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.

Secular Spirituality?

Sage have published a long and detailed Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence, and my review has just appeared. Word limits truncated the text; my full text is linked below. This reduction persuaded me to write a separate paper, also linked below.

The Handbook thoroughly confuses spiritual development with religious development. Only a few of the 60+ authors begin to tease out differences. Guidance on spiritual education by NCC and OFSTED make it clear that religious aspects are only part of the whole, but that spirituality is embedded also in creativity, emotions and relationships. The book I edited with Erica Brown (of Acorns Children's Hospices) in 1999 on spiritual, moral, social and cultural education across the curriculum located 'the spiritual', whether in maths, science, history or the arts, in deep 'who am I?' questions, as opposed to the 'how do I relate?' question behind moral education.
For all children, the issue of 'who am I, really, deep down' is of supreme importance. For children who cannot answer 'I am the child of loving and caring parents' the implications are far reaching. Where does their image of themselves come from? Some may find other significant adult role models, including teachers (of both children and adults) who are sensitive to the issues and open hearted. Those who joined teaching to help people and give them a chance in life. But their role model might be a gang leader, or an over-paid celebrity with a drink and drug problem. Their life horizons will be affected - for some, their life ambition is to make money, in whatever way necessary.

Spiritual education is not a textbook curriculum but a state of mind, in adults and passed on to children by infectious example. Children have strong innate curiosity about who they are and what they can become, and if they are negative, then the adults around them have knocked the positivity out of them. They are made disspirited, separated from a spiritual way of seeing in which their lives are, and will become, significant in positive ways which promote relationship and community.

I am not institutionally religious and have no great need for belief in the supernatural. I have no need for pat answers, since I love ambiguity and unanswered questions. Its a good job, since that is all we have in life. Yet I have certainties, about respect, equality of opportunity, social justice, the right to life, community, the support of the weak. This is what I mean by sacred. They are things I would die for.

When I talk with members of the various religions, these things are their sacreds too. So our conversations and relationships are easy and positive. There are shared understandings. There is much to share. I may be not 'in' but I am also not 'out'. I personally do not dignify my sacreds as divine revelations, but they are absolutes for me nonetheless. Arguing for my sacreds is why I write. The best of religious thinkers and writes also start inside the soul with the same issues and do not say, 'You must believe what I do. My way is the only path'. At this deeper level, religions can scarcely be divided. The Sikh scriptures have verses from Muslims and Hindus as well as Sikhs. They differ at a superficial level, tribal differences that can kill. At this level religion ceases to be spiritual.

So children being spiritual means that they think deeply about their place in the community and the world, and how they can promote peace through their actions and attitudes. They show respect for others, and learn to respect themselves. Regarding others as their equals, they support others unselfishly and feel enriched by their success. Peace is something to be fought for, non-violently, opposing both conflict and the root causes of conflict since these threaten safety, security and life itself.

Links:
Review of Sage Handbook
Secular Spiritual Education? , Educational Futures, vol.1, no. 1, pp.49-69.

A touching neurosis?

Heather Piper and Ian Stronach have just produced an interesting boot called Don’t Touch. The Educational Story of a Panic. It deals with the “moral panic” about touch in school education. It makes a strong case that this panic has sexualized, even fetishised touch, as even the 99+% of innocent adult staff are left questioning their own and their colleagues’ motives. The result is that the child who needs the consoling cuddle is denied one; and also that older children play on sexual possibilities, misunderstanding or misinterpreting a normal gesture, or making malicious accusations. The panic has played havoc with proper educational practice. Inappropriate fear of risk causes professionals to fear for their careers, and play safe to the extent of creating an emotionally sterile educational environment.

Research ethics committees ‘police’ research but can come to unethical decisions by rejecting research which is potentially beneficial to children, on spurious grounds of child safety coming from a notion of the child as victim. The criminal records bureau activities demonstrate that there are more restrictions on helping children than for buying explosives. Restrictive school and local authority guidelines make irrational and disproportional responses. Then follows case studies from nursery, primary, secondary and special education, and then Summerhill School, the ‘progressive’ democratic independent school. This draws on empirical data from interviews and observations. These give examples of taboos on touch being worked through professional contexts. There is evidence of a mix of defensive and protective behaviours (being accompanied, leaving doors open) and heroic resistance to “the chokechain” (p.7), especially by early years workers. The Summerhill example is interesting in that the openness of the school is declared to be a nightmare for paedophiles. Everything is discussed and debated openly, and positive relationships are promoted. In Ofsted’s concern to close the school down as non-compliant to national standards, one inspector called in the social services when a teacher was observed openly giving a girl pupil a shoulder massage. Such officious behaviour is styled corrupting, making spontaneity in relationship building (within appropriate boundaries) much more difficult, making the good seem evil.

The concluding chapter recommends that touch should be considered as part of relationships. Just as we need ‘good behaviour policies’ instead of focussing on bad behaviour, so we need ‘good relationships policies’ instead of ‘Don’t touch guidelines’ which criminalises innocent touch. Rather, the concern should be to encourage appropriate relationships, child to child and adult to child, in a context of openness to discussion. Most current guidance to schools is viewed as wholly inappropriate, as it treats touch as a problem in itself and not part of a larger concern for good relationships. The democratic and open practice of Summerhill School is presented as the best model for schools to follow.

Most people would agree that paedophiles and other dangerous individuals should not have easy or uncontrolled access to children in school. It is a far cry from this to get to a situation, described in this book, that professionals are not only deeply worried about false unsubstantiated accusations, and begin to question their own motives behind their care of and affection for their charges. This is having the effect that children are denied the physical contact and emotional warmth they need for confidence and consolation, and are becoming part of a generation which sexualises touch, brought up to believe that adult-child touch must always be by definition sexual. Summerhill School is given as a shining example of the opposite approach, where relationships come first and democratic empowering discussion give pupils the skills and understanding to understand when something is wrong, and to take appropriate action.

The tendency to maintain emotional distance between children and unrelated adults brought about by a Don’t Touch culture impedes the development of their relationships with other adults. This diminishes empathy and sympathy for others; this emotional distance makes it easier to victimise and even murder. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child report (October 2008) complains of negative attitudes to children and adolescents in the UK promoting a punishment culture through ASBOs and detention. These things are linked. Helping children improve relationships with others should be a top priority for education, schools and society at large, which should over time reduce anti-social behaviour. That is, educational and school policies need to be positively proactive rather than negatively reactive, raising intrinsic motivation over punishment as the strategy of choice. This book explores one aspect that will make a difference and should be read by both professionals and policymakers. I applaud it. (Full review on http://escalate.ac.uk/4868).

Therapy, education and therapeutic education

I have just reviewed a book on "therapeutic education" (http://escalate.ac.uk/4752) which raises issues. The authors mean positive pupil-centred education which is non-conflictual: since the book's educational focus is a special school, this is described as 'healing', hence therapeutic. It is defended through reference to therapists such as Maslow and Rogers. Of course, the authors are describing 'good', motivating and positive education per se and the work 'therapeutic' is a misnomer. A therapist will have had substantial education and training to develop a knowledge and expertise to contribute to health care and child development. A speech and language therapist for example helps children with communication difficulties. Teachers and educational professionals who are untrained in these fields cannot replicate their work. Equally a talking therapist (a psychologist, psycho-analyst or counsellor) work with particular insights and skills which the untrained cannot hope to match.
However, there are few therapists on the ground and their time and involvement is expensive. They therefore can only deal with acute cases. In practice, pupils are referred and join the waiting list. There are general things that teachers can do to help children with non-acute developmental delay or with emotional and behaviour difficulties which are not severe. Indeed this helps the therapist because some ground has been covered and acute cases better identified - there will be some pupils who make progress and don't need to be referred. Although we might call this 'good' education, based on positive relationships, teachers and others do need both training and consciousness raising to change practice.
For example, behaviourist rewards and punishments are often a school's only strategy to deal with challenging attitudes and behaviour. This aims at submission rather than personal growth and actually doesn't work. Punishments escalate to exclusion when the problem gets passed on to others and the pupil remains stuck. Education should be 'healing' in a broad sense, and promote personal growth. This is main focus for the training needed - a simple message to understand but more difficult to put into practice routinely.