Fifty of these posts is something of a milestone. They are the lessons I have learnt from living in the classroom of the real world.

They are the lessons I learnt after my formal education at school and University ceased. They are not lessons from the library of my mind, or from the libraries of other peoples’ minds.

I started writing the posts way back in 2008, and the early ones are now in the Archives of this Blog. I monitor those who follow me. My Blog has had over 10,000 “unique” visitors and over 20,000 visits since I started.
Some of you have left as soon as you have arrived. Others have stayed for a while, browsed and subsequently returned. Not many have told me whether you agree or disagree. A pity. Why not start now?

I am grateful if you have plucked a few of them out of the airways. I suspect that no-one has read them all the way through, unless some Big Brother computer is doing so, which well it might. This being the case I should try to explain here for the benefit of newcomers what impels me to keep writing.

It has suddenly occurred to me that I can best do this not by saying what I am for, but defining what I am against. This week this is actually easy.

The “Times”, last Monday, featured an advert placed by the “Campaign for State Education.” I hasten to say that I am not against State Education, but I am against this particular campaign. I am against the hundred or so people who put their name to it and to the Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education that also put its name to it, and gave the game away by doing so.

Their website says that “Governments have inflicted market values on the education system. Casino planning has led to wider gaps between rich and poor and has largely benefited the ‘select’ at the expense of everyone else.” It ends by saying “We reject the hierarchical division of skills into academic and vocational subjects and affirm that well educated children need both mental and practical skills. We affirm that only a commitment to a cultured, skilled and inclusive society offers a way out of the recession that faces us and that most of us did not cause.”

Wow. Is riding your hobby horse to Banbury Cross really the way out of recession?

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with “market values” just as there is nothing intrinsically right with State control. It is whether or not they are professionally managed. Things go terribly badly wrong when they are not.

Act One Scene 4

(stage version)

A discussion in the staff room on motivation. Emma Kirk is the music teacher from the Caribbean and Joan Errington the English teacher.

EMMA KIRK . Can I give you a story to tell them? It will make a good startingpoint. It comes from a book I’ve been reading. The story comes out of Africa. “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’.”
…..

EMMA KIRK I know another part of the trouble. It’s them folk that prattle on about the evils of capitalism and competition.

JOAN ERRINGTON Oh come on.

EMMA Oh yes it is. That’s why we don’t win things. Why we have so few sporting heroes of our own. They don’t like competition. Poor little things. Tell that to the Chinese. Today their students are keeping our universities going. Why? To compete. Competition’s a part of life. Wanting to be somebody is part of real living. Earning and spending our dosh makes the world go round, now don’t it? Those folk who moan on about these things are just running scared of life They expect the State to tie their bootlaces for them. That’s no good way to be. Now is it?

(Do read the whole scene.)

These campaigners cannot stand the pursuit of Excellence. They see it as divisive. They cannot understand the self-discipline that it imposes. They reject hierarchies, but skills and talents vary greatly from one person to another, from one surgeon to another, one violinist to another, one hairdresser to another, one waiter or waitress to another if, for example, one is multi-lingual and the other is not, one car driver to another – Formula 1, I’m referring to.

They should read my post No.17: Channel 4 “The World’s Greatest Musical Prodigies”. Their world should not look quite the same after they have read it.

They see the State bringing an end to recessions. The real world tells a different story. All history tells a different story. Golden Ages come from a Society that is confident in itself. Confidence is born out of excellence not out of the mediocrity they aspire to. It has never been the product of an Equal Society.

Visit Older Entries: Post 5 – Is Equality past its sell by date?

Their way of thinking introduced the “bog standard” comprehensive school. Killed Polytechnics and many Grammar Schools too. Targeted 50% of children into Universities but forgot about the rest. Their way of thinking led to the closure of 100 special schools so that children with special needs could have a right to mainstream education, the right to be bullied, the right to have a classroom assistant looking after them instead of a qualified and dedicated teacher giving them the time they needed.

I will give you a few quotations from Death of a Nightingale to sum up what I think of these campaigners.

From the Prologue

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…..Just how sensitive is the system today to individual needs that are far more numerous and varied than most people realise?

From Act Two Scene 3

Eileen Winterton, chair of governors, is asking Joan Errington, English teacher, why Margaret Williamson, head teacher at Brighouse School and her partner, tried to take her own life.

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.

EILEEN WINTERTON Poor Margaret. I’m afraid our old friend Karl Marx is still around in education. People are looking for that elusive level playing field, and with the proviso that no-one actually competes on it.

JOAN ERRINGTON Yes, they are forever looking for solutions to the world’s problems in the libraries of their minds, not in the classrooms of the real world.

EILEEN WINTERTON They don’t see how complicated it all is these days.

JOAN ERRINGTON Yes, they think it’s so simple, so very simple. And they think that what they would want for themselves, everyone else should want as well.

EILEEN WINTERTON That’s why they keep putting square pegs into round holes.

JOAN ERRINGTON Yes, with epoxy glue.

EILEEN WINTERTON And when it all goes wrong – you know how the old saying goes – they point a finger at other people when they should see where their other three fingers are pointing.

JOAN ERRINGTON I like that. I hadn’t heard it before.

EILEEN WINTERTON It’s not just Karl Marx you know. Liberals are the very worst people for thinking things are simple. The Achilles’ heel of the Liberal is naiveté. And, when you don’t know you’re naïve, well it’s highly dangerous.

JOAN ERRINGTON Insanity.

EILEEN WINTERTON No, I’d put it another way. You can care too much. You can you know, if you see people how you’d like them to be, and not how, I’m afraid, most of them are.

JOAN ERRINGTON Yes, I think we’re getting there. If you want to know why poor Margaret tried to kill herself, don’t look just at her. And, don’t think it was all to do with the LEA either. That was literally the last straw, the straw that broke the camel’s back. You have to look at the world she lived in, as I know she saw it. She why she was so depressed, why she kept taking those goodnight pills all the time. Then you’ll begin to understand. You’ve got to dig deep. When people go as far as she went, you’ve got to dig deep to understand.

EILEEN WINTERTON I do see it now. Yes, it’s ironic isn’t it? Right at the very bottom, there are two dreams in Western Society, the Marxist dream and the Liberal dream, separately and together, both of them, the opium of the brainy classes. And why? Because they inhabit the world of “wouldn’t it be nice if.” Wouldn’t it be nice if only such as such were the case?

JOAN ERRINGTON And, of course, it very rarely is.

EILEEN WINTERTON Give a function to the State to make the world a better place, put a value on individual worth, yes, but allow for human frailty as well. They don’t do that. That’s where they both go badly wrong.

I have a very simple view. Try to give children an education that meets their individual needs – academic or practical – and society’s needs will then look after itself. Not the other way round. And open their eyes to the big wide world. It’s both opportunistic and frightening, encapsulated in the one word “challenging”.

Just this week in the “Sunday Times” Chris Woodhead in his regular column wrote “Earlier this year ministers decided to stop funding the gifted and talented programme in order to divert funds to the ‘disadvantaged’. ” It is that sort of attitude that appals me though, no doubt, the campaigners applaud it.

The country’s future depends on those children more than on most others. They need to be nurtured in both State and Public Schools even if the result is socially divisive. That should be tackled as a separate issue. I am actually on a committee that awards bursaries from a private benefaction here, so there are ways of doing this.

Let me in contrast tell you of an experience that exhilarated me. Last week I went to a concert at the Sage Gateshead where the applause for the orchestra at the beginning of the concert lasted longer than the applause you would normally expect at its end. Why?

It was a concert given by the country’s National Youth Orchestra, 175 strong. They were applauded on to the stage and it took quite a time. Their needs I am pleased to say had been met despite the fact that somewhere along the line a school may well have been responsible for its own admissions policy and had selected them

Let me quote one of them, Abigail Gostick, a clarinettist from Newbury, age 17:

“Although I am still deciding upon my next steps within the world of music, the NYO has opened up a world of possibilities for me to think about. This summer, I was lucky enough to be among a small group of NYO musicians working for a week with children who have physical disabilities at a school in Hampshire. It was amazing and deeply rewarding to watch the smiles on their faces as they heard live instruments for the first time and then had the opportunity to lead the ensemble themselves using speech and body movement. To know you can have that kind of impact on people with music is incredibly inspiring. The week has helped me to appreciate that not everyone has the ability to communicate as easily as we do but through the ‘universal language’ of music, we are able to connect with and bring out the best in people.” (My underlining).

I saw this with my own eyes and ears when I was a governor of a special school for children with a physical disability, and that is why music has an important place in “Death of a Nightingale.”

From Act One Scene 2

From a music lesson. Emma Kirk is the music teacher.

EMMA KIRK You know, music for kids like ours is, I always say, like what God’s leaven gives to bread

From Act One Scene 9

From another music lesson. Terry is a “difficult” pupil.

EMMA KIRK You guys will never be alone in life when you have found music. And one other thing. If you listen to spiritual music, really listen, you won’t worship a tribal God, you’ll worship God, the creator of everythin’ and everyone. God that will heal the wounds of mankind.

TERRY That would be a fuckin’ miracle.

EMMA KIRK Terry, don’t use that word in my classroom. Don’t use it ever again….But, for once, I am agreein’ with you. People shouldn’t just pray together when they mourn their dead in war.

Read Post No. 18 “David could not tie his shoe-laces” to understand still more what I am saying.

I really do ask whether those well-intentioned people asserting the right to mainstream education for children with special needs gave even a moment’s thought to their need for music in their lives; whether they would find it in mainstream schools. Was it what they thought about at all? Were they thinking about any other of their needs? Did they even know what those needs were?

There are many clever people caught up in education. I do, however, ask if they are always wise. The one thing I am sure about is that they are not street wise. When you are dealing with people it is the one thing you do need to be.

Joan Errington certainly echoes my thoughts when she says:

JOAN ERRINGTON Yes, they are forever looking for solutions to the world’s problems in the libraries of their minds, not in the classrooms of the real world.

What then is my reason for writing these Posts on my Blog?

It is because I want to encourage you to download “Death of a Nightingale” and read it, or better still get an opportunity to see it on the stage. I want people to think about the issues I am raising and not lose sight of them in the volcanic ash of the General Election debate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Should you claim credit for solving a problem you have helped to create? You may be asking this question about the Credit Crunch. I ask it here in relation to the policy of Inclusion.

In the last ten years an additional 100,000 teaching assistants have been recruited to facilitate Inclusion – I ‘m sure it wasn’t part of the original plan – to help mainstream schools accommodate children with special educational needs; the ones that would otherwise have been educated in the hundred or so special schools closed through Government policy.

I have referred to the huge cost of this in a number of the posts in this Blog, for instance Post 13 Lady Warnock – Thank you for being so honest.

Now read the news item on the Education Page of the BBC website: http://cli.gs/pqr8R

Teaching support ‘raises results’
By Hannah Richardson
BBC News education reporter

Teaching assistant with pupils

The increase in teaching assistants has been linked to better result

Schools that increase spending on teaching assistants have improved results, a report suggests.

But the Training and Development Agency for Schools study says it could be the children who are not getting extra support who are benefiting the most.

This may be because it allows these pupils to concentrate on the teacher, without being distracted by others.

The government said the report showed money spent on teaching assistants had been a good investment.

…

It comes after another report suggested that the greater level of teaching assistant support a child received, the less progress they made.

This is certainly the law of unintended consequences twice over.

Sorry, but I do have to ask. Is Inclusion proving to be a success or a monumental cock-up? You say…. truthfully.

Read the rest of this entry »

In my last two posts I drifted away from Death of a Nightingale with my own musings about the charade we call Democracy and my practical suggestion for a better way of doing things.

I must now return to my play, and use my characters to say where all this is leading – to the issues the Parties prefer to avoid. Do you worry, as I do, why Western Capitalism seems so ill at ease, more than that, why it looks so sick? And why ours more than most?

What do YOU do if you are a passenger in a clapped out old banger, the driver keeps clashing the gears, doesn’t appear to know the difference between the accelerator and the brake, and you suspect you are on the wrong road anyway? YOU THINK.

I write to help you to do that, especially this post, as you will see as you read on.

In my book I explained that Special Educational Needs provided a vehicle for my journey. This is the journey. I shall complete it when I succeed in getting the play staged and publish this Blog at the same time – all of it is brain fodder – food for thought.

Let me remind you. In the first Act of the play the Head teacher of Brighouse School, Margaret Williamson, is persuaded by the Local Education Authority to argue to parents the case for the closure of her school. She sees this as an act of betrayal and, in a state of despair, she tries to take her own life. In the second Act Eileen Winterton, the chair of Governors, asks Joan Errington Margaret’s partner and the English teacher at the School to explain the nature of her despair.

There is then this short dialogue in the stage version:

JOAN ERRINGTON Yes, I think we’re getting there. If you want to know why poor Margaret tried to kill herself, don’t look just at her. And, don’t think it was all to do with the LEA either. That was literally the last straw, the straw that broke the camel’s back. You have to look at the world she lived in, as I know she saw it. She why she was so depressed, why she kept taking those goodnight pills all the time. Then you’ll begin to understand. You’ve got to dig deep. When people go as far as she went, you’ve got to dig deep to understand.

EILEEN WINTERTON I do see it now. Yes, it’s ironic isn’t it? Right at the very bottom, there are two dreams in Western Society, the Marxist dream and the Liberal dream, separately and together, both of them, the opium of the brainy classes. And why? Because they inhabit the world of “wouldn’t it be nice if.” Wouldn’t it be nice if only such as such were the case?

JOAN ERRINGTON And, of course, it very rarely is.

EILEEN WINTERTON Give a function to the State to make the world a better place, put a value on individual worth, yes, but allow for human frailty as well. They don’t do that. That’s where they both go badly wrong.

Generations have lived through, and suffered too much from the Age of Ideology. See where it has led, as people tried to give substance to their dreams, fought for them, died for them but, at the end of the day, found them, in so many cases, always round the next corner of their lives.

Equality? Harriet Harman drives a Bill through Parliament with that title to it, but have we ever been so aware of inequality in the UK as now when we hear of Bankers’ bonuses and Parliamentary perks? (Visit Post 5 to see the holes in Harriet’s bucket.)

Democracy? 35% of voters (22% of the electorate) elect 55% of the MPs but, worse than that, many are not voting for their party so much as voting against another party, and voting with their own personal agenda more than for any national agenda. Meanwhile, no one is really accountable for anything, and our rulers spend taxpayers’ money as though it was their own and they had just won the Roll-over Lottery.Another bucket with a holes in it.

Rights? Our legislators create them without realising that some people would be better off if they hadn’t; also without realising that one person’s right can be another person’s restriction. This will be news to some, especially those who do not realise that a “legal right” is often not a promise, but only a hope. Read Death of a Nightingale from cover to cover to understand all this.

Socialism? The Labour Party takes command of the controlling heights of the economy and nationalises the Banks. You would think that this would give them the command they always wanted. Remember Clause 4. But, no. They want to denationalise them just as soon as they can – and I believe them – and they cannot even use their control to stop the banks using bail-out money to pay huge bonuses, get them to provide credit for enterprises that need it or give a decent return on cash ISAs.This bucket has lost its bottom altogether.

Capitalism? The debace of Equitable Life and the continuing plight of its policy holders, Nick Leeson and the demise of Barings, the “Dot-com” bubble, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi, the collapse of Enron and the Credit Crunch – and all in little more than one decade! Admit it – Something is very badly wrong with Capitalism – not least with its supervision. Capitalism certainly needs salesmen, but not so many of them selling money for a quick buck, rewarded for short term gain not long term profit. Too many lemmings! Too many bears too, and not enough bulls.Auditors should audit the truth into accounts and lies out, not the other way round. Computers should show up when traders are gambling with other people’s money not managing it or, worse still, gambling with money that isn’t there at all.It’s time to tweak capitalism and protect the value of our money and our savings. THE POUND HAS DROPPED. WHEN WILL THE PENNY?

Conservatism? In the credit crunch the Tories applaud the nationalisation of the banks and they have to acknowledge that the free market, self regulation and the “loose touch” contributed to the failure of the banking system to prevent toxic debt swamping the system. They have to acknowledge it, but have they taken it on board? Why don’t they throw Lord Ashworth overboard? My worry is that they still love our clapped out old banger.

Liberalism? In my experience Liberals just love to play charades, especially the charade of Democracy.The LibDems still seem to think that all you have to do to solve problems – like Special Educational Needs and Education generally – is to throw more money at them. How naïve can you get? Post 35 explains all. When will they realise that you cannot clean out the stables with a feather duster?

Karl Marx and Adam Smith must be rotating in their graves. Asquith and Jo Grimond must be making a fine speeches in theirs.

So how about an era without Communism, Fascism, Socialism, Conservatism and even Liberalism? Instead, how about an Age of Pragmatism? How about combining realism with idealism?

Here are 10 suggestions for some rules or guidelines

1. Nothing that is, or has been, must always be. (Post 1 – April 2009>older entries)
2. Sometimes we are all equal. More often we are all different.
3. Accept that there is a hierarchy of skills and talents, all have to be nurtured.
4. Promote excellence and spurn – sorry, wrong word – don’t be satisfied with mediocrity. (Post 17 )
5. Be sensitive to the differing needs of others, especially if you are contemplating strike action.
6. Fairness not Equality should provide the benchmark for human conduct.(Post 5) You can always aspire to be fair.
7. Respect is a two way street, especially in matters of faith.(Post 9)
8. People with power over others should be accountable for the way they exercise it and not, as now,be “Teflon-coated.”
9. Allow always for human frailty. It won’t go away. Ever. Accountants, in particular, please note, and acknowledge your own.
10. Above all, people and not money or dogma should control our destiny.And remember, “Give us this day our daily bread” is a prayer, not a demand!

A little less short terminism and a little more personal honesty would help too; they are, if you think about it, inter-related.

If these rules applied, for a start Education and Special Educational Needs would look quite different as would the NHS.

Two questions:

1. Just how pragmatic are YOU?

2. Which Party should win my vote?

You tell me.

Read the rest of this entry »

The public services, too.

As with my last post I write this without using the characters in Death of a Nightingale as intermediaries.

If you have read Death of a Nightingale or this Blog, or even if you have just browsed this website, you may think that I am antagonistic towards civil servants, especially mandarins represented by James Harrington in the play. He is a bit of a “wanker.”

But if that is the conclusion that you have drawn, you could not be more wrong. I have, over the years, met many who were dedicated, competent, conscientious and totally incorruptible. What I am antagonistic towards is the system within which they work.

The System is the problem

There is clearly something very badly wrong with it as there is with Parliament itself. (Visit post 48) The two are inter-connected at the navel.

Look at the public services. They are like a rudderless ship, overmanned, holed beneath the waterline, struggling to keep afloat in an ocean storm.

Consider the facts revealed in the recent study by Policy Exchange under the title: The Renewal of Government, a manifesto for whoever wins the election. The study compares the public sector with the private.

The public sector has better pay and pensions, almost total job security, much less redundancy but, hard to believe, in fact quite incredibly, it shows less improvement in productivity, many more strikes, more sickness and absenteeism and poor morale generally!

Click http://cli.gs/qX10vJ and put “morale” into its search engine. See where it leads you. You only need to give it five minutes.

It’s not a matter of money

I draw one stark conclusion from all this. You don’t solve problems by throwing money at them. You solve problems by managing them. Why do LibDems in particular always think it is just a matter of money? Why are we are so bad at dealing with these problems? Different question. Same answer.

Today, the world is very complex. It is not a place for the amateur however well intentioned. Yet, we have a system that allows amateurs, MPs - yes in today’s world they are amateurs – to be involved in day-to-day management decisions? Far too many of them are lawyers, PR consultants, journalists, and party political hacks, sorry, career politicians . And we repeat it in local government. The one thing they are all good at is talking in meetings. And they get plenty of practice.

It is a time consuming, money wasting, short-termist game, everyone pretending that this is democracy in action. As I have said, every con man needs a mug, and we are the mugs to allow this charade to continue.

Death of a Nightingale points this up

Death of a Nightingale uses the virtual reality of theatrical drama to provide just one illustration of the price we pay. Well-meaning amateurs, many without a clue as to the range of special needs that exist, simplistically thought there were savings to be made, or projected in their gut what they imagined they would want for themselves for everyone else. Both were wrong.

That is why they went on to close over one hundred special schools and shoehorn children with special needs out of a supportive environment of a special school into mainstream schools. We then pay billions of pounds for classroom assistants to help teachers look after them, in most cases bullied and excluded, yes excluded, in an inclusive environment. Certainly the policy was right for some, but certainly not right for others.

Not just in education

The same has happened with mental hospitals. These were closed to save money or because its patients should be looked after within the community. So what have we done? Filled the prisons with many of them – at£40k per annum a time, apart from the cost of the methadone. And now we are forced to build more prisons and cannot afford rehab centres! (Read Times 17 March 2010 on Drug Addiction).

Just what good is the legal right to something if you are worse off as a result and if others are worse off too? And it is always the most vulnerable.

I repeat. Management today should be left to the professionals , to the people who really know how to meet the needs of children with special needs, or people with serious mental health problems, or with health problems full stop. Managers without that knowhow cannot easily be good managers.Too many managers and decision takers lack this professional knowhow. And they keep their jobs.

It does not need to be this way. I suspect that this is not the European way which instinctively we criticise, but shouldn’t. There they train a political elite to govern.

If special education and SEN help you to understand the problem, it can also help you to see a solution to it.

Power up your imagination

I am going to invite you to power up your imagination. So please stay with this to the end.

First, imagine that the Department for Children, Schools and Families in London was scaled down in size dramatically butwith Higher and Further Education restored to it from Lord Mandelson’s little empire. It should never have been taken away.

No more target setting for a start to get bums on seats in our Universities – silly then, even more silly now – whether they should be there or not. No more target setting to get children with special needs into mainstream schools whether it is best for them or not.

Now, while you are about it, abolish OFSTED. You’ll see it won’t be needed. With me so far?

Next, if you are ready, get rid of Local Authority control over schools – and the whole panjandrum of Inclusion as well. You will soon see that they are surplus to requirements too.

Saved a bit of money already? And helped to reduce the country’s black hole of debt?

Next, instead of all of that, get local authorities to appoint three regional education authorities staffed with highly skilled educational practitioners, one for education, one for higher and further education and one for special educational needs. The last one would include some medical and psychology practitioners as well. The template for this already exists. It is there with regional airport authorities and with something like Tyne and Wear Museums.http://www.twmuseums.org.uk/about/ourmission (Visit Post 41) It also worked with the regional development authorities like the Tyne & Wear Development Authority.

What I am urging you to imagine really does work, and works well.

Now, give these authorities a simple remit. Meet the varied educational needs of pupils and students in their region, academic and vocational, and promote excellence.

I think it was Yevtushenko who wrote “Let every man be great, including the man who makes my galoshes.”

They would, of course, need to be centrally resourced to enable them to fund schools and Universities and to check them out to make sure that they were fulfilling their remit and working within their budgets. They would be accountable to the local authorities that set them up and report to the DFES, putting their reports on the NET.

One final thing. Hiring and firing and pay bargaining should replicate that in the private sector. It works

In the context of all of that schools and Universities and their boards of governors would be given their individual remits and their budgets, and they would be required to work within them, again with the same disciplines that operate in the private sector.

Accountablity at the core

“ACCOUNTABILITY” should be at the core of this in the same way that “BLACKPOOL” is at the core of Blackpool Rock. It is the one thing that distinguishes democracy from autocracy – or not, as the case may be!

All of this would be an enormous culture shock, but deadwood would go, and success would be rewarded. People would start to enjoy their work. Oh yes, it might save a bit of money too.

Heralding the Age of Pragmatism

What would all this mean? I shall explain in my next post. Essentially, it would herald an end of the Age of well-intentioned Ideology. It would see in the birth of a new Age, the Age of Pragmatism.

It might work! And we very badly need it to.

Please copy and paste http://cli.gs/nmA1a6 to anyone you think will be interested.

No, I am not saying bring back Guy Fawkes, all is forgiven.

And I do not write this an anarchist in the Spanish Civil War. I am not saying abolish democracy. I am saying, make it work. Give a little power back to the people and to their elected representatives. I don’t often agree with Tony Benn, but this is what he has been saying too.

In Death of a Nightingale I sometimes found it quite useful to use my characters to put into the public domain thoughts and ideas buzzing around in my own brain. Here I will not use intermediaries. This is directly from me to you.

There is an old adage. “If it ain’t broke, don’t mend it.” But what if it is broke? What if it is badly broke? You don’t believe me? Watch BBC Parliament on TV.

The scandal of MPs expenses is just the tip of the iceberg.

It is the symptom of a much deeper malaise. MPs on their own admission, if you watch as I have done their own debates on their own future, are no more than lobby fodder without the power to challenge the Executive on behalf of their constituents.

See all too often the acres of green and red leather largely uninhabited by any living being. A better analogy, see the oceans of green and red leather with the odd piece of driftwood floating on the surface. Then suddenly two big whales appear, blowing their blowholes for half an hour every Wednesday, and the sea suddenly heaves with little minnows.

Prime Minister’s Question time. What a waste of time!

Just what does it ever achieve? Proving that Democracy is alive and well? Or, that it is half dead and sick?

Then there are the Select Committees.

Potentially they are the best part of our democracy when they sit in Westminster Hall. But currently they are constructed to be part of the System, not a counterbalance to it. Their composition is controlled by the party machines. Their members are then so deferential that they wouldn’t say boo to a goose. And there are plenty of geese around these days. They never press home the really difficult questions. Congressional committees are much more abrasive in the States.

Take the “Credit crunch” for instance.

They all lament the fact that the banks and the regulatory authorities allowed the excessive growth of debt in the economy, but they never ask why they allowed the excessive growth of bad debt, toxic debt, billions and billions of it. Did the printers serving their super computers have to print it out in red to draw this to someone’s attention? That is where the real problem lay. My late mother who ran the offices in a multi-million pound furnishing company thought that bad debt was bad business. That’s why I do too.

The right question to put to leading on both sides of the Atlantic is not whether there was “due diligence” but whether there was any diligence.

Remember there are three simple truths when it comes to economics:

1. Every conman needs at least one mug.

2. People will be greedy if politicians let them.

3. Politicians will let them if there is something in it for them.

Once you understand that you understand everything! In particular you will understand why the “Dot-com” Bubble was succeeded by the collapse of Enron, and the collapse of Enron succeeded by the Credit Crunch – and all within a decade. Think about that when you are told that the Credit Crunch was just a global crisis no-one could anticipate.

Iraq.

They ask why Tony Blair took the country to war in March 2003. Much more important, they never ask on what conditions the Cabinet allowed the army to be moved to the Middle East in the first place. In October 2002 the US Congress passed a Joint Resolution to authorise the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq. That is when there should have been a clear decision as to when and if the army could be used in war. It was all too late to ask this question just before the battle started. What alternative did the Attorney General have then but to say that it was legal? Could he possibly say a war was illegal at the moment America was about to start it and the British army stood alongside them? Get real.

And now we have a phoney war.

Should cuts to our £170bn budget deficit start now with the Tories or later with Labour. And will front lines services be threatened? But the cuts have started already, and front line services are already being affected.

Only yesterday I watched on BBC Parliament a live debate in the House of Lords on Higher and Further Education.

£1bn cuts have already been imposed. What happened to “Education, Education, Education”? It was quite a commentary on our Parliamentary system that while Higher and Further Education come within Lord Mandelson’s province, he was notable by his absence. He was not present to listen to and answer the debate relating to his own Department. The cuts will deny over 200,000 young people access to Universities, and probably the ones least able to afford it will be hurt the most. It will affect further education on Teesside where those who have lost their jobs after the mothballing of the Corus Steel plant will most need it. Meanwhile Estelle Morris, a former Labour Minister of Education, now Baroness Morris of Yardley, advocates that Universities deal with these cuts by, amongst other things, introducing two year degree courses. All comment is superfluous.

Cuts already threaten front line services in the NHS too.

In today’s Newcastle Journal I read that the Government has just issued a new national operating plan for the NHS. This, according to the Journal, already threatens the closure of 100 beds in highly rated Q.E Hospital in Gateshead and other sites. Will they never learn? The last Conservative Government, to save money, encouraged hospital trusts to aim at 100 per cent bed usage, closing wards and hospitals in the process. This did not provide for winter epidemics, but it did provide a breeding ground for MRSA and Clostridium Difficile superbugs as beds were overused without pause and without any provision for isolation wards as in the Netherlands. What was designed to save money ended up costing it.

In the same paper I read that a £7.5bn plan for the overhaul of the East Coast Main Line to replace the ageing Intercity 125 fleet which date back to the 1970′s has been postponed.

Capital expenditure promised to pick up the slack in employment is clearly a mirage.

Death of a Nightingale, if you read it, tells the same tale of financial ineptitude in relation to Special Educational Needs.

Back in the 1980′s and 1990′s the Conservative Government turned to accountants, Coopers & Lybrand, and asked them to advise how to save money on special education. They saw that three per cent of children with special needs were costing the Exchequer eight per cent of the total spend on education. Cut the number of statements. Close special schools. Hey presto, there will be savings. No calculation was made as to the capital and revenue cost of doing this. No-one anticipated that it would be necessary to recruit over 100,000 non-teaching care assistants at say £15k a time to help mainstream schools cope with the influx of children deprived of the choice of mainstream or special school.

Read the book and my website and weep! And please don’t excuse the shortcomings of the policy because of lack of money. That won’t wash now. It certainly won’t wash in the years ahead.

The truth is that neither the Conservative Party nor the Labour Party have a particularly good track record when it comes to making cuts. For the Conservatives, at times their hearts are in the wrong place. For the Labour Party, sometimes their brains are.

I quote in my book a memory going back to 1961 at the Liberal Party conference in Edinburgh. The then Leader of the Party, Jo Grimond, said of Harold Macmillan and his government at the time “They couldn’t run a sweetie shop in the Lothian Road.”

The fact is that the same thing, at one time or another could have been said of every succeeding administration, Labour or Conservative.

The problem is not basically with the political parties; it is with the system of government itself.

It is confrontational when issues should be debated on their merits not on the basis political in-fighting and short term political gain that ends up as long term national loss.

There could not be a better time than this to institute major change in Westminster.

After Maastricht more and more laws are now made in Brussels by the European Commission. Meanwhile power has moved the other way too. Decision making has been devolved to the Scottish Parliament and to a lesser extent to government in Cardiff and Belfast.

Meanwhile there is increasing disenchantment with Westminster with 35 per cent of voters (22 per cent of the electorate) electing 55 per cent of the MPs who gain what they euphemistically say is a mandate to govern.

There is a renewed call for a change to the voting system to try to make individual votes count, not just in marginal constituencies; to give voters MPs that they can personally identify with and support, and actually worth giving a good living wage to.

Sure, the political parties don’t like “hung parliaments”. They like to get things all their own way if they can. But should they? Good for them? Maybe. Good for us? Maybe not. When one is bad, the other is worse. Maybe they shouldn’t get it all their own way. Maybe they should have to argue their policies out in a broadly based forum more truly representative of opinion in the country. Might we not then get better government? It happens in most other European countries that work multi-party democracies.

The UK is the odd man out.

And if this forum held the executive properly to account and if, right through the system, those who cocked things up were not moved sideways in the jobs, but fired, maybe the public would be better served.

My solution is very simple. Make the Houses of Parliament a museum.

It would make a truly great museum. We are very good at making museums. Commission Madame Tussauds to recreate the Narvik Debate in its debating chamber. That is recognised as a high point in British Parliamentary history. In May 1940 backbench MPs, some dressed in military uniform, rebelled against Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and paved the way for Churchill to take his place. Let the world see one man/one woman one vote at its best. It would be a gift to posterity, and of much more lasting benefit than the First Emperor of China’s Terracotta Army.

Something “British” would be really be the best in the world – the best tourist attraction in the world. The benefit would be much more long lasting than Olympics in 2012.

And wouldn’t it be a better way to sell democracy to the world than the bible and the bullet?

Meanwhile, a different forum should be constructed right for 21st Century, as many are in Europe today, a half circle; opposing forces shouldn’t just glower and yell at each other; it is a bit out of date to make the distance between the government and opposition benches 3.96 metres, said to be equivalent to two swords’ length. They should talk to each other not at each other. Design it so that the elected representatives of the people and the best brains around vet new legislation and hold overweening civil servants to account, people like James Harrington the mandarin in Death of a Nightingale.

The essence of good governance is to trust professionals to get on with their jobs at every level of society, but pull the mat out from underneath them when they fail. That is not the way of it in Britain today. It should be the basis of a new compact with the civil service Unions.

You know something. The Party that offered this at the next General Election I confidently predict would win by a landslide.

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I am sure that Joan Errington, the English teacher at Brighouse School in Death of a Nightingale, would approve if I borrow the words that Shakespeare used to describe the 7th age of man to describe one of the things wrong with UK plc today.

The Mid Staffordshire Hospital Scandal is just the latest example.

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

As Shakespeare traces the seven ages of man, those are the famous closing lines of ‘all the world’s a stage’ in”As You Like It”. His characters are still around today, appearances a little different, natures very much the same and the parody unsurpassable.

If you want to know why civil servants get it wrong so often, keep wasting vast sums of taxpayers’ money, give bad advice to government – or fail to give good advice – create or perpetuate jobs that do little more than bolster unemployment figures – and it matters not one jot which political party is in power – then let me use Shakespeare’s words lamenting life’s closing days, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste sans everything” to describe all those who serve on bodies whose remit it is to provide accountability in the system, but very rarely do. In particular, “sans teeth”.

Read on. You will see that the same is true of the NHS. You will understand why the Government refuses a public enquiry into the Mid Staffs hospital scandal.

In my last post I wrote of the mandarin, James Harrington, in Death of a Nightingale ” … you would not expect to see him on the Clapham Omnibus. The person exercising authority does not need to be reasonable; effective and competent, yes and, in a much better world than ours, accountable … “

In this post, I want to pick up the proposition that mandarins should be accountable. A news item in the Times last Tuesday, 18 February is still fresh in my mind. You will find it on page 18.

Baroness Young of Old Scone told the Times that she had decided to resign as chairman of the Care and Quality Commission, the newly formed “super regulator of health and social care”. She said that “her notion of what was required of an independent regulator sat uneasily with the Department of Health… Rugged independence is not what they are looking for; they are looking for something much more emollient and collaborative.” In short, sans teeth …. Pity she didn’t stick it out, but that’s another matter.

No wonder the Mid Staffordshire Hospital scandal. And there are many more scandals where that came from.

By way of another illustration, a doctor I know with a serious heart problem realised, as most patients would not, that a hospital nurse dispensing warfarin to him was giving him the wrong coloured pills indicating an excessive dose. He was able to correct her.

The Baroness, IF ONLY SHE HAD STUCK IT OUT, might properly have asserted the need for two nurses always to be involved in dispensing medication as a core discipline. No wonder so many patients claim damages against the NHS and many who don’t!

Official Figures

In 2008/09, 6,080 claims of clinical negligence and 3,743 claims of non-clinical negligence against NHS bodies were received by the Authority, up from 5,470 claims of clinical negligence and 3,380 claims of non-clinical negligence in 2007/08.

£769 million was paid in connection with clinical negligence claims during 2008/09, up from £633 million in 2007/08.

The Independent

Sunday, 13 July 2008

NHS: 60,000 medication blunders in 18 months. Every year, 24 patients die as a result of being given the wrong drug or the wrong dose.

By Brian Brady and Nina Lakhani

Never mind the cost. What about the suffering?

Mid Staffordshire hospital is not alone to get it wrong.

Does “a better world than ours exists anywhere in the world”? Whether it does or not, that is not to say that it ought not to. The absence of accountability may be the same the world over, but in a country like China there will be absolutely no need for a time wasting and costly charade to make it seem as though it does.

Here is an illustration from the Global Edition of the New York Times on January 11. Thomas L.Friedman writes “We applied for a US Department of Energy loan for a 92 megawatt project in New Mexico and in less time than it took them to do stage 1 of the application review, China signs, approves, and is read to begin construction this year on a 20 times bigger project!” It’s worth reading the whole article on page 7 headed “Who’s sleeping now?”

Just think about this. The one thing that ought to give Western democracies their cutting edge over authoritarian regimes should be the accountability of the system. Instead Western democracies waste so much time trying to pretend that it exists when it doesn’t, that they actually put themselves at a disadvantage.

Why do Governments continue to allow this? It’s very simple. Every four or five years they are held to account. They are answerable to the public for the mistakes that are made, and therefore it is best that voters do not know too much about them. MPs protect their seats. Civil servants protect their jobs. There is a name for this – symbiosis, more colloquially, “I’ll watch your back if you’ll watch mine.” In short – the cover-up.

In the UK here are just a few public bodies that are supposed to provide the checks and balances in the system; there is OFSTED, the Local Government Ombudsman, the Audit Commission, and all those Commissions of Enquiry. There are also Parliamentary Select Committees, hand-picked by the Party Whips. And MPs themselves should have a role here. And there is now the Care & Quality Commission.

There is no shortage of velvet gloves, but no sign of an iron fist in any of them, or steel in the backbone for that matter.

Oh for a permanent Paxman fist in even one of them!

If you want to understand read Death of a Nightingale and see a case in point. Special Educational Needs is now a disaster zone for many children with special educational needs. Some academics who advocated Inclusion as dogma in the 1990′s would have you believe otherwise but, if you don’t believe me, read the growing evidence of it at the end of the opening page of this website.

And read for your light entertainment “Alice in Blunderland” a parody that I include in post 15 here. See it all in virtual reality and in surreal reality too. Once you know the way in which the system operates, the world is never quite the same again.

Let me put this argument another way. Visit Breaking the Magician’s Code: Secret of Knife throwing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHCyNkixqs4. When you know why the magician doesn’t run out of beautiful models, the illusion is no more, never to return. The world is never the same again.

The following extracts from Death of a Nightingale may destroy some of your illusions. Mine were destroyed a long time ago and I am much the better for it.

Act One Scene 3

James Harrington, the mandarin from London, has just arrived at the regional office of the Department for Education. He is explaining to Judy Fotheringham in charge there how the system works.

JAMES HARRINGTON You really mustn’t allow yourself to be upset by the media. Whenever this arose my father – he was a wise old bird if ever there was one – he always said that the Pharaohs weren’t put off their grand design for the Pyramids by carping criticism in the Alexandria Times. I’ll tell you something else. Have you heard the Latin tag “Audi alteram partem”?

JUDY FOTHERINGHAM My Latin’s not very good these days. Doesn’t it mean something like “You have to listen to both sides of the argument”?

JAMES HARRINGTON Pity you didn’t have a classical education. In the civil service manual, “Audi alteram partem” is translated to mean that “you can drive your car on the wrong side of the road. ” Politicians watch our backs and we watch theirs. They provide the safety valve for the system. If we get it very badly wrong, they lose their seats. It works. Mistakes self-correct … in time.

David Harding, the Director of Education for Westborough, later explains how the system works to Margaret Williamson, head teacher of Brighouse School.

Act One Scene 8

This is the scene where David Harding, the Director of Education for Westborough, persuades Margaret Williamson to argue the case for the closure of her school to its parents.

DAVID HARDING It’s what we have to do. OFSTED will be on our backs if we don’t.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON I thought OFSTED was interested in standards and wouldn’t like what you are suggesting.

DAVID HARDING You misread it. They’ll turn a blind eye to it. They won’t put a black mark against you or your school while this is going on. And when they inspect us they’re only interested in whether we are delivering government policy and meeting government targets. That’s the way that things get done.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON And people get done, David.

OFSTED by the way is an acronym for Office for Standards in Education.

You can see the consequences in the final scene of the play.

Act Two Scene 6

Eileen Winterton, chair of governors, Margaret Williamson, head teacher, and Anwar Fawzi, a parent, look on as Brighouse School is demolished.

EILEEN WINTERTON Margaret, the problem’s not just here. It’s everywhere. Remember Enron when that big American energy company went bust and people lost billions. In Enron they had another name for it. They called it “rank or yank”. You were “ranked” if you played ball with them, “yanked”, sacked, if you didn’t.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON It probably explains why no-one blue the whistle on our credit crunch. Someone must have known about all that mountain of unpaid mortgages. They must have.

EILEEN WINTERTON There’s always a cover-up, every single time. That’s why they play “pass the parcel” with our complaints – you know pass the buck. Nobody’s held accountable when they boob. They make sure of that. That’s the real trouble

ANWAR FAWZI You’re right there. And they play games with us, those people. They play charades when it comes to consultation – they don’t really consult – they just want to make it look as though they do.

(Bulldozer noises continue in the background until the end of the scene.)

It is not as though no-one has seen the problem. It’s just that no-one ever does anything about it. Hence Baroness Young of Scone feels that she has to resign only five months after the Care and Quality Commission has started work.

Prologue

The recent Power Report pointed to “the weakening of effective dialogue between governed and governors” and “the rise of quiet authoritarianism within government.” …Sad to say, the report has already been allowed to gather dust as reports of this kind invariably do, and everything goes on as before.

The Power Inquiry was set up by the Joseph Rowntree Trust in 2004 to mark its centenary. It established a Commission under the chair of Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, to investigate why the decline in popular participation and involvement in formal politics has occurred, to provide concrete and innovative proposals to reverse the trend and to explore how public participation and involvement can be increased and deepened.

I flag this up even though the flag is at half mast.

You may or may not like Rudi Giuliani, but read his book on Leadership and you will see that he spotted the problem and he at least tried to do something about it. Not living in New York I wouldn’t know how far he succeeded.

Notes & Quotes

From Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani

The New York City school system was never really going to improve until its purpose, its core mission, was made clear. What the system should have been about was educating its million children as well as possible.

Instead, it existed to provide jobs for the people who worked in it, and to preserve those jobs regardless of performance. That’s not to say that there weren’t committed professionals at every level within the system. There were, and that’s the shame of it. Those with their hearts in the right place were the ones who suffered most.

Until I could get everyone involved to sit together and agree that the system existed to educate children, fixing little bits of it was symbolic at best. Band-Aid solutions can do more harm than good.

Does this sound all too familiar?

To conclude this post and to paraphrase Shakespeare – Something’s rotten in State of Western Democracy. The scandal of MPs expenses in the UK is a sign of it. It is, however, the least of it.

I’d cast my vote at the forthcoming general election for any of the three main political parties that looked as though it was seriously going to tackle it, not just pay lipservice to tackling it.

Termites, of course, not a chance.

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If you are not a lawyer, you may be unfamiliar with Clapham and its famous Omnibus. Lawyers, you see, say that a reasonable person is “the man on the Clapham Omnibus.” Not a woman, you will note! Ah well, there’s some lawyers for you.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century Clapham was a part of South London favoured by the wealthier merchant classes. Samuel Pepys lived there. Later evangelical Anglicans and social reformers lived around the Common, especially those like William Wilberforce campaigning for the abolition of slavery and child labour and prison reform. Later still, in the twentieth century, it was a commuter suburb, and out of favour with the upper classes. It was then that a reasonable man was spotted on a ‘bus there.

In Death of a Nightingale there is one character who I say quite specifically you would not expect to see on that ‘bus. He is the mandarin from the Department for Education and Skills, James Harrington.

This is how I describe him:

He exudes quiet authority, and he smiles through cold teeth. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. His father was a district commissioner in the Punjab during the Raj. He watches his own back very carefully, as well as the backs of others. His job is to deliver policy as quickly as possible. Nothing happens otherwise. Hence ends justify means sort of person. His suit, shirt and tie, Savile Row. You would not expect to see him on the Clapham Omnibus. Not the ordinary man in the street.

And this is how I introduce him

Act One Scene 3

Regional officer Judy Fotheringham is joined by a civil servant from London, James Harrington. The Westborough City Council’s Director of Education, David Harding, and its head of Special Needs Gerry Thompson arrive soon after. They discuss the closure of Brighouse School. It has been thwarted by strong campaign by parents to keep it open. Over 15,000 reasoned objections persuaded the Minister to reject plan to close the school.

JUDY FOTHERINGHAM (on the telephone) Yes, I did listen to the repeat of “Yes Minister”. I do admire Sir Humphrey.

James Harrington knocks and enters

JAMES HARRINGTON Are you talking about me?

JUDY FOTHERINGHAM (still on the ‘phone) God has just walked in. I’ll ring you back later. Bye (To James) Hello, good to see you again.

JAMES HARRINGTON Nobody’s ever said I had a divine presence before. Mind you they thought my father had when he was a District Commissioner in the Punjab. But people do turn to me for the occasional miracle. I don’t object to being called Sir Humphrey, but I do have to correct you about Yes Minister. We only like to think we’re wise and knowledgeable. I am not sure we always are.

JUDY FOTHERINGHAM Last night’s programme was really cruel. Did you see it?

JAMES No, I missed it.

JUDY FOTHERINGHAM It was all about the Dome and Government waste, not the waste of £800m so much as the public view of it. Hacker said the problem was not so much its viability as its visibility.

JAMES HARRINGTON I don’t disagree with him. We paid a terrible price at the time.

JUDY FOTHERINGHAM And, Hadrian didn’t say that twelve million people would visit his Wall in the year of its completion, and that that venture was a good deal more ambitious than the Dome.

JAMES HARRINGTON You really mustn’t allow yourself to be upset by the media. Whenever this arose my father – he was a wise old bird if ever there was one – he always said that the Pharaohs weren’t put off their grand design for the Pyramids by carping criticism in the Alexandria Times. I’ll tell you something else. Have you heard the Latin tag “Audi alteram partem”?

JUDY FOTHERINGHAM My Latin’s not very good these days. Doesn’t it mean something like “You have to listen to both sides of the argument”?

JAMES HARRINGTON Pity you didn’t have a classical education. In the civil service manual, “Audi alteram partem” is translated to mean that “you can drive your car on the wrong side of the road. ” Politicians watch our backs and we watch theirs. They provide the safety valve for the system. If we get it very badly wrong, they lose their seats. It works. Mistakes self-correct … in time.

As I have said, you would not expect to see him on the Clapham Omnibus. The person exercising authority does not need to be reasonable; effective and competent, yes and, in a much better world than ours, accountable, but reasonable? No. We should have no expectation there.If reasonableness is there, it is a bonus.

But that is not to say that there are no characters that I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see on the Clapham Omnibus.

And, it doesn’t have to be a man. I am very comfortable nominating a woman for that role. In Death of a Nightingale the English teacher and school governor, Joan Errington, the partner and confidant of the head teacher Margaret Williamson fills it perfectly.

In the words of the old saying, she has the serenity to accept the things she cannot change, the courage to change the things she can, and the wisdom to know the difference. She listens. She thinks. She is well balanced. And she cares. She makes a major contribution to the ethos of Brighouse School. I am sure that there are many like her dedicated to teaching children with special needs.

This is how I describe her:

In her thirties, very committed to her job and to the School. She takes a personal interest in some of the pupils and takes them to local theatres. She sees her work as a vocation. She loves and respects the head teacher. She prefers to appear studious with spectacles, rather than attractive with contact lenses.

Early on we learn that she took Tracy, a pupil at Brighouse School, to the RSC and gave her a love of drama. Although all my characters are fictitious, I know two people not totally dissimilar in real life.

I now set out three extracts from the stage version of the play. By the time you have read all three, you will get to know her as well as I do.

Act One Scene 10

Margaret Williamson, head teacher, is distraught. She has been pressurised by the Local Education Authority to commend the planned closure of her school to its parents. She shares her distress with her partner, Joan Errington.

(They snuggle up together on the couch)

MARGARET WILLIAMSON I think I know the answer.

JOAN ERRINGTON What?

MARGARET WILLIAMSON I’ll resign.

JOAN ERRINGTON That’s a silly thing to do.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON No, it’s not. It’s the only thing to do.

JOAN ERRINGTON Just put that idea right out of your head.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Don’t you understand. I’m pig sick of this job. And I’m pig sick of the world we’re living in. Every damn thing is a cynical charade, and I’m now given a lead role.

JOAN ERRINGTON If everyone who didn’t like their job resigned, there’d be a hell of a lot of vacancies.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON (Begins to cry) Don’t you understand, I just can’t do it any longer. I can’t look kids in the face. I can’t look my staff in the face, or the governors. And, what’s more, I can’t look myself in the face either.

JOAN ERRINGTON You must.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON I can’t.

JOAN ERRINGTON What about us?

MARGARET WILLIAMSON What about us? It won’t make any difference if I’m not here.

JOAN ERRINGTON Of course it will make a difference. But anyway it’s a waste. You’re a wonderful teacher and a wonderful head. You can’t give all that up. What about your pension? What are you going to live on? What will you do with yourself?

MARGARET WILLIAMSON I’ll find something. I won’t be the first teacher to throw in the towel. Now will I?

JOAN ERRINGTON Look, whoever takes your place will do what you’ve said you’d do, and probably without any conscience at all. What on earth are you going to gain?

MARGARET WILLIAMSON My conscience. My sanity.

JOAN ERRINGTON Oh, come on. That’s self indulgence.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Self Indulgence. Self Indulgence. Oh my god. How can you say that to me? You of all peo ple. What a horrid thing to say. I don’t think you understand me at all. I want out. I want out altogether. Out, out, out.

JOAN ERRINGTON You’re just trying to make a martyr of yourself.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON If that’s the best thing you can say you’d better go.

JOAN ERRINGTON Oh, be sensible.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Go … Please go.

JOAN ERRINGTON I just hope and pray you’ll come to your senses. In a year’s time all this will be a bad dream.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Just leave me alone. Leave me alone.

It is of course Joan Errington who, 24 hours later, finds Margaret Williamson comatose having taken an overdose.

In the second Act Joan slowly fully understands why.

Act Two Scene 3

Eileen Winterton, chair of governors at Brighouse School, meets up with Joan to try to understand why Margaret has tried to take her own life.

JOAN ERRINGTON Well, just say she’s a casualty of the world we are living in. That’s certainly where you have to start.

EILEEN WINTERTON I do worry about that. Especially this bit of it.

JOAN ERRINGTON So do I. You’ve read 1984?

EILEEN WINTERTON Yes, but it’s not as bad as that, surely?

JOAN ERRINGTON It is, and it isn’t… what is a free society these days?

EILEEN WINTERTON We’re not living in a dictatorship. We’re a long way from that.

JOAN ERRINGTON I’m saying something different. What I am saying is that in one sense you are free, in one sense you are not. If you want some of the goodies today you have got to accept Big Brother.

EILEEN WINTERTON Who is Big Brother? The PM?

JOAN ERRINGTON Whoever is the PM. It’s the System. We live in a dependent society. We depend upon each other. There’s nothing wrong in that. But we also depend upon the State, and far too many people are totally dependent on it.

EILEEN WINTERTON That’s very true.

JOAN ERRINGTON People at the top of the pile can be every bit as dependent on the State as people at the bottom – probably more so. More to lose, or to win. And the price you pay for the State being kind to you, you obey it or you comply with it. You toe the party line, or you keep your head down, right down below the parapet. You cooperate. You do what’s expected of you.

EILEEN WINTERTON I suppose that is a bit Orwellian.

JOAN ERRINGTON It is the way it’s going. Then there’s “Spin”. What is “Spin” if it’s not another word for “New Speak”? Can you believe anything you are told these days? Take the words ‘”parental choice” or “parental preference”. When parents can’t, mustn’t, to talk to a school where their children might go, or when the schools they are supposed to choose from don’t exist, – they have been shut, democratically of course, but shut all the same – you might as well say “parental rhubarb”.

EILEEN WINTERTON I’m afraid you’re right.

JOAN ERRINGTON And there’s far, far too much politics in education full stop.

EILEEN WINTERTON It has to be. The State provides the money.

JOAN ERRINGTON Yes, but it keeps meddling. It should demand standards, but it shouldn’t keep meddling and trying to control us all the time, and it’s all this social engineering I can’t stand, and I don’t think Margaret could stand it either.

EILEEN WINTERTON I am curious, Joan, would you like to be a Head Teacher one day?

JOAN ERRINGTON I would not. Too much pressure from too many sides. I wouldn’t have wanted Margaret’s job for all the money in the world.

EILEEN WINTERTON We do get it wrong, if that’s the case. Teachers like you have so much to give.

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 ofopportunity. It’s just, well, opportunity.

………

JOAN ERRINGTON (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.

While Harriet Harman makes much of gender inequality in her Equality Bill – too much in my view, all-women short lists for parliamentary candidates, for example, from which I understand her husband is exempted – her Government presides over more inequality than I can ever recall – MPs expenses, banker bonuses, public sector pensions, State power against the citizen, for example in Tribunals (Visit Post 44) job security in the public as against the private sector. It is not just an unequal Society. It is an unfair Society too. Sorry, there’s me ranting again. If you want to read more visit Posts 4 and 5 of this Blog.

Back to Joan Errington and the play.

Act Two Scene 5

Margaret Williamson seeks to find peace within herself by confessing to the governors that she had succumbed to pressure and agreed to betray the school by siding with the Local Authority’s plan to close it. She has invited Eileen Winterton, chair of governors, Frank Jones, chair of finance who has resigned in protest, and Joan Errington to her home.

JOAN ERRINGTON I knew, of course. Margaret told me, before it all happened. She said she felt like a little lump of plasticine in the hands of the LEA.

FRANK JONES But you didn’t want to say.

JOAN ERRINGTON I couldn’t say, could I? And anyway, I am still not sure what we can now achieve by starting up the fight all over again. I really can’t see it helping the school and the kids. I think that NHS bod, John…

EILEEN WINTERTON Lavers?

JOAN ERRINGTON Yes, John Lavers was probably right. We should draw a line. All I really want to do is to teach. Can’t we get back to that simple idea? I will let you into a secret, when I was at school my first love was politics and sociology. The trouble is that these subjects make me angry, and you can’t teach in a permanent state of anger, hot or cold. It’s not good for you and it is certainly not good for the kids.

FRANK JONES You made the right decision. But why English?

JOAN ERRINGTON Three reasons. First of all I love it. Secondly, I think that every generation has a responsibility to pass on its heritage to the next. That’s what teaching is about. Finally, I think we all take our own heritage for granted. We shouldn’t. We’ve given over half the world English.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON I bet the Romans didn’t appreciate what a wonderful gift Latin of all l languages was going to be to the world either.

JOAN ERRINGTON I bet they didn’t. Anyway I, connect with politics and sociology at the same time, and without the aggro. Just think of the great tragedies, Hamlet.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Yes, indeed (sadly) “To be or not to be”.

JOAN ERRINGTON Your winter of discontent, Margaret? Think of Othello.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Poor, poor Desdemona (feeling sorry for herself again)

EILEEN WINTERTON I could name one or two Iagos today.

FRANK JONES I’m beginning to see what you mean.

JOAN ERRINGTON I’ll give you one or two more. “The best of times and the worst of times”.

EILEEN WINTERTON Tale of two cities?

JOAN ERRINGTON Yes, Charles Dickens. Fiction and fact aren’t all that far apart.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON There’s poetry too, Joan isn’t there? “I wandered lonely as a cloud”.William Wordsworth.

JOAN ERRINGTON Oh dear. (A look of real sadness)

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Sorry Joan, but it’s been like that recently. How about then (ironically),Cat on a hot tin roof?

JOAN ERRINGTON Yes, we mustn’t forget great American writers who had their own way with English.

FRANK JONES I thought the Americans didn’t do English any favours?

JOAN ERRINGTON No, not at all, Frank. Just get the poems of Emily Dickenson out of the library,and start there. And after that come back home and read the poems by Rupert Brooke. You know he was one of the lost generation, died during the First World War.

“… thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.”

Ah me, once upon a time. You see politics, sociology and the human story are never far away from teaching English. I can very easily keep my early interest going with our wonderful English language, and without any torment. That’s what I want to give to our kids. And it’s for life, not just for exams.

EILEEN WINTERTON More strength to you. Look, I don’t want any teacher to martyr themselves. It’s not worth it. You are all much too valuable. I think we are going to have to accept the inevitable if they carry parents with them. Joan, you just keep teaching. And Margaret, don’t feel the need to share your thoughts with anyone else. You’ve got a career to start up again. Don’t sight of that, for heaven’s sake.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON I’m grateful for that. Joan, one thing I must ask you. Have you forgiven me?

JOAN ERRINGTON Well, almost.

MARGARET Only almost? Oh dear.

JOAN ERRINGTON I wish you hadn’t asked me. It’s the way it is, for you and for me I think.

Why do I choose this moment to write this pen portrait of Joan Errington?

In a few months time there will be a General Election in the UK. The city of Westborough, where Brighouse School is located and where Joan Errington lives, is an unusual constituency. It is a three way marginal.

Joan Errington is not wedded to any political party. I am sure that she is quite undecided which way to vote. She is tempted not to vote at all, but she knows that she should. She is one of many; a floating voter feeling that any moment she is about to drown!

Are any of the three main political parties wired into her worries and her needs? Do they even begin to understand them? I wonder.

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Let me explain.

Newcastle University is currently presenting a number of public lectures in the Curtis Auditorium under the banner of INSIGHTS. Sir Martin Harris gave the first of them this week on “Excellence and Inclusion in Higher Education.” He is to be followed shortly by Bonnie Briar, General Dannat and Baroness Shirley Williams.

In other words Sir Martin is a heavyweight. Amongst other things formerly Manchester University vice chancellor and then vice chancellor of the University of Salford, but here as the Director of Fair Access to Higher Education.

Interestingly in 2004 this is what Times Higher Education wrote about his appointment:

“Highlighting continuing tensions over access, Mr Clarke delivered a stinging rebuke to Chris Patten, Oxford University chancellor, over claims that universities were being “forced” to admit more working-class students.

Mr Clarke said that he was disappointed by “silly flutters from one or two Oxford people” and dismissed claims that the Government would use quotas and fines to socially engineer admissions.

Mr Patten had said the Government’s plans to interfere in admissions amounted to “appalling” social engineering and a threat to a free society.

Mr Clarke said: “I don’t think Chris has taken the trouble to understand what we are proposing, he’s been rather lazy about it. I think he’s rather let himself down in the way that he’s going about it. He’s gone back to being a party politician.”

There was a lot about Sir Martin’s lecture that I liked, that I applauded. He espoused the pursuit of excellence. He endorsed meritocracy. He drew a distinction between excellence which he favoured and elitism which he disapproved of. He assured his audience that Universities had to remain 100% in charge of admissions. Not a teeny weeny bit of pressure to admit more students from working class backgrounds? No positive discrimination in favour of some that becomes actual discrimination against others, such as all-women MP shortlists under Harriet Harman’s banner of Equality? – My interpretation of what he was saying. – No, just its encouragement by the provision of bursaries. The cost of being a student should be no obstacle to students.

Of course he saw his remit as the pursuit of equality of opportunity.

I will come shortly to the reason why I am writing this post, but I must observe here that I take a different stance in my play about equality of opportunity that you will see when you read the following extract:

Act Two, Scene 3

Eileen Winterton, chair of governors, is trying to understand why the head teacher, Margaret Williamson, has tried to take her own life. Joan Errington, her partner, and the English teacher at Brighouse School is trying to explain.

JOAN ERRINGTON We certainly do know how you get it wrong. It makes me feel so sick at times, especially now. You know 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 at the root of a lot of our trouble. It’s mucked 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? Don’t you see? All kids are different, very different, and they need different kinds of opportunity. Fair play is what they all want, not equality. If kids are not given the opportunity that’s right for them, especially ours, they won’t be equipped to meet the challenge of the times. They won’t be included in this cut throat world that’s coming in fast. And this country needs them to be. That’s what education should be about. Above all else, giving them that 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. And it has got a good side to it, 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.

EILEEN WINTERTON Well, I’m afraid our old friend Karl Marx is still around in education. People are looking for that elusive level playing field, and with the proviso that no-one actually competes on it.

JOAN ERRINGTON I agree. They are looking for solutions to the world’s problems in the libraries of their minds, not in the classrooms of the real world.

EILEEN WINTERTON Of course it’s not just Karl Marx you know. The Achilles’ heel of the Liberal is naivete. And, when you don’t know you’re naive, well it’s highly dangerous.

JOAN ERRINGTON Insanity. King Lear.

In short, equality of opportunity is and always will be a mirage. Education should be about “opportunity in a fair society”, not equal, not the same, and not just to get into University, but real.

And this applies to children with special educational needs as much as to anyone else.

I underline this in the Prologue in Death of a Nightingale:

Prologue

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.

I set out the argument in some detail in Posts 4 and 5 of this Blog. Essentially Equality promotes mediocrity and undermines meritocracy. Equity, fair play, promotes excellence and endorses meritocracy.

I am sorry Sir Martin, you cannot have it both ways.

But this is not where I cross swords with him and his lecture, even though that is clearly what he is trying to do.

What was quite startling to me was that in a fifty minute lecture on a subject with the word “Inclusion” in its title, from first to last he never once mentioned Inclusion for children with special educational needs.
It is interesting when you come to think about it – I have read a lot about Inclusion of children with special needs into mainstream schools over the years – I have seen nothing that I can recall about its provision in Higher Education. Not once.

You would have thought that someone who was a Director of Fair Access to Universities would have this within his remit. Apparently not.

This is where Inclusion ought really to click in for those who have survived the bullying – or avoided it – overcome their learning difficulties and started to embark on their adult lives.

This is where I fully endorse it, but where the educational establishment and academia would appear totally to ignore it. Ah well. Maybe they thought, quite mistakenly as it happens, that Inclusion would save money, but here they knew it would cost money in terms of access and support. Perhaps they didn’t even acknowledge that there would be some children with special needs that would aspire to higher education. Perhaps it was providing them with unequal support.

***

By strange coincidence this is part of a BBC report today: (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8495290.stm)

Disabled students wait for specialist equipment grants
Almost 12,500 students in England are still waiting for grants to pay for specialist equipment, figures from the Student Loans Company show.

The statistics reveal two thirds of students with a disability or special needs are still waiting for money.

***

And here’s another sad news item that has just come my way, hot from the press too:

Angry statement from the NDCS (National Deaf Children’s Society) – unfairness for deaf students in exams

In a debate on the Equality Bill in the House of Lords on 27th January, the Government refused to take action that would help ensure a fair and equitable exam system for disabled students. NDCS is deeply concerned that the current drafting of the Bill will allow exam bodies to discriminate against disabled students. Jo Campion, Head of Campaigns at NDCS, said:

The Equality Bill was meant to remove all traces of discrimination in exams, but instead maintains a system which is unfairly loaded against disabled students. It now enables a range of unnecessary get-out clauses for exam bodies to avoid having to make exams genuinely accessible.

Government figures show that deaf children are already under achieving at school. These new laws will make it even harder for deaf children to get the qualifications they need to be independent and successful in life. Deaf students and their parents will be expressing anger and disappointment today that the Government has sided with exam bodies rather than disabled students. (My underlining)

In 2005, the exams regulator withdrew support available to disabled candidates. NDCS successfully fought to get this support reinstated for deaf students, however NDCS continues to receive complaints from deaf students and parents highlighting that this support is not being provided.
NDCS is calling on the Government to urgently reconsider its position and ensure the Equality Bill provides genuine access to examinations for disabled students. Deaf students currently experience the following examples of discrimination in exams:
§ Failure to provide written transcripts for video or radio recordings
§ Failure to provide extra time to lip-read instructions
§ Being asked questions which are inappropriate for a deaf young person to answer. For example, a deaf student was asked in an English exam to describe how it felt to be a fan of a music band. The examining body refused to accept that the question would disadvantage a student who has no experience of listening to music.

***

Isn’t it ironic that this issue arises under the Equality Bill? It all goes to show how unfair Equality can be at times. Quod Erat Demonstrandum, to coin a phrase.

I am glad that all this affords me a rare opportunity to change camps here, and join the ranks of the Inclusionists.

I left my card with Sir Martin and with the vice chancellor of Newcastle University. I indicated that I would welcome a dialogue. I have also recently written to Professor Wedgwood at my old college at Oxford, Merton saying the same.

I had to observe to the Warden of Merton recently that the nice question today is whether some in academia live in ivory towers or cardboard castles. A few may even live in sandcastles or in a castle in the air!

Ah well, when I say the things I do, it is not surprising that the drawbridge is pulled up fast and the moat is filled with water.

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When I edited “Death of a Nightingale”, a play that I wrote “to be read”, so that a shorter version of it could be performed at a rehearsed reading at the New End Theatre in London last November, I inevitably lost some of the dialogue that I liked but could no longer include.

In one respect I left a waggy tail behind, but removed the dog!

Here is “the waggy tail.”

Act Two Scene 6

Part of the dialogue between head teacher Margaret Williamson and two parents as they watch Brighouse School, a school for physically disabled children, being demolished. It comes in the final scene of the play.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON The system has become one big job protection society. It’s not about enriching kids lives. And we pay for it.

JUDITH FAWZI You’ve hit the nail on the head there.

ANWAR FAWZI Rights of kids paramount. Words. Empty words. You just try to assert those rights today, you know, in a tribunal. It’s not easy.

ANWAR FAWZI And not cheap either.

JUDITH FAWZI No, not if you have to get a medical report.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Tribunals are supposed to help you. I’m afraid that they are really just a part of their defence works.

ANWAR FAWZI And Statements are our part of ours. And now they’re trying to get rid of them altogether. Then our kids will have no real rights at all.

Here is “the dog” that got left behind.

Act One Scene 3
(Play written to be read)

A discussion in the staff room between the head teacher, Margaret Williamson, a care assistant, Wendy Robinson, Emma Kirk, the music teacher and Joan Errington, the English teacher. They are worried about the threatened closure of their school.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Meanwhile our great government can’t make up its mind whether we are a part of one large sausage machine, or a lot of small sausage machines, and they keep coming up with more and more paper plans, more and more targets.

WENDY ROBINSON They certainly keep themselves fully employed. Good intentions maybe, but so had my Aunt Mabel.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Who is your Aunt Mabel, Wendy?

WENDY ROBINSON She doesn’t actually exist. But in our family we always blamed her when things went wrong.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON No, she exists alright. She works alongside Murphy. Did you not know? I’ll tell you exactly where she is.

Mum wants little Johnny to come to this school. Thinks it’ll meet Johnny’s needs. The medics agree. We agree, and we’ve got a place for him – and the more kids there are in this school the less on average each one costs. Yes? But no, Murphy, who’s not wired up to what we do, decides the fate of little Johnny and wants to send him somewhere else, and Mabel, who of course is legally qualified, chairs the tribunal that decides what’s in Johnny’s best interests so long as it makes the best use of economic resources, and she goes along with Murphy. Mabel’s word is final.

But you can appeal against it. To whom? I’ll give you one guess….to the ever courteous, totally dependable Mabel. The needs of little Johnny are supposed to be paramount, but they get lost somewhere along the way. What a crazy mixed up world. They’ll give the job to a computer next. You watch.

EMMA KIRK Hey stop this. We’re not politicians and sociologists. I just want somebody to let me teach.

JOAN ERRINGTON That’s a real cry from the heart.

EMMA KIRK I’ll bet you most teachers would say the same.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Sorry girl, you’ve got to be a sociologist today if you want to be a teacher. You’ve got to know how people tick, and you’ve got to know the real world – not the fantasy world you’d like it to be. That’s where our kids are going to be and they, especially them, need all the help we can possibly give them.

JOAN ERRINGTON I wholeheartedly agree, Margaret. You have to be a sociologist, a psychologist, and a fairground manager too.

There is a Prologue to my play in the book. Here is a short extract:

“The recent Power Report (chaired by Baroness Helena Kennedy QC) pointed to ‘the weakening of effective dialogue between governed and governors’ and ‘the rise of quiet authoritarianism within government.’ If I can remove the wrapping paper, it is saying that our democracy is often just a sham, and that the problem is not so much spin as twist. It is a serious criticism of those who wield power – the subtle and not so subtle pressures they exercise – the patronage they use to get their way. It should be no surprise that lawyers, accountants, academics and others, from time to time compromise strict standards of professional behaviour and play word games instead.

I have seen it happen. If the System does look itself in the mirror, it needs to recognise that the mirror itself is a distorting one. Will it do even that?

Sad to say, the report has already been allowed to gather dust as reports of this kind invariably do, and everything goes on as before.”

Yes, I hope that you’ve restored the dog to its waggy tail.

I am writing here about Tribunals. They badly need sorting so that they can be a check on the system, not just an integral part of it, so they can help the citizen deal with the State and not just help the State deal with the citizen. There’s a big difference.

I know something about Tribunals. I have seen parents trying to seek their assistance; but more importantly, for many years, my wife Ros was a volunteer member of a Citizens’ Advice Bureau Tribunal Unit, secured a law degree to facilitate that and represented many clients before Disability Appeals Tribunals. Later she also became a wing member of one of them, adjudicating Disability and Social Security appeals.

A few people were fortunate enough to secure her services and are fortunate to secure the services of people like her. Most, I suspect are not, although Trade Unions do, where they can, represent their members.

I know just how vulnerable are those who use the Tribunal system without outside help. If you are accused of murder, rape or arson the State will rush to provide you with legal aid. Not so if you have a claim against the State and the implementation of its policy.

The argument is that Tribunals are informal, and you don’t need lawyers. That is nonsense. You do. Just as in criminal cases, they are governed by Law; by both statute and statutory regulation and by legal precedent covering decisions in earlier cases. These will be argued against you. But there will be no-one to challenge those arguments and to cross examine witnesses, and no-one to argue them for you if you are on your own. You are at the mercy of Mabel!

On one occasion my wife told me that not only did one of her clients not understand the initial arguments but, after 7 years, at the actual tribunal hearing he couldn’t understand the chairman’s decision, and didn’t even know that he had won! That is how complicated some cases can be.

If, in the words of the Power Report, you are seriously concerned about “re-balancing of power between the Executive and Parliament, between Central and Local Government and between the Citizen and the State.” -if you are – you should do something about redressing the power between the Citizen and the State in relation to Tribunals.

There is a solution. When claimants cannot afford a solicitor, third year law students studying welfare law should, as part of their University studies, offer their services to those taking their claims to Tribunals. In educational tribunals it would be on a pro bono basis. Where a cash claim was involved it could be on a “no win no fee” basis.

It would be a very good learning experience for those students, maybe a refreshing one, a bit like a cold douche on a hot summer’s day. For students of Jurisprudence at Oxford University, if they still inhabit the same rarified atmosphere that I enjoyed many years ago, it might come as a bit of a shock to the system too.

Anyway, why not?

I am sure that Termites will find an argument against it, you know the people who say they want to improve things, but never ever do. Termites? You’ll have to scroll back to my other posts to understand fully what I mean.

You will see why it is time to bin them, and why it is time to move on.

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