This post is an open letter to Sarah Teather, LibDem MP, Minister of State for Children and Families

Dear Minister

A few years ago when you were in Opposition you wrote to me saying that the shortcomings of Inclusion in relation to Special Educational Needs should be addressed by an increase in funding.

If this was right – but I don’t think that it was – then you have a real problem this Autumn when you issue a Green Paper with your proposals for SEN.

There is, of course, nothing like real power and responsibility as Minister of State for Children and Families to bring home the truth of a situation. The evidence is now piling up that Inclusion was a disaster in the making.

I set out the uncomfortable facts in other posts in this Blog.Its shortcomings had nothing whatsoever to do with money. The Labour Government threw money at it like confetti, trying to make it work; it recruited a paper-led army to run it. It was a flagship policy, all complete with target practice under the supervision of OFSTED. But you heard less and less of the word “Inclusion” as time went by, and the flagship was taken out of the line altogether during the last general election.

Putting it quite simply, it was a cock-up by everyone.

The Treasury, advised by accountants Coopers & Lybrand, thought that there were savings to be made by including children with special needs in mainstream schools instead of special schools. It never occurred to them that mainstream schools would have to employ about 100,000 classroom assistants at about £15k a time to help them cope with the influx after the closure of 100 special schools.Job creation certainly. Cost to the taxpayer a matter of no consequence. On my calculator £1.5e+9. Work out the annual wage bill for yourself.

Act One Scene 3

JAMES HARRINGTON (Mandarin) Money is where money needs to be is my motto.

That, of course, was in 2002.

Also in 2002 and in the years before that, disability organisations projected their own personal needs and thought that an open door to a mainstream school was more important than a helping hand in a good special school. They never anticipated the scale of the bullying in mainstream schools. They never realised that education and care would, in many cases, be less good, and that many children would end up being excluded in an inclusive environment.

Act 2 Scene 5

TRACY I’ve tried to understand it. Why do some people like to destroy things that are beautiful? They do. They really do. Some are just out and out vandals. What they can’t have, they don’t want anyone else to have. But others? Maybe it’s because they think that what’s right for them is right for everyone else, when it just isn’t, and then they go on to think that everything else is wrong. If that is the reason, they make a big mistake. When you think about it, isn’t it a bit arrogant? A bit blinkered? Aren’t they – how do say – sometimes just too clever by half? Certainly too clever for our good. It isn’t as though they’ve always got it right for the kids that want to go to mainstream schools and there are some.

Somebody should tell them.

Academia had worked it all out in the libraries of their minds, not in the classrooms of the real world.

There is never a shortage of people living in “wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if” land, and especially in the world of education.

Death of a Nightingale, and this website and Blog invite you to acknowledge this.

Acknowledge it to the world. Acknowledge it to yourself. Baroness Warnock, one of its leading protagonists, did so a few years ago. She said “Possibly the most disastrous legacy of the 1978 report, was the concept of inclusion.”(Visit Post 13). If you don’t grasp the nettle this Autumn, I will give you just one guess who the Labour Party will blame in two years’ time for the failings of their policy. Such is politics.

That is not to say that more children with special needs should not be admitted to mainstream schools; that provision should not be made for them there. There will always be winners in the lottery of life; but there are losers too unless you are careful,

What I find necessary to keep saying is that there should always be a choice between mainstream and special schools. As I said in my last post, “Yes” a right to a mainstream education with some sensible caveats. But “Yes” also a right to opt out of mainstream schools to a special school, again with sensible caveats. Neither of these rights can guarantee education appropriate to individual need, but at least they can try to. Don’t be satisfied if it is merely adequate. The Law is not satisfied. You should not be either.

So, when you prepare your Green Paper this autumn I suggest that you start with two blank pieces of paper.

Act 2 Scene 3

EILEEN WINTERTON … You can’t turn the clock back. You just can’t. We don’t need an old clock. We need a brand new compass.

On one of them write what you want to achieve, and on the other how you propose to achieve it.

What you should want to achieve is very simple – meeting the extremely diverse needs of children with special educational needs.

That should be paramount. I know there are those who think it is a bourgeois fad to assert individual need, but maybe they don’t have children with special needs themselves or have not taught them.

As you develop your mission statement avoid all words to do with “social engineering”, words like “Inclusion”, “outcomes” and, yes, “equality of opportunity” too.

Act 2 Scene 3

JOAN ERRINGTON (English teacher) …. What these kids want is not equality of opportunity. It’s just, well, opportunity. (And the same goes for very many other children who do not have special educational needs.)

I quote the authentic words of a pupil to the local Director of Education when I was a governor of a special school. I incorporated them in a letter Philippa wrote to the Prime Minister:

Act 2 Scene 2

Children like me don’t want to be social experiments. We have got one chance and the staff here know just how to make it a real one.

Adopt instead “value-added” words like “excellence”, “opportunity”, “fair play”. These words will measure the success of your policy.

On the other piece of paper write the words “professionalism and commitment by those who care”.

As you develop these words recognise that local education authorities are not best placed to handle special education on a day-to-day basis. Their boundaries are too small. Their responsibilities are too diffuse, and the financial and political constraints under which they work get in the way. Too often they can’t afford to care.

I know that there are many in Local Government who mean well but they, like everyone else, end up as casualties of a bureaucratic system that constantly short-changes children.

It is important that you grasp WHY?

Let me illustrate what I am saying. Little Johnny is blind. There is a school for the blind outside his local authority area. The local authority will not want the cost of sending him there, and little Johnny’s parents will have a battle on their hands, But there actually isn’t a school for the blind in a neighbouring authority because the catchment area of a single local authority is not big enough to support one. It is a CATCH 22 situation.

I urge you not to under-value professionalism and ignore commitment. When dealing with children with special needs you need both. Mainstream schools often dilute them. That is the price you pay when you rely on classroom assistants – “amiable mums” as they are called – to do the work of professional teachers and therapists.

What do I mean by “professionalism”? A potent mix of talent, self discipline, training, practice over many years, an exquisite care for detail, sorry no nine to five stuff, and preferably no skullduggery. The only way we can properly claim that the British are “the best” at anything in the world is if we start to reassert this.

And what do I mean by “commitment”? Simply service above self.
You really need both of them in all walks of life.

I know that Michael Gove is opening the door to parents to create their own schools. Parents of children with special needs have their work cut out just looking after and bringing up their children without opening schools for them.

If you can establish a strategic partnership with Disability Organisations, and structure a way to harness their knowhow and their concern with a new range of community schools with pooled resources for children with special needs, you can make this a part of your Big Society.

In short, dump “Inclusion” as a watchword and substitute the words “Excellence and Opportunity.” These are the words that should flower in your garden. In my experience they have less to do with money and more to do with attitude of mind.

You might get somewhere if the Coalition asserted these words elsewhere as well, and you didn’t just talk interminably of “austerity” and ” financial cuts”.

Yours sincerely

Alan Share

PS It would be remiss of me if I did not use this letter to offer you two complimentary tickets for a performance of “Death of a Nightingale” when it is staged at the New End Theatre Hampstead from 2nd to 27th March next year.

In the meantime, it is unlikely that you will have time to read the contents of this website and all 58 posts on this Blog. But if you read its first page from the bottom up and numbers 1-8, 11-13, 29, 43, 49, 53 and 57 of my Blog it will evidence what I have written above.

cc David Cameron MP
Nick Clegg MP

I do not normally read law reports in the Times. But on the 15 July this year the headline “Delay did not deny right to education” caught my eye. But in this instance the delay did! The Times got it wrong.

The case: A v Essex County Council

When I read it, I saw that it was about the rights of an autistic child and they were being argued out in the Supreme Court. It must have been a close run thing because the decision voiced by Lord Phillips was a majority decision, three to two. The decision was against the child.

I felt for the child and for the local authority too, the educational needs of the one, the difficulty meeting those needs of the other. It was a very sad situation. I felt for the Court as well.

The child, named A, was autistic with a severe learning disability. He also had a severe communication disorder and challenging behaviour. He suffered from epilepsy; frequently having 10 to 15 short epileptic fits a day, despite medication. He was doubly incontinent, had no concept of danger and required constant supervision.

At the age of 12 he was excluded from his school because it couldn’t cope. It took eighteen months to assess his needs and find residential accommodation for him. The case was all about those eighteen months. Had he been deprived of the education he was entitled to during that time?

As I read the heading to the Times law report, I realised that the case was wrongly described. Shame on the Times! It should not have read “Delay did not deny right to education.” It should have read, “Delay denied the right to special school”. The “right” to education was only to a mainstream school. It was not disputed that child A could not exercise it, having been excluded from it.

What about the right to opt out?

These were the words that Lord Phillips used:

“The authorities … did not support the proposition that article 2 imposed … a positive obligation to provide education that catered for the special needs of the small, if significant portion of the population which was unable to profit from mainstream education…. The right of access to education conferred on A had to have regard to the limited resources actually available to deal with his special needs.”

WOW, as they say. Brothers, sisters, comrades and all you lawyers and academics trumpeting “rights” provided by Parliament or, better still, in the European Convention of Human Rights, it is high time you realised that sometimes rights are worth no more than the pot of gold buried at the end of a rainbow, and just when you most need them.

Let me underline what precisely this means in the context of special educational needs.

Over 100 special schools were closed from 1997 onwards. “For a small if significant portion of the population” this curtailed those resources So, for some children it actually destroyed the “right to education” enshrined in article 2 of Protocol 1 of the European Convention of Human Rights. In the future, parents wanting their children educated in a special school will find this case argued as a precedent against them.

I do not criticise the Judges for seeing the world as it is, not just as they would like it to be. They are not the problem. I do criticise the politicians, lawyers and academics – those who fashion and lead opinion – the social engineers among them.

They never seem to take into account how the world actually is when they try to make it how they would like it to be,totally ignoring human frailty for a start. I especially criticise those of them who “delete without reading” anything that conflicts with their mind set opinions. They are the real Termites. You will know what I mean by that if you have read these posts.

All of this explains is why, as chair of governors of a special school, I helped parents in their successful campaign to keep it open; why I have written Death of a Nightingale and continue to write this Blog.

Act 2 Scene 6

The scene is outside the School. A bulldozer is slowly demolishing the building. Staff, parents and children watch. Joan Errington is the English teacher, Emma Kirk the music teacher.

JOAN ERRINGTON Oh God, politicians. Save us from politicians. Scurvy politicians, that’s how William Shakespeare described them.

EMMA KIRK Jesus Christ said, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”.

Visit Post 43 of this Blog “Rights – Buttercups and daisies, buttercups and daisies …

…. And we are those little white dandelion heads that blow away in the wind.” It is with these words that Tracey, a pupil with cystic fibrosis, introduces the audience to the stage version of “Death of a Nightingale.”

And read on.

Just what is the value of a right to mainstream education for children with special needs if they are then left in the hands of classroom assistants (“amiable mums” as they are affectionately called) instead of trained teachers with time to give them, and if they are bullied? And, I repeat, what about the right to opt out?

Some people do not want to know, do not really care.They should stew in their own juice.

I have seen a boy controlling his computer with a wand attached to his forehead. I have seen children rescued from bullying in mainstream schools. I have listened to their parents. For them it was not just a “learning experience”! You do not forget these things.

Today all the talk is about “The Big Society” and, in education, Academies. In the autumn Sarah Teather MP, Lib Dem Minister of State for Children and Families, is producing a Green Paper on Special Educational Needs. I hope that it is not edged in black.

When so many special schools have been closed, when resources are tight, when all the talk is about voluntary effort and the tiny question that has to be asked, apart from any other, is where it is going to get its core funding from, just how do we make sure that children with special needs receive the skilled professional support that they need?

What about this right?

Clause 1 (3), 2001 SEN Act: ‘If a statement is maintained under section 324 for the child, he must be educated in a mainstream school unless that is incompatible with – (a) the wishes of his parent, or (b) the provision of efficient education for other children.’ (my underlining)

Catchpole v Buckingham County Council and another, The Times Law Reports on 18 March 1999, Lord Justice Thorpe said “the local education authority had a duty to ensure that a child with special education needs was placed at a school that was appropriate. It was not enough for the school to be merely adequate.”

I hope that the staging of Death of a Nightingale at the New End Theatre in Hampstead next March will make a contribution to answering that question.

Hansard 7 July 2010:

Q7. [6252] Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con): Will my right hon. Friend give an assurance that all new academies that will be set up will be obliged to accept children with special educational needs?

The Prime Minister: I can absolutely give my hon. Friend that assurance. Academies will be required to ensure that pupils with special educational needs are admitted on the same basis as other schools. Children with special educational needs have special needs, and a compassionate, decent and tolerant country will ensure that they get the help, support, education and love that they need. (my underlining)

Do these words reassure you? Do they ring true in the real world outside Parliament? Do they ring true in the classrooms of real world outside cloistered academia?

You may possibly be reassured by them if you go along with one academic, whose blushes I spare by not naming him. Joan Errington, the English teacher, quotes an actual article he wrote arguing the case for Inclusion.

JOAN ERRINGTON I read an article recently by one of our clever, clever guys – far too many of them in education, and too clever by half for our own good, if you ask me. He said – children with special needs come in tens, scores, even hundreds, not one by one. He said you’ve got to give up the individualised approach, give up the individualised approach. Would you believe it?

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Yes, I am afraid that some academics just don’t understand, and of course they go on to teach their students the error of their ways. Their students then have to repeat those errors to pass their exams. Ugh.

JOAN ERRINGTON I wrote a letter to the paper saying that he should teach kids in special schools like ours not teach about them.

As chair of governors of a special school for over 10 years I saw the staff’s commitment to the school’s mission statement, “Whole School – Whole Child”. I saw that you couldn’t just feed all children with special needs into one vast educational Mix Master.

The Prologue

“Care, and take care” is the underlying message within the play. I am not sure that everyone does. Far too many people don’t. It would be much better if everyone talked about children with very different special educational needs, because that is the way it is. The needs are not all the same. And children are not all the same either.

When you reach the end of the play, reflect for a moment on just how many different kinds of need there are – physical disabilities and psychological ones and, separate from that, but often in addition to that, learning difficulties as well, some designated profound.

So the other thing to reflect upon when you reach the end of the play is that, in fairness to everyone, it is just as important for the system to be sensitive to the individual needs of children as it is to plan for a more equal, more harmonious society. With proper accounting it should cost no more.

***

Today classrooms are populated by far too many bully boys and girls. Teachers may have too little time and sometimes too little training as well. Supply teachers are here today and gone tomorrow. Teaching assistants don’t always know how to stretch children in the way that trained teachers do and, in many cases, do not improve attainment. Ironically they can create a sense of exclusion in an inclusive environment, stigmatising pupils in the process. Teachers are not always trained to relate to them. Thousands more teaching assistants have come on stream since 1997, quite a number of them supporting children with special needs7. Did anyone anticipate this – and calculate the cost? In addition, there are too few therapists and money is still short. But then the policy of Inclusion was never properly costed by anyone in the first place. Thus, cost benefit analysis is a totally alien concept.

Author’s Note

Brighouse School caters for children who have physical disabilities and learning difficulties associated with them. There are very many of these disabilities. They include cerebral palsy, spina bifida with hydrocephalus, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, rheumatoid arthritis, heart conditions, osteoagenesis imperfecta, Crohn’s disease, epilepsy and neurological disorders. There are also victims of road traffic and other accidents. This is the world of burns and fractures. There are sub-divisions of each disability.

But there are also many other quite different needs and other special schools cater for them, some with a national name and a national reputation. There are children with profound and multiple learning difficulties PMLD, emotional and behavioural difficulties EBD, with hearing problems, speech or sight impairment, sometimes total. There is also dyslexia, dyspraxia and autism. In other words, think of a fruit shop. There are apples, pears, peaches, grapes, bananas and so on. With apples alone, there are coxes, bramleys, and golden delicious et cetera. It’s the same thing with SEN. There are about 400,000 children with learning difficulties of one sort or another.

These children need highly trained, dedicated teachers, carers and therapists, including a school nurse, physio’s, speech and language therapists, art and music therapists and psychologists all of them with the time, the patience and the expertise to give them the one chance that they have to find their place in the world. And now, facilitating Inclusion, there is an army of teaching assistants as well.

I need hardly remind you that times have changed. In 2002 when the play takes place the Mandarin, James Harrington, says “My motto is that money is where it needs to be.” Today, Mandarins are more inclined to say that money isn’t where it needs to be.

Now read again the answer that the Prime Minister gave. I repeat the question. “Do these words reassure you?”

Let me remind you what the Law states that Society must provide:

Clause 1 (3), 2001 SEN Act: ‘If a statement is maintained under section 324 for the child, he must be educated in a mainstream school unless that is incompatible with – (a) the wishes of his parent, or (b) the provision of efficient education for other children.’

Catchpole v Buckingham County Council and another, The Times Law Reports on 18 March 1999, Lord Justice Thorpe said “the local education authority had a duty to ensure that a child with special education needs was placed at a school that was appropriate. It was not enough for the school to be merely adequate.”

Phelps v Hillingdon Borough Council, Anderton v Clwyd County Council, Gower v Bromley London Borough Council and Jarvis v Hampshire Country Council. Times Law Reports, July 28,2000. The House of Lords ruled that LEA’s duty of care required them to ” have to take reasonable care of their health and safety including the monitoring of their needs and performance.”

By the way, you don’t need to ask this question of the Prime Minister, but you may ask yourself, why those Local Authorities spent good money inviting Judges to say that they should not have these responsibilities.

But here are some questions someone might care to put to the Prime Minister.

1. Yes, Academies will admit children with special needs, but will they provide education that is appropriate to the needs of children with special needs? Will they have ring-fenced funding? Will trained professionals be around with time to give them? And will this be done without prejudicing the rights of children without special needs to receive education that is appropriate to them?

2. Will other mainstream schools in a period of austerity be able to meet those needs?

3. And the question those wedded to the dogma of Inclusion never think about asking, do they? If parents find that the needs of their children are not being met in mainstream schools and want to assert their statutory right to opt out of them, will there be special schools around that can provide that “appropriate” provision that they can opt into?

Read Death of a Nightingale or, better still, plan to come to the New End Theatre in Hampstead in March. You may find that you agree with Eileen Winterton, the chair of governors when she says:” You can’t turn the clock back. You just can’t. We don’t need an old clock. We need a brand new compass.”

Read the rest of this entry »

A good friend of mine sent me a riddle:

You are driving in a car at a constant speed. On your left side is a ‘drop off’ (The ground is 18-20 inches below the level you are traveling on), and on your right side is a fire engine traveling at the same speed as you. In front of you is a galloping horse which is the same size as your car and you cannot overtake it. Behind you is another galloping horse. Both horses are also traveling at the same speed as you. What must you do to safely get out of this highly dangerous situation?

This was my reply: Wake up from your nightmare as soon as possible.

Her reply to that: Real answer: get off the merry-go-round at once!

I then asked: BUT WHY WAS I ON IT IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Her reply: Ah! Only you know that.

And my answer to that: That’s life. But I prefer to call it a roller-coaster: EILEEN Look, there’s a lot wrong with this world of ours. There always has been. There always will be. But there’s an awful lot right as well, isn’t there? You’ve just got to ride that roller-coaster between the two. And try not to fall off.

Now a little story.

Miriam Margolyes, that well known actress and a family friend of many years standing, came to the rehearsed reading of Death of a Nightingale. I invited criticisms of the play and she was forthcoming. I was not greatly pleased when she criticised the characterisation of those involved. But it did have the benefit that it provoked me to think a bit more about the roller-coaster that Margaret Williamson, the head teacher, had been on before she fell off, when she tried to take her own life.

Was it just, as I had thought, the awful realisation that she had let the school down, let her pupils down, let the parents down, yes, let herself down when she succumbed to pressure from the local education authority to argue to parents the case for the closure of her school to further the policy of Inclusion. Was it just that she felt no more than “a lump of plasticine” in their hands? Was that the reason?

Maybe there was more to it than that? Margaret Williamson had shared her personal agony with her partner, Joan Errington. She suddenly thought about resigning as a way out. Joan said that that would be self-indulgent. There was a tiff and they parted company. I had not thought about the 24 hours between that tiff and Margaret trying to take her life. Those 24 long hours! I added this short dialogue.

Act Two Scene 3

Eileen Winterton, chair of governors, badly wanted to understand why Margaret Williamson, the head teacher, had tried to take her own life. She thought Joan Errington would be the best person to tell her. She invited Joan to a local coffee house for a chat.

JOAN ERRINGTON I guess so. I must go. (Stands up to leave) …….You know, I’ve just really seen it. It wasn’t the pills that kept her going. It wasn’t me either. It was the kids, and she did so worry about the world they’d have to grow up in. She knew, you see, she knew. In those twenty four long hours she suddenly realised that whatever she did, do the bidding of the LEA or resign, whatever she did, she’d lost everything that made her life worthwhile.
(Eileen also stands up to leave)

EILEEN WINTERTON Of course, you’re right. That was her despair. Thank you for your time. I do appreciate it.

JOAN ERRINGTON Oh, I don’t like my world at the moment one little bit.

EILEEN WINTERTON Look, there’s a lot wrong with this world of ours. There always has been. There always will be. But there’s an awful lot right as well, isn’t there? You’ve just got to ride that roller-coaster between the two. And try not to fall off.

JOAN ERRINGTON I suppose so. See you again soon. Bye.

If you read “Death of a Nightingale”, or better still come to see it at the New End Theatre in Hampstead next March it may provoke you to think again about some assumptions you have made, not least whether life is just a merry-go-round or a roller-coaster. There is a difference.

And you may also ask yourself why 176 children between the ages of 10 and 14 committed suicide last year, and maybe 1,000 or more attempted to do so. By the way, the number of suicides mentioned in the BBC report may be less than the actual number as coroners prefer not to bring in a finding of suicide to save the feelings of the family and society generally. That is one reason why the true facts are hard to come by.

Just what was the nature of their despair? In very many cases, as the BBC report states, it was bullying. (Visit Post 11 “Bullying defeated” Where did Mr.Aaronovitch get that idea?)

Again benefitting from the rehearsed reading of the play at the New End Theatre last November this is the new ending to the play that was not present in the original version.

Closing Scene

Bulldozer continues its demolition, and sounds continue for a full minute. Time for quiet contemplation. Tracy is a pupil at Brighouse School, and “Death of a Nightingale” is her story about her school.

TRACY Remember the little white dandelion heads blowing away in the wind. Well, a couple of weeks ago, in the next street to mine, a boy of twelve – I think he was a bit overweight – well, he tried to take his own life. Thank you for coming to listen to my story.

Can I leave you with a really naughty thought to take home with you? There are some little creatures that build and defend their own nests but they cannot move on and they cannot do anything else. That’s what they do. They build and defend their own nests. That’s all they do That’s all they’ve ever done. That’s all they’ll ever do. There is a name for them. “Termites”, yes “Termites.”

If there are any of them here tonight, let them go to their beds and sleep peacefully … if they can. Good night.

Read the rest of this entry »

Visit Post No.41 – Wasn’t it all just a noble dream?

That is my great worry and, I suspect, that deep down it is for most people.

If you think that Death of a Nightingale is only about special educational needs you may be surprised that I am asking that question here.

But Death of a Nightingale has a subplot. It features a music lesson that highlights the importance of music to children with special needs and it explores the way in which music can contribute to interfaith dialogue.

The Prologue to the play also contributes to that dialogue. It is because of what it says about interfaith dialogue that gives it its relevance to Gaza.

In a conflict that doesn’t just go back to the arrival of Hamas on the scene in Gaza, doesn’t just go back to the creation of Israel by the UN in 1948 but resonates with wars of religion over three Millennia right back to Biblical days, a conflict that has at its core an argument about land rights in a land that everyone describes as Holy, maybe an interfaith dialogue is where a resolution to the problem has to start alongside any political dialogue.

This is much more constructive than self righteous well wishers sitting comfortably in their very detached houses pronouncing on how Israel can get its security or Palestinians can secure a state of their own, wringing their hands in despair at every use of force. They disapprove of rockets fired out of Gaza; they deplore Israel’s use of force as disproportionate; they call for an end to the blockade, and they get all worked up when a few people die. They forget that civilians always die in wars until they find a way of stopping them altogether, and an effective humanitarian blockade is probably the least worst way of fighting someone who wants to destroy you.

They forget how Britain dealt with V1 Doodlebugs and V2 rockets bringing death and destruction to homes in London and South East England at the end of World War II. Winston Churchill sent 1,000 bomber raids over German cities. They forget Dresden. Churchill would, I suspect, have given short shrift to anyone calling for an independent international enquiry at the time.

The truth of the matter is this. With the Holocaust still vivid in its collective memory, recollecting sins of omission and not just sins of commission by Nazi Germany, Israel will trust no-one but itself to defend itself against any new little Hitlers whose declared objective is to destroy it, and it will do whatever it deems necessary to do so. Think otherwise at your peril.

But the Palestinians also have needs to be met, and the conflict will continue until people tire of war, tire too of being used as pawns in other people’s power games and find a way to resolve it … or until they blow themselves up; until they beat swords into ploughshares or use them against each other until they run out of swords.

Only when you “pool” sovereignty – state or nation – do you really end war. Over 600,000 died in the American Civil War in the 19th Century learning this lesson, and many civilians with them. Millions have died in Europe learning the same lesson, soldiers and civilians.

I was myself reminded of the cost of that lesson to Europe only a few weeks ago. I made my first visit to the Normandy beaches in France, the location of the D Day landings in 1944. I visited the killing ground that was Omaha beach. I went to Arromanches. I stood in a 360 degree cinema there. As the camera lens ranged over the war cemetery – tragically just one of many in Europe – thousands and thousands of graves – all of them marking in perpetuity young premature deaths, I suddenly found myself weeping uncontrollably. I couldn’t even speak. I couldn’t believe myself. It brought it home to me that they had all sacrificed their lives so that I and other could live. War is a nasty business whichever side you’re on.

The residents of the Holy Land have to learn something even more difficult. They have to learn to “pool” faith, to share their belief in one God, while still keeping their own individual way of expressing it.

Don’t say pooling faith can’t happen. They said that about national sovereignty In Europe. It can happen. It actually started with Spinoza! It is happening now. The Alexandria Declaration. The Jerusalem Foundation. HaEmek Medical Center serving Jews and Arabs. its guiding philosophy ‘Coexistence Through Medicine’, Daniel Barenboim’s East West Divan Orchestra. The Dignity of Difference by the Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks. Some people – Israelis and Arabs – are building bridges as well as fences.

I make the Prologue to Death of a Nightingale my personal contribution.

The Prologue

A number of years ago I heard the following proposition which I endorse here. If there is one God, it shouldn’t be outrageous to suggest that for the billions of people on this planet there are many paths to him or to her, just different routes up the same mountain, and that each one is equally valid and each one blessed. The Matterhorn above Zermatt in Switzerland looks quite unlike Monte Cervino in Italy, but it is the same mountain.

The strength of individual belief underpins the validity of one – it does not undermine the validity of another. It also underpins its integrity. No single way is exclusive, although Judaism, Christianity and Islam all find words to suggest that theirs is. If they have that belief, isn’t it time for them to shed it? A compassionate God – or Allah the All-Merciful – in
his wisdom must be allowed some continuing discretion as to whom he admits into his divine presence – now mustn’t he?

I cannot believe that God has favourites among his children. There has been and still is too much suffering caused by those who have believed this. We are dealing here with the Infinite. There is no edge to the universe. The concept of God should reflect that. I am happy to echo here sentiments that others, much more learned than me, have expressed,most recently Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks (now Lord Sacks) in his book, The Dignity of Difference.

God is not One but, if n stands for infinity, One to the power of n. That is a thought to unite all those who believe in a supreme deity. In the name of humanity they should rejoice in sharing it. The Alexandria Declaration of the three Faiths was a real start. It needs to continue.

Monotheism stems from tribes in the desert that couldn’t live in harmony then any more than they would appear to be able to do so today. The Holy Land is an unholy mess. Jerusalem is not a city of peace. But those tribes produced Holy texts, the Torah, the Bible and the Koran. Beautiful documents. There is an exhibition of them in the British Library as I write. Incredible wisdom in their day, but they contain militant passages right for their day, but out of synch in our global world. They were written when the sun went round the earth, not the other way round, and when bullocks and goats were sacrificed upon an altar. They predate Copernicus, never mind the Hubble telescope and all the scientific discoveries of our times. Furthermore there are some things we are not given to know for sure or at all, and so many things scientists do not know even now.

So give Holy texts the respect they deserve, but not now an unquestioning literal obedience if that denies to God’s presence compassion, and if it denies to people of other faiths or no faith at all their common humanity. We will need all the help Holy texts can give us if we are to contain HIV Aids and confront the effects of climate change on our psyche, never mind on our landscape and on our financial resources.

So I say where I stand. We should see ourselves as partners on Planet Earth, not rivals, as bringing forth the blessing of tranquillity, not the curse of violence, and the gift of sacred beauty, not the ugly face of conflict. How can you educate a multi-ethnic society in any other way?

People should not just come together in prayer only when they mourn their dead in war

This is where you can begin.

22 The Alexandria Declaration January 2002

Delegates:

o Bishop of Jerusalem, The Rt. Rev. Riah Abu El Assal
o His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey
o His Eminence Sheikh Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, Cairo, Egypt
o Sephardi Chief Rabbi Bakshi-Doron
o Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel, Rabbi Michael Melchior
o Rabbi of Tekoa, Rabbi Menachem Froman
o International Director of Interreligious Affairs, American Jewish
Committee, Rabbi David Rosen
o Rabbi of Savyon, Rabbi David Brodman
o Rabbi of Maalot Dafna, Rabbi Yitzak Ralbag
o Chief Justice of the Sharia Courts, Sheikh Taisir Tamimi
o Minister of State for the PA, Sheikh Tal El Sider
o Mufti of the Armed Forces, Sheikh Abdelsalam Abu Schkedem
o Mufti of Bethlehm, Sheikh Mohammed Taweel
o Representative of the Greek Patriarch, Archibishop Aristichos
o Latin Patriarch, His Beatitude Michel Sabbah
o Melkite Archbishop, Archbishop Boutrous Mu’alem
o Representative of the Armenian Patriarch, Archbishop Chinchinian

In the name of God who is Almighty, Merciful and Compassionate, we, who have gathered as religious leaders from the Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities, pray for true peace in Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and declare our commitment to ending the violence and bloodshed that denies the right of life and dignity.

According to our faith traditions, killing innocent in the name of God is a desecration of His Holy Name, and defames religion in the world. The violence in the Holy Land is an evil which must be opposed by all people of good faith. We seek to live together as neighbours respecting the integrity of each other’s historical and religious inheritance. We call upon all to oppose incitement, hatred and misrepresentation of the other.

The Dignity of Difference by Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks

Page 55 (2nd edition) “The radical transcendence of God in the Hebrew Bible means that the Infinite lies beyond our finite understanding. God communicates in human language, but there are dimensions of the divine that must forever elude us.

As Jews we believe that God has made a covenant with a singular people, but that does not exclude the possibility of other peoples, cultures and faiths finding their own relationship with God within the shared frame of the Noahide laws.

These laws constitute, as it were, the depth grammar of the human experience of the divine: of what it is to see the world as God’s work and humanity as God’s image.

God is God of all humanity, but between Babel and the end of days no single faith is the faith of all humanity. Such a narrative would lead us to respect the search for God in people of other faiths and reconcile the particularity of cultures with the universality of the human condition.”

If you really want to help to secure a long lasting settlement in the Middle East you should start echoing these voices, not leave them soundlessly echoing in a wilderness of silence.

Just think about it. If those who are guided by their faith started to acknowledge that in a global world their God can no longer be a tribal God, no longer God belonging exclusively to them, the whole nature and dynamic of that political dialogue changes and must be all the better for it. Failing that, Armageddon? Needs must.

Let those who believe in God give God a chance to heal.

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Some things sadden me. Some things appal me. All have driven me to write Death of a Nightingale and to continue writing Posts for this Blog.

Visit the comments on my last Post.

Crina wrote “But I believe the point I failed to make was that excellence will always be a minority, because most people are not interested in promoting it.” This saddens me. It should worry you.

David Gale wrote “The words of our local Director of Children’s Services still ring in my ears, “Gifted children are excluded from our Inclusion Strategy”. This appals me.

Visit Post 51. I quote Chris Woodhead in his weekly column in the Sunday Times “Earlier this year ministers decided to stop funding the gifted and talented programme in order to divert funds to the ‘disadvantaged.” This also appals me.

Do these thingsappal you? They should.

Recently a retired teacher said to me that one reason why girls were doing better than boys today was that boys ridiculed those in their class who were “swots”.

The following was a part of OFSTED’s glowing report on the special school that I was a governor of for many years. “a good school with many outstanding features… pupils in the school are highly motivated, eager to learn and responsive to the high expectations of their teachers…. the School’s ethos is very positive.” Note all those words about a special school! It didn’t stop the local authority wanting to close it. The parents successfully fought to keep it open.

But over a 100 special schools were closed, many of them I am sure just as excellent.

Some people actually begrudge excellence, are jealous of it. They label it as elitism when it is nothing of the sort.

This post is written for the benefit of all those who think that the pursuit of excellence is either a complete waste of time or positively wrong because it makes society less equal.

I invite them to open their eyes and their ears, and keep their mouths tightly shut until they have done so.

Look at Britain when it was really great. Visit the Railway museums in Manchester and York. See the magnificent steam engines. Hear about the Mahogany Men, the best of all the railway men who were on the footplate of the Mallard, in 1938 and still today at 126 mph, the fastest steam locomotive in the world, “Mahogany Men” because they could afford luxury mahogany furniture in their homes. Look at the mahogany furniture itself made by a once-upon-a-time great UK industry trading off names like Chippendale, Hepplewhite and Sheraton. Look at St. Pancras Station, the wonder of architect Sir George Gilbert Scott now being lovingly restored for Eurostar. Look at its brickwork and its ornamentation.

Those were the days when excellence was a byword for British craftsmanship and engineering, the thing that gave people their pride. Yes, a “Land of Hope and Glory.” A little pomp and a lot of circumstance. It resonates to this day in the “Last Night of the Proms.”

Don’t think that this all has to be past tense.

It is part of my world now, living in Newcastle.

The illuminated multi-coloured band of light across the Tyne that is the Gateshead Millennium Bridge at night. The nearby Sage Music Centre where its world famous architect Sir Norman Foster aspired to excellence in its acoustic properties, and is universally acclaimed as having achieved it. I am lucky enough to enjoy both on a regular basis, as are countless others from all walks of life.

I see it in the Care Home that I chair. It has been awarded the top 3 Star rating for the excellence of its care due to its caring and highly professional management ably supported by a willing and caring staff. Allof them rejoice in that excellence, as do the residents.

You look at your world.

Look outside the UK. Look at Singapore Airlines, Qatar Airlines – no, don’t look at British Airlines. Look at the way the Chinese opened their Olympic Games. Look at the newest linear accelerator from the receiving end of the latest form of cancer treatment and those who programme it. If you suffer from Prostate cancer, and if you have been diagnosed early enough, you appreciate this. I know.

As I have said, look at El Sistema, the orchestra from the back streets of Caracas and its now world famous conductor Gustavo Dudamel.( Visit Post 17 Channel 4 -The World’s Greatest Prodigies.) Listen to our young musicians in the recent BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition held in Cardiff. Look at the railway system in Switzerland, its timetable more religiously adhered to than the Bible itself.

Don’t tell me that you can’t see evidence of excellence around you, not least the whole wonderful world of IT that we wouldn’t even have dreamed of twenty or thirty years ago.

Shock Treatment!

Come on, you moaning Minnies, you negative noodle heads, you cynical cesspits. Wake yourselves up. Get real, as they say in work-a-day English. Understand that while you certainly have to be mindful of the “have-nots” in your midst, remember that it is the “haves” that come up with the ideas, go out and compete in this fiercely competitive world, generate the jobs and pay the taxes.

Never mind the Coalition’s mantra “Freedom, Fairness and Responsibility” the good, solid and reliable words that they are. What is needed is a word that has the capacity to excite and, equally importantly, generate pride and self esteem. “Excellence” is just such a word.

What we need is a society that is not afraid to aspire to excellence, not one just cringing and whingeing in a corner, demanding more of their “rights”, believing that all you have to do to get them, is to go on strike.

What on earth is value of the right to a minimum wage, when you’ve just lost your job? What on earth is the value of the right to mainstream education if, when you get there, you have third rate teaching and you are bullied? What on earth is benefit of the right to a University education if you are saddled with debt at the end of it and a degree that doesn’t provide a job? (Visit Post 43 “Buttercups and daisies …”)

Today you can see more clearly than ever that “rights” are much more a hope to be worked for than an expectation waiting to drop into your hands. At the same time recognise that one person’s legitimate hope maynot always be compatible with the legitimate hopes of other people. That’s where fair play comes into it. Equality here is a non-starter.

Next question. What is the true worth of being an accountant, a lawyer or an academic when standards of professional excellence are often ignored and, yes, betrayed? I have seen it. We have all seen it.

The Labour Party wants to know why it lost the last election. It might dwell on these questions. The Coalition wants to dig the country out of the hole the Labour Government left the country in. They need to think about these questions too.

It is not just a question of power to the people. It has to be more than that if all they do with it is to handle it in a well meaning but amateurish way.

The country needs to rediscover the horizon that it once had, but has since lost sight of as it looked for the quick buck, the short cut, the easy life, the feather bed and, yes, the very greasy pole.

Remember society always has a choice. It can either allow the bad to drive out the good or it can ensure that the good drives out the bad. It is a matter of management, uninspiring or inspiring, and the peer group pressure that it generates … or tolerates. It is a good moment to realise this. Remember, too, the old saying: Fish rot from the head.

Read Death of a Nightingale and you will understand what I am saying:

Act Two Scene 3

Eileen Winterton, chair of governors, badly wanted to understand why Margaret Williamson, head teacher, had tried to take her own life. She thought Joan Errington English teacher and her partner would be the best person to tell her. She invited her to a local coffee house for a chat.

JOAN ERRINGTON It makes me so sick at times, especially now. When terrible things like this happen – you know I’m very, very close to Margaret – you really start to think. I’ll give you a strange thought. The word ‘Equality’ is a lot of the problem. It’s mucked up, fucked up education for years. We are not all equal.

EILEEN WINTERTON No, that’s heresy. Surely there’s got to be equality of opportunity?

JOAN ERRINGTON What does that actually mean? What does it mean? Don’t you see? All kids are different, very different, our kids especially, and they need different kinds of opportunity. Fair play is what they all want, not equality. The needs of gifted and talented youngsters are every bit as important as the needs of kids in our school, from the country’s point of view maybe even more important. Those that trumpet equality don’t begin to understand that. If kids are not given the opportunity that’s right for them – and they’re all different – they’ll never meet the challenge of the times.

EILEEN WINTERTON Then, of course, they’ll never be included in it.

JOAN ERRINGTON Yes and this country needs them to be.

EILEEN WINTERTON I’ve always thought that another word for Equality is mediocrity.

JOAN ERRINGTON And what’s even worse, for many people the quest for Equality is simply built on envy.

EILEEN WINTERTON Or guilt. Well, the opposite of envy is ambition. Envy somehow diminishes you. Ambition enlarges you.

JOAN ERRINGTON Interesting you should put it that way. Emma – she’s for ever quoting the Bible – she keeps saying there’s no sin in ownin’, but there is a sin in covetin’.

EILEEN WINTERTON It’s not surprising that, a lot of kids have lost their way.

JOAN ERRINGTON They’ve never been shown it, Eileen – you know, the way to live that’s right for them – that’s what education should be about. What these kids want is not equality of opportunity. It’s just, well, opportunity.

EILEEN WINTERTON It certainly is a rat race these days and a different kind of rat race from any before.

JOAN ERRINGTON But a rat race you can’t run away from. It has got its good side, if you know where to find it. I’m sure none of this sadness would have happened to Margaret if people realised like we do that all kids have very different needs.

Let me round off this post with the tale from Africa told by the music teacher Emma Kirk in Act One Scene 4 of Death of a Nightingale:

“Every morning a gazelle wakes up. It knows that it must run faster than the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows that it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start runnin’.”

Yes, all you moaning Minnies, you negative noodle heads, you cynical cesspits, only when you have seen the urgent need to assert the pursuit of Excellence, only then do I say it is safe for you to open your mouths.

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Last Sunday the BBC Programme “The Big Question” returned to the issue of Special Education and asked whether children were being discriminated against by being educated in special schools. But this is the wrong question. Apart from anything else opening a discussion on special educational needs with these words stigmatises special schools.

The right question to have asked is simply whether education meets the needs of children with special needs. Separately you might also ask whether it meets the needs of children fortunate enough not to have special needs.

When you realise that the needs of children are all very different, and certainly not just the same as the needs of your own child, or what you think the needs of children should be in an ideal world, you will begin to find the right answer. Not until.

Visit the Message Board for the feedback on the programme, and read how quite a number of parents and teachers responded to it. Follow this link http://cli.gs/uQQAHmand you will see what I mean.

You may then begin to understand what I am getting at when I wrote in the Prologue to Death of a Nightingale the following:

So, when you talk about the “right” to Inclusive Education you should recognise that some will want to assert it and may succeed and thrive. Some may assert it but be disappointed and wish they hadn’t. Some may want to assert it but be denied it. Finally, some may not want to assert it at all but be forced to accept it with no other realistic choice available, and some may want to assert a different right altogether – the right to go to a special school. Remember that children without special needs have their rights too. This actually summarises how things are.

Social reformers have not always grasped this. I fully appreciate that an international consensus set the wheels in motion, but I suspect that many have looked at this simplistically, seeing it as essentially society’s difficulty not an individual’s and, with the very best of intentions, projecting what they felt in their gut they would want for themselves for everyone else, a not uncommon mistake. Even disability organisations that have done so much to help the disabled may have fallen into the same trap.

That is why they may not always have seen the quite different and varying needs that some children and their parents actually have, and a not always pleasant reality they have to deal with every single day. Very simply, some do not want an open door. What they want is a helping hand and the comfort zone of their own company. For them change is a worry and a threat.

In the BBC Programme, as so often happens, parents projected their own needs and, yes their own frustrations, for everyone else, when they are different, projected what they thought the world should ideally be like without realising it never will be.

Never mind the parents and the teachers. What about the children? What do they make of it all?

Well, I can give you a clue. I admit to something akin to plagiarism in my play. For over 10 years I was chair of governors of a special school faced with the threat of closure. The parents fought a successful campaign to keep it open and that is a different story to the one I tell here. But in the play Tracy is not unlike one of the pupils I knew. The letter that she reads out in the play is based on a letter that her school friends wrote to the Director of Education supporting their parents’ campaign, urging the Local Authority to keep her school open.

ACT Two Scene 2

TRACY I’ve still got the letter that Philippa wrote to the Prime Minister. She shared it with us before she sent it. I offered to make it a special wheelchair delivery to 10 Downing Street, but she just posted it. Johnny said he’d make a news story out of it in the Gazette. It got a little write up there. As I said, I’ve still got a copy.

“Dear Mr. Prime Minister

I am writing to invite you to visit my school. I am writing to you personally because you should know what pupils like me think about where we should be taught. I know that some love the big challenge of a mainstream school. We think we will be much better off here, learning more and enjoying our school days as well. You should see for yourself just how much we will lose if this school is closed. My parents told me this could still happen, even though all our parents said that they wanted it kept open. My childhood was a happy one, but difficult at the same time. When you are in a wheel chair and all your friends have been walking, straight away it clicks you’re different. I first went to a primary school but I was called “old wheelie bin” there and that was not very pleasant. Some friends of mine were called “spackers.”

Then I came here to Brighouse. They gave me real enthusiasm for living. Brighouse does not take or give the easy option. It pushes everyone to the full and then pushes some more. They pushed me academically and physically even though I am in a wheel chair. I’ve competed three times in Great North Runs, and I went to the Athens Para Olympics with two of my friends. I won a Silver medal, and my friend a Gold. And I am planning to get my GCSE’s and word processing qualifications. And I also play in the Tin Pan Ally Steel Drum Band. We have gigs every week and give a lot of pleasure to a lot of people and especially to ourselves.

Children like me don’t want to be social experiments. We have got one chance and the staff here knows just how to make it a real one. If you could just spare the time to come down to our school, and look into the eyes of the children and ask them where they want to be, I personally guarantee you won’t want us to go anywhere else. I may not be a voter today. But I soon will be.

Yours sincerely,
Philippa Jones,

TRACY She got a long letter back, not from the Prime Minister. We wouldn’t lose out. Our parents would be fully consulted you know, de da, de da, de da. That’s one thing they’re very good at in 10 Downing Street …writing letters.

Special Education is going to provide as good a test as any of the new Government’s intention to get away from top-down solutions in education. It won’t be easy for them.

It wasn’t just New Labour that endorsed the policy of Inclusion. The Tories thought it would save money, and it hasn’t. The Lib Dems thought it was a matter of human rights, and it’s now more a matter of human wrongs!

Will they both acknowledge that the policy was flawed, and is a disaster in the making as Baroness Warnock, one of its greatest advocates, has acknowledged? (Visit Post 13 Lady Warnock, thank you for being so honest)

Will politicians really stop meddling and start trusting the professionals to do the job they have been trained to do? Will Boards of Governors along with their head teachers be trusted to manage their schools and their school budgets not just play out a charade that this is the case? Will they know for a start how much money they have to spend?

Will the pursuit of excellence, and not just academic excellence, transcend the pursuit of equality that all too often in education equates with mediocrity?

In Death of a Nightingale I portray a school not unlike the one I was a governor of. Its excellence had nothing to do with me. It was there when I arrived. I felt privileged to be a part of it. Will the educational establishment stop stigmatising schools like it? That’s the other question that I ask.

Death of a Nightingale is my contribution to that end.

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