Childcare ratio change is ratio-ning attention, and courting danger

I’m a tad late to the party on this one, but it’s never too late to be genuinely concerned.

For some months now there have been rumblings that the Government is planning to increase the ratio of children to adults in childcare situations in the UK. Bear in mind that already Gove has decreed that 30 is no longer the maximum for a primary class. This is leading to teachers in the public sector simply performing crowd control, or schools forced to spend budget usually deployed elsewhere on employing extra classroom support so this doesn’t become the case. As a result, it is slowly eating away at one of the fundamental pillars of our – in the main – excellent state education system, and therefore in the not-too-distant future, at the standards it can achieve.

And now the Government turns its Vulcan death stare to childcare. With a huge number of UK children in paid childcare situations, decisions here are not affecting a minority. Not, I hasten to add, that it would matter if it was. It would still be wrong, unkind, and potentially catastrophic. Liz Truss and Stephen Twigg battle it out in the ‘for and against’ video here (who’s that woman on Liz Truss’s right as you look at the footage, I ask you?); a well-reasoned piece from a specialist against it is here. And as a bonus ball, here’s an article on the Tories’ ‘childcare expert’ that I had to share, as it beggars belief. And, in addition, I would like to tell you a story.

On the day my little girl L1 turned three, she was in her kind, attentive, well-staffed nursery. We had given her her pressies and had the following day – which also happens to be my birthday – off for a double-bubble celebration; so as a consequence, that day, I was in work. I was five months pregnant with L2 at the time.

Unknown to us, my poor little girl must have had a viral infection, as mid-way through the morning, one of my department popped her head round the door (I was in a lengthy meeting) looking pretty frightened. “Your nursery’s trying to get hold of you”, she said, “L1 has fainted and she’s going to hospital.”

Needless to say it was one of the most terrifying moments of my life. Lovely marketing team members got me out of the office replete with £20 to get me home by cab if push came to shove, but the train’s faster; and with an hour and a half commute ahead of me – at least – to get from work to hospital; M AWOL; and my mother while find-able and on her way, still a little distance away, my tiny daughter had no-one with her at that very difficult point in her small life. Except, of course, she did.

Because there were enough staff members at that nursery for her key worker to hold her close until the ambulance came, to travel to hospital with her in the ambulance, to be there until we could be, and then to wait with us all until we knew that – thank God – everything was alright.

What would have happened to my baby, my just-three year old if she was at nursery after Liz Truss’s threatened reformation? Well probably they wouldn’t have noticed her unconscious so fast, for a start. And she would likely have been sent in an ambulance, confused, scared and unwell, on her own, with strangers, because there would have been a mere scraping of staff available to look after the kids remaining in the nursery, let alone send one off with my girl. I’ve written this with tears in my eyes from the memory, let alone the thought of what could have been. This ratio change cannot be allowed to happen.

While on the subject of discrimination…

… As of course I just have been, speaking about maternity rights, I wanted to highlight this individual example of how unbending bureaucracy and rigid adherence to rules, not the needs of human beings, will cause not only distress, but also risks forcing a brilliant young person to think differently about himself.

My friend’s son, now aged 12, started at secondary school in September, like thousands and thousands of other eleven year olds. Equally, like thousands and thousands of eleven year olds, the school’s about eight miles away so he has transport arranged to take him to and from the school. He has Downs Syndrome, but thanks to his own attitude and that of his parents, this is not the defining factor of his life. Sadly I have not met the lad in person, but from Facebook posts from his mum one thing that’s very clear is that the defining factor of his life is all the things he can and does do – drama, hanging out with friends, learning at school – which are identical to those thousands and thousands of eleven year olds I referenced previously.

For very good reasons, as a result of a risk assessment he travels to school in a minibus, on which for the moment there are no other kids, simply because no other kids in that area right now need it.

So there’s lots of room in that minibus.

On the main school bus, there is usually sufficient room so that when one of the kids travelling on that bus wants to bring a friend home, they pay £2, and that friend travels as well. So my friend’s son wanted to pay his £2 and bring a friend home with him, too. Like everyone else. And the answer from the council was – you’ve probably guessed it – no. Because apparently no-one else is insured to travel in this spacious transport option bar my friend’s son and the driver. It is – this makes me so angry on their behalf – ‘against policy’.

So this lad who never considers himself disabled or different, because of the work his parents and others have done to make this so, now at the age of eleven, only eleven, is being told by the system that unlike everyone else he cannot invite a friend back from school, because he is ‘different’ to the others. Previously, why would he think that? Now, because of their blinkered actions, thoughtless discrimination and refusal to look at the circumstances of an individual person, the risk is that ‘different’ – negatively – is how he will start to feel.

It is horrible and it is wrong and it is thoughtless. It is unthinkable that a child able to manage happily in a secondary school with all his peers is suddenly told that actually, usual rules do not apply. I wanted to highlight this firstly to say to his inspiring parents: anyone who thinks ‘people first’ is outraged by this treatment of your son, and you are right to fight this all the way, you will find waves of support wherever you turn.

But secondly to highlight that we – collectively, including local councils and other public bodies who I appreciate are constrained by budgetary and other requirements – must think first about the effect that rules and regulations have on people before these rules and regulations are set in stone. Ask questions, consider scenarios, talk to service users… Just look at the human element before you apply a cost to the service you deliver. As a country we run a risk of becoming utterly enslaved to available budget coupled with risk aversion (I refer to my previous post for a macro application of this principle) and every individual has a responsibility to apply ‘people first’ to their own activities in order to counteract this insidious trend.

Maternity pay discrimination – the tip of the iceberg

Oh joy. At the moment there is such a plethora of rampant lunacy being spouted by people in the public eye that I scarcely know to where I should turn my attention.

This week however I believe the winner (to date – no chickens being currently counted) is Godfrey Bloom MEP, and his comment: “No self-respecting small businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age”.

An excellent blog on the full comment is here in The Spectator, written by Isabel Hardman.

Now, I only want to focus on two things. Firstly, Mr Bloom discriminates against one small group in society in this way, when it is actually impossible to do so for the following reason. Is there any way to identify who is going to need to take significant time off, for a plethora of often terrible, tragic reasons? No. So discriminating against women like this is not only offensive in terms of the skills, experience and capability being confined to the scrapheap because of a ‘maybe’; it is also bonkers, because there is absolutely no way to tell who will actually cost your business cold hard cash by their unexpected absence. And to look at it one way, at least with maternity leave you have some time to prepare for what’s going to happen. There is a good reason why it is illegal to ask someone about their future baby life choice plans in interview. Would any employer think about saying “are you planning on having a massive car crash while you work for me?” or “do you reckon you’re likely to have a stroke within first 12 months of working with us?”. Should we start asking about how many hours’ sleep a night people have, as part of the interview process? No? Well maybe we should. Being overtired leads to a whole range of risk factors. Claiming that you won’t employ child bearing age women to ‘mitigate risk’ is discrimination, pure and simple. There are an awful lot of more, um, risky risks to keep an eye on here.

And secondly, let’s be practical for one small moment. No matter how you cut it, it wasn’t ever an option for M to take the mat leave on my behalf, now was it, yet we both wanted the children. So let’s say I was a bloke and everything else was exactly the same – background, experience, achievements, even the penchant for unnatural hair colouring – would that make me as a man a better employee, or simply less of a risk? It’s the latter; therefore it is discrimination, as the deciding factor is dictated by circumstance not skill. I feel very lucky that both my maternity leaves were taken while I worked for a truly enlightened boss. Or maybe he was just being fair, and it is the alternative ways that many other employers react that make him appear enlightened.

Parental leave – where either parent can take the time off – will make things easier on the individuals taking the leave to decide who and when, supporting both careers (allegedly), but oooh that’s a UKIP quandary then. Because shouldn’t that as a result mean that men of any age ought to be viewed as an employment risk, since a man at any stage of life could become a dad, and take the time off.

I read Richard Godwin’s Farage interview in the Evening Standard on Monday, and was chilled by UKIP’s current lack of a deficit reduction policy, and apparent lack of ability to deliver one. “In October, we have to put down a plan of how we would deal with the deficit — and that is going to be one of the biggest challenges we’ve had to face,” said Farage blithely. Perhaps UKIP should concentrate on working out this, rather than trying to dictate demented business policy.

Michael Gove’s phonics farce

On Tuesday I went to a phonics meeting at the Ls school. L2 has the misfortune to be a victim of the second year of Michael Gove’s demented Phonics Screening Check; like all schools, ours has had this ridiculous additional test foisted upon them. Thanks ‘Mike’. Now I appreciate that by the language I’m using you can probably spot I’m not the biggest fan of Gove nor indeed most of the changes he’s either introduced or trying to introduce, but in the interests of involved parenting I thought I’d best go along to find out more.

Firstly, testing tiny children – and they are tiny children – academically is a farce. They are little, and tests are stressful, no matter how nurturing the environment they take the test in. I simply cannot understand why the concept of success or failure has to be a part of education when they are in their second year of school. It’s pretty rubbish to be six and told that you’ve failed something, isn’t it. There is enough of that shenanigans later on.

And they learn in different ways at different paces. I only have the two children but even from that statistically insignificant sample (it would never stand up as quotable proof in The Day Job) I can see that this is the case. So for one child, learning to read via phonics might make perfect sense, while for the next, it’s photographic recall; for yet another, it will be sound association. Some children think in pictures, some think in words, and some think in something entirely different. So testing progress on a phonics-based system can’t possibly provide a true guide to how clearly they’re taking things in.

And in addition, surely seeing a clearly made-up word to read out will throw many little children into a state of confusion and even panic. They don’t know it, it doesn’t mean anything, but they’re expected to say it. The word isn’t real, yet have to behave as if it is. It’s a fairly sophisticated concept, isn’t it, asking a five or six year old to sound out a word via phonics to deliver a vowel and consonant combination that doesn’t actually include a meaning at the end of it?

Because yes, that is this test. And here is the heart of my objection to it. The list of words they have to read consists of a mixture of made-up and real words which they are expected to treat in the same way. On the practice sheet – I have it in front of me now – the made-up words are ‘ot’, ‘vap’, ‘osk’ and ‘ect’. I already predict L2 will be too caught-up in the make-up of an ‘ect’ – or is it ‘to ect’, who knows – to take the rest of it in. And I would argue that the English language is rich and varied enough that if Gove’s gang really must test at this stage – and it seems to be something they’re increasingly set upon – they could at least mine the set of real words available to test the same end result.

Don’t try and tell me that the children might know all the words selected – I think at this age that’s highly unlikely; and at least when they succeed in sounding out something real that they’ve never seen before, it’s a step further in vocabulary rather than just in phonics mechanics. Language isn’t mechanics, it’s beautiful, so can’t we please just use it.

Why, for me, decades will not diminish the memory of Stephen Lawrence

Incredibly, it’s 20 years on 22nd April since Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death at a bus stop in Eltham. This breath-taking piece by Jemima Kiss for The Guardian brought that day as clearly as if it were yesterday. Please read it.

The devastating results of his death ricocheted out beyond his brave, strong, dignified family to the heart of the nation’s consciousness. It shook up and subsequently revolutionised our at the time rotten police force, and did the same to the very foundations of the British justice system, leading to the double jeopardy law being scrapped specifically to allow Dobson and Norris to be retried for the crime that for the preceding almost two decades everyone had known they had committed.

A terrible tragedy leading to a terrible miscarriage of justice out of which due to the strength, conviction and tenacity of, in the main, Stephen’s incredible mother Doreen, in many ways this country is transformed. Last summer she was the Olympic Torchbearer who brought tears to my eyes – it was so right that she should play that role, and so good to see her achievements acknowledged. She took her personal grief and need to see justice for her son much further than the vast majority of people, myself included.

I was living in South-East London at the time of Stephen’s murder, and I was pretty much exactly his age. It seemed to me impossible that someone who I could have been at school with, met in the pub, wherever, could have had his life cut short in what was literally the blink of an eye, at the whim of a group of sick racists. At 18 you’re so alive, and the violent ceasing of that state is unthinkable as you are living in it. This goes a long way to explaining why 18-year-olds can tend to the kamikaze, so much so that it’s an expected (while feared by parents) stage of fighting through to adulthood. But murder, callous deliberate ending of that life’s potential – takes it to another level of unthinkable.

I know that amongst my immediate peers there is still a clear memory of 22nd April 1993, and an ongoing genuine outrage at the way the Lawrence family were consistently denied their right for justice for their son. Just reading Facebook around the 2012 trial and conviction of Dobson and Norris showed the passion we all still feel that justice must be done. And we all cheered the bullish statement following their conviction, aimed at the three, equally guilty, still at large: We are coming for you.

Stephen Lawrence’s tragic murder is woven into the fabric of my teenage memories, a part of me. I pray that full justice will be done and that I and all the other peripheral teenage observers I was surrounded by at the time, who genuinely and truly care, will see the right outcome, at last, for the Lawrence family in their fight. To show your support here’s a link to the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust.

Musings on the sin of the stereotype

‘That’ Mail Online article got me thinking last night. I don’t especially want to inflame the ire of Shona Sibary, but I do object to sweeping stereotypes. So what I do want to do is point out that it seems to me that in writing the piece how she did she lost any chance of being taken seriously. Because instead of writing eloquently about her personal experience, she demonised through cliché an entire community.

The vitriol with which she listed her one-size-fits-all views of Mumsnetters was surprising in more than one way, but one of the biggest surprises was that it actually got published under the guise of ‘journalism’. Lumping together an entire online community as poisonous Boden-clad bullies, a ‘Muswell Hill super-mob’ showed a simplicity of thought which I would have thought was beneath any serious writer. But least forgivable was the offensive assumption that those of us who choose to use Mumsnet for whatever purpose it fits in our lives are all somehow subjugated and stifled by their apparently unwanted children, who have according to Ms Sibary removed their sense of identify and sense of worth and ability only to achieve ‘short-term gratification’.

The suggestion that in having babies fulfillment goes out of the window and petty-minded vileness takes its place cannot be justified. It condemns an entire community to the status of imbeciles, not adults making a serious choice to bring children into the world and you know what, embracing it for the life-changing experience it is, good and yes, indeed, who would dispute it, bad. Accusing a complete online community of being on Prozac is not only critically offensive to those mothers – and fathers and non-parents and indeed anyone in any demographic – who have issues in their lives that had led them to need medication or other forms of psychological support – but for me is like taking a flame thrower to a single bluebottle. In these sweeping statements I lost any residual sympathy I may have had for Ms Sibary’s experiences. Because in writing this way she doesn’t stand up to her ‘bullies’ (her word); instead she mirrors the very rhetoric she is complaining about.

It has to be said here that my experiences of Mumsnet – which I am privileged to say include a visit to Downing Street in support of the Railway Children charity – have been of a group of articulate, intelligent and passionate women who act to do something about situations – in this case, runaway children – which they find unacceptable from any angle.

Just like Ms Sibary’s article, this is my opinion. Criticise or agree, that’s the individual reader’s call. But don’t stereotype me because of what I write, and the forum on which I choose to write it.

Sprinter or wing? Reclassifying the seasons

The next weather front is frogs

I am planning to start a petition to ensure official reclassification of the current season, because beyond doubt it is the most ridiculous weather I have ever experienced. Best names I can come up with so far are ‘sprinter’ or ‘wing’ – I bypassed ‘rubbish’ even though that’s probably most appropriate.

Let’s face it, this weather is driving down even the most inanely, pointlessly optimistic (me) now. It’s unprecedented, and therefore surely deserves new entry status in the Oxford English Dictionary. I have finally caved in and re-washed my big winter coat, putting it on fast-dry when it ought to be out in the sun drip-drying and airing for summer storage. I am also starting to worry about August’s plan for camping, and considering if an in-tent portaloo may be required for those midnight knocks by nature.

The kids aren’t overly concerned, I have to admit. L1 mutters that she doesn’t like the snow anymore but I think that’s more to keep my whinging company than a deep-seated conviction on her part. She misses the trampoline but careful application of my tea towels to kind-of absorb the left-over hail means she can still get out there and bounce even during sprinter/wing with reasonable regularity. L1 is out diving for the ball come rain, hail, snow, plagues of frogs (bear with me on the latter, way things are going it’s surely next) but I am having to do more laundry than ever before with the attendant mud.

Other seasonal possible names very welcome – answers on a postcard (or via the medium of electronica) if you will…