The early years matter to policy makers

 

The Early Years Matter – FACT. That is according to Professor Susan Deacon`s independent report which by some extraordinary coincidence apes many other independent reports globally.

"The period before birth and in the early months and years of life has a profound impact on a child’s life, on their physical, mental and emotional development and, in turn, their life chances. Our intuition tells us that. A vast body of research and evidence proves it beyond doubt. So investing our time, energy and resource in a child’s Early Years makes sense – for the individual, the family, society and the economy."

"We know - not think, but KNOW - that a greater focus and investment on Early Years and early intervention - particularly where a child’s needs are greatest - provides a real prospect of turning this situation around. If we don’t act now, if we just do more of the same, we will simply stack up problems for the future."

http://www.gov.scot/Resource/Doc/343337/0114216.pdf

There is no evidence to support this way of KNOWING.  If the `Solihull approach rap` sounds ridiculous, that is because it is. Yet the Named Person is expected to accept the myth of the first three years without question.

"Challenging the prevailing myth-heralded by the national media, Head Start, and the White House-that the most crucial brain development occurs between birth and age three, Bruer explains why relying on the zero to three standard threatens a child's mental and emotional well-being far more than missing a few sessions of toddler gymnastics. Too many parents, educators, and government funding agencies, he says, see these years as our main opportunity to shape a child's future. Bruer agrees that valid scientific studies do support the existence of critical periods in brain development, but he painstakingly shows that these same brain studies prove that learning and cognitive development occur throughout childhood and, indeed, one's entire life."

https://www.jsmf.org/about/j/myth_of_the_first_three_years.htm

Read more https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bruer-myth.html

Technology will meet the national and global demand for social and emotional assessments

"Perhaps the greatest consensus in K-12 learning today centers upon the critical importance of student social and emotional learning and the development of their noncognitive character strengths—their skills for success in school and life..."

"In the past decade or so, the common sense point of view of teachers in the field and educational leaders has been emphatically endorsed by researchers, social scientists, and think tanks, including Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, New York Times journalist Paul Tough, MacArthur "genius" prize winner Angela Duckworth, the Hewlett Foundation, the RAND Corporation, the National Research Council, the Brookings Institute, and the New America Foundation, just to name a few..."

"And more still: Formative assessment is all the rage, thanks in part to the influence of John Hattie’s Visible Learning movement, and accordingly many schools and districts are seeking to provide better and more frequent dollops of feedback to students about their SEL progress—and seek assessment tools and systems to do so. Coming from the Carnegie Endowment for the Advance of Teaching and elsewhere are demands for and interest in a greater use of measurement for continuous improvement. The example provided in Carnegie’s recent book about improvement measurement is of `productive persistence`."

"Many school systems nationally are particularly interested in strengthening student development of academic mindsets such as self-efficacy and the growth mindset; others are equally or also attentive to resilience and perseverance as paramount for their students. Yet another topic of fast-rising interest in the wake of adolescent depression and self-harming is student `wellness.` Work in all three of these domains demands better measurement methods to support educational initiatives designed to better prepare and support our youth and their healthy development..."

"The ProExam Center for Innovative Assessments is pleased to present in 2016 a true next-generation solution to meet the extraordinary demand for social and emotional learning and noncognitive character strength measurement..."

"The constructs measured are soundly built upon the many-decades-old and enormously research-validated psychological framework known as the Big Five factors. The Big Five is used to structure facets which every educator and every researcher recognizes as vital, malleable, and proven meaningful for success, such as dependability, persistence, curiosity, and agreeableness..."

"ProExam is a national leader in the credentialing and digital badging space, and, as an added benefit, this tool will provide the opportunity for schools to have their students earn competency-based credentials for demonstrated high proficiency in each construct."

"This is a truly comprehensive, wrap-around solution that meets the national and global demand for high quality social and emotional learning assessment."

http://21k12blog.net/2016/01/19/next-generation-noncognitive-assessment-is-needed-now/#more-6764

Let us not forget UNESCO and the OECD who also engineered this extraordinary demand for social and emotional learning and the measurement of non-cognitive character strengths.

The `Enabling State` is being rolled out across the UK

There was an interesting post from Mike Robinson on Facebook (Monday 26 2015).

He was commenting on the Cabinet Office proposal to alter the relationship between the individual and the state, as part of constitutional reform.

One of the ways the reformed relationship may be expressed is through the idea of continuously improving public services by experimentation. "Test, try small, fail fast and learn."

Mike Robinson quotes Bertrand Russell to indicate where some of the ideas about psychologically experimenting on the citizen may have originated.

"In The Impact of Science on Society, written in 1952, Russell had this to say: “I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology ... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called 'education.' Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part ..."

"It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment. “The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship ... The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity."

"But I anticipate it is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray. “Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.” "

https://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-robinson/from-conception-to-grave/10208093807841927

Recall that Noam Chomsky has talked about education as the indoctrination of youth in the Corporate Assault on Education. It has a long history and is speeding up as more young people in the US are channelled into private technical colleges and begin their working lives burdened with debt. Only the elite have access to the best educational establishments.

In Scotland the altered relationship between the individual and the state is being acted out through public service provision and is set out in a number of documents about the Enabling State. Sir John Elvidge who previously worked in the Cabinet Office and the Scottish Office is acknowledged as masterminding the policy in league with the Carnegie UK Trust.

One of the ideas of the Enabling State is that there needs to be constant tweaks and iterations to systems in order to improve services. It is the same model as "Test, try small, fail fast and learn."

Since outcomes are based on human behaviour, this methodology is really about experimenting on human populations.

It can be seen to be working in Curriculum for Excellence where teachers are now expected to engage with each other to design the curriculum themselves, but within very tight constraints, thus bypassing local authorities. The idea is that the curriculum must be constantly updated and regulated by centralised control. New standardised testing is being brought in to monitor outcomes.

Andrew Carnegie, the great philanthropist, bequeathed a most beautiful park to the `toiling masses` in Dunfermline, Scotland.  A kind gesture, perhaps, but there is a message that the role of the masses is to toil for others. This attitude is being slid into place in Curriculum for Excellence where workforce training begins in the nursery and NEETs (not in employment, education or training) are tracked when they leave school. Education in Scotland has become more vocational and no gap year for some sections of the community is allowed. 

Of course, it is recent technological advances that allow statistical methods, integrated services and e-governance to be implemented. The reformed relationship between the individual and the state is also being brought in through the Named Person scheme but this is only one small part of a much wider agenda of control.

The Enabling State was discussed earlier in the year by UK Column and is worth another view given recent developments. The discussion begins at about 17.46 minutes.

A new database will work alongside the Named Person scheme

"THE SNP is to create a £12million database containing medical details about every child in Scotland, with officials admitting the trove of information could be stored abroad."

"It will work alongside the controversial Named Person scheme, allowing health workers to "monitor" youngsters at the click of a button and flagging up parents who refuse vaccinations."

"The network will join with another upgraded NHS database containing the medical records of everybody north of the Border, known as the Community Health Index (CHI)."

"Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie called for a parliamentary debate on the plans, saying they would "fuel concerns" Scotland is moving closer to ID cards."

"Ten-year contracts for both projects have been put out to tender by the Scottish Government, with a target start date of August 2016 and a total cost of up to £32million."

"Ministers were accused of "jumping the gun" as the so-called super-ID database, or the NHS Central Register, is still awaiting a parliamentary review..."

"A Scottish Government spokeswoman said: "This is not an expansion but an upgrade of existing databases, some of which are 25 years old and which have become expensive to maintain."

"It does not represent an extension of the personal data held by the NHS and is not linked to previous proposals to change the operations of the NHS Central Register."

 http://www.express.co.uk/scotland/584325/ID-card-every-student-Scotland 

The Scottish Government spokeswoman fails to understand what integrated services are about , that is,  Government knowing all there is to know about its citizens, or she is being deliberately misleading.

The point is that children`s services have been integrated in Scotland so that health is joined up with social care and education. With a concept as broad as `wellbeing` to play with,  medical records will include the child`s relationship with its parents, for example, dressed up in the language of attachment theory.

Health reviews which are looking more like they are becoming compulsory will include an examination of the child`s cognitive abilities, social and emotional learning, as well as the parent/child bond. Interventions will then be provided to children who are failing to measure up, and particularly to parents who do not fit the Government approved standard. An additional support need could be just about anything

As well as fearing that the accumulation of personal data may be vulnerable to cyber criminals and online  paedophiles, citizens need to start fearing their Government.

I am reminded of John Taylor Gatto`s description of the Chinese Dangan.

"The Western-inspired and Western-financed Chinese revolution, following hard on the heels of the last desperate attempt by China to prevent the British government traffic in narcotic drugs there, placed that ancient province in a favorable state of anarchy for laboratory tests of mind-alteration technology. Out of this period rose a Chinese universal tracking procedure called "The Dangan," a continuous lifelong personnel file exposing every student’s intimate life history from birth through school and onwards. The Dangan constituted the ultimate overthrow of privacy. Today, nobody works in China without a Dangan."

"By the mid-1960s preliminary work on an American Dangan was underway as information reservoirs attached to the school institution began to store personal information. A new class of expert like Ralph Tyler of the Carnegie Endowments quietly began to urge collection of personal data from students and its unification in computer code to enhance cross-referencing. Surreptitious data gathering was justified by Tyler as "the moral right of institutions."

 The Scottish Dangan is also a tool for social experimentation:

See http://alicemooreuk.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/joined-up-working-for-global-governance.html

The 3-Step Improvement Framework for Scotland`s Public Services

　

The Carnegie Trust lies behind the 3-Step Improvement Framework as well as the Chinese Dangan. These matters are always a long time in the planning.
　

The Scientific Management of Children: John Taylor Gatto

 "There was a purpose behind schooling, and it had nothing to do with what parents and children wanted but what a highly centralised economy and strong political state needed."
"Woodrow Wilson talking to businessmen said: 

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. "

"Forgoing the privilege of education was not to be a matter of choice, which probably explains why Wilson`s remarks were not broadcast to the common public but were made behind closed doors."

"By 1917 all major school administrative jobs nationwide were under control of a group referred to in the press of the day as "the education trust." A record of the first meeting of the trust in Cleveland, Ohio exists, and an attendance roll showing that the interests of Rockefeller and Carnegie were represented, together with those of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. British evolutionist Benjamin Kidd wrote in 1918 that the chief end of the project was "to impose on the young the ideal of subordination."

" One famous insider of modern schooling back in the post-WWI days (when the model was hardening) called government schooling `the perfect organisation of the  hive.` That was H. H. Goddard, chairman of psychology at Princeton.  Goddard believed standardised test scores used as a signal for privileged treatment would cause the lower classes to come face-to-face with their own biological inferiority. It would be like wearing a public dunce cap. Exactly the function `special education` delivers today. The pain of endless daily humilation would discourage reproduction among the inferior, Goddard thought. Galton had virtually demanded it of responsible politicians on both sides of the Atlantic in his own writings. "

NSPCC evidence debunked

 The NSPCC, never shy of shock tactics, or making a case without producing evidence, has decided to have its annual conference in Scotland.

It is at conferences such as these where speakers are intent on driving the professionals, clinicians, experts and policy makers to look beyond the boundaries of their existing fields in order to push the case for early intervention. 

"There is growing recognition of the need for early intervention to prevent child abuse and neglect and improve children's life chances. "

When they talk about early intervention they mean intervening in family life before a crisis occurs. Where is the evidence that early intervention prevents child abuse? Although the number of children taken into care increases year on year, the number of murdered children certainly has not fallen. It looks more like, despite the lessons learned and the conferences, the wrong children are taken into care. They go on:

"Together delegates will explore the crucial challenges we face in our approach to child welfare and protection and share the latest research and best practice from both infant mental health and child protection social work."

Then there is this bombshell - they use the same debunked brain scans of the two three year-olds to support their case.

Isn`t it about time, instead,  that social workers were taught that these images show two different head sizes?  Since when did research indicate that neglect shrinks the skull of a child?

In fact, the images are more misleading than that.

It looks like the spokesperson for the NSPCC has stepped too far beyond the boundary of his field, and maybe that is not such a brilliant idea!

ttp://www.nspcc.org.uk/Inform/newsandevents/cpconferences/beyond-boundaries-conference_wda99065.html




From the the Guardian:

"Val Gillies, a researcher in social policy at South Bank University, takes the scans head-on. "That illustration of the walnut brain is from a paper by Bruce Perry. There are no details given of the case histories of those kids. We don't know what 'normal' was. We don't know what 'extreme neglect' was. We don't even have a scale on that image. It's had the most powerful impact, but I've never seen another image like that. When people say, 'I've seen a brain scan showing what neglect does to the brain', that's the image they're talking about."

"Immediately, there are a few things wrong with this: with no details on the case study, except for the fact that "extreme neglect" meant life in a Romanian orphanage, we could be dealing with anything, from the effects of malnutrition to a disability. But even without the drama of the image, the use of these extreme populations is misleading."

"Aside from the dodgy science, if you look at who's pushing this stuff, it's wealthy philanthropists, Heinz, Carnegie Foundation, with the same notion, that the ills of society are located in the lower orders."

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/apr/26/misused-neuroscience-defining-child-protection-policy