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Throw the book at prisoners and they'll love it
Literate inmates are teaching the illiterate in a pioneering scheme, finds Minette Marrin
Wandsworth Prison is punishingly ugly. An officer led us down some steps into a bleak open space between tall buildings. I could see nothing growing, not a shrub, not a handful of grass. The officer kept locking and unlocking gates as we left the outside world and the natural world further and further behind.
The vulnerable prisoners' unit houses prisoners whose crimes are not popular with other inmates, such as bent coppers and sex offenders, I imagine. It was some of these prisoners I had come to meet and there they were in a small, very functional room that serves as a chapel, with mugs of tea -a group of middle-aged men in neat casual clothes who had been unlocked for the occasion.
Visiting prisoners feels like an intrusion, but these inmates really want to meet a journalist who is interested in what they are doing. It is something that they are proud of and their pride is a kind of liberation. These men are the pioneers of a new voluntary literacy scheme whereby prisoners who can read teach prisoners who can't.
It is well known that there is a high level of illiteracy in prison. Illiteracy almost certainly contributes to crime and to recidivism. People who cannot read or write will find it hard to get and keep jobs and may drift into crime. Quite apart from that, illiteracy is deeply frustrating and humiliating and rage and shame can make people antisocial and destructive.
Christopher Morgan put these ideas together: last month he won the annual Lord Longford award for prison reform for his Shannon Reading Plan, and he is the man who took me to see how it works in Wandsworth.
Morgan set up the Shannon Trust in 1996 to use the royalties from Invisible Crying Tree, a book of letters that he exchanged with Tom Shannon, a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder. Neil Lodge, a young prison officer, asked to try the plan in the vulnerable prisoners' unit and launched the Shannon Reading Scheme, or Toe by Toe, in late 2000.
It is entirely voluntary, no training is needed, it costs the taxpayer nothing, and it works. By the end of 2001, 80 prisoners had learnt to read. Last year the scheme began to spread widely and there are now about 400 mentors teaching about 1,000 prisoners in 80 different jails.
The prisoners I met were all founder members and teachers (or mentors) of the Toe by Toe method. The rules are simple. Lessons must be given five times a week for no more than 20 minutes, one to one, and must follow the Toe by Toe reading manual (which is provided free by the trust). A lot of people were sceptical at first.
One officer had his mind changed by seeing a prisoner weeping in his cell after he had, for the first time, been able to read a story to his granddaughter in the visitors' hall.
"I've seen prisoners, I've seen Irish terrorists, change their whole outlook on life through education. But that's not open to people who can't read," said Bob Duncan, a former prison governor. "I don't know if you can imagine what it's like to have a letter from your mother which you can't read."
The illiterate prisoner cannot decipher the countless notices everywhere or read a private letter by himself, or join any of the education or training programmes or learn a trade; he might not be able to work in kitchens or laundries if he cannot read the health and safety notices.
Illiteracy is itself a kind of imprisonment; there is no way out of the boundaries drawn by what you can't know.
One prisoner agreed to come into the chapel and show me part of a session. He was an elderly black man, neatly dressed, with grizzled hair and a quiet and rather sorrowful manner. He explained that he had never had any education and had been completely unable to read.
Hard though it is to learn to read after 60, he was making good progress. He read aloud from a passage of complex words, prompted occasionally by his mentor; when I asked him what this success meant to him, he smiled. The meaning of this reserved, sad smile was clear. "I have seen a dirty, smelly little self-harmer turn into someone clean with self- esteem and a haircut," said Lodge. "For the first time in their lives they feel normal."
Other prison officers have confirmed that learning -and teaching -reading makes prisoners much more confident and constructive, much less prone to aggression and mood swings. Lodge was the first officer to support Toe by Toe, but many others have come to see its benefits. The scheme could not work without the active daily help of prison officers and the enlightened support of the Prison Officers' Association.
I asked whether there were any prisoners that Toe by Toe cannot help, such as people with dyslexia; the mentors believe that their manual can teach almost anyone. The idea that learning to read is simple will no doubt be seen as hotly controversial but it makes perfect sense to me. When I was a child, my brothers and I taught our younger sister to read. We used the Dr Seuss books and, without realising it, a conventional, old-fashioned phonic method, putting sounds together; puh-ee-guh is pig, as we ourselves had been taught. It was easy.
However, it took us a long time because she has a learning disability, or what was then called a mental handicap, as a result of brain damage at birth. As far as I remember her school had given up, or perhaps her teacher did not have the determination or the time that we (like the prisoner mentors) had.
In the end my sister became an excellent reader, with vocabulary and spelling that are well above average. At some point a social worker told our mother that we should not have taught our sister to read: we were imposing our middle-class aspirations upon her.
So we were in a way. We were aspiring, on her behalf, to all the pleasure and understanding and confidence and independence that only a person who can read can aspire to. Even in prison.
This country's schools have been failing children for decades. Many of the failed children of yesterday are now in prison, where the rate of illiteracy is startling. Among young offenders it is thought that 70% are functionally or totally illiterate. According to a social exclusion unit report of 2002, more than half of all male prisoners and more than two-thirds of all female prisoners have no qualifications. Many different studies have shown that dyslexics are very much over-represented in prison (52% as against 10% in the general population, according to one survey).
It is encouraging that people in jail might now, through learning to read, be finding for themselves a way out of their imprisonment and into a much wider, richer world, in this sense at least, and maybe later, too, on the outside.
Perhaps they might consider sending their used copies of Toe by Toe to the education secretary, or even offer their services in the classroom; if cons can teach other cons to read, they might have even more spectacular results in failing schools, before some of those children turn into cons and fetch up somewhere like Wandsworth, in their turn.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 28, 2004 | Comments (0)
Take care, those medical experts can ruin your life
There can be no worse injustice, in peace time, than to convict innocent parents of the terrible crime of murdering (or hurting) their own babies when they are found guilty solely on the basis of a questionable scientific theory, or on the unquestioned evidence of one expert alone, and when there is nothing to suggest the parents are guilty, except that particular evidence and that particular theory.
Nearly 20 years ago there was a very ugly case in Cleveland, when many parents were forcibly separated from their children on suspicion of sexually abusing them.
It was a time of growing public obsession with child sex abuse and a growing feeling that it was much more common, across all classes, than anyone had supposed.
A Dr Marietta Higgs came up with the view -a theory -that certain kinds of child sex abuse can be diagnosed by "a particular kind of physical examination", as Dominic Grieve MP delicately put it in a recent parliamentary debate. In fact it had to do with how they responded to anal examination. This was used as evidence in the Cleveland cases, with disastrous results for many innocent parents and their children.
Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, in her wide-reaching report at the time, warned against excessive reliance on expert opinion without sufficient corroborative evidence. Doesn't this sound exactly like the heartbreaking cases of Sally Clark, Trupti Patel and Angela Cannings?
All these women were tried for murdering their babies on the basis of Professor Sir Roy Meadow's evidence, as prime prosecution witness.
Sir Roy is the paediatrician and expert witness who gained celebrity, and lately notoriety, with his views on sudden infant death syndrome and his theory of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. Readers might recall his rather chilling rule of thumb: unless proven otherwise, one cot death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder.
These three women, at least, have at the cost of terrible suffering had their names entirely cleared. Clark was released from jail last year after her second appeal, Patel was acquitted. Cannings was finally released from prison after her second appeal last December, partly because the judges were doubtful of Meadow's statistical evidence and his "intensely dogmatic approach".
Immediately after the Cannings judgment, the attorney-general ordered a review of 258 criminal convictions within the past 10 years in which a parent has been found guilty of killing a child under the age of two. Two-hundred-and-fifty-eight is a big number. And it is not only criminal courts that can make such decisions, and separate (surviving) children from parents. Family courts can and do and have -some of them on the basis of Meadow's evidence.
Some of these family court decisions are to be reviewed, though it is not clear which. The children's minister, Margaret Hodge, with her customary tact and fellow feeling, announced in a newspaper interview that the government can't reunite thousands of mothers with children wrongfully taken from them. The number of family court cases could even run into tens of thousands, she said.
Never again, one might say. But now it seems that the same thing might be going on with shaken baby syndrome (SBS), which is current orthodoxy. There are, supposedly, 200 cases of SBS every year in this country and seven times that number in America -babies so violently shaken, according to the theory, that it causes bleeding around their brains and in their retinas (at the back of the eye), along with brain damage and often death.
These two kinds of bleeding are seen as textbook evidence that the baby has been been violently shaken, unless proved otherwise. This theory has sent bereaved paretns to jail. However new American and British research published in The Lancet last week casts doubt on the scientific basis of the theory of SBS.
Two articles, two letters and a Lancet editorial all make learned versions of the same point, that the science behind SBS is not good enough. Retinal bleeding is a "scientifically questionable" sign of SBS and should be re-examined. The evidence for SBS rests on a very small database, most of it poor-quality research, with serious data gaps and logical flaws. And if the medical indications of SBS are not as clear cut as had been previously supposed, doctors should "consider the diagnostic criteria, if not the existence, of shaken baby syndrome".
A very moving BBC1 documentary to be shown tomorrow (Real Story: Shaken Babies) also casts grave doubt on SBS, and therefore on the criminal convictions of people sent to jail for it.
Anyone who is still troubled by the wounded faces of Clark or Patel should watch it. Not every baby with "telltale" bleeding and damage has been attacked; there could be another explanation. The telltale signs are not necessarily telltale at all. There are people in prison who may well be innocent.
The question that intrigues me is why some people allow themselves to feel so certain about a theory, particularly one with such fearful consequences. Certainty is so hopelessly unscientific. Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect much in the way of a scientific approach to evidence from social services or juries, but doctors ought to know something of scientific argument.
There is no absolute proof in the world of so-called facts, only confirmation or disproof of a theory. And all these fashionable orthodoxies are only theories. And all scientific theories, however useful, are imperfect. Most of them are much modified or abandoned as newer and better evidence emerges.
Medical history is littered with ideas of diagnosis and cure which have turned out to be nonsense -not just doubtful, or imperfect, but nonsense. (Think, for example, of 19th-century theories about the damage to health of masturbation which led to children being tied up in bed. Think how many entirely unnecessary hysterectomies have been done on bogus medical grounds by knife-happy surgeons.) Besides, surprising and unusual things do happen in life. Doctors, of all people, should have (and fortunately very often do have) a certain modesty in the face of the complexity of experience.
Unfortunately this modesty is not encouraged by some of the temptations faced by the most ambitious doctors. Giving evidence as a medical expert, and becoming well known and well paid for it, carving out a niche with a bright new medical theory, or aligning yourself to a prominent man with a bright new theory and becoming his disciple, do not encourage doubt. Glittering prizes don't go to the doubtful. Clarity and certainty are more useful.
It is not clever to challenge such a man at the top of his field, either in learned journals or in court. There's not much room at the top and he is probably in charge of it.
Curiously enough, in a society supposedly so lacking in respect, most people defer almost uncritically to the expert. Equally curiously, in a society supposedly so sceptical, proper scepticism is in fact a very rare virtue. And scepticism is the enemy of injustice.
The Sunday Times | | Comments (0)
Spare me all the flowers - a mum's place is in the wrong
On Mothering Sunday, when I was little, we children would go and pick a few limp daffodils and present them to our mother, whereupon she would tell us it was all nonsense. She was a woman of firm views.
She hated the mawkish sentimentality of the day and the way children were manipulated into saccharine demonstrations. Mothering Sunday, she would explain, is the fourth Sunday of Lent and was traditionally the day when girls and boys in domestic service were given time off to go home to visit their mothers. Therefore, she would conclude, it was hardly relevant to children who lived with their mothers all year round in a godless family like ours. We could pick flowers for her any time.
The result of her firm-mindedness was that we never observed Mothering Sunday; at least I never sent cards or floral tributes but simply rang up to agree yet again how ridiculous it all was. But I think she minded secretly and felt sad which only goes to demonstrate the implacable rule of mothering, any day of the year: that a mother's place is in the wrong -as she often told us.
No amount of firm-mindedness can protect a woman from the contradictory and sometimes impossible demands of being a mother. Motherhood is a circle that women are somehow supposed to square. There will always be a host of people to tell a mother that she has got everything wrong: her children, their father, their therapists, her friends, her divorce lawyer, the aggressive hordes of self styled experts in the media -and perhaps her own under-confident heart as well.
Either she will, as in the accusation levelled at my mother's generation, have devoted herself too much to her children and family and, as a result, become clinging, smothering and financially dependent. Alternatively, these days, she will have devoted herself too much to her job -neglecting her children and family in all sorts of disabling ways, thereby contributing to the breakdown of society.
It is hardly surprising that millions of European women are avoiding motherhood altogether or only, cautiously, managing 0.9% of a baby. In some European countries the birth rate is below the figures needed to sustain the present population level, even if the high birth rate of some ethnic minorities is taken into account.
The only people who are embracing motherhood with unworried enthusiasm in this country are, of course, the wrong ones -the fast-growing contingent of gymslip mothers and irresponsible teenagers who happily get pregnant, again and again, careless of how to support their babies or even who the father is. Perhaps there will be glossy Mother's Day cards for these teenagers before long, if they aren't in the shops already: "Congratulations! Three before you're 17! Way to go!"
One girl who would be entitled to such a card is Courtney Cassidy from Leicester, who recently made the news with her startling sexual history. Now 18, she produced three babies by three different men by the time she was 17, the first of them when she was 14 and "felt ready".
Courtney does not even know the name of the sire of her second baby, Lennon, who was the result of a drunken night's clubbing when her first baby, Laina-Leagh, was six months old. She does not think there is anything wrong in expecting other people to pay for her and her babies in their bleak council flat.
Although Courtney appears to be optimistic this is still a sad story and an increasingly common one. Man hands on misery to man, as Philip Larkin wrote in his poem about what your mum and dad do to you -and woman hands on misery to woman, too. Courtney's mother has four children, all by different fathers, and her older sister Emma also had her first baby when she was 14.
The really shocking thing about this story is not the deprivation and the irresponsibility that underlie it. It is that now her story has made the news, Courtney is becoming a minor celebrity. She has been bombarded by television companies and newspapers that want interviews and "glamour modelling", possibly topless, which she might do. "I'd love to be like Jordan," she said. In other words, the poor girl is being rewarded for her feckless behaviour.
The message to other young girls from backgrounds like hers will be obvious: have babies and skip school. You have nothing to lose and maybe a lot to gain, starting with a place of your own and maybe a bit of fame. The message to young women who have been responsible is also clear: they need not have bothered when irresponsibility carries no risks.
Something strange is going on here. There seems to be a huge and growing confusion about motherhood. On the one hand motherhood is publicly celebrated as never before. This in itself is odd, because fewer and fewer women devote themselves to it, even part-time. When most women were full-time mothers, motherhood may officially have been apple pie, but it was not triumphantly hyped up the way it is now.
These days celebrities are chosen as mum of the year; last week the winner was Ulrika Jonsson, who is expecting her third baby by a third father. Pregnant film stars proudly display their bellies and never stop talking about motherhood being the best thing that ever happened (while doggedly pursuing their brilliant careers). In a startling aggressive celebration of motherhood a statue of a disabled, armless woman with a huge pregnant belly has just been unveiled in Trafalgar Square.
Meanwhile we are inundated with alarming advice from all sides about how to give birth the right way, feed babies, make the right choices about nappies and play and how to cope with sibling rivalry. We are nagged constantly about the many dangers our children face -medically, psychologically, socially, sexually and so on -in our extremely risk-averse society.
Motherhood is presented both as amazingly wonderful and amazingly difficult and demanding. Yet it seems, mysteriously enough, that it is not too wonderful or difficult to combine with a demanding job -and not too difficult for a deprived, troubled young teenager. It just doesn't add up.
All this suggests to me a striking public hypocrisy about the rights and wrongs of motherhood. Most mothers are in the wrong in one way or another -they are too demanding, not strict enough, wrong about the MMR injection or unable to breastfeed. Yet the only mothers who do not feel that they are in the wrong are precisely the ones who are clearly in the wrong. They are the schoolgirl mothers or the women who drift from pregnancy to pregnancy in a haze of irresponsibility and poverty, who neglect their fatherless children and themselves and who are wholly dependent on welfare.
All this confusion is depressing. Perhaps it's for this reason that Mother's Day does not really seem to me to be a day to celebrate, any more than it did to my mother.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 21, 2004 | Comments (0)
Oh Lord, even the archbishop is clutching at atheist straws
We must not mock the afflicted, according to the Christian teaching of my childhood, but the temptation to mock the Church of England, and particularly the Archbishop of Canterbury, in their various afflictions, is almost irresistible.
Last week Dr Rowan Williams told a clutch of theologians at 10 Downing Street that it would be a good idea to teach Philip Pullman's bestselling children's trilogy in religious education classes in schools.
Apparently, the archbishop has recently enjoyed the stage adaptation very much and he thinks His Dark Materials could address the "inadequacies of some religious education courses which only taught about religious festivals".
It is impossible not to laugh. This is an exquisite example of the silliness and trendy opportunism that inspired Peter Simple's comic creation in The Daily Telegraph of Dr Spaceley-Trellis, the go-ahead Bishop of Stretchford, the Pooter of the Anglican Gotterdammerung.
Of course it would be a very good thing if schoolchildren (and adults as well) were encouraged to read Pullman's masterpiece (although its massive sales suggest that not much encouragement is necessary). I read each of the books aloud to my son, as they appeared, and then more than once again for myself, and they are dazzling.
It is hard to see them as children's literature only.
Their intellectual scope is vast, just as their mythic appeal is profound.
Nonetheless (and also because of that), children love them. But for an archbishop, no matter how go-ahead, to recommend them as texts for religious education lessons is daft.
"In a very real sense," as Dr Spaceley-Trellis would say, these books are a powerful attack against organised religion and against the idea of God. The deity turns out to be lying enfeebled and ancient, and is in fact killed.
The trilogy has rather understandably outraged many Christians; the Association of Christian Teachers condemned it as "shameless blasphemy" and The Catholic Herald said it is "fit for the bonfire".
I myself did not read it that way. But one need not take such a simple-minded view as that to agree that the trilogy is far from Christian-church-friendly, and absolutely unbelieving in the sense the old-fashioned Christians were taught to believe.
"I only hope," said the archbishop "that teachers are equipped to tease out what in Pullman's world is and is not reflective of Christian teaching as Christians understand it."
Some hope. One can only wonder what planet he inhabits. There can be few teachers equipped for such a difficult intellectual exercise -these are complex books and to judge them critically demands a wide knowledge of literature, theology and history.
Teachers, let alone their pupils, know extraordinarily little of the most basic Christian doctrine. And, in any case, Christians, as in Dr Williams's own church, are deeply divided on almost every aspect of Christian doctrine, particularly on the priesthood, on sex and on marriage.
There is something deeply depressing about Anglican squabbles about homosexuals, as if with all sorrows of the world, it is to be this that finally divides the church. These days you can believe almost anything, or nothing, and still call yourself a Christian, an Anglican. One can hardly help sympathising with religious education teachers for sticking to a few fun festivals.
The obvious question is why the archbishop of an ailing church would want to tag on to the coat tails of a bestselling atheist intellectual such as Pullman. The answer, I suspect, is power. Power by association. Touching the hem of the garment of success.
Pullman, or rather his story, has the sort of mythic and moral power that the church has for so long been losing. His narrative seems to meet needs that the Church of England's narrative -muddled, enfeebled and incoherent as it is - cannot. I suspect that the archbishop somehow hopes to bring his church renewed power by association with the glamour of His Dark Materials and its mass appeal.
It cannot work. The difficulty with the Christian narrative -to use the buzz word -is that its power has depended on its being literally true.
For centuries Christians were taught to believe literally in the divinity of Christ, in the virgin birth, in miracles, transubstantiation, a personal god who intervenes in history, the efficacy of personal prayer, the devil, damnation, the resurrection of the flesh and the life everlasting, with all your original arms and legs restored, if necessary.
When I was a schoolgirl our teachers were already saying, in the spirit of the newly created Dr Spaceley-Trellis, that we must think of it all as metaphor. In other words, we must think of it as not literally true, in other words untrue.
And at that point Christian teaching -the faith -suddenly has no more power than any other of the great myths, and some to my taste and to many people's, are much more satisfactory. The point about them, and their enduring power, is that one does not have to believe them literally.
You do not have to go to the stake on the question of whether Beowulf really existed, or Persephone was really taken down to the underworld, or Leda was actually impregnated by a swan, or even whether Gollum really bit off Frodo's finger. All these things have deep resonances, but none of the inconvenient claims of fact.
It is striking, in contemporary surveys of religious belief, that most people call themselves religious but will only admit to a faith in something vague and indeterminate out there, long on general "meaning" but short on any detail.
They tend to say, quite incorrectly, that all religions are the same really, or that what matters about them is the same.
Most of us seem to have a sense of the numinous and most of us admit to spiritual needs, whatever that may mean, but few of us can bear much religious detail.
In fact, those with specific religious beliefs tend, almost by definition, to be fundamentalists, and most of us are wary of fundamentalism.
Dr Williams wrote last week of "purification by atheism" -meaning that faith needs to be reminded regularly of the gods in which it should not believe. He said that Pullman does this effectively for the believer.
This is simply incomprehensible to me. It seems to me that by suggesting what is not believable, atheism (or agnosticism) does not purify faith; it undermines it or destroys it. Hence the sad affliction of the church today, unable to believe yet unfree to disbelieve, institutionally faithful, yet more and more faithless, which is the classic position of existential bad faith.
Pullman's trilogy has nothing to contribute to Christian belief; on the contrary, it presents a spiritual vision of the world without any god at all, a world beyond god, all the more powerful for being no more and no less than fiction.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 14, 2004 | Comments (0)
Why should I put my son at risk to help a failing school?
There is a certain justice in the way that Alastair Campbell, for all his maniacal efforts to manipulate our perceptions, has managed to get himself stuck with an image that enrages almost everyone.
It is perhaps less just that the anger he provokes should be directed at his consort, Fiona Millar, and at her new television series on state education.
Admittedly, she can be pretty infuriating in her own right, but the questions she raised in last Friday's programme ought to have been seriously considered long ago.
Underlying her series is the confused socialist logic, no less annoying for being discredited, that unless everybody can have something, nobody should have it.
Since not everybody has choice in education, nobody should have choice. Since some people have no option but their local "bog standard" comprehensive (as Campbell once memorably described them), nobody should have anything better.
Choice is in fact the problem, in her view. If only the -how shall we describe them? -better sort of parents would patronise their local state schools, they would pull them out of the bog standard. But as everyone knows, given a choice many of them won't. Many of them in their parental perversity prefer to choose what they think is best for their children, as far as they can.
However, Millar completely failed to convince me that the problem with state schools is choice. The choices that lead to white flight, inner-city blight and gross inequalities between state schools (which she describes well) are not the problem, but a response to the many problems that failing schools face. Most of these problems lie outside the school gates. Schools cannot fix inside the gates the problems that are destroying them from outside. Nor can a few well-meaning middle-class parents.
The problems that make many state schools, particularly in big cities, absolutely unacceptable to responsible parents, let alone to parents of very able children, are social. They have to do with high levels of delinquency and crime among young people, with drug abuse, with a disaffected youth culture and with large concentrations of people newly arrived from other countries and cultures who speak little English. Everyone knows this.
Nobody in her right mind would send her child to a school on the other side of the city if he could go to a reasonably good school down the road. Nobody wants her son to go to a school an hour away which won't provide local friends to play with afterwards. Parents cannot get involved with these schools because of the distance. They also involve using unreliable and dangerous public transport.
Parents do it because they feel driven to, not because of snobbery or racism or frenzied ambition.
It is an article of faith, to which Millar subscribes, that demanding "middle-class" parents can pull up a school to meet their own aspirations (and therefore they ought to). But what is the evidence for this unexamined creed? It may be so, in some cases. But how many parents like that does it take to make a critical mass in a huge state comprehensive? The inertia they would face is immense.
My experience of middle-class amelioration in action is just the opposite. We live on a communal garden that includes some social housing. At one time a difficult and aggressive boy with many of the usual social problems was terrorising the younger children. Despite the fact that he was in a minority of one, swamped, one would have thought, by middle-class children and their well-meaning mummies and daddies, nobody could do anything to restrain him.
The atmosphere in the garden was soured, the strong feeling of community was threatened and little children were afraid to go out. Talking to him was useless, thumping him was against the law and his mother could do nothing. The problem was never solved; it merely disappeared when he moved elsewhere.
Translate this boy and his problems into an inner-city state school and multiply him many times. In some of the worst inner-city schools 30% of children have special educational needs and 25% is common. That means they have either serious emotional or social problems or learning disabilities, or they can't read, or they speak little English.
To have 30% of the children in a classroom presenting complex and disruptive problems is not good news for the other 70%, or for their teacher. How could the presence of a few aspirational middle-class children in such bedlam possibly help anyone? How can a couple of bossy parent governors make a dent in such complex problems?
I don't want to sound entirely negative. Even the worst of failing schools can be turned round, though it is almost always by a charismatic head teacher more than by anything else.
Until recently our local comprehensive in Holland Park, west London, was famously bad. Its previous Ofsted report was one of the worst I've seen -it had low standards throughout, poor discipline, a rough catchment area and all the problems of having more than 100 foreign tongues. Recently, however, I heard a charismatic new head teacher was achieving great things, so I went to visit.
The school had changed out of all recognition. The atmosphere was friendly, purposeful and quiet. Discipline was good, the facilities were excellent and a few months later this notorious school received a good Ofsted report. I wanted to send my son there -it would have suited him well.
However, it was out of the question. The school manages to control the children inside its gates, but once outside there is nothing to stop any delinquents behaving as badly as they like. A few do -it only takes a few -and they terrorise the others; a few get into drugs and gang life early on and any boy who is unlucky enough to get involved with them is in for trouble.
It is hard, if not impossible, for schools to exclude disruptive pupils. The police, it seems, either can or will do nothing with such social wreckers. My ambition was to get my son as far away as possible from them. The only other state secondaries for boys in our borough, both very good, are open only to Catholics -this does not seem fair, as Millar's film suggests.
These are social, not school problems. Schools cannot solve them, although they an help a little. Idealistic middle-class parents can't solve them either although they can help a little, too. In my view there are all kinds of reforms that could be tried, outside and inside schools, beginning with segregation.
Different children with different problems and abilities should be educated differently in different classrooms. Some children should be excluded altogether from their school and even sometimes from their neighbourhood. But until some such solutions are found it is pointless to expect what we have to call "middle class parents", meaning good, purposeful parents, to bear the burden of our failing schools and be denied any choice.
It is unjust in any case, but more to Millar's point it is a tried and tested way -tested throughout the communist world -of ensuring not that standards go up, but that they go down even more widely.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, March 07, 2004 | Comments (0)
