Political party funding: "A plague o' both your houses!"

I reprint this Peter Hitchens piece from the latest MoS because it stands as a monument to why we shouldn't give our allegiance to either of the two largest political parties. He reproduces it on his blog here and expands on it here.

I think it is time for the Tories to stop being so hoity-toity about the trade union grip on Labour. The Tory Party has a whopping great skeleton its cupboard which I am now going to pull out and wave about.

I promised to keep quiet about it nearly 30 years ago, and I’m still not naming my source. But Mr Cameron’s self-righteous attack on Labour has persuaded me that it’s time to come clean.

The Tory manifesto in 1983 pledged to do something about one of the worst scandals in British politics, the ‘political levy’ by which the unions take money from their members to put into their political funds. These funds are then used to buy influence in the Labour Party.

If you belong to most British unions, you pay into this unless you opt out. Many don’t even know they’re contributing. Others are afraid of drawing attention to themselves by opting out. As a result, millions of people give money to Labour without wanting to, via union political funds. And so they maintain the union stranglehold on British politics.

It needn’t be so. Margaret Thatcher’s 1983 manifesto promised to end this disgrace. If the unions wouldn’t sort it out, it said, ‘The Government will be prepared to introduce measures to guarantee the free and effective right of choice.’

She won with a huge majority. It was a mandate. So what happened? The then general secretary of the Labour Party, the late Jim Mortimer, approached the Tories through a special back-channel. Word was sent to the late Margaret Thatcher that she would be unwise to act on this pledge.

If she did, Mortimer warned, she might well destroy Labour and so – unintentionally - ensure that the Tories were beaten at the next election by the SDP-Liberal Alliance.

He added that if by any chance Labour survived, and came back to power, it would take a terrible revenge. It would pass laws to stop the Tories raising funds from business.

The ‘Iron Lady’ buckled and collapsed. For the sake of party advantage and short-term gain, the plan was dropped. A few feeble ballots were held instead, which hardly anyone noticed.

So Margaret Thatcher and her Tories actually saved the Labour Party from richly deserved oblivion. The disastrous 1997-2010 Blair-Brown government is their direct fault.

They also made sure that the unions would keep their thumb on the national windpipe for another 25 years and maybe much longer.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy.

Special Ed

This week one of my wife's relations asked me questions for an assignment for her Teaching Assistant course. Perhaps some of my answers may lift the lid a bit on the world of special education. All observations and opinions are, of course, my own and not official.

1-Do you have any experience working with special needs children?

Yes. [Looked After Children two years... For a year or so I also taught at a project to reintegrate 15-year-olds youngsters who had been out of education for some time... some supply teaching at special schools for physically disabled children...autistic children at an ASD special school for a couple of months... From 2006 on at primary age Pupil Referral Units... now I am the Targeted Intervention Lead Teacher and assist staff with assessments of various kinds.]

2-Do you feel that children with disabilities should be integrated into mainstream schools or segregated into special schools? Why?

Some yes, some no. Integration can be good for the pupil, because it helps prevent institutionalisation and low expectations; it can also be good for the mainstream children to learn to mix with, cope with and help children who are different from them. But there are some children with emotional or behavioural difficulties (EBD), or who are on the Autistic Spectrum (ASD), who don’t mix well with mainstream children or cope well with a large group. Perhaps physical disability is easier for “ordinary” children to see and understand.

3- What effect do the SEN children have on the mainstream pupils?

I don’t get to see this much in our context. Mostly, we cater for children who have been excluded from mainstream. And it depends on what kind of SEN it is – emotionally upset and attention-demanding children can seriously subvert the work of a class, which is why they tend to get excluded.  Autistic children can get very stressed by noise, changes of location etc. In a mainstream school it takes a very skilful and energetic teacher to manage children of different kinds in one class and still make adequate academic progress overall, and the workload and stress on the teacher can be considerable.

There is also the question of how different SEN types react to each other. EBD and ASD children don’t understand each other; EBDs wonder why ASDs “don’t stick up for themselves” and also why they butt in, pass annoying comments or tell teacher about misbehaviour, whereas ASDs wonder why EBDs aren’t following rules, and don’t understand why they get hit for telling the truth. EBDs enjoy being a bit out of control; ASDs try to control everything (e.g. I know a little girl who made a coloured time chart for when each of her friends was supposed to spend time with her).

3-In your experience of education (personal +professional) how have attitudes +policies changed towards special education?

Many primary schools are now much more aware of the need to use strategies to manage behaviour, and are on the lookout for special needs. But the skill level is patchy – there are still schools that let a child’s problems continue for years and then throw them out as SATS looms up. Secondary schools are, I understand,  generally well behind primary schools in adapting to the behavioural variety of their intake.

Screening and funding arrangements for special needs are currently changing, and some suspect that there is a save-money agenda behind some of the changes. Our PRUs feel that there are not enough special school places and the system is creaking; it doesn’t help that we now have so many broken and abusive or inadequate families that yield children with enduring emotional problems.

4- Do you have a teaching assistant to support you in your daily routines? What do you feel are the benefits  and disadvantages of this?

Yes, we all have at least one full-time TA in every class in our PRUs. It’s essential for managing the children’s behaviour, and for professional protection against false accusations (we sometimes have to handle children physically, for their own and others’ safety). And there is so much paperwork.

A number of TAs are agency staff and need to be shown how to do things our way; this means more time in training and supervision. It’s a hard job and not everyone stays with us.

5 – Within your setting how do you ensure that the planning and day-to-day routines are flexible to accommodate individual children needs?

Activities are planned to meet the range of abilities, so there is differentiation in task and outcome. We also look at learning styles (visual/audio/kinaesthetic), do regular assessments of behavioural risk, have individual Behaviour Management Plans, Individual Education Plans (IEPs), CRISP analysis (Criteria for Special Provision) and do social developmental and attitude testing using the Boxall Profile or PASS (Pupil Attitudes to Self and School). Staff have to be flexible because individuals can still “kick off” and the work of the class may have to be suspended while issues are resolved.

6- Do your children have a voice in your setting? Please give examples.

Yes. For example, many are involved in the Common Assessment Framework and some are Looked After; both processes allow the child to express opinions. And we have a School Council that meets several times a term – they enjoy the sense of responsibility. When they have seriously misbehaved they do a Put It Right sheet that asks them to reflect on what they did, why, what the result was and what they should do next time. In their exercise books they can indicate how well they think they understood their lesson.

7- In your opinion does statementing lead to a more inclusive practice? Please explain.

Most of the primary schools that buy into our additional services work hard to spot and help children with difficulties. The SENCo in such schools will usually be pretty good at doing CRISPs, IEPs, IBPs (for behaviour), Pupil Provision Plans etc. Young teachers also seem to be fairly well briefed on managing behaviour and special educational needs – far (far) better than the teacher training I received in the 70s.

A Statement of Special Needs has legal teeth and is reviewed at least annually. It defines the child’s needs and how they are to be addressed. You can end up with a formidable list as SENAR (Special Education Needs and Review) takes in reports from all and sundry and in effect turns all of it into action points. You then have a recommendation as to placement – which is decided by SENAR in association with the parents/carers: mainstream with funded support, special school, or a “resource base” (a school with some mainstream classes but also a special unit where the child may spend much of the time).

We do see placements fail in secondary, especially in Year 7, as many children can’t cope with the transition, so our [PRUs are] now doing more to hold onto and support children across the KS2/KS3 divide, and in KS4 the youngsters are being steered into projects like the XXXX Project, rather than into secondary schools that can’t or won’t effectively cater for their needs. Not everyone is made for mainstream school.

8- You said you work with inter-agency and CAF. Can you tell me a bit more on how this supports the inclusion of the child?

Think of the child’s difficulties as symptoms and their family and its circumstances as the causes. The CAF process can reveal what’s really going on at home, and help to get agencies to work more urgently to solve problems (e.g. re inadequate housing). Education and social work have a significant interface, and if you don’t deal with the whole child you’ll only get partial success.

But it also becomes clear that in some cases, even the parent/carer isn’t as committed to the child’s needs as they should be. Ultimately this can lead to a social services referral for neglect or abuse – but at least that is also a kind of progress in solving the child’s problems.

We are now generally doing fCAFs (Family CAFs) rather than individual child CAFs, because more often than not there are other children in the same family with problems, or the adults have their own difficulties, or the family as a whole has a problem (e.g. housing).

The government has latched onto CAF as a tool for tackling “problem families”, which means that in some cases the agenda can be at least partly driven from above rather than by the clients. CAF was set up as a voluntary system and the official “mission creep” could undermine the consensual nature of the process.

9- How does funding affect inclusion for your setting?

We get additional funds, but I’m not an expert in this. However, we are not a special school and so don’t get the level of resources they do.

10 – Do you find there is any policies or provision that restricts you doing your job?

Our children have significant social and emotional difficulties. The demands of the National Curriculum can be a burdensome distraction in these circumstances, because until the emotional needs are met the learning can’t proceed. It’s quite a juggling act. I’m wondering whether provision like ours shouldn’t have its own specialised curriculum.

We also tend to be used as a prolonged, cheaper alternative to special school provision. The original concept for our PRU was that children would only be with us for a few weeks, while we did assessments and organised reintegration; instead, we have had a number of children who have been with us for 1 – 3 years. Partly that’s down to a shortage of special school places and partly to difficulties in getting readmittance to mainstream. There is also the question of how long it takes to conduct a Special Needs Assessment – typically at least 6 months; and unless it starts early in the Autumn Term you’re unlikely to complete in time to secure a place in special school for the following September.

11- I know from experience that some families are hard to reach, how does your setting encourage parent partnerships?

CAF is helpful. We also had Family Support Workers that liaised between us and the home, but this ended in April when we reorganised. We used to have a nominated Integrated Family Support Team member, but again this has faded back and now we are just referred to the local IFST for such support as they may be able to provide. Our plan is to develop some of our TAs to offer some support for parents and carers; and they are currently being trained by me to take over CAFs, which until recently I’ve run myself.

12 –If you were developing a 5 year plan, what would you like to change or develop in your setting?

a. Radically shake up Special Needs Assessment, to be more like a Formula 1 pit-stop – get the professionals to see the children and write their reports within a few weeks at most. Ideally a Statement should be finished in 4 – 6 weeks, in my opinion. Also, these assessments should be made at the child’s home or mainstream school – not wait till a permanent exclusion.

b. Following from (a), as soon as a Statement is finished, the child is entitled and should begin receiving it in full immediately and with full funding, not languish in a PRU like someone whose plane has been cancelled.

c. Work with primary schools to create Transfer Panels as in secondary schools, who have taken on pupil-swapping and made it a success.

d. More training and support for staff in mainstream schools, to help identify and support children with additional needs.

e. Rethink the curriculum and provide more standardised resources and courses of work. Teachers are spending too much time on the paper side of things and in dread of OFSTED, when their energies should be going into the children.

If we did all the above we would hardly see any children arrive in our PRU. This would be a good thing, as putting children with behavioural difficulties together in one place is like the cross-infection of a doctor’s waiting room.

 
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy.

The e-University

An extract from a letter sent today to Lord Krebs:

[...]

It would now seem theoretically technically feasible to offer some courses to students in other parts of the country and the world, by electronic means. Potentially, the work of the College could reach larger numbers and also those who might not, for one reason or another (perhaps financial), be able to come to Oxford in person.

Lectures could be transmitted live or recorded for re-broadcast, as the National Theatre now does for dramatic performances (see http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/). The communication could be two-way, with questions and comments submitted by Internet, email and Twitter (like the BBC’s Question Time, for example). Similarly, presentations by teachers at other universities could be made available to Oxford colleagues and students.

Students could be authorized to remotely access the University’s subscriptions to online publications (Times archive, JSTOR etc). (Certain subjects might lend themselves more easily to this approach in the first instance – mathematics, perhaps – as in some other fields access to texts may be more difficult, until such time as everything has been scanned online.)

Reading lists, assignments and much reading and source material could be stored in the Cloud; coursework submitted by Web; teachers and graduate students could offer teaching, comment and support by email, Skype etc.

The potential inherent in the technology could be a Gutenberg revolution in higher education – an “Invisible College” for millions of advanced learners. It would be a far more radical step than the extramural studies currently available; it would be the virtual, interactive presence of far larger numbers of students and researchers than could be physically accommodated in any University, yet learning and being nurtured intellectually in the way that Oxford has fostered for centuries.

Perhaps a start might be made by raising funds for a few e-scholarships for poor but talented individuals in developing countries, such as India and China?

[...]

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France: John Ward on DIY, "Deliverance" and dog days

We’ve reached that time down here where the very ground beneath you pulsates with heat. Being alone here this year, I’ve taken now and then to dropping into the local Bar Portuguese for a beer. It’s full of swarthy latins – as always cheerful – discussing what they now see as an unavoidable disaster for their homeland. I can walk in and – with my hair and eyes – easily be mistaken for a German. There is an awkwardness, until they realise I’m British – and then everything changes: I am bought obscure Portuguese liquor, and given the sort of welcome usually reserved for Eusebio forty years ago, or Ronaldo today. I mention my passion for Manchester United, and more rounds are bought.

The main problem this consumption could pose is how I get home again. But luckily, there is a short-cut back to the house: I can use it to weave unsteadily back there legally on foot…unless under French law you can be found drunk in charge of yourself. I’d imagine you can’t be.

When it gets this hot and water is in short supply, more make do and mend comes into play. I collect all my bottled water packs and chop off the top and bottom. The main residue is then wrapped around new tree stems, and thus protects them from the attentions of deer…who are buggers for rubbing up against the bark and nibbling at it. If they nibble all the way round, then the young sapling dies in short order.

The top bit of the plastic bottle can be inverted to create a simple channel by the side of herbs and vegetables, and so massively reduce wastage of the water being applied to keep them going. The chopped-off bottom I fill with any stale beer knocking about. Snails are born beerheads and can’t resist it. They get legless, and then drown. Not that they have legs anyway. It’s a figure of speech.

At the top eastern end of the property is the real (as opposed to metaphorical) Slogger’s Roost. There I recycled a couple of pallets from the roof renovation two years ago, using them to create raised beds of flat-leaf parsley the rabbits can’t reach. I’ve also been gradually planting lavender, a rose, and a few shrubs up there. These represent a hopeful attempt to give some fragrance to an area whose main advantage is that first, it’s a long way from the house and offers me peace in which to write; and second, it is sheltered from the wind that can bite in mid-Spring and late Autumn here.

The main point of my little respite is that I achieved an aim in making it: to do so without spending one centime. Everything that went into its creation was recycled and reformed in a new role. But just before midday today, I noticed my least likeable farming neighbours using a crane-grab and chainsaw to slash back the high hedge behind the Roost. To one side of the site I’ve constructed a permanent windbreak out of old tongue and groove we ripped out when renovating the upper floor. In their enthusiasm, the chain saw artists looked about to massacre one of my better creations.

This farming family is, to say the least of it, a bit odd. None of the locals here like them. They have that beaky-nosed, eyes close together appearance of the sinister hillbillies in Deliverance, and there’s a very good reason for this: they’re the product of incest. Try not to be shocked: it’s more common in remote rural areas than you’d imagine. Their mum killed herself five years ago; I remember being horrified when I asked the Mayor why, and he replied with a shrug meant to be self-explanatory, “She drank”.

It’s amazing how often our species thinks that an observation of a symptom is somehow a diagnosis. It didn’t seem to occur to the Mayor that maybe she drank because of depression, or guilt about the incestual sex, or both. But either way, it was with some trepidation that I legged it up to Slogger’s Roost to see if her sons knew of my tongue and groove genius. Yes, they did was the answer…and then five minutes later they demolished the right-hand end of it.

It didn’t take long to fix, so I shouldn’t make a drama out of it. But deepest darkest France consists of far more than the starry-eyed bollocks you see on A Place in the Sun.

Tonight, the Andy Murray syndrome was at work again. The Wimbledon authorities closed the Centre Court roof – after to a lot of Polish whine. It was a fearsome struggle afterwards, but Murray came through in the end. Here by contrast, it is now cooling a little. The fire of late afternoon has dimmed to a mid-evening kissing the skin rather than burning it. The sun makes love to you here in a hundred different ways throughout the day. I’m always grateful for its variety…as every appreciative lover should be.

I may well have to pay in a future life for the good fortune of having a place like this. But as I have grave doubts about reincarnation, I’m not about to get upset about that. I did work very hard to get the house; but then, I know lots of equally talented folks who worked even harder, and didn’t. Humility in such matters is never a bad thing.

By John Ward. Republished by kind permission of the author.

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Pic of the day: V&A

The spiral staircase in the Jewellery Collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 04 July 2013. (Photo: author.)

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Human history vs Earth's history

 

If we wrote the entire history of Earth on A4 paper at 1,000 years per page, the stack would reach up a bit over 1,533 feet - higher than the top of the antenna on the Empire State Building.

 

Of the 9,200 reams of paper, only the top 5 would have anything about humanoid creatures; the last ream (thinner than the top line of the column in this diagram) would contain the entire history of homo sapiens, and the uppermost 0.8 inches would record modern man (homo sapiens sapiens).

 

The final 10 leaves tell of what happened since the end of the last Ice Age, and the first writing by Man himself (in Sumerian) appears on the fifth-to-last page.

 

As you float in the air above, you reach out and pick up the top sheet, which is written in the language of the time. In the British edition, the first half of the page is unintelligible to the ordinary reader, as it's a mixture of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Norse, Norman French and Middle English. Even the early part of the second half, in Modern English, can be confusing, as it may contain words no longer used, and others whose meaning has since changed.

 

A standard A4 sheet contains 46 lines at 8 - 9 words per line, so the history of the globe since 1900 is covered in the last 5 lines - about 40 words. There are only 8 people in the world still alive who were born before then; all of them are female.

 

The last dinosaurs - wiped out by the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, 66 million years ago - are to be found 22 feet further down the stack - still nearly 40 feet above the top of the antenna on the Empire State.

 

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Peasants

I recently ploughed through a collection of Chekhov’s short stories – 209 of them on my Kindle, although a few were duplicated – possibly alternative translations. Did he write more than 209 minus the duplicates? I don’t know, but by gum they’re good. 

I hadn’t read much Chekhov up until then, but what a writer! He found time to be a doctor too. Here he is writing a fictional, but one suspects all too real account of peasant life in late nineteenth century Russia :-

Only the well-to-do peasants were afraid of death; the richer they were the less they believed in God, and in the salvation of souls, and only through fear of the end of the world put up candles and had services said for them, to be on the safe side.

The peasants who were rather poorer were not afraid of death. The old father and Granny were told to their faces that they had lived too long, that it was time they were dead, and they did not mind.

They did not hinder Fyokla from saying in Nikolay's presence that when Nikolay died her husband Denis would get exemption--to return home from the army. And Marya, far from fearing death, regretted that it was so slow in coming, and was glad when her children died.

Above all, they were afraid of catching cold, and so put on thick clothes even in the summer and warmed themselves at the stove. Granny was fond of being doctored, and often went to the hospital, where she used to say she was not seventy, but fifty-eight; she supposed that if the doctor knew her real age he would not treat her, but would say it was time she died instead of taking medicine.

Anton Chekhov – Peasants (1897)

Russia has produced so much talent and to this outsider at least, seemingly wasted under the thumbs of mass murderers and autocratic wastrels. Why I don’t know, but we still need talent like Chekhov's.

There is one problem with him though. When I finally put aside my Kindle and looked around at modern entertainers and celebrities...

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.