Seminar

COMMISSION ON SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS

Monday, 1 January 2010

Seven days' blogging

Andrew Sutton

www.conductive-world.info

1-7 February
2010

Monday 1 February
http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/to-london.html
 1
To London
To the Palace of Westminster

Michael Gove MP Shadow DCSF Secretary

and
Sir Robert Balchin DL, Chairman of the SEN Commission
look forward to welcoming you to a
SEMINAR ON SPECIAL EDUCATION [sic] NEEDS
9.30am coffee for 10.30am sharp, till noon
on Monday 1st February 2010
in Westminster Hall Debating Chamber
(Grand Committee Room)

So up early this morning and off through the freezing frost to the railway station to go to London,
to the Houses of Parliament, on the cheapest fare that I could find (£54.10, even with my
pensioner's card – ouch!). Arrived on the dot of 1030 and, if there had been any coffee, it was long
gone.

Over the next few days* I shall report what I saw and heard there, and what I see (very much as an
outsider) as the Conservatives' very real problems over 'SEN'. I shall also share such thoughts as
this sparks off about what an incoming Government might do in this sector.

Readers' comments and queries will be very welcome throughout this process and I hope that these
will cover not just wider issues raised but also relate to matters more specifically to do with
Conductive Education.

At first sight, all this might appear a matter wholly to do with the United Kingdom but it would be
wrong to think of this other than as a local manifestation of an international problem. Contributions
form non-Brits therefore will therefore also be warmly welcome.

2 comments:

Norman said...

Does the term and concept 'SEN' itself have a future? I wonder. I shall look forward to reading your report, Andrew.

2 February

Andrew Sutton said...

SEN: the term and what comes with it: here to stay?

I do hope not. I have been resisting 'SEN' since Ron Gulliford first promoted the wretched expression. Unfortunately
almost everyone else has unthinkingly gone along with it, and its stain has gradually spread across the globe
(translated into languages other than English too). As the most minor act of resistance, people with something better
to say should stop using the term altogether. Better, argue against it. More important than simply the term, however,
are the loose thinking and inchoate philosophies that stand behind it. Going along with this term has given it legs. Just
ignoring it is probably not enough now to make it go away. People with something better to say, have actively to
fight, both the term and what it comes with. What do yoy say instead? Try saying what you mean.

Andrew
2 February 2010

Adelaide Dupont said...

The term I knew best, certainly in the early intervention context, was those with additional needs, which may be in
education or elsewhere. My American friends will say extra challenges or enhancements. Yes, you would have to
fight the stigma and prejudice which comes with it. And the microinequities.

Adelaide
2 February 2010

Tuesday, 2 February
http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/conservatives-seminar.html

2
 The Conservatives’ seminar
Setting the scene
The event was held in the Grand Committee Room of Westminster Hall, a location evoking
powerful memories from the early, glory days of Conductive Education's explosion out of Hungary
on the shoulders of parent-power (it may be worth returning to that occasion at a later point, but
this should not divert me further here).

The Grand Committee Room is not really all that big (or really all that grand), a modest piece of
Victorian Gothic (think Hammer House of Horror out of Past Times), and was well-filled by its
present audience of some 125 people. I squeezed myself as far to the front as I could, particularly
so that I could watch Michael Gove who, as likely next Secretary of State, was clearly the focus of
the show

For those who wonder, I stayed awake for the meeting's whole hour and three-quarters.

Some 'seminar'
One should not really write 'audience' in the context of a seminar but this was not really a seminar
in the proper sense. There were three fairly short addresses from the platform, a couple of set-piece
presentations from the floor (about special schools) and most of the rest of the proceedings were
given over to those from the floor who has something that they wished to say to Michael Gove on
the platform .

The first of these, expectedly, had 'autism' clearly evident in its opening sentence but to tell the
truth I was not always clear what all these individual presentations were actually about. Partly
blame my diminishing hearing – but the room was not designed with acoustic properties in mind
and, to be honest, not everyone who spoke was at home with this kind of presentation.

It was not of course a seminar at all, not that it could be given its circumstances. The meeting was a
way for the platform to hear and call for ideas. There was no amplification system in operation, no
written agenda nor any other distributed papers, and no list of participants. It was very interesting
to watch the process and I do hope that the platform learned something useful from what it could
hear at the head of that long, muffling room. What this might be, and how it might be sifted and
integrated would be interesting to learn, but there will be no written report.

(To be fair, I have been to a number of such semi-public occasions over the years since Iain Duncan
Smith began opening the Conservative Party up to the outside world a few years back. They have
always been interesting to watch but I have wondered whether they have really served purposes
other than their stated one of enlightenment. And no, I do not know whether other parties run such
shows: just that I have never been invited to one).

Each of these meetings that I have attended has been larger than the last. I did not, however,
recognise anyone at this one whom I recall meeting from previous ones, no one whom I have
known else where from 'special educational needs', and no one from Conductive Education. There
are several ways of understanding this, of course.

The audience was predominantly white and middle-class. I had anticipated more younger people
there but the audience was primarily greying, and included some oldies. I can only guess who the
people there were:
• some special-school headteachers
 • some parent-campaigners (especially those who have opened their own facilities)
• some people from smaller voluntary bodies (not the big ones, they will be lobbying by other
means
• some individual parents with links to the party
• some local Conservative politicians
• nobody with an apparent disability (though one man did declare himself to have attended an
ESN school)
• no obvious education academics, none that I recognised anyway (but I no longer know
many)
• most glaringly – and predictably – no trace of the great majority of those whose children
fall under the wide 'SEN' pseudo-category: the families and children who are poor,
powerless, alienated, dispossessed and ill-educated..
I had the impression that most of these who were there do not know each other – i.e. there is no
coherent lobby out there, and that these were largely individuals with their own personal concerns
to advance. They too then are in their own way alienated. If conversations at previous meetings can
serve as a guide, many or most of those present hold no great truck with the Conservatives. Having
given up on 'the present lot', however, they have increasingly regarded a modernising Conservative
Party as the next Government and the only possibility for change.

Noticeable was common accord from the platform and from the floor towards two great issues of
the past, once unquestionably good things, now agreed to be bugbears and a blight on people's
lives: unthinking inclusion and heartless local authorities. Schools and teachers got off quite well.

The mood was calm if insistent, People felt strongly, but they 'behaved'. It felt perhaps that they
might be feeling greater cause for hope than they could remember having done previously. Why?
Well, at last they were being listened to and taken seriously.

What was said?

Tomorrow this series continues with an account of some of the things that were actually said at the
seminar, with particular reference to what the Commission is actually saying.

In fact, not a lot appears to be said that has not already been said in the Commission's Second
Seport: I should like to offered keener readers some homework, a URL of the Second Report, but I
cannot find it on line. Maybe somebody will be able to oblige.

A copy of the Commission's 'interim recommendations', from November 2005, which seems much
the same, can be found at:

http://www.conservatives.com/pdf/specialneeds-nov2005.pdf

I have no news of the long-promised Third Report

Wednesday, 3 February
http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/document-so-far.html

3
A document so far
The Commission's Second Report
It has involved some difficulty to trace an online version of the Commission's Second Report. but
late last night I at last found it, buried without obvious signposts deep and unsung within the
Conservative Party's website:

http://www.conservatives.com/pdf/specialneedsreport2007.pdf

Those whose may have any cause to be concerned for the areas that it covers, whether by what it
says or – probably more importantly – what it does not say, really ought to look at it.
• This is certainly the most family-oriented document ever put forward as a guide to possible
educational and child-welfare legislation in the United Kingdom – perhaps anywhere in the
world. The writers of this Report have clearly listened to the cares of certain parents and taken
these very seriously to heart indeed. In this respect it is a most progressive and indeed
revolutionary document, with monumental implications, an assertion of rights that parents
around the world might wish to follow.
• Technically, however, in terms of its understanding of child development and education
(pedagogy and upbringing) – and the interrelationship between the two – it is from the Stone
Age. One cannot blame the Report's authors for this, where might they have heard otherwise?
Spot this for yourselves. You might also care to ponder all the details that are promised for
inclusion in the Third Report, when it appears. That is where the Devil will appear.
Brilliant parents' (and children's) rights are of little use if they amount to a right only to access a
primitive and maybe destructive technology (and I do not here mean 'technology' in the sense of
gadgets and gubbins, but the technology of pedagogic science).

I suspect that there is some awareness of this problem at the higher levels of the decision-making
process.

Tomorrow: something of what further was said at Monday's meeting

Reference
Balchin, R. (Chmn.) (2008) Commission on Special Needs in Education The Second Report.
London, Conservative Party.
http://www.conservatives.com/pdf/specialneeds-nov2005.pdf

1 comment:

Norman said...

Thank you Andrew for hunting down this second report. I had not previously read it. I shall be interested to read
tomorrow your further account of the recent Seminar. Perhaps. methinks, I should wait to add comment. Having now
read the second report, I find that I can largely welcome it, I would wish to ponder further on the following:

1. I suspect that the sort of thinking evidenced at national level in references to 'free schools', 'the 'Swedish
model' and even the American Charter schools model, has in the past 2 years moved substantially beyond that set out
in this report, even for special schools.

2. This is most notable in the Second Report's apparent willingness to leave the funding of special schools
with/via the local authority. The case for so doing is poorly argued and unconvincing. On the other hand,
the Second Report firmly dismisses the apparent anxiety, even at senior levels, that levels of funding could
otherwise get out of hand.

3. Most curiously, considering the report's radical proposals in other parts, is the failure to grapple with the
admittedly huge question of whether there might not be alternatives to the whole paraphernalia of the late-
20th century institution of schooling and the powerful vested interests of the education industry and lobby.
Let me illustrate this last point with one example: Conductive Education, as I understand it, is a 24/7/365 necessity.
And yet in the UK, and no doubt elsewhere, we have backed ourselves into an apparently irrational (in the 21st
century) pattern dictated and dominated by school terms and holidays. What disabled children do in the holidays and
out of school, remains someone else's problem. To consider alternatives exposes some very radical questions indeed.

Norman
3 February

Thursday, 4 February
http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/what-was-said-on-day.html

4
What was said on the day?
Not a lot
Michael Gove MP, the likely next Secretary of State for Education, was the focus of the show. All
remarks seem to be made to him. He made clear at the very outset the importance of this subject to
the Conservative Party and, by extension, to the next Government of the United Kingdom:

Our Leader, David Cameron, considers that the families of children who have special needs are one of our highest
priorities.
He did not have much else to say. This for a reason, he explained:

Politicians are like walkie-talkies. They have two modes, to transmit and to receive. Today I am here to receive.

Thus far into the deliberations of the Commission – and so close to the forthcoming General
Election – this offers an intriguing slant on the present situation.

Michael Gove is not just a politician. He is also a journalist. He did try to draw the meeting's
attention to that fundamental dichotomy within the grand category 'SEN', the need to 'distinguish
between children who have problems about behaviour rather than things that you an do nothing
about'. Not terribly well put but one knows what he means. Whether or not many in the audience
did, nobody rose to his challenge.

As for inclusion, he would like to see 'the best of both worlds', but did not suggest that he yet has
found principles for how this might be achieved, nor did one emerge from the floor where this
again seemed a generally lesser concern.

What does the Commission favour?

There seems nothing of note new since its Second Report. No mention was made of all the details
that are promised for the Third.

The Commissions seems to favour encouraging parents' taking the lead in setting up new schools in
the voluntary or private sectors. The potentially socially divisiveness of this did not emerge. Nor
did the more directly personal implications of foisting upon often already overburdened families
the Herculean task of setting up a new school from scratch.

The Commission enthuses excitedly over separating assessment from provision: 'Statements would
be by independent people governed by a number of objective criteria.' The Commission does not
like tribunals and adversarial proceedings, though 'there would of course be an opportunity at the
end of this if it all goes wrong to go to a tribunal, or something like a tribunal, with opportunities
for mediation along the way.' This and the 'objective criteria' and the 'profiles' that these will
contribute to, desperately need a seminar (or two, or three!) devoted to them. Monday was not,
however, the forum for this. No doubt we shall hear much more about this proposal. At an
appropriate time Conductive World might look at the awkward questions that lie beneath this
particular stone,

In default of discussion
How can something so wonderfully exciting and humane sound so dull? Probably when it is
reduced to the murmuring of a crowd of individuals testifying to their own individual causes,
without coming together around some big idea or ideas that that might sweep the whole along
towards some common resolution. Without even common concepts, or even word, one is left with a
host of other people's problems, strongly felt and for the most part legitimate concerns, but mostly
by definition of little interest to anyone else – little tails than cannot individually wag the dog.
Further, it has to be remembered, there are potentially conflicting agendas in this crowd.. For
example, a head-teacher described his idea of freedom under a new order: the freedom of schools
from local-authority control. A laudable goal in its own right, no doubt, but not the freedom that
many, perhaps most parents would prioritise.

Again and again there emerged the repeated refrain: 'funding, funding, funding' – or, as David Gove
summarised it from his viewpoint: 'costs'. Raising one's eyes to the bigger economic situation it is
hard to see how any policy that does not significantly cut costs has any long-term chance of
being implemented. There was no indication among those who spoke that this is a factor in people's
consideration. Having mentioned the dreaded word 'costs', Mr Gove kept his council. Another
seminar required here too, I guess...

There were no good words from anyone for local authorities, their officials, and cynical 'inclusion'
policies. Mr Gove, though, saw a problem:

In complex cases a lot of agencies might have to be involved – but how do you ensure that they don't spend all their
time filling out forms? It is essential to minimise the level of bureaucracy. We need a single gateway, early in life so
that all the child's needs are considered together.

Really, does nobody question the relevance or feasibility of prescriptive determination

(‘assessment’) of a child's 'needs'?

Climate change
If, as seems likely, the Conservatives win power in a few months' time, an interesting spectator
sport will be to watch all this stuff hit the fan of the established order of special education needs in
the United Kingdom (all no doubt within the over-arching context of budget cuts and public-sector
redundancies).

And what will Conductive Education in the UK do then, poor thing?

Tomorrow, though, a SEN’s dilemma for the Conservative Party.

1 comment:

Norman said...

A couple of quick thoughts before bed:

1. If a Conservative government should be intent upon extending the Academy schools system to new
providers such as voluntary and private organisations, then it is both reasonable and just that this same
policy should be inclusive of special schools, maintained and non-maintained. An assurance is needed.
Balchin 2 says something similar then draws back.

2. ‘Parents’ per se will not set up schools. They might (like us at Paces) form charitable organisations which
will then seek to register new Academy Special Schools (I do not like the Balchin 2 term ‘Special
Academy Schools’). Such organisations are likely to require the involvement of an existing organisation
with a track record; such an organisation might well seek to collaborate with others to create a single
national Academy special school. In this way, for example, Paces could work with other CE centres not
yet schools, to do so. Equally, we could find a ‘Swedish’ private sector partner. (thus the argument about
the burden on parents is something of a chimera).

3. Funding. Funding. Funding. True -cuts in public services might well destroy any such initiative. That
aside, the high level policy problem, I'm told, is the fear of runaway costs (see also Balchin 2): not the
hoary old LEA complaint that 'private' schools are milking the system as a cash cow, but that the new
assessors will feel less inhibited in making recommendations as to schooling. Balchin 2 addresses this in
part, but a proper proposal from CE to establish an Academy Special School will need to better answer
this fear.

In my view this is an opportunity for CE in the UK like never before. Am I a lone voice in thinking this? If anyone
reading this cares to, just contact me. I'll be happy to meet and talk.

Norman
3 February
Friday, 5 February
http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/sen-conservatives-dilemma.html

5
The Conservatives' dilemma
The first law of holes

The Conservatives' predicament

Michael Gove, on behalf of what may be increasingly considered a Government in waiting,
introduced his contribution to Monday's meeting with a political statement of immense importance
to everyone in the UK concerned with 'special educational needs', whether as users or providers::

Our Leader, David Cameron, considers that the families of children who have special needs are one of our highest
priorities.

Would the Conservative Party accord this matter such priority without this direction from its very
top? Given the pressure from despairing and articulate parents, bubbling up across the country over
the last ten years or so, the universal media support that they enjoy, and the political weakness of
any likely opposition from the established system, then the answer is probably: Yes – but not as
much. 'The most vulnerable in society' are all politicians' stated priority, but 'one of their highest', I
think not.

The Conservative Party, though, at the bidding of David Cameron, has to act otherwise. It does not,
however, have much of a feel for the technical issues involved. Few people in the country do –
otherwise we should hardy be in such a mess in the first place. The Conservatives have to make a
go of it nonetheless.

Stop digging!
There used to be a little souvenir stall on the way from St Stephen's Gate to Central Lobby. On
Monday I saw that it is much bigger now, and its stock has gone upmarket. One staple for years
seems is no longer on sale: an inexpensive fridge magnet which bears the House of Commons
portcullis and the following snippet of wisdom, as invaluable in politics as in every field of life:

The First Law of Holes: if you are in one, stop digging.

DENIS HEALEY

The Conservatives now know that they will inherit a big mess in this sector of education, just how
colossal a mess I doubt that they have yet to realise. Take the question usually presented
simplistically as 'teacher-training', not just a matter of teachers, nor of 'skills' to be trained. Yes, let's
have more and better teacher-training (and associated activity). But who is going to train, and more
fundamentally, in what? Oh yes, and where is the money coming from? Mr Gove does already
seem to recognise elsewhere that it might take a generation or two to put Humpty-Dumpty
together. Nowhere in education is this more so than across what is currently called 'special
educational needs'.

The incoming government has a couple of ideas ready to implement: jiggle the arrangements for
statementing (separate ‘assessment’ from provision) and create more special-school places
(especially through the initiative of parents and bodies outside the present state sector). Neither will
achieve fundamental change, and to a large extent the same things will be done to the same
children, by the same people, with the same outcomes – one of which will continuing parental
disappointment and dissatisfaction – this time with the new Government.

So perhaps it is time to stop digging deeper and deeper in the same place, and face some previously
unfaced questions. To use other words, technical rather than political, step outside the exhausted
'SEN'' paradigm.

Unfaced questions
What unfaced questions? Here are a few that leap immediately to mind, my mind anyway. Others
will have their own, possibly overlapping lists of fundamentals. Good, let's hear them.
• There is no operationalisable taxonomy of educational and developmental disorders.
• There is no common theoretical structure under which to discuss them.
• There is not even a common vocabulary for that.
• There is no special pedagogy (no general pedagogy either!).
• The is no explicit social compact on what the schools (all schools) are there for.
• There are no explicit, concrete goals for the adulthoods of most children with
educational/developmental disorders.
• There is little or no common understanding of the relationship between teaching and
learning (writ especially large in the case of children who are 'special', in whatever way).
 • For most such children, contrary perhaps to unquestioned myth, there is little or no effective
knowledge base for what to do about them.
• There is, however, a large workforce dependent upon the myth that there is.
• There is little relevant, practical, technical knowledge available in the existing services, and
there is little relevant knowledge in 'academe' either.
• Society tends to regard such children to a large degree through the problems that they pose
for the state education service.
• Contradictorily, especially where children are young or developmentally disordered, a great
rhetoric has recently arisen about the health and social-care 'needs' of these children.
• This rhetoric may in effect be operationalised largely through the problems posed by
marshalling over-elaborate state services (see for example the Audit' Commission's report on
Sure Start this week).
• There are no quick fixes to most individual children's educational/developmental problems –
correspondingly there will be no quick fixes for remediating or compensating for the
inadequacies of existing services, or in establishing new paradigms for services to succeed
them.
• There is no money to address most of these problems according to present ways of thinking.
• There are but islets of political will to do so.
• Realisable money and effective political will are likely here, as elsewhere, to be socially
skewed.
• To an overwhelming degree, it is only parents who love their children and hope for them –
parents can do without the additional (often crushing) burden of negative, dysfunctional
services, but they may be vastly helped by collaboration from those who have relevant and
effective knowledge and orientation.
• Etc., etc., etc. This lot for starters, anyway. I could doubtless go on!

I will not venture here to state even these raw and unrefined fundamentals in any order of priority,
never mind attempt to classify and hierarchicalise them. Gathering 'fundamental lists' of this sort,
putting them together, arguing over and elaborating them, and starting to consider critically what
might be done to respond, may be a necessary step towards solving them. The Conservatives’
dilemma is that the time to act is upon them, they cannot do nothing but the actions already
proposed amount only to more of the same (and when these result in disappointment, who will be
to blame), and even the basic questions to be asked are daunting.
Saturday, 6 February
www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/sen-time-for-politics.html

6
Time for political decision
But, please, a measured one
A journalist, who would very much like to do a story on 'special educational needs', writes to me
during this last week –

I agree, the general concept (and stupidity) of SEN is an interesting one to look in to...and one that manages to baffle
any half-interested media observers to the point where – even if they did have the motivation – the whole area is too
muddy and vague for them to get involved...

She is so right, but what she writes is in no way specific to journalists. The same goes for
politicians too. The mechanisms involved in a thoroughgoing examination of matters of disordered
development – and what to do about them – are not what most people really wish to hear about (the
same goes for many in the medical and paramedical professions, and even in education). Folk
would much rather hear some apparently crisp, uni-factorial explanation of cause and effect (hence
the immediate attraction of, say, dyslexia, or the mad panic over MMR). Multi-factorial, transactive
models require time... and are not amenable to the quick-fix magic bullets that every one would so
like to see,

A couple of weeks ago I heard Michael Gove remarking à propos another systemic problem within
our education service, that it would take a generation, perhaps two generations to fix. Well, 'SEN' is
another one.
So, what to suggest that the Conservatives do about this? Very soon they will be told by their
Leader to return home and start preparing for government. As far as 'SEN' goes, presumably this
Commission will have produced the third part of its report by then. Whether it does or not, the
Conservative Party should thank it very much, and send it home. On coming to power, a
Conservative Government would doubtless wish to consider implementing such things from that
Report that seem seems politically apt – but in doing so, it should recognise that it will have barely
set out upon the long road of needed reconstruction. (It may indeed even be heading off in futile
directions).. The Commission's recommendations will soon be history, already foundering on the
continuing effects of all those fundamental problems that it has not faced.

A Royal Commission
If one accepts that there can be no quick fix, then there is no need to rush. So here's a solution that
politicians might like, since it shows that they have done something concrete but it leaves their
options open. In the meantime, others must take up the burden of critical examination of what has
gone wrong, winnowing down the hard specifics of what is proposed into new generalisable,
operationalisable notions more readily managed by the normal political processes.

This approach does not of course involve accounting just the evidence and interests of those
implicated in present arrangements and approaches, but those of all citizens who want to contribute
to the process. A Royal Commission is no informal discussion like the Conservatives' present
Commission on Special Educational Needs. It is not a cheery, consensual group drawn from
existing professional establishments, like Mary Warnock's Committee of Enquiry, an assemblage of
the usual suspects. A full-blown Royal Commission potentially brings to bear the power and the
intellectual force, the independence, that those 'most vulnerable in society' require on their social
case if their problems are even to be properly understood, never mind have anything effective done
for them.

A sledgehammer to crack a nut? No. There is precedent, albeit a long time ago now, when services
for such children were first emerging as priorities in this county and in other advanced economies
around the world. Yes, that was more than a century ago now, but social mechanisms and structures
set in train in those days have now largely run their course. It is high time to start anew. Given the
likelihood of the United Kingdom's having a Prime Minister who has had himself the indelible
experience of parenting a disabled child, there is perhaps opportunity too. If not now, when?

What a nice election pledge a Royal Commission would be.

Footnote: Royal Commissions

In Commonwealth realms a Royal Commission is a major government public enquiry into an issue... A Royal
Commissioner has considerable powers, generally greater even than those of a judge but restricted to the 'Terms of
Reference of the Commission.... Royal Commissions are called to look into matters of great importance and usually
controversy. These can be matters such as government structure, the treatment of minorities, events of considerable
public concern or economic questions... using the very broad coercive powers of the Royal Commissioner to defeat
the protective systems that powerful, but corrupt, public officials had used to shield themselves from conventional
investigation. Royal Commissions are usually chaired by one or more notable figures. Because of their quasi-judicial
powers the Commissioners are often retired senior judges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Commission

1885 Royal Commission on the Blind, Deaf and Dumb set up

1889 Report of the Royal Commission on Blind, Deaf, Dumb and others.

1904 Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded set up.
1908 Report of the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded
Sunday, 7 February 2010
www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/future-of-conductive-education-in-uk.html

7
The future of Conductive Education in the UK
Catch the tide or miss the boat?

Twenty-odd years ago the advocates and pioneers of Conductive Education in the UK, whether
would-be users, or professionals, media people, politicians, or individual and institutional
supporters, were clear about what they were doing what they did. Despite their particular individual
emphases, they were all activists. They saw Conductive Education as an catalyst for change in
existing ways of construing and providing for children and adults with disabilities, for their
families, and for those who offered services for their benefit. They saw Conductive Education as a
potential agent of change, but found themselves increasingly in a context where the only change
allowed was to be 'more of the same'. Now, as in many aspects of life, more radical reappraisal is
on the cards. In 2010, though, is Conductive Education ready and able to stand forth?

This posting is the seventh in a series if seven. In the first of these, I wrote –

Readers' comments and queries will be very welcome throughout this process and I hope that these will cover not just
wider issues raised but also relate to matters more specifically to do with Conductive Education.

I did not hold my breath. In the event, thank you to Norman Perrin, and Adelaide from Australia,
and the journalist whom I quoted in the sixth of these postings. As for everyone else, thanks for
nothing. Inter alia, Norman commented on the third of this series of postings –

In my view this is an opportunity for CE in the UK like never before. Am I a lone voice in thinking this? If anyone
reading this cares to, just contact me. I'll be happy to meet and talk.
I know that Norman too is not prone to breath-holding behaviour. I do hope that the Good Ship CE
in the UK can get its act together, and act. Otherwise Norman might be better saving his breath
for striking out on his own.

BRUTUS. There is a tide in the affairs of men.

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

Julius Caesar, act 4, scene 3, lines 218–224

3 comments:

Adelaide Dupont said...

For a start, don't tell me that they haven't been Royal Commissioning for a century now (if the figures in part 6 are
straight: Wikipedians will possibly record the major ones). They've had reports and inquiries aplenty. And
there's a definite gap in the market for Royal Commissions. Something about people with ‘high and complex
needs’.

Adelaide
8 February

Andrew Sutton said...

Sorry, I expressed myself poorly. I was not referring to Royal Commissions in general. Of course there have been lots
over the last hundred years or so (not least in Australia, though they have been rather less common in the UK over
recent years). I should have been clearer: I meant Royal Commissions on what people presently call 'special
educational needs’. There have been enquiries (like Mary Warnock's) but a Royal Commission carries more authority,
both in its powers to take and examine evidence, and correspondingly in the notice that might subsequently be taken
of its findings and recommendations. The time is past for chummy chats and unchallenged warm fuzzies.

I disagree with the second half of your comment, on two accounts:

(1) it invokes the too-often unquestioned concept of 'needs' , one of the first aspects of present ways of thinking that
requires keen, critical examination;

(2) it implies that the seriousness of certain children's developmental disorders that makes them an especial problem,
whereas the problem is surely systemic and system-wide.

Andrew
8 February

Norman said...

David Cameron
The Times
3 July 2008

‘Let me give you two examples of how this virtuous circle can work.

‘We will give parents the power to set up new schools. Once parents are more closely involved in how their
child's school is run, they will take more responsibility for making sure it is a success. That will drive
standards up and provide our society with the economic and social security that a skilled workforce brings.

‘The same goes for welfare reform. We will give more power to charities and social enterprises that really
 know how to get people into work - paying them for their success. Armed with this power, they will have a
greater stake in - and a greater responsibility for - making success. And their success will mean more people
moving from long-term poverty to long-term employment.’

Norman
8 February