most need reassurance and encouragement to make the best of talents that may be limited or under-nourished.

To be fair to commerce and industry, government has monopolised the testing and certification of school students for two decades so that the idea of alternatives has been lost from sight, partly through ideological fear of a two-tier system. When the forerunner of our present system of school exams appeared over fifty years ago, it was run by university examinations boards for their own purposes, university admissions. For many organisations it was much easier to use these than devise tests and examinations of their own. Then there arose organisations such as City and Guilds which provided syllabuses and examinations for skills and understanding not covered in GCE O-level examinations.

Some organisations, I have the armed forces in mind here, do maintain a system of tests established for their own particular purposes, which test a range of skills including those which candidates could be expected to have learned at school. This independence is being taken further now; ATC cadets can work for NVQ qualifications in technical subjects as part of their “leisure” activity.

At a meeting hosted by the Royal Society ten years ago I listened to leaders from the UK’s leading engineering companies describe their steps from school – a number of them had left at fifteen, via apprenticeships which involved working full-time and studying in their spare time so that by the age of twenty-one they had worked and kept themselves for six or seven years, a worthwhile piece of learning in itself – no student debt for them, but were also well on the way to qualification as professional engineers and, later, to directorships. My host for the occasion, Ford’s director of graduate recruitment, told me how the company had closed its apprentice training school in Dagenham when the supply of young recruits had been diverted back into schools in the name of inclusion. Now the company had to recruit about 400 engineering graduate recruits each year and, so poor were their practical skills, the apprentice school had to be re-opened to teach them, as my friend put it, “the business end of a screwdriver.”

Civil engineering too provided its routes; more recently, at the world’s most expensive boarding school, I taught the daughter of an English father who was pleased to have attended, “a good secondary modern school,” which had set him up for an apprenticeship and a career which had culminated in responsibility for an enormous redevelopment scheme for a midlands city. Today, in Switzerland and Germany, young people are encouraged to take up apprenticeships as ways into careers and professions and I have heard, only last week, of a friend’s daughter who is working and studying her way to becoming an architect.

Would it be too much to expect commerce, trade and industry to by-pass government and, instead of looking to the state for answers and solutions, to provide syllabuses and examinations for its members? They would not rely on government as a guarantor of standards which in itself would be a bonus.

Qualifications backed by trade and industry, could overlap with school work – presumably continuous writing and calculation would be part of any worthy testing. They would provide a link with the world outside school and education, a reminder that schools and education are not ends in themselves. They could be available for schools to take up where appropriate, but also for other organisations and for any individuals. This the sort of thing to which the CBI should give a lead and for which it should be prepared to take responsibility.
Perhaps then, in conjunction with the universities, it could sponsor the establishment of an independent examinations board to test the subject areas, history, science and languages, that the confederation does not want to see as part of the new diploma system, along with all academic subjects, a system responsive to the needs of educators, employers and young people rather than government which has its own, constantly moving goals.

24 Jun 2008 Return to top of page

Exams – what we owe kids

I am sitting here marking IB papers and read that the head of a new regulator, Ofqual, is warning that pupils should not expect accurate examination results.

Why is it that, every summer, the English and Welsh seem to demean and undermine the examination system that is inflicted upon our teenagers each year?

Do we adults ever stop to think about what we owe young people?

If the system that we adults have contrived, santioned and imposed is so bad we should replace the system. It is not fair to pupils, vulnerable conscripts in all this, to complain then do nothing.

Nine years ago the school where I was teaching in Switzerland, exasperated by the antics of British Secretaries of State for what was then called education, ditched A-levels for an examination system that politicians cannot touch, one that makes real demands of students and is spreading world-wide.

And there other routes we could take.

16 May 2008 Return to top of page

School Exams – militant kids needed

As a head teacher I was once confronted by protesting students who objected to my plans to teach bee-keeping.

They knew nothing about bees, which arrived, and some of them learnt to handle bees and produce honey in suburbia. I wish that there were militant students in schools now who would strike over something about which they are much better informed – tests and examinations.

We need a young, liberal Peter Hain to lead our sixteen year olds out on strike, or Old Labour’s Red Ken.

Only sixteen year-olds can stop the regular interference and undermining to which their examination system is subjected; parents and teachers have proved powerless. Teacher unions of course implement changes that they themselves have condemned while parents are not as well informed and are subject to simplistic political blandishment and scare-mongering.

No, only the kids can beat on the system. Face it, politicians regularly call on schools to fix teenage smoking, under-age pregnancy, obesity, lack of respect for authority, gun-crime, illiteracy and teenagers’ excessive and intrusive visibility whenever bored or unoccupied. To no avail.

Has anyone tried telling young people that they could do it, that they are bomb-proof?

This week the fear is that teachers and schools will not be ready to start new diploma courses for fourteen year-olds in September. Last week there were fears about the Pre-U, a new elite qualification and its threat to A-levels, the gold standard, which teachers have now said, this week, will further complicate choices that sixteen year-olds have to make. Last month the Tories’ claimed that the government had reneged on Tony Blair’s pledge that the International Baccalaureate would available for all students. Eighteen months ago A-starred grades to enhance A-levels were announced to enable really, really, really bright kids to be identified alongside a long list of vocational diplomas many of which have failed to attract more than tiny handfuls of candidates and are now to be scrapped.

These matters are irrelevant, an enormous distraction which serves only to cause stress.

Universities and employers despair of the literacy skills (sic) of eighteen year-old school leavers, parents are confused and frightened for their children and, unforgivable and worst of all, teenagers resent the regime of excessive testing which they have suffered and are angered by the denigration the examination system always suffers just as their results are announced. They could be forgiven for seeing themselves and their achievements simply as statistical fodder for governments desperate to manufacture good news and for head teachers with eyes on good publicity.

So, what might happen were the current crop of GCSE candidates to say bollocks to all this. We have done the work, our teachers have predicted our results and most of us are coming back for the next two years anyway. A mini gap-year will prepare us more effectively for sixth-form study. Let us melt quietly away sometime around the end of this month and chill.

Yes, teachers would thunder at their pupils and the government would doubtless declare a crisis, but they would, wouldn’t they. Institutional inertia is a powerful thing. Doubtless we would be troubled by educational horror stories over the holidays, but crises are resolved, difficulties overcome and sometimes a challenge brings out the best in governments and schools as well as individuals. These young people are only just starting out in life for goodness sake, and have time to make mistakes and learn lessons for themselves. My one failure at O-level was English Literature; now I have a good degree in the subject and am an examiner for the International Baccalaureate.

Ten years ago I left state education and went to teach in an international school, in Switzerland. In my first year there we replaced British A-levels with the IB. Each September our own sixteen year-olds were joined by students from all over the world for the last two years of schooling. We had to assess their ability in a number of subjects – they had to take six for the IB – and integrate them with our own students. Only students from British schools had GCSE results – the rest of the world seems to manage without.

Three days of intense assessment and interview and the term was under way. Minor changes to our arrangements were possible and occurred when necessary, but we knew what we were doing. You see, the IB has two great virtues: change to any particular syllabus is permitted only once every five years and the organisation is controlled by the schools that use it.

One of the reasons that this independent school abandoned A-levels was that the system suffered unpredictably at the hands of British governments. British governments have lost any right to control these matters and should now allow individuals and organisations the freedom to learn to do things for themselves.

18 Apr 2008 Return to top of page

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State-funded public schools for all children

Underage drinking

Report cards for parents

Are Comprehensives Failing?

Judge calls for commission on family breakdown

Blair for Presidency of the EU?

Lords Reform

MPs' salaries and expenses

Payout for Essex home schoolers

Young Olympic diver withdrawn from school bullies

Classroom Bouncers

A terrible day for children’s news

Suffer the little children

The British Diaspora

School Places

Home-Bred Victims

Academies and other means

Come-uppance for criminals

Can state education heal itself?

Inhuman Resources

Fixed penalties for careless driving

Trapped in their own testosterone

Orwell was right about pigs and politicians

Paternity – something for the ego

Have a nice day – terms and conditions apply

Adopted Children and Natural Parents

No more schools on the never never

Children should sue parents

Teenage Parents

A quick fix, just like a quick apology

What’s in a Marriage?

Teachers’ increasing reluctance to counter violence in schools.

Another round of apologies

Scrapping of compulsory modern languages

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Row over separate Muslim assemblies [2]

Head ousted over separate assemblies

The Immortal Squealer

Swiss vote on immigration

Camerons to use state schools.

Tornado – the first steam loco built in Britain for fifty years

Golliwog and other words

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Selfish Parents

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Teachers strike over academies.

Schools and consultations with parents

Home tutoring – cover for abuse?

Ofsted to blitz boring teachers

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Risk of further test fiasco in schools

Journalist warned for releasing a hamster

Advertising in school teaching materials.

Children failing to speak

Academies not taking their share of disruptive pupils.

Deadbeat fathers

Schools and consultations with parents

Dog breeders and parents face different expectations

Children as litter.

Vandals understood.

Pet owners – the ultimate responsibility

Brave parents who break the mould – home tutoring

State school teachers flee to independents

Encouraging cycling

Justice and Safety on the roads

Adults and “feral” children

Troubled by other people’s children

The latest James Bond

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Church of England and Lords Reform

Attempts to ban smacking

Head’s feeble call for the abolition of SATs

Police tactics and troublesome teens

Camouflage for the likes of Gary Glitter