Pathways To Inclusion

In the 1940s, Americans were encouraged to smoke Camels as an aid to digestion. The ‘increased alkalinity’ was particularly good for you, apparently. Smoking wasn’t just regarded as innocuous, it was seen as positively beneficial . Light up on any street today, and you become a social pariah, polluting the air and draining the NHS of resources, selfishly taking doctors away from the sick kid who needs a heart transplant and making them tend to your odious blackened lungs instead. My point is, social attitudes change over time. And what one generation regards as harmless, even a force for good, future generations may come to view as socially undesirable. Last night I attended a debate put on by the Private School Policy Reform (PSPR) group, who are valiantly trying to establish some kind of meaningful direction for future reform of the independent education sector. Six speakers offered their proposals for how they would level the playing field. There was a brief discussion, follo...

There has been a steep rise in the number of assemblies and form time presentations focusing on the issue of climate change. Unless we change course soon, approximately 75% of all assembly time will have been taken away by 2030, caused entirely by man-made climate change school resource packs. It has broken free from Geography and Science lessons, and now all manner of classrooms, from PSHE and RE, to Maths and English, are talking about it. But it feels to me like we haven’t worked out how to tell this particular story. We haven’t figured out the language yet, the tone, the narrative arc. And it’s really important we work this out sooner rather than later. My son, who has just turned four, knows that the Earth is sick. He knows this because he recently got out from the library ‘ Hello, Mr World ’, in which our planet is weirdly personified as a patient being examined by two young children pretending to be doctors. It’s a cute conceit, if you ignore the fact that it leads to a...