Pathways To Inclusion

A few months ago everyone around me who was working with vulnerable young people seemed to be gearing up for a mental health crisis. Floods of referrals would be needed, and who was set up for online consultations? Home visits? Who’s in charge of the trauma recovery programme? Now, from where I’m standing, it feels as if the crisis we were expecting never, really... happened. Or at least hasn’t happened yet. Why? Landscape #5 by Fabienne Monestier 15 years ago, on the day of the 7/7 bombings, I was working in a large hospital a couple of miles away from Tavistock Square. Please, don’t clap for me. I was an accounts administrator in the private outpatient wing. Anyway, my lasting memory of this day is of all these consultants tearing away from their private consultations, donning scrubs (it was the first and last time I ever saw them wearing scrubs) and milling around near A&E. Ready and, heroically, waiting. For patients that never arrived. The number of people injured turned out t...

“As with almost everything, the impact will be felt most by low-income communities and families, and we as a nation will have to ask ourselves how we view our role as a society. Is it to support those in need? Is education a public good or a positional good?” (Akil Bello) Now is patently not the right time to be putting children through the 11-plus. While all other exams have been cancelled, schools will be ploughing ahead mercilessly with the 11-plus tests in September as planned. These are exams which will determine the path of these children’s education, their friendships, their careers, their lives. The highest of stakes, the greatest of pressures, and a level of stress most 9-10 year olds probably don't need in their lives right now, let alone their parents. What's more, this year will inevitably see the widest gulf between those children fortunate enough to live in comfortable, well-resourced homes, and those who do not share these advantages. Between those who can offer ...

Urban Myth by David Antonides I miss the undulating flow of a varied existence, the rhythmic passing between spaces, the rituals that celebrate the demarcation of time and place. The experiences, for the most part, remain largely similar. But they are no longer physically or temporally distinct from each other. And I'm finding this problematic. So yes, I miss going to the pub, and going to soft play with my children. I even miss going to work. But it’s not the places themselves that I miss, rather it’s the ability to pass from one space to another. And, crucially, the ability to leave them. To return to a place that is not them. Or, to put it another way, since pretty much all of our shopping has moved online, I don’t miss the feeling of being in a shop so much as I miss the feeling of not being in a shop. Just like, since all our social drinking now takes place on our sofa, I miss the time when our lounge wasn’t also a pub. And now that I am fielding my work on devices that are a...

Stay safe. I found it strange at first when this became our new sign-off. Shouldn’t it be 'keep well'? Or 'stay healthy'? But no, it's our safety that appears to be under threat. An intruder has broken in, past the defences we naively thought might have protected us. Over the last couple of weeks, I have started to reflect on how losing our safety net might help us better understand those who've never had one. The Fountain by Juliano Kaglis After my wife and I were burgled a few years ago, the thing we lost that hurt the most was not any of the possessions that were taken, but the underlying feeling that our front door marked the point at which outsiders could not enter. It has since taken time (and some heavy duty locks) to rebuild this psychological sense of security, for that is what we needed to do. We as humans need to kid ourselves every day into thinking that the walls around us will keep out any potential dangers, just so that we can go on...

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...

"Exclusion and seclusion can echo relational trauma and systemic trauma; physical restraint can echo physical and sexual abuse. Retraumatisation... may drive even more challenging behaviour." (Centre for Mental Health: Briefing 54) Trapped by Ashley Huisman A number of cases recently have seen mothers taking, or threatening to take their child's school to court for the seemingly barbaric systems of internal exclusion that are in use. Mothers of children with ADHD, with ASD, with mental health difficulties, with family trauma. The mother of a son who spent a third of his school year in ‘isolation’. The mother of a daughter who attempted suicide while she was in an isolation booth. I'm glad that it’s been widely reported on the BBC and even made the front page of the Guardian a couple of weeks ago; we downplay cases like this at our peril. There is now an active ‘ ban the booths ’ campaign group, and the first ‘ lose the booths ’ conference took place in L...

"I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care." Jean Rhys  'Belonging' by Maria Friberg Too many children feel like they do not belong. In their communities, in their schools, in their homes. When I see children who are persistent absentees, who are at risk of exclusion, I see an unmet craving to feel like a valued member of something, anything. I see a desperate search for belonging that can take them to anywhere and anyone who might offer it to them, whose risks and long-term consequences they are unable to safely evaluate. We know that a sense of belonging is critical to the development of a child. We have know this since Maslow , since Bowlby . The renewed focus in the 1990s, through the work of Goodenow , and Baumeister & Lear...