Privatising state education

"The announcement in April 2014 that there will be new floor targets from 2016 –85 per cent children must reach Level 4b –has nothing to do with raising standards. It is about accelerating the number of academy conversions and thus privatising state education. There will be no new resources to help children reach these targets. On the contrary, austerity means schools’ budgets are frozen. Teachers will not get any more time. They will continue to drown in paperwork generated by anachronistic levels, league tables and performance-related pay."

"Some estimates suggest that around 90 per cent of primary schools will become ‘failing’ schools and thus ripe for conversion to academy status. Add to this the suspicion that stand-alone academies are no longer allowed by the government, it is clear that Gove and DfE have cooked up a recipe for total
privatisation. Our schools will be run by a series of giant chains. It is a nightmare scenario. We need to make a stand against this now."
http://antiacademies.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/AAA_general_briefing_Apr2014_3rd.pdf

Why children die: death in infants, children and young people in the UK

"Every year, 1,951 more children die in the UK than in Sweden, Europe's best performing country for childhood mortality.

`Why children die: death in infants, children and young people in the UK` was written by independent experts - Ingrid Wolfe, Alison Macfarlane, Angela Donkin, Michael Mormot and Russell Viner -Why children die reviews the existing evidence on childhood mortality." http://ncb.org.uk/whychildrendie
The social determinants of health can help to explain why negative health behaviours are more common in low income groups. Having no job, no prospects, and little money in a developed economy can lead to low levels of self-esteem, poor mental health, depression, higher levels of stress, and difficult relationships, and can make having children young an appealing option...

Sweden has different cultural attitudes from the UK, and these translate into policy. For example, Sweden has lower levels of poverty but it also has a more equitable distribution of poverty and social exclusion between age groups, as shown previously. Furthermore, the Nordic cultural approach to the early years of life means that the quality of their early childhood education and childcare systems, together with long and equitable parental leave, speak of countries that understand childhood to be a special time deserving of protection.

Reducing childhood deaths and improving children’s lives through actions at the level of civil society and state could be achieved by ensuring that all families have a sufficient income to buy essential goods and be free from stress about basic security of housing, heat, and food. These things could be achieved through more equitable distribution of resources through redistributive fiscal policy, and by social policy that protects the young and vulnerable.

NHS is to encourage home births

The abuse of attachment theory has been taken to a whole different  level with the recent proposal that many mothers will not bond with their children if they do not have a natural birth.

"These are just some of the stories women were sharing in online forums yesterday, following the announcement that the NHS is to encourage hundreds of thousands more women to give birth at home, without a doctor present."

First-time mothers are to be told they are just as safe having their baby in a small midwife-led unit as on a labour ward. Most of those having their second child will be told under draft new NHS guidelines that giving birth at home is as safe as hospital.

The encouragement for home births marks a major change in NHS guidance, which previously warned mothers to be cautious about having a baby at home.  

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2627677/How-NHS-push-home-births-spark-war-mothers.html 

The reason that mothers were encouraged to have hospital births was because the birthing process is unpredictable and in hospitals all facilities are on hand, just in case.

Unlike other early intervention proposals, this one is brazenly obvious. It is about cutting costs and has nothing to do with the wellbeing of mothers and babies.

Facebook paedophile escapes jail

"A Facebook paedophile who is described as ‘every parent’s nightmare’ has escaped being sent to jail."

"Timothy Storey, 34, appeared the perfect middle-class husband yet groomed hundreds of children on the social networking site."

"By posing online as a privately-educated teenager, he persuaded girls as young as 12 to film themselves naked for his twisted pleasure."

"Despite being convicted of eight child sex charges, he was given only a three-year rehabilitation order."

"MPs and charities said the ‘appalling’ sentence sent out a terrible message to the young victims brave enough to give evidence against him. The case was last night referred to Attorney General Dominic Grieve by Tory MP David Burrowes."

"He said: ‘The sentence is woefully inadequate and out of touch with the increasing dangers of online sexual abuse.’"

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2627557/Why-internet-predator-not-jailed-Fury-Oxford-graduates-husband-goes-free-despite-grooming-hundreds-girls.html

Now troubled children are an investment opportunity

http://gravitychildcare.com/

"An 18% return on the most disturbed and needy children in care homes is the extreme end of Britain's outsourcing culture."

"In the two years between 2010 and 2012 outsourcing to private children’s homes rose 8% to 67%.' "

"Good investments are hard to come by in these low-interest times. But here's an eye-catching brochure from Gravity International. It shows the exceptional profit a canny investor can make from services the state outsources to the private sector."

"Here's the offer: a phenomenal 18% return guaranteed in one year, with your investment safely secured on a property (though in reality nothing is ever that secure). What is the business? Caring for the most disabled, disturbed and needy children in residential homes."

"But, however good, the huge sums skimmed off the top in profit would be better spent on extra psychotherapy and education for children whose outcomes are so dismal. A quarter of prisoners come from care."

"But it's a rising market, with more than 68,000 in care last year, up 2%,...."

"Making money out of tragic children is the extreme end of the outsourcing culture...."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/troubled-children-investment-extreme-britain-outsourcing-care

As the number of children removed from their parents continues to rise, there are other investment opportunities in the increasing number of adoption and fostering agencies. The current policy for early intervention means that children are taken away at a younger age and spend a longer time in the care system.

Are we expected to believe that all of this is just a coincidence?

Serious issue for Scottish education as curriculum for excellence fails on numeracy

"The experiment that is ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ has now been shown to be failing signally in what is arguably the most important skillset to be developed, if Scotland and its people are to be successful – numeracy."

"In the last three years, the standards of numeracy have been shown to have fallen by no less than 7% in Scotland’s primary schools – the irreplaceable foundation area of skills for life."

"Young children are hungry for facts and for ‘controls’ – the skills and techniques that put them in charge of the world around them – ‘so various, so beautiful, so new’."

"They are not yet equipped to deal with abstract thought and to form opinions as such – psychological facts that ought to direct the nature of curricula at primary and at secondary level."

"The failure of the demonstrably content-free zone that is Curriculum for Excellence [the teaching profession has an in-house and much less flattering name for it] in numeracy – the great British Achilles heel – could not be more alarming."

"If the right level of foundation knowledge and skills is not acquired by children during their primary school years, there is no real second chance to repair that damage."

: The Numeracy element of the 2013 Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy, published on 30th April 2014, is available online here. It surveyed 10.5 thousand

http://forargyll.com/2014/05/serious-issue-for-scottish-education-as-curriculum-for-excellence-fails-on-numeracy/

Police target under fives

Early intervention programmes are getting more ridiculous in Staffordshire;

"POLICE are targeting hundreds of children under the age of five – to stop them turning to a life of crime.

Staffordshire Police are teaming up with councils to attempt to transform the lives of the vulnerable children before they start school.

The crackdown will initially target more than 400 pre-school children who are known to the authorities."

http://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/Staffordshire-Police-target-children-bid-tackle/story-21064690-detail/story.html

Attachment theory

We are informed on the Scottish Government website that the "Early Years Collaborative is a coalition of Community Planning Partners - including social services, health, education, police and third sector professionals - committed to ensuring that every baby, child, mother, father and family in Scotland has access to the best supports available. It's the world's first national multi-agency quality improvement programme."

One of their objectives is to shift the balance of public services towards early intervention and prevention by 2016 and to sustain that change to 2018 and beyond. They claim to have a strong evidence base for the efficacy of early interventions which derive from research on attachment and child development. In order to break the cycles of deprivation and poverty they make the point that:

A renewed emphasis on the period between early pregnancy and 3 years old is needed to reflect the evidence that this is the period with the greatest bearing on outcomes and a critical period in terms of breaking cycles of poor outcomes.

They are in agreement with the campaigning group, Scottish Attachment in Action (SAIA):

Scottish Attachment in Action (SAIA) is an interest and campaigning group committed to promoting better experiences of attachment in the Scottish population and effecting positive changes in social policy, education and mental health. We believe that improving the existing understanding of and attitudes towards attachment is essential for altering Scotland`s current record on poor health and socially destructive behaviours.

http://www.saia.org.uk/

This is a very demeaning view of Scottish parents who are held responsible for failing to form attachments to their children and so causing the country`s social and economic problems.

As well as being over simplistic, this view allows the government to shift the blame for current social and economic problems on to parents, rather than to recognise that poverty is not just a matter of individual decisions, but arises from macro-economic forces beyond the control of individuals which only governments can address.

 It also reveals a skewed and out-of-date understanding of child development.

`Moving on from Bowlby` has blogged extensively about attachment and child development theories. Although the extracts do not refer to the Scottish government website specifically, they address the thinking behind the Scottish government`s policy:

At first, I found it difficult to put my finger on exactly what it was about these texts that made me uneasy. After all, they recognize that child development involves the complex interaction of many factors, they’re comprehensive in scope, and children’s welfare is at the heart of their agenda. [She goes on..]

• The model is policy-based rather than evidence-based, despite claims to the contrary. If it was evidence-based it would be framed in terms of child-development as a whole. This would include an evaluation of the physical factors involved in individual development, the root causes of children’s needs and the socio-political context that determines which children are in need and what their needs might be.

• The model is based on biological knowledge that pre-dates WWII. ... Old knowledge isn’t necessarily wrong, but research has moved on since then. The model of child development proposed by the texts doesn’t seem to recognize this.

I can understand why practitioners working in child protection focus on the emotional and social aspects of a child’s development and why attachment theory has intuitive appeal. But attachment theory and social and emotional development aren’t synonymous with child development per se.

My understanding of the term child development is that it refers to every change that a human being undergoes between conception and adulthood; genetic, anatomical, physiological, emotional, cognitive and social. It would be unreasonable to expect everyone working with children and families to be experts on every aspect of development, but since all aspects are interrelated, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect them to have an accurate overview of all aspects.

http://movingonfrombowlby.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/what-social-workers-really-need-to-know-about-child-development/
　

Father arrested at school board meeting

A father was arrested at a school board meeting in Gilford, New Hampshire, for exceeding the two minute rule whilst he was objecting to the pornographic material provided to his 14 year old daughter in her literature class.

The school assigned readings for kids as part of their coursework. That's normal.

 
One difference though...
 
One of the books they assigned to the class of 14 years olds had a passage that was full blown porn. .)
 
The school did not notify the parents in advance and when they finally got around to telling them, they made vague references to "adult situations."

http://www.brasschecktv.com/videos/schools-are-prisons-1/father-arrested-for-objecting-to-14-year-old-daughter-being-assigned-to-read-porn-by-school.html

Child stealing by the state

"This is truly horrific news. In Britain today a secret court system is stealing and trafficking people’s children. It’s summed up as the ‘Gulag of the Family Courts’ in Jack Frost’s book, and as ‘Child Stealing By The State’ by other journalists. This uncovers a brutal conspiracy between Social Services, the police, the courts, government and public authorities, to unlawfully take children from their parents and pass them into a frightening and often abusive Social Services system. That conspiracy still exists; so does the evidence."

"When a small community newspaper, the UK Column, was set up in Plymouth with the mission of exposing massive public sector fraud and corruption, its volunteers were shocked at reports of child stealing sent in by parents across Britain. It was hard to believe at first, some of the stories, but the evidence became overwhelming. Files of letters, court documentation, emails. There were lies, perjury, falsified medical evidence, false psychiatric assessments, kidnapping, psychological pressure, police threats, blatant collusion of defence and legal teams of prosecution against the parents, failure to prosecute the perpetrators of child abuse and medical incompetence, and victimisation of innocent mothers. The courts had taken no notice of the child’s wishes. This horrible tarantula web of a system is secretive and powerful; local councillors cannot challenge their own Social Services departments about their actions."

"Social Services are UNACCOUNTABLE to anybody and hide behind secret family courts and confidentiality. They use the courts to gag parents and suppress exposure. Governments offer local authorities more money for more children they can get into care; they set targets. 25,000 children a year are being taken in this way..."

http://beforeitsnews.com/eu/2014/05/child-stealing-by-the-state-on-the-increase-2558974.html