Monthly Archives: August 2011

The Death of Distance

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It was the economist Frances Cairncross who coined the phrase “The Death of Distance” She used this to demonstrate how the concept of distance has been annihilated due to modern communications technology.

This was brought home to me recently when reading my grandfather’s journal. Douglas James Gibson fought in the First World War 1914 – 1919, survived typhoid in 1921, went out to Malaya in 1923; and by 1942 was managing five rubber plantation estates until the Japanese invaded and captured Singapore. He was taken prisoner and held in Changi Jail as an internee from 6th March 1942 until his release on 3rd September 1945 – losing 90 lbs (41 kg) in the process.

Over his three and half years in incarceration he kept a meticulous diary in his passport, in almost microscopic writing. Looking at this diary seventy years later it’s hard to relate to how communications have so shrunk our world.

When my grandmother Jess boarded the Empire Star, one of the last boats out of Singapore, my grandfather didn’t hear if she was safe until 14 months later. The letter he received to give him the news of her safety had been dispatched nearly 9 months earlier. In the course of this period he was aware that the Empire Star had been struck by three directs hits in the Straits of Durian,  just off Singapore, although he never gave up hope of her survival. 

He started sending letters to her immediately on his internment and continued to send these off into the ether – not sure if they would get there or if there was anyone there to receive them.

Through the lens of 2011 it’s hard to believe that we would have to wait 14 seconds – never mind 14 months to hear the news of a loved one. With mobile phones, Twitter, Facebook, Skype, 24 hour rolling news we expect to be informed immediately – and there’s hell to pay of we aren’t.

Yet who am I to criticise? For in one of those lovely quirks that happen in life I spoke to my son yesterday, via Skype, nearly 66 years to the day that my grandfather was released. And where was he calling from?……………………….Singapore.

What would my grandfather have given for such an opportunity?

Douglas J Gibson, Changi Jail – sketched by Rupert Pease (Died Changi 1944)

 Diary entries March April 1942

Inclusion: an adult agenda?

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This year I’m going to be visiting schools in East Lothian on a drop-in basis whenever a gap appears in my diary. And so it was today I managed to fit a 30 minute visit to school while travelling between two meetings.

I loved that the head teacher was walking along the corridor with her shoes off. Of course she was a bit shame faced but I’ve always liked the combination between informality and educational rigour. As I visited the classes I was hugely impressed by the quality of work I witnessed and the positive relationships between the teachers and the young people.

Anyway, enough of this, for the point of this article is connected to something the head teacher told me about how they support  children with autism in the school. At the end of last term the school had arranged with their educational psychologist to work with each of the classes who had such a child as a member. In a number of sessions – some which had the child present and some which didn’t – the educational psychologist described what it was like to have such needs, explained the behaviour, and talked about how to accommodate and respond to their classmates on the autistic spectrum. Apparently the children have been wonderful and it has contributed to creating an environment where all children belong to the school community and engage in worthwhile learning.

This description triggered a memory from last year where I led six separate workshops with secondary school students. Under the Right Blether banner we listened to 180 young people about their experiences in East Lothian schools and communities. Their responses were overwhelmingly positive, but there was one recurring theme which got me thinking.

The theme, which came up in every one of the workshops, could be characterised by the phrase “It’s not fair”. The focus of that concern was the feeling that some of their peers were treated advantageously to themselves. The young people they were referring to were those who were typically badly behaved, disruptive, disengaged, and generally not interested in education. Yet the apparent reward such young people got from the school were opportunities, chances, tolerance and recognition that were not available to the typically diligent and well behaved student who was not given such leeway – hence the recurring refrain “It’s not fair”.

This is the parallel I’d like to draw with what I heard about last week. Schools nowadays go to great lengths to try to engage with the hard to reach. So often we know that many – if not all – of such young people come from disrupted backgrounds: backgrounds where drink, drugs, neglect and violence can be ever-present; backgrounds where love, clean clothes, regular meals, and stable relationships are unknown. Yet when we – the school – try to understand and compensate for such experiences through out-of-school opportunities, second chances, and additional support we are accused by the majority of our students of being “unfair”. Yet these are same young people, who, if shown a video of neglect, starvation, violence, abuse, or the effects of poverty on children in developing countries, would happily engage in fundraising activities.

So why is it that they can’t see the “unfairness” of the life experiences of the troubled boy in their class who is always the first to be sent to the depute head teacher? Perhaps the answer lies in what I saw happening in the primary school I visited last week. For they are tapping into the natural sense of justice which every child has – but which can only be triggered if they are helped to understand and empathise with what it’s like to have such needs – or experience such a life.

It makes me think that “inclusion” has for too long been an adult agenda. We, professionals, politicians, social scientists, public health and criminal justice experts, etc, etc all argue for schools where young people from vulnerable backgrounds are included in our mainstream schools. Yet how often have we taken the time to explain “why” we do this to the other young people in our schools?  Is it any wonder that they consider our actions to be “unfair”.

What if we worked with young people, staff, parents and other supporters of the school to tackle this in a structured and positive manner – which did not stigmatise the individuals concerned? By seeking to involve all members of school community actively in the “inclusion” agenda – but especially the children and young people – we have a chance to create places where all young people feel a common sense of belonging and responsibility for one another.

I’ll leave the last words to a young person I met as part of a Right Blether Workshop held at one of our residential homes:

“No-one knows what it’s like to be me.”

Twitter?

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After putting it off for over two years I’ve set up a twitter account.

My first tweet reads:

“should I keep a twitter account as a director of education and Children’s services?”

Perhaps a twitter account would make my role more transparent and more connected to colleagues, parents, young people and members of our communities?

http://twitter.com/donjled

It takes a community to raise a child

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“Broken society”, “disconnected youth”, “dysfunctional communities” have been just some of the headlines following the recent riots across the UK, and torrents of words have followed, but vital in all of this and little mentioned is the relationship between a school and its local community.

As society looks for explanations and solutions for the recent troubles, those of us in Scotland cannot be complacent. Gang violence, knife crime, and youth offending in some Scottish communities are among the highest levels in Europe. Yet in these communities we have schools where these same young people conduct themselves in a very different manner. They are not perfect in any way, and statistics would suggest that far too many of our children are disengaged, excluded and failing to achieve. But it is a fact that our schools are essentially safe places where standards of behaviour are generally good.

So why do we see such a discrepancy between what happens in school and in what happens in our communities?

I would suggest that for too long schools have seen themselves as islands within their communities. Too often we have sought to create a school environment which sets itself outwith the local community. It creates its own ethos, values, and standards of behaviour, and as long as young people conform to these values in school, we feel that we’ve done our job. As educationists, we labour under the misapprehension that young people will be able to carry these values out into their homes and communities – and in that way we’ve done the best we can.

The reality is that many of our young people don’t see any connection between the school and their community, and perhaps that’s where we need to focus our attention.

Seeking definitions of what we mean by “community” does not really help – at the last count there were over 95 separate definitions. However, if we look for the common threads within these definitions, there begins to emerge a consensus around some key features.

A community usually has a number of characteristics, namely, membership or belonging, influence, integration and fulfilment of needs, and a shared emotional connection. I’m pleased to note that our schools fulfil these characteristics for many of our young people. But how many of our communities can claim any such fulfilment? Young people repeatedly claim to be excluded from their communities. They have no sense of membership – in fact, for some young people, they are explicitly excluded. The community certainly does not fulfil their needs, nor do they have any influence over community (at least in legitimate terms). But above all, a significant minority of our young people have no emotional attachment or sense of belonging to their community, or the other people who share that community.

So what do they do instead? They create these attachments to geographical territory (not their communities). They seek approval for acts which reinforce their connection to their peers – these acts are often referred to as “anti-social” in our terms – but are highly social in terms of the young people themselves. Finally, they see their needs met by membership of a group that provides them with a sense of belonging.

Before those of us in schools become too comfortable with such an accusatory view of our local communities, I would suggest that some of the blame lies with ourselves. Of course, one might expect that – schools are often put down as the source of so many of society’s ills. Yet I believe schools have retreated from their communities over the last 50 years. This is done partly to protect their own integrity, and partly because communities themselves have not seen a part for them to play in the education of young people.

It was Morgan Scott Peck, the eminent American psychiatrist, and author of A Road Less Travelled, who suggested that there were four stages of community building. The first of these was what he termed “pseudo-community”. This is where we pretend to be a community but in actual fact we hide our differences for the sake of being able to claim community status. I’d suggest that is where most of us reside in terms of relationships between schools and their local community – happy to use the terms of reference but, when examined in any real depth, failing to fulfil the any of the previous characteristics of a true community.

Peck saw the second – and necessary – stage of community building to be chaos. That is, he thought that the only way to break free from the comfortable phony community status was for some form of chaos to ensue which brought the community to confront the reality of the situation.

Perhaps that’s what we have just experienced in the UK. The chaos has brought us to our senses. It has made us reflect upon the reality of the situation.

Peck’s third phase is where most of us now are – a sense of emptiness and loss. But if we follow Peck’s line of travel, there is a chance that we could see “true” communities emerging from this process.

For me – ever the optimist – I see this as an exciting opportunity to challenge the pseudo-community links that we often have between schools and communities and, instead, create something which conforms much more to the aspiration of “It takes a community to raise a child”.