Less than a month before the eleventh anniversary of the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq, the near destruction of much of the country, heritage, culture, secularism, education, health services and all State institutions, the country is poised to revert "two thousand years" say campaigners. On 25th February Iraq’s Cabinet approved a draft law lowering the age of legal marriage for females to nine years old. Iraq was, prior to the invasion, a fiercely secular country, with a broadly equal male, female workforce and with women benefiting from a National Personal Status Law, introduced in 1959, which remained "one of the most liberal in the Arab world, with respect to women’s rights."
The legal age for marriage was set at eighteen, forced marriages were banned and polygamy restricted. Cohesion between communities was enhanced and fostered by: "eliminating the differential treatment of Sunnis and Shiites under the law (and erasing differentiation) between the various religious communities …" Women’s rights in divorce, child custody and inheritance were an integral part of the Law, with Article 14 stating that all Iraqis are equal under the law.(1)
Stuarty Syvret`s blog is up and running again albeit at a new IP address:
"So – November 2008?
What was taking place around then? And what was I writing and publishing on this blog that can have so frightened the Jersey establishment?
Jersey’s public authorities were secretly attempting to get this blog taken down in November 2008 for three reasons: (a) to cover-up their concealment of child-abuse, (b) to prevent scrutiny of their illegal suspension of Police Chief Graham Power, and (c) desperate panic that their vacuous, spin-doctor-authored smearing of the Haute de la Garenne investigation had had its entire legality and scientific credibility challenged head-on, immediately, by postings like this:"
In light of the Children and Young People Act which has been passed in the Scottish Parliament and the implications for children and families regarding their personal informatiom held in various datasets, it is interesting to review what the Scottish Government had to say about ecare in 2008.
A significant development over the next few years will be the new version of the national eCare framework that will further support information sharing. The existing framework already supports controlled messaging of information about child protection issues, and is being rolled out across Scotland in 2009. The next version of the framework is being developed in parallel, to support electronic sharing of information about children and young people to aid decision making surrounding their needs. The system is also being designed to ensure strictly controlled access to information, yet give ready access to those practitioners who need to know who else may be involved with a child or young person. More information on the development of the eCare framework is available on the Scottish Government Data Sharing and Standards website.
In the future, practitioners will be expected to record information using shared language, structured around a standard practice model, sharing key relevant information through the eCare framework.
It is also interesting to read and hear Professor Alex `Sandy` Pentland, from MIT, and his pontifications about the potential that Big Data has for re-shaping society.
Dr Richard Saul has this to say about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder:
This so-called condition has apparently spread like wildfire across the globe in recent years, with a huge increase in its diagnosis and medication. More than 4 per cent of adults and 11 per cent of children in the U.S. have been diagnosed with ADHD - a leap of more than 40 per cent in the past decade. It's now the most common mental health disorder in the UK and affects around 2 to 5 per cent of school-age children.
Prescriptions for the stimulants used to treat it, including Ritalin, doubled for children and quadrupled for adults in the UK between 2003 and 2008. But these stimulants - so-called because they're designed to stimulate parts of the brain thatare not thought to be working properly - frequently do not help, and instead cause a range of side-effects, some dangerous. They can even make symptoms worse.
To treat ADHD as a condition, rather than a set of symptoms, is doing a terrible, and dangerous, disservice to the children and adults who are diagnosed with it. There is no doubt that the symptoms - an inability to pay attention to details, fidgeting, interrupting, difficulty staying seated, impulsive behaviour - exist.
But to lump them together and turn them into a diagnosis of ADHD, then to treat this so-called condition with stimulants, is like treating the symptoms of a heart attack - such as severe chest pain - with painkillers, rather than tackling the cause of them by repairing the heart. It is dangerous, neglectful and wrong.
Here is a common sense account written by a parent who questions whether or not the condition ADHD exists:ADHD REPORT
There is no doubt that a case can be made for or against the diagnosis. All of this does bring into question what is likely to happen in Scotland if a `named person` in charge of the wellbeing of a child disagrees with a parent about such a diagnosis. How are disputes to be settled? At the moment it is impossible to say.
Parents in England were not informed in the information leaflet about care.data that their children`s medical records would be automatically harvested:
The records of some ten million youngsters in England will be taken from GP surgery computers this spring to be part of the care.data project. Leaflets about the scheme contain no mention that children’s records will be ‘extracted’. It is only revealed in NHS guides for patients and GPs on the internet.
Data: The records of ten million youngsters in England will be taken from GP surgery computers this spring to be part of the care.data project, despite there being no mention of children's data in information leaflets Last night MPs and doctors said it was ‘highly irresponsible’ not to specify that children’s information would be uploaded.
Former Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: ‘To do this tochildren’s data is a very serious abuse of the rights of the child and their parents.
'The first duty for protecting children is down to the parent, not the State.’
In Scotland the `named person` has the responsibility to collect children`s data from any record, including their medical records. All they need is a concern about the wellbeing of the child - which covers just about anything. Big Brother Watch discusses the issue:
Despite opposition from the public, church leaders, legal experts, MSPs and civil liberties groups, the Children and Young People Act was passed in Scotland. This new piece of legislation now means from birth until the age of 18, every child in Scotland will have a specific state-appointed ‘guardian’ to safeguard their interests and oversee their safety. Initially, this person is likely to be a health visitor or midwife, with the role latterly being taken over by a school teacher whowill have a "duty" and responsibility to act as the child’s guardian. Not only that, but to allow these ‘guardians’ will have legal authority to access information from the police, council, NHS, amongst others.
The connection between the BBC and paedophile Jimmy Savile is now well known. Less well known perhaps is the controversy surrounding the paedophile Eric Gill`s statue above the main entrance to Broadcasting House which depicts an adult with a naked boy. Despite the matter being raised in Parliament the statue remains in place. A discussion of the artist and his work can be found HERE
More recently the following article has appeared in the Daily Mail:
The son of the authors of the Topsy and Tim children's books was a leading member of the notorious paedophile lobby group PIE, it has been revealed. Leo Adamson, whose parents have sold 21million books, is said to be obsessed with underage boys and has twice been jailed over his links with the Paedophile Information Exchange.
Three years ago, he was convicted of trying to block a police investigation into a child porn ring involving members of PIE who shared drawings of children being raped. The 52-year-old is the son of Jean and Gareth Adamson, who created the much-loved Topsy and Tim series in 1960 and based their adventures partly on their ownthree children.
The books, which have made their creators into multi-millionaires, were last year adapted into a BBC television series shown on CBeebies, the channel aimed at children up to six years old.
The children and young people (Scotland) bill sets out a new legal status called a kinship care order, which the government claims will finally recognise kinship carers in law and increase the support they are offered. However, a closer look at the proposals reveals they are billed as saving the Scottish government and local authorities money by reducing the number of kinship children with "at risk" or "looked after" status, which entitles them to crucial services and financial allowances. The financial memorandum of the bill states that only a fraction of those applying for the new kinship care order are expected to be entitled to start-up grants, the legal cost of applying for the order or a basic allowance to support their caring role.
A report published last year by the charity Buttle UK in association with Bristol University showed that more than one in 71 children in Scotland are in kinship care and that the majority of these placements are informal, ie, unsupported by the local authority. Buttle UK claims each informal kinship carer saves the taxpayer between £23,500 and £56,000 a year, despite many of these carers finding themselves in poverty, with 31% of these families unable to provide all the eight basic items that most of us consider necessities, such as heating and winter clothes.
"Fulford, now 61, is the most senior public figure to be exposed as an apologist for paedophiles among Left-wing political groups of the 1970s and 1980s. He has enjoyed a stellar rise through the legal profession, becoming a QC in 1994 and a part-time judge the following year."
"In 2002 he became the first openly gay High Court judge, being nominated for a knighthood by Tony Blair, and in 2003 took up a prestigious role at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Last year he was nominated as an Appeal Court judge by David Cameron and appointed to the Privy Council, the elite group of senior politicians, judges and clergy who advise the Queen on constitutional matters."
"in the late 1970s he was a newly qualified Left-wing barrister when he joined the NCCL, now known as Liberty, which had links to known paedophile groups and attempted to lower the age of consent to [4] and water down child pornography laws."
"Fulford’s involvement with the radical movement to legalise child sex goes even further than that of the Labour Ministers, documents uncovered by The Mail on Sunday show."
"He personally set up a group to support the ‘executive committee’ of PIE in the summer of 1979, after they had their homes raided by police."
Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust has apologised after its care home on Piggy Lane in Bicester failed a Care Quality Commission inspection. It was inspected on January 8 and “raised concerns” in several areas, said the CQC report. Medication was out of date, and staff admitted that they could not always provide safe care because of management and staffing problems.
The report said: “They said they had far too much to do, and this sometimes compromised the safety of the care they could deliver.”Katrina Percy, chief executive of Southern Health, has this morning said: “Obviously I am extremely disappointed that we have not been offering the quality of services we should be. “All of our drive and passion is going into improving the services we offer.”
Common Core is the school curriculum being pushed into many states in the USA and has its critics. The Curriculum for Excellence was introduced into Scottish schools in August 2010 and the new qualifications will come on-stream from the summer exam diet of 2014. Here is what the Scottish Government has to say about it:
Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) is the 3-18 curriculum in Scotland which offers a broad and deep general education from early years (aged 3) through to the end of S3 (typically age 15). It includes a senior phase of education (typically 15-18) which provides opportunities to develop skills for learning, life and work and obtain qualifications. It promotes the ability to learn and to reflect on their own learning, skills for life that will help young people go onto further study, to secure work and to navigate successfully through life. Ultimately, the aim is to make our education system fit for the modern world and improve young people's achievements, attainment and life chances; through enabling all young people to become successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors.
Here is what Robin Eubanks has to say about Common Core on Trans Resister Radio. It is well worth listening to because of the concepts she refers to in her criticism of Common Core. These same concepts appear in the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence.
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Although these two education systems seem miles apart it is interesting to note the parallels and to ask the question: from where does this common language originate? For instance, both systems explain that learning will take place through experience and outcomes. Then we have the emphasis on wellbeing.
With regards to Curriculum for Excellence, we are informed that `health and wellbeing` will occur across the whole of the learning framework.
The framework begins by describing features of the environment for learning which will support and nurture the health and wellbeing of children and young people, including a positive ethos and relationships, and participation in activities which promote a healthy lifestyle. These statements are intended to help to inform planning and practice within establishments or clusters and also by individual practitioners.
Wellbeing plays an important role in Common Core too. Here is Robin Eubanks on the subject.
...you will find quite a bit of meddling about what is supposed to make us "happy" going forward. Very much grounded in communitarianism as so much else seems to be these days. We had already noted in previous posts that the UN started a World Happiness Report in 2012 and the OECD has been pushing Subjective Well-Being as a means of aiding its Great Transition emphasis.
When governments decide to shift the "focus of economic measurement from production [i.e. consumer choices] toward people’s well-being," that is a significant enabler of stealthily shifting to a needs economy. Especially when there is to be a focus on "equality, sustainability and nonmarket dimensions of well-being that cannot be captured well by conventional ‘objective’ means." ....
Interesting, because it could not be clearer that the Scottish Government through Curriculum for Excellence is shifting children in the direction of a needs economy.
The responsibilities of all include each practitioner’s role in establishing open, positive, supportive relationships across the school community, where children and young people will feel that they are listened to, and where they feel secure in their ability to discuss sensitive aspects of their lives; in promoting a climate in which children and young people feel safe and secure; in modelling behaviour which promotes health and wellbeing and encouraging it in others; through using learning and teaching methodologies which promote effective learning; and by being sensitive and responsive to the wellbeing of each child and young person. ...
So GIRFEC, the child protection system for all children in Scotland, is enmeshed in Curriculum for Excellence but that was always made clear. What has been less transparent is that Curriculum for Excellence is a programme of behavioural change. Here is Robin Eubanks again who is able to explain the motivation behind attending to wellbeing. .
Now that mouthful term means that the governments now want insights into the "emotional states and experiences of people belonging to different groups." With those insights, factors like "long-term unemployment, depression, or lack of income" that are shown to be drivers of long-term suffering can supposedly be reduced. Because LBJ’s Great Society policies turned out so well. The idea is also that positive experiences can be enhanced or increased. Yes, ‘enhance’ was the word used and this could easily turn into a parody with the catch-phrase "I’m from the government and I’m here to help," but the intentions are quite serious.
I`m from the Government and I`m here to help.` It`s not a sly joke in Scotland because it happens to be the reality. Here`s the Scottish Government:
The health and wellbeing of every child and young person is greatly enhanced through the individual support and pastoral care which they receive through having an identified member of staff who knows and understands them and can support them in facing changes and challenges and in making choices. Members of staff are often best placed to identify even minor changes of mood in a child or young person which could reflect an important emotional, social or mental health issue with which that child or young person needs help or support. It is important that children and young people feel that they can share their anxieties with an appropriate individual who has the skills, rapport, responsibility and the time to listen and to help, or can identify appropriate sources of support.
This is GIRFEC again but also note the emphasis on facing changes and challenges. Curriculum for Excellence is about making changes. Robin Eubanks puts forward her ideas about these changes being a massive attempt at social engineering.
Going into 2014, let’s keep in mind the intentions described in that report which are clearly laying the ground work for attempts at extraordinary levels of social engineering for the future. Think of it as teed up in the dark away from prying eyes that could ring an alarm. We were quietly lurking in the outfield though and have caught what was intended to be a most troubling concept. Now we get to frame sought 2014 policies through the "lens" of making Subjective Well-Being the domain of governments in the 21st century. As if we are all merely wards of the state in need of constant oversight.
`Wards of the state in need of constant oversight? Yes, that`s GIRFEC and it`s no metaphor. Here it is:
Children’s capacities to learn are shaped by their background and home circumstances as well as by their individual development. Exposure to different social and environmental influences contributes to the way that attitudes, values and behaviours are formed. These in turn affect their ability to make and take decisions.
Note the emphasis on social and environmental influences which contribute to attitudes, values and behaviours.Why is a curriculum for education in schools discussing these concepts unless there is a will to change attitudes, values and behaviours. (social engineering) This is particularly worrying given that this document is supposed to be about educating children in a curriculum of excellence, so that alongside GIRFEC, Scottish children will not be able to `think` without approval from a Government appointed state agent.
Progression and development in many aspects of health and wellbeing will depend upon the stage of growth, development and maturity of the individual, upon social issues and upon the community context. Teachers and other practitioners in planning together will take account of these factors, ensuring that experiences are relevant and realistic for the child or young person in his or her circumstances. Particularly within experiences and outcomes which span more than one level, careful planning will be required to ensure appropriate pace and coverage, and teachers and other practitioners will need to decide when and how the experiences and outcomes are introduced.
There is no discussion of educational content beyond health and wellbeing, experiences and outcomes. Common Core has been criticised because it dumbs down children in the USA. The critics have expressed concern about that curriculum particularly in relation to wellbeing, experiences and outcomes. So who are the drivers behind these changes in education and why should such divergent educational systems have so much in common?
Now for that second admission we can make great use of in 2014. We have long known that the accreditors answered to UNESCO and intend to use education to drive cultural change. We also knew that UNESCO globally is the driver of all the tremendous changes in higher ed. We have suspected UNESCO is the driver of K-12 reforms globally including the US Common Core, but I have been looking for the proverbial indisputable link beyond UNESCO being a named partner in the global 21st century skills movement. I now have that proof downloaded and hard copied along with UNESCO’s desired global curriculum and methods. Helpfully available on CD-ROM so with digital learning we parents will never see it.
Here’s the really fun part, UNESCO says it has, since 2002, been addressing education reforms with "renewed vigour" because it serves as the "Task Manager of Chapter 36 of Agenda 21." So much for people who consider any mention of Agenda 21 to be proof you are a "conspiracy theorist." It appears that the Paris-based UNESCO bureaucrats and their supporters have clearly been the ones theorizing how to best conspire and with the aid of our money and children. The stated aim is "the educational strategies and action plans at all levels and sectors of education in all countries." All means all, folks. UNESCO also confirmed what many of us have long suspected. The International Baccalaureate Organization is working hand in hand with it in implementing Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 in unsuspecting schools and districts. Frames the true intentions behind that IB Learner Profile, doesn’t it?
