A Good Childhood: Searching for Values in a Competitive Age

The report, A Good Childhood: Searching for Values in a Competitive Age for the Children's Society by Richard Layard has just been published. Details are on The Children's Society website

Recommendations include:

Teachers should:

Help children to develop happy, likable social personalities.

Base discipline on mutual respect.

Eliminate physical and psychological violence from school.

Make Personal, Social and Health Education statutory.

Present sex and relationships education not as biology but part of social and emotional learning.

New tests on emotional and behavioural well being should be carefully piloted.

There are various recommendations for parents, governments, advertises, media and others but these are summarised by the final recommendation:

All Society should:

• Take a more positive attitude to children. Welcome them into society and help them.

Recommendations include abandoning SATs in favour of teacher assessment, investing more heavily in child and youth services, and providing youth facilities and centres with educative as well as recreational aims.

The report, now arrived, is a slim Penguin paperback. It is written in simple language, so simple that it seems like obvious common sense and hardly worth writing about. Yet, if it is common sense, why have opposite policies and strategies been in place for 20 years? - a curriculum more enamoured with testing than with enjoyment; a mechanistic demand for literacy and numeracy than with their development within a relevant and appropriate context which excited the children; an ethos of 'managing' behaviour with punishments rather than developing positive attitudes and self-control? The alternative answers are out there, and were in common use before these new 'reforms' in 1988. Further, the critique of this report was being shouted out loud across these 20 desert years - what about relevance such as work on the environment and citizenship? So these were tacked on to the margins, to be done in stolen time. What about enjoyment and achievement as well as good scores? So new guideline were given to require teachers to get children to enjoy the unenjoyable curriculum. This is non-political. The Tories started it, New Labour continued it equally enthusiastically. Someone has to change it. I hope that the Children's Society report gives a nudge in the right direction.

Facts and figures:
Percentage of children 5-16 with
Anxiety disorders 3.3%
Depression 0.9%
Conduct disorders 5.8%
ADHD 1.5%
Autism/ASD 0.9%
Eating disorders 0.3%
Total, any disorder 9.6%

Treatments: family talking therapy is highlighted, but the quality of the interaction is crucial. The best can improve the situation by up to 28%; this goes down as quality of the therapist decreases (based on family ratings). A very poor therapist can make things worse. Pages 121-3.
Costs of social care, remedial help and crime, per child (averages, 1998 prices)

• with conduct disorder £70,000
• with conduct difficulties £24,000
• without disorders or difficulties £7,000 (source: p. 126 and note 260).

Looked after children:
About half of the children held in custody were 'looked after' in care.