Pathways To Inclusion

This letter's been doing the rounds on EduTwitter these last few days, sparking off all manner of heated debates and reaching the ears of the local press. An academy in Lancashire sent a rather angry missive to the parents of a student with autism who had apparently not been working hard enough during lockdown. It's worth reading, if you haven't already done so. What's the first thing that strikes you? Is it the weirdly long-winded rambling? The poorly constructed clauses of the first paragraph? The way it's not personalised (it's evidently been sent to several parents), and yet at the same time still manages to come across as a deeply personal attack on the poor kid? Or is this just an inevitable result of what's been happening in education these last 10 years or so? Because this has been coming. Iterations of this letter get sent out every term. It's unusual in its brutal honesty, perhaps. Like they've forgotten that they're supposed to hide t...

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...

Am I a metaphor? Julia Donaldson stories are like a nice scent that you come across one day in early parenthood, and you think 'that’s nice'. So then someone follows you around spraying the scent in your face and on your clothes and bed and every room of your house and in your car and everywhere you go, every day, five times a day for the next four years until you can’t smell anything else. We love Julia Donaldson, of course. Don't get me wrong. But as my eldest child is moving on (to the brilliant Roald Dahl), and my youngest is just starting to ride the JD wave, I thought I’d take this opportunity to rank and review, from worst to best, 13 of her stories that have occupied so much of our lives in recent years. 13. The Smartest Giant in Town Putting aside the long-winded and tedious narrative, there are deeper issues with the story that earn this last place on my list. This is a normal town, seemingly populated by giants. But the relationship between the giants and the reg...