Ordinary Tears

Tonight I find myself with a dilemma. Yes, I have eaten too many chocolates and the fridge is stuffed with tempting goodies but, even considering the state of my lockdown middle, it is not the when-do-i-start-the-diet dilemma that concerns me. To be honest there are a number of concerning dilemmas that I could choose from now that I am living in Tier 4, but it isn’t any of those either. No, the focus of my wondering sits in my eyeline watching telly.

He’s wearing a rather nice pair of new trainers his grandfather (my dad) paid for but hasn’t seen (and who hasn’t seen him in the flesh for over a year), gently flicking his overly long hair out of his eyes. He looks tired but I am reluctant to send him to bed. It’s nice to have his company.

Lockdown isn’t easy for him. He’s been bored today because there isn’t much for him to do and there is nowhere for him to go, regardless of the weather. His world shrank significantly during the spring and summer and it’s going to shrink again, thanks to a letter from the doctor.

I could tell you all manner of things about him, but here’s the thing: tonight (today), it all feels a little bit too much like justification.

People are tweeting and journalists are writing, chatterers chatting and they are discussing the latest numbers in relation to deaths from Covid and somehow the ‘worth’ of ‘people with underlying conditions’ has found its way into the mix. Only the ‘sick’ or the ‘old’ should be shielding, or, ‘they would have died anyway’, or some other nonsense that implies that only the strong survive and the ‘underlying conditioners’ are there to be looked after and ‘shielded’ and that somehow proves that We Who Suggest Such Things are Good People and so that’s OK then or something, and people who haven’t got a condition, underlying or otherwise, or not one they know about anyway, are breathing sighs of relief and advocating for an end to lockdowns because reasons.

I mean, what do you say to that? What do you say that you haven’t said before?

His life doesn’t need justifying, and neither does his safety or anyone else’s. And while I’m at it this pandemic isn’t a political matter – or it shouldn’t be – and if everyone is off sick (or even about half) we haven’t got an economy or an education anyway and yes, we should be scrutinising legislation that diminishes our rights (here’s looking at Brexit, kid) and we should be worried that if too many people have covid they will turn up in the hospitals and said hospitals won’t have any time or space for anything else except to deal with the most urgent right here and right now so we ought to be taking care and following public health advice because not following it will do exactly that.

And finally we aren’t the only generation to find our lives turned upside down by circumstances beyond our control; we aren’t the first and we won’t be the last. We’re not the first to shed tears over the state of it and wonder what will our young folk do when we come out the other side, and to hope that maybe we’ll rebuild things better because now we can see inequalities we don’t like and perhaps we’ll have some energy for change when it’s all over. There’s nothing special about us at all.

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An Apology

Apologies for the silence. I’ve been a bit busy. I’ve been busy working, stretching myself thinly and growing fat on oven chips and posh pizza (we don’t like cheap pizza with its fake cheese topping and cardboard bottoms). It’s alright when it goes alright, a logistical Heath Robinson Affair, ready to topple as soon as someone runs out of leave. At least I haven’t got any marking to do, even if I have the report writing, the phone calls and the emails, so many emails on a continuous running stream throughout my working day.

And then there’s the appointments. Squeezed in between the school run and the supermarket delivery, I have to log in and use a password and it’s not even for me. I have to explain (again), cajole and question; is that blood test really necessary? Will it make any difference? Is there really no-one to coordinate it all? No paediatrician for a grown up boy? It’s me? Are you certain, are you sure?

And the meetings. The number of strangers touching our lives is growing daily and yet we can’t find anyone to spend the personal budget on. Economic migrants, we haven’t got a social network; we haven’t got time to form one. Even if we had, there’s no reason why anyone we knew would want the job. No-one wants an itty bitty job that pays peanuts, and I don’t know about you, but I can’t shift that sneaking feeling that there’s an element of motherblame that still hangs around us, whispering, poisoning.

Slowly, so slowly, ‘inclusive’, ‘inclusion’ has shifted its meaning. Slowly, so slowly, we depart, softly wrapped up and separated into a lonely little isolated world and I can’t help but wonder, as I sit in front of the fire in a haze of relief and slight bogglement that the weekend is finally here and tomorrow I can sleep beyond the alarm, who should be apologising to who.

Disabled Children are People

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, I’ve done it again. I’ve read something in the newspapers and it’s made me cross. No, it’s not the latest from the Brexit Express (although that is a close contender) and neither is it the latest skeleton to come tumbling out of Boris Johnson’s closet. Nope, you’ve guessed it. It’s the one thing that is pretty much guaranteed to have my fingers stomping all over the keyboard; the treatment of SEND in the press.

This time it’s the Times. Not a newspaper I frequent more than occasionally (my in-laws get it for the crossword – apparently – and I tend to give it a glance through when I’m there), today’s article is another good reason not to make a special effort to either get myself a subscription or go to the newsagent with my actual money.

Apparently, you see, pupils are losing out on £400 million of school funding because it’s being ‘diverted’, ‘siphoned off’, no less, to special needs. Parents are getting ‘golden tickets’ in the form of Education, Health and Care Pans and councils have had to ‘raid’ their mainstream schools budgets (to the tune of that £400 million) in order to pay for the ‘surge’ of pupils categorised as having special needs.

So let’s get a few things straight and see if we can’t redress the balance, just a little.

1. Disabled children are people.

Actually, I think that’s the only thing that needs to be said. I could go on at length about the contributions to school communities and society in general, of disabled young people or I could remind you of the world of statements that ended at 16 and how that was the time when many fell off a metaphorical cliff edge. 

I could rant about the rights of all children to an education and I could add several thousand words on the subject of segregation, hate crime and danger if that education doesn’t happen. I could take a trip down the school corridor and point out that the door mat isn’t a learning island for anyone and that disability can be seen on the outside or appear only on the inside. 

I could veer into policy and weigh up the pros and cons of ring fencing the SEND budget in the same way as the Pupil Premium (or whatever it is called now) and describe the damaging effects of the school accountability system, the inaccessible nature of exams and tests, the overblown curriculum, but I won’t.

I could point out the lower life expectancy of disabled people, and in particular learning disabled people, that has nothing to do with disability and everything to do with treating people as commodities, as if they are, somehow, a character in a book, less than human so I’ll say it again:

disabled children are people.

I expect I’ll have to keep on repeating that.

 

The winds of change

Ahh, it seems that Ofsted have been busy bees and produced a new guide as to what they are looking for when they come calling at English schools to tell us which schools are good and which are bad (on a four point scale). Whether it is hoops or goalposts that they have been moving, who can tell; what we do know is that there has been a Change of Focus.

Now, I’d like to make something clear: I have not read the latest iteration of the Inspection Framework, and neither do I intend to (I am on holiday until the end of the week, after all, and, after an intense Autumn Term where I finished , not on the Friday, but the Saturday, I intend to get the most loafing I possibly can out of it) for the time being.

I am, however, very much interested in the focus of the change – the curriculum – and I am interested to see the direction we all take on the matter (I suspect it will go the same way as planning, lesson structure and style and marking, if I’m honest). Just how good will the curriculum offer of our schools be? What will a Good-or-Outstanding One Look Like? I am agog.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of knowledge. It is power, after all, and, apart from anything else, learning about stuff and things is interesting. Knowing about quite a lot of things helps you to understand the world around you and your place in it. Lots of stuff and things in schools gives lots of children the chance to find out which stuff and things they are really interested in, and which they might like to study further, if any. Being alert and interested in what is around you helps to make you less of a victim of circumstance and more able to have at least some sort of illusion of control over it.

But, as ever, there is a thing. And it’s such a big thing that I have felt the need to put some words on this page and do some Pointing Out. A curriculum offer is all very well and whoop-de-do, but what if there are a number of children/young people in the learning community who aren’t getting much, if any, of it? I hate to point out the obvious, but isn’t it all a bit like window dressing, or worse, stage setting, the reality of which is sleight of hand and one-dimensional fakery, if it isn’t available to all?

I mean, leaving aside the shrinking curriculum that is down to economics (I’ve got a child who is looking at A level choices, I’ve been investigating sixth forms) and the reduction in options thanks to accountability (don’t get me started on Year Six, we’ll be here for weeks), until Ofsted start looking at the offer for SEND, which includes curriculum, I’m not going to be thinking it’s anything much different to what has gone before.

The Funnel

I was doing some sorting out the other day. We have been decorating the sitting room (NOT the lounge; lounges are for people who live in a constant state of 1970s and have things like dark green shag pile carpets and pine-orange furniture), and part of this process has been the temporary removal of the book case (Argos) to the garage and the serious reconsideration of every book that had been shoved onto it when we first moved in, over a year ago now, upon its return. Two sets appeared: those that made it back onto the shelf, and those that have been transported back into the garage, en route to the charity shop. It’s not been easy, I can tell you.

It’s not the books that you know you really didn’t like but are somehow worthy, or the ones you didn’t really like that are the problem, or the ones you know you will NEVER give away (dog-eared tomes, some without covers, testament to how much you have loved them) that cause the difficulty; it’s the ones I enjoyed, but that I know I will never read again. They are the ones I weigh in my hands, on the shelf and off, until I reluctantly make a decision.

Old work diaries fall into this category, bizarrely. I’m not sure why this is, they aren’t ever going to come in useful for something, after all. Not personal diaries, though. I have about four or five year’s worth of them, tucked away in the bottom drawer of my desk, religiously filled in until about the beginning of March, apart that is, from 1987. In 1986, I had discovered Yes Prime Minister, and that Christmas, along with a novelised volume of Sir Humphrey’s diaries, I got a Yes Prime Minister diary of my own. I enjoyed it hugely, and, true to form, attempted to keep it (up until March, and, when I was putting the books back on the shelf the other day, I found it and I read it.

I have to admit that up to the point of perusing my old diary, I had been indulging in a bit of parental guilt over the State of The Children and giving myself a good and proper hard time. In 1987, I was fifteen and in the Fifth Year, the same age, in fact, as A. The first year group to take the GCSE, I was supposed to be getting ready to take my exams. The record of my teenaged days (lie-ins, a lot of lie-ins, Eastenders and novels) was reassuring.  Like my children today, I hadn’t given The Future a second thought, and here I am, sitting on the sofa at the grand old age of forty-six and I seem to have turned out not so badly after all. It made me feel better.

I don’t know, though. I can’t help but worry. Part pf me guesses that this all-consuming, corrosive worry about your kids is part and parcel of parenting in England at the start of the 21^stCentury. The sands, somehow, seem to have shifted. It’s no longer acceptable to go along to the odd coffee morning while the kids jump on all the beds upstairs (and pull all the bedclothes off while they are at it) or send them out to play in the morning and only see them at meal times; today we must cart them round to baby gym and toddler singing, rugby/football/ballet tots, swim club, martial arts; the list goes on, it is never ending and gets worse as the children get older. The number of distractions, of things we must say ‘no’ to is exponentially increased. It doesn’t seem acceptable to muddle along, to be good enough; somehow life seems to be painted in extremes of success or failure.

But when I look back to MY education and MY mid-teens(even if I do it with the subjective distortion of memory) the pathway before me seemed much more open. If I got a good grade, it was up to me. If didn’t, I would get another go. If I made a mistake, it wasn’t the end of the world. I was the person those grades mattered to, the person who owned them. Not my parents, not my teachers; me. There were opportunities and choices for me, lots of them, or that’s what it felt like, anyway.

I guess that is my greatest fear. I look at my children, my learning disabled son and my typical younger ones, snapping at his heels and growing up fast. Their moment of opportunity and choice is fast approaching (before the straightjacket of adulting rears its ugly head). And yet. In an age of austerity, and what I seem to continually describe, to myself and others, as an ‘increasingly challenging policy backdrop’, what choice, if they don’t fit a certain kind of straight-line progress, standard-child mould, will they have?  Is the world really their oyster? Or have we, unwittingly, as a community of adults continually obsessed with our own performance, despite our constant prating on about social mobility and our love affair with the idea of meritocracy, created instead for them an educational funnel?