But the laws which social workers needed in order to save Khyra’s life already exist. Social Services took on investigating the children’s welfare, after two reports from other professionals – then let it drop without even completing a basic “Initial Assessment”. Other people were worried about Khyra and her siblings too.

This article was written between February 2010 and today, i.e. before the Serious Case Review (SCR) was published. The SCR (which is due out today) may well provide more insight than has been available to me so far. But even before the SCR, there was a fair bit in the public domain about how the tragedy came to happen. So I thought it was worth releasing this interim analysis now, in the hope that it’ll help to inform subsequent commentary.

I want to write this keeping Khyra in mind as a person, so I’m taking the liberty of linking to this beautiful picture of her (from the Birmingham Mail).

::a moment of respect::

Introduction

Some time early in 2010, a report was put into the public domain from the court case where Khyra’s surviving siblings were taken into care.¹ From that account, we have more facts now than when her story was first reported.

I’ll quote at length from that, and also from the very useful Government document Working Together to Safeguard Children 2006,² which I’ll sometimes abbreviate WTtSC.

(I’m using a colour code for the quoted documents, as there are so many of them in this article. Court report, Government guidance and similar official pronouncements, Other sources/ commentators. All bold type is mine, to make it easier to skim-read. Footnote numbers are bold where the footnote contains discussion, and non-bold for references.)

I’ll start by considering some of the surrounding discourse…

Point-scoring with her name

Some people have cited Khyra Ishaq’s death as a terrible warning against allowing parents to take care of their own children without professionals overseeing them.

Back in October 2009, Maggie Atkinson had recently been named as the new Children’s Commissioner for England. Interviewed by the Children, Schools and Families Committee, she was asked about non-school education and the (now considerably discredited) Badman Review. In her answer, she treats Khyra’s name as her trump card:

I have absolutely no doubt that the vast majority of families who choose electively to educate their children at home are doing so for entirely right reasons, for entirely honourable, fair, just, creative and admirable reasons. But I would give you two words, and they are the first and second names of the child who died – Khyra Ishaq.

(By the way, if you follow the link to read the rest of Ms Atkinson’s answers to the Committee, please note that her account of home ed law 20 years ago is inaccurate. In fact she had neither the right nor the duty 20 years ago to “go into [the] premises” of electively home educating families, though she may well have mistakenly thought that she had, as perhaps did some of the families.³)

In April 2010, The Times contributed their own misleading description of Khyra’s life:

At the moment Britain has among the most liberal [home education] laws in the developed world and does not require parents to register or be inspected.

Khyra Ishaq, the seven-year-old girl who starved to death at the hands of her mother and stepfather in Birmingham, was supposedly being home educated by them.

“Supposedly being home educated”? True in the sense that the Local Authority (LA) had her listed in that category by the time she died. But even while the children were all still in school, there had been reason to doubt that they were safe in their mother’s care.

As the Victoria Climbié Foundation put it,

Home education was a small aspect of this case. It is clear that there were numerous occasions where social workers and the agencies involved could and should have spotted and intervened to help Khyra much, much earlier.

Their headline sums it up:

“Home Education did not kill Khyra; Agency Failings did”

Birmingham blame game

In an article from March 2010 entitled Khyra Ishaq and the scandalous blame game, journalist Paul Dale points out Birmingham Council’s attempt to use home ed law as an excuse – here alluding to “cabinet children, young people and families member” Les Lawrence and children’s director Tony Howell.

A week ago, the pair told a press conference there was nothing more that could have been done by social services or education officials to save Khyra.

This was because Khyra had been removed from school by her mother to be educated at home, and under English law local councils have no right to demand entry to a house in order to make sure a child really is being educated.

That is true, but totally irrelevant in this case, and it didn’t take Mrs Justice King, the judge presiding over care proceedings involving Khyra’s brothers and sisters, to see through such a ludicrous excuse. As Mrs Justice King pointed out, social workers could at any time have insisted on seeing Khyra, talking to her in depth and conducting an initial assessment, they simply chose not to do so.

One of the great unanswered questions surrounding the Khyra Ishaq case is why the council became sidetracked on the issue of her education, when common sense should have suggested that information from teachers about the state of Khyra and her siblings – always thin, cold and so hungry – warranted a full social services investigation.

Another question is which bright spark dreamt up the home education excuse, and why on earth did anyone think the council would get away with it?

<snip>

Perhaps Coun Lawrence and Mr Howell did not read Mrs Justice King’s coruscating assessment, or maybe they assumed the report would never come into the public domain?

But it did come into the public domain: the report he’s talking about is the very same thing I allude to in my intro, Birmingham City Council’s application for a Care Order for Khyra Ishaq’s surviving siblings.

The Court report

Here we encounter in print someone who was genuinely trying to establish the facts, Mrs Justice King.

The report makes very sad reading. But if you can face it, it does shed a lot of light on Khyra’s death and what happened to lead up to that. (I don’t quote here the most harrowing aspects of her life and death; my focus is on what was known outside the family at the time, which might have saved her. If you want the full details, you can always follow the link to the whole document.)

Invitation for input

This is probably a good point to say that my analysis of what led up to Khyra’s death is based primarily on

I’m not a social worker myself and never have been.

It’s therefore quite possible that someone with different background knowledge might pick up on implications that I missed, or be able to say “actually at this point what ought to have happened is that“, or “such-a-thing is common, this other thing is unusual”. If you can shed more light, please do comment.

Also, as I’ve acknowledged above, I’ve not yet seen the Serious Case Review at the time of writing this.

Now to the sequence of events…

First signs

Khyra died in May 2008. The first signs of something amiss had come more than a year before her death:

52. On 20th March 2007 the mother had a meeting with Mrs J B from G P School about K who had been caught stealing food at school on two occasions. …

53. It was agreed between the mother and the school that K would be seen by another teacher, L H, to talk through why she was stealing. There is a note about that meeting which is deeply disturbing. K throughout it was obsessed with food and to being what she referred to as “a good girl.” She spoke of getting nice porridge if she is good and horrible porridge if she is bad.

M is Khyra’s brother, a year older than her; he was at a different school due to his autism and other special needs.⁴ The first incident described here took place in September 2007, around eight months before Khyra’s death:

58. … A teaching assistant in M’s class recorded her shock at how much weight M had lost over the summer. In her written evidence she described him as “really thin and like a child from Ethiopia.” She spoke of him being weak and tired and the weight still “dropping off.” …

59. Just before Christmas 2007 the mother told M’s school escort that he was not to be allowed breakfast at school, only fruit. This made M cry.

60. M’s class teacher, A Q, gave evidence. He is a teacher of considerable experience and was a very impressive witness. He spoke of M’s obsession with food which went he said beyond the obsessive behaviour one can see from time to time in children on the autistic spectrum. It was, he told the court, “the expression on his face that made the staff so sure it was not autism but hunger. You learn to read the children. None of the other children were ever as hungry as he was.” Mr Q told me quite openly how, seeing how hungry M was and knowing of the mother’s embargo on chocolate and second helpings, he arranged for the cook to give him extra large portions rather than seconds. On one occasion Mr Q caught M taking an apple core out of the bin so he found some fruit to give him.

Z is Khyra’s brother about two-and-a-half years older. He was at the same school as her. There were concerns about him too:

78. An incident occurred one day when the children were having fruit at break time and Z was seen taking extra fruit. When asked about it he said he was hungry and was told he could certainly have extra food but must ask.

79. A few days later Miss W [Z's class teacher] saw Z as she described it “frantically stuffing his pockets with fruit” from a fruit box in the playground. Miss W demonstrated this graphically in the witness box, showing the court by using both hands being used again and again to put fruit into the pockets with a desperate intensity. Miss W was sufficiently concerned on that occasion that she wrote a so called ‘concern report‘ and passed it on to the pastoral worker at the school, Mrs. D. Miss W also spoke to Miss C [one of Khyra's teachers] and discovered that she too had concerns about K and food. Mrs D, the assistant Head teacher of the school and in charge of pastoral affairs, was told of this also.

80. Z was obsessed with food. He was found loitering around the dining hall with a view to going back in to get another meal. …

Not all the concerns were about food and hunger. At a meeting around November 2007,

70. … Miss C told the mother that K was hungry all the time and spoke of the petty thefts. The mother was angry and said K had stolen food before. She went on to say that K “wets her pants on purpose in front of her” and that she had sent her to school in the same pants in order to teach her a lesson. “Can’t you smell the stench?” she asked Miss C. Miss C described herself as having being speechless at what was being said and that the mother was unconcerned and seemed unable to realise what she had said.

December 2007 and later

Khyra and her older siblings Z and L stopped going to school in December 2007.⁵ B, the three-year-old, stopped going to nursery around the same time. A and M were still in school: A at secondary school, and M at his “special school”.

61. After Christmas Mr Q became more alarmed. M was holding up his trousers with his hands because he had lost so much weight and the staff, on Mr Q’s instructions, started to look for marks on his body when he was undressing for swimming. He raised his concerns with the Deputy Head and the matter was transferred to the school nurse. She weighed him and noted that his weight was between the 25th and 50th centile having been previously on the 75th and that the mother was restricting his diet.

A Daily Mail article from 2009 describes one of the children being examined by a doctor in January 2008. If the article’s correct, then from the age and gender, the child must have been M. The doctor was “Dr Suraj Ahmed … an assistant specialist in community paediatrics”.

Weighing 22kg, the boy was below the average weight for his age.

Dr Ahmed said: ‘I pointed this out to (Gordon) and said that he appeared not to be getting enough calories. I suggested that he might benefit from seeing a dietician but she was not keen on that. She was against it.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this story; I suspect it’s based on Dr Ahmed’s evidence from the trial of Khyra’s mother and stepfather for Khyra’s murder, but I haven’t seen a transcript of what was actually said in evidence.⁶

This doctor’s examination is never referred to in the Court report. Was the doctor at all worried about M at the time? Was anything said to Social Services?

64. … Ten days before K’s death M’s teacher made another referral, describing him as “thin, weak, tires easily, feels the cold easily. Whenever food is available he will constantly ask for more.” …

That paragraph is ambiguous in not spelling out to whom the teacher made this referral. In context (and recalling that the doctor’s examination is not documented in the Court report), the word “another” suggests to me that this may have been a second referral to the Deputy Head and/or the school nurse, i.e. within M’s school. At no point does the Court report seem to suggest that the staff of M’s school made a referral to Social Services.

What’s clear, however, is the nature of the teacher’s concern.

Neighbours too had noticed the children:

111. Some time in February 2008 the mother went round to a next door neighbour’s where a Polish family called W lived at the time. When the door was answered the mother was at the door and it is accepted was angry and accusing a family member of the W’s of feeding K behind her back. She said a thin, underfed child, K, was brought to the door and that JA joined them. K pointed to the daughter of the house and said that she, the daughter, had been giving her bread. Mr W is clear that no-one had given K bread but said that there was no fence between the gardens and they used to put bread out for the birds. He could only guess that it was that bread that K was eating but was too afraid to admit it to her mother.

JA was the mother’s partner – not the children’s father, though.

The children’s father was living abroad by that time; he’s since been quoted as saying that he had expressed his concerns anonymously to Social Services after becoming alarmed by the mother’s behaviour, but, to paraphrase, didn’t want to rock the boat too much for fear of losing all contact with his children. But he doesn’t come into the care proceedings transcript, except in this little bit of context:

4. At the time of K’s death in May 2008, the mother and father had long since separated. The Father was living in Spain with his new wife and their two children. Mother was living in the former matrimonial home with all six children together with a man called JA who I will refer to as either “the Intervenor”⁷ or “J” which is how the children knew him.

Again, it’s not in the Court report, but another Guardian newspaper article from February 2010 mentions the observations of a different neighbour, from about two months before Khyra died:

8 March Amandeep Kaur, who lived nearby, sees Khyra dressed in underwear in the back garden of her home. She was later to tell police that it was a cold morning and the “abnormally thin” child was whimpering.

Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board said in February 2010⁸ that

… the police investigation identified at least 30 individuals … who could have intervened and made a difference.

It is alarming because it was clear to us that many people in the community had concerns but did not feel able to share them with the many agencies that are there to help.

But for now, let’s go back in time to December 2007, when three of the children stopped coming to school.

First approach to Social Services

192. The concerns of the Deputy Head teacher, J B [hereafter Miss B], had reached such a level by the time the three children had been withdrawn from school that on 19th December 2007 she made a referral to social services. Miss B’s point of contact there was the referral officer R C [Miss C]. Her written referral centres on the food issues outlined earlier in the judgment in relation to each of the children.

Note that there are two people in the Court report both referred to as “Miss C”, and both of them appear in this article too. (Presumably surnames were given in the original; some full names are also given in various newspaper articles, but I’m sticking to the Court’s initials here.) One, Miss A C, was a schoolteacher of Khyra’s, and the other, Miss R C, was the Social Services initial point of contact for this kind of referral. From now on in the article, I’m talking about the latter.

Miss C said that Social Services wouldn’t take it on:

194. Miss C’s evidence was that in having “scrutinised” the information provided by the school, the view was taken that as the school already had a working relationship with the family it would be better for them to continue with their work rather than their department intervene which might “antagonise the situation.” Miss C therefore contacted Miss B to say that the case did not warrant an assessment.

This decision and explanation seem to me puzzling. I gather that sometimes, the information provided in a referral isn’t clear enough to convey the reality of the situation, but this doesn’t seem to have been the case here. The judge comments in summing up:

232. … The school’s referral was unequivocal, it was issues over the children being hungry, thin and cold which were of concern, …

Working Together to Safeguard Children clearly states:

2.125 Staff in schools and FE institutions should not themselves investigate possible abuse or neglect. They have a key role to play by referring concerns about those issues to children’s social care, providing information for police investigations and/or enquiries under s47 of the Children Act 1989, and by contributing to assessments.

In other words, it wasn’t the school’s place to investigate neglect; so when Miss C said “continue with their work”, what work did she mean?

And in what sense did the school have “a working relationship with the family”?

At any rate, Miss B (the deputy head) did visit the house herself. She rang Miss C again to report her continuing concern. Miss C again said that Social Services would not take it on, and instead recommended that Miss B get the police to do a “safe and well check”; this too happened.

In the interests of not overloading readers with unnecessary detail, I’m going to relegate those two visits to a footnote,⁹ because neither made a difference to the overall situation.

Miss B’s comments seem to show a gap in understanding at this time between the social workers and the school:

199. … Miss B said that in any event such a [safe & well] check would not have allayed her concerns as given the history she felt that it was necessary to know what each child looked like on a day to day basis.

Miss B’s reasoning may have been that the sight of a child alive on one occasion didn’t prove anything about their long-term wellbeing – and if so, I agree. I don’t understand why the social workers recommended a one-off “safe and well check” rather than investigating the signs of ongoing neglect.

Anyway, this wasn’t the most crucial episode, so I’ll move on.

The second referral

207. On 28th January 2008 a liaison meeting was held at G R P School. Miss R M, an educational social worker attended the meeting. The school expressed their concerns for the children, describing them as being “at risk“. They told Miss M of their unsuccessful referral to social services before Christmas.

Miss M tried visiting and phoning the family, but got nowhere either. The mother pretended to be out, and on 30 January when Miss M rang up,

209. … simply shouted over her and was not listening.

So it must have been 30 or 31 January when

210. … Miss M then spoke to Miss C at social service.

211. Following her conversation with Miss M, Miss C recommended the carrying out of what is known as a CAF, that is to say a Common Assessment Framework assessment. This is low scale intervention where local agencies (other than the local authority work), with families in order “collaboratively to resolve any issues they face”. Miss M said in evidence that she told Miss C in terms that she did not think that such an assessment would work as the mother would not co-operate and the whole basis of a CAF assessment is co-operation. Miss C agreed to discuss the matter with her manager.

In other words, Miss C from Social Services recommended a CAF, which could be initiated by Miss M in her role as “educational social worker” or by the school, and would not necessarily involve Social Services.

This was inappropriate, since (to quote a helpful page from Salford City Council)

1.5 The CAF is not for when there is concern that a child may have suffered or may be at risk of suffering Significant Harm.

(The CAF is more about helping people to access services, and ensuring that several different agencies aren’t all repeating the same kind of assessment with people in the same family. It’s supposed to help people not to have to jump through the same hoops over and over to get support.)

Miss M pointed out that a CAF wouldn’t even work, anyway, because Khyra’s mother was extremely unlikely to cooperate, and (unlike child protection investigations), it’s up to the family or child to decide whether to start a CAF process.

Miss M’s powers and duties

In understanding Miss M’s role, I think it’s important to note that an “Educational Social Worker” is not what most people imagine from the words “social worker”. In some LAs, the same job is known as Educational Welfare Officer, which is perhaps a bit less misleading. An EWO or ESW is usually part of the Education Department rather than Social Services, and in most LAs, they needn’t have a social work degree (though not all “ordinary” social workers have that either).

An article on the Connexions careers site quotes Deborah Bell, an ex-school-teacher and now (or then) “Principal Education Welfare Officer” for the London Borough of Hillingdon, giving an outline of her job:

This department covers a whole range of issues like bullying, exclusion, school attendance, child employment and school-aged parents.

From Birmingham City Council’s current web page on the Education Welfare Service (EWS):

When a young person has a record of absences, or has stopped going to school altogether, Education Welfare staff work with parents and carers, school staff and other agencies, including the Courts, to restore attendance.

I haven’t seen a job description for Miss M’s actual job, but from the job title, it seems likely that a lot of her time would have been spent on this kind of anti-truancy work.

Birmingham EWS also has a role in child protection:

The Education Welfare Service takes lead responsibility for the Local Authority in matters of Child Protection. EWS provides the link to the Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board (BSCB); provides written guidance notes to schools; provides advice, guidance and practical support in cases of child protection referral; co-ordinates information for Designated Teachers in schools; co-ordinates training courses through Birmingham LSCB and the Health Education Unit.

But note what’s not there: it’s not the responsibility of the EWS, or of any individual staff member there, to investigate abuse or neglect. Miss M – unlike social workers with a child protection remit – would not have had the legal power to insist on seeing the Ishaq children, however concerned she was. Her safeguarding duty in Khyra’s case would have been to report any welfare concerns she had to Social Services, which she did.

In fact, paragraph 211 shows Miss M spelling out to Miss C the reality of the mother’s non-cooperation. Miss M wanted Social Services to take on the case (i.e. beginning with an Initial Assessment). From the chronology, it seems it may have been this conversation which eventually swayed Social Services to accept the referral.

(I’ve seen/heard a couple of instances of people implying that Miss M was mistaken in not visiting the family again herself.¹⁰ But on the evidence currently available to me, it looks to me as though she’s one of the few people involved who did do her job well, and even helped other people to do theirs.)

Social Services take it on

226. … on Thursday 31st January, Miss C and her manager reconsidered the referral that had been made to social services and Miss C contacted Miss M. She said that they would carry out what is known as an Initial Assessment on the I family. …

That’s a very important bit – because the Initial Assessment is what ought to have happened and then didn’t.

Note that the assessment was to be of the whole family – all six children, including the two still in school.

In the next part, look out too for the phrase “Section 47” or “s47” – a formal enquiry following concern that a child is “suffering or likely to suffer significant harm“.

The nature of an Initial Assessment

The most useful explanation I’ve found so far about Initial Assessments comes from Working Together to Safeguard Children.

Here, “LA children’s social care” doesn’t mean a separate department; it’s roughly equivalent to saying “Social Services in their work with children”.¹¹

5.37 The initial assessment is a brief assessment of each child referred to LA children’s social care, in which it is necessary to determine whether the child is in need, the nature of any services required, and whether a further, more detailed core assessment should be undertaken (paragraph 3.9 of the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families (2000)). It should be completed by LA children’s social care, working with colleagues, within a maximum of seven working days of the date of referral. The initial assessment period may be very brief if the criteria for initiating s47 enquiries are met. <snip>

5.39 The initial assessment should be led by a qualified and experienced social worker. It should be carefully planned, with clarity about who is doing what, as well as when and what information is to be shared with the parents. The planning process and decisions about the timing of the different assessment activities should be undertaken in collaboration with all those involved with the child and family. The process of initial assessment should involve:

• seeing and speaking to the child (according to age and understanding) and family members as appropriate

• drawing together and analysing available information from a range of sources (including existing records); and

• involving and obtaining relevant information from professionals and others in contact with the child and family.

<snip>

5.43 In the course of an initial assessment, LA children’s social care should ascertain:

• is this a child in need? (s17 of the Children Act 1989); and

• is there reasonable cause to suspect that this child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm? (s47 of the Children Act 1989).

So an Initial Assessment of all six children would have included speaking to the children, and would have brought together the concerns of the various staff from two different schools who were seriously worried about the health of Khyra, Z and M.

It seems to me this would have turned up enough “reasonable cause to suspect… significant harm” – if, indeed, the documented concerns from Khyra’s school weren’t already enough. (Working Together to Safeguard Children makes clear that neglect in itself may be “significant harm”.¹²)

Unless something else had then gone wrong at Social Services, this would have led to a Core Assessment under section 47 of the Children Act 1989, and to intervention in the children’s lives.

(Here, it may be helpful to consult the flow charts on pages 142 to 148 of Working Together to Safeguard Children 2006, summarising referral, initial assessment, child protection plan and child protection conference, etc.¹³)

Now let’s see what actually happened…

Did Miss G need consent from the mother before talking to school staff?

228. On the same day, 31st January 2008, the case was allocated to a social worker called A.G. On 1st February Miss G endeavoured to contact Miss M with a view to arranging a joint visit to the house to discuss with the mother the completing of an Initial Assessment in respect of the six children. Miss G subsequently told me in evidence that whilst an Initial Assessment does mark the acceptance by social services of a referral it still requires the consent of the parents before any enquiries can be made about the children from third party agencies such as the school and the health services.

229. It now seems to be common ground that this was a misunderstanding on her part and no such consent is required although parents are asked to consent/co-operate with the assessment as a whole. The social worker therefore intended to go to the home at 36, L R and ask the mother to complete the relevant consent forms enabling enquiries to be made.

So Miss G believed that she must obtain parental consent before making enquiries at the children’s schools. This seems to me one factor in Khyra’s death, inasmuch as Miss G must have believed she wasn’t allowed to initiate contact with M’s school. (To recap, M is Khyra’s slightly older brother who went to a “special school”, and concern about his weight had first been noted at school after the summer holidays in 2007.)

On the other hand, it’s clearly nonsensical to suggest that the social workers needed the mother’s consent to consult the staff of Khyra’s school, who had already made the first referral; and information sharing doesn’t arise in the context of interviewing the children themselves. So in my view, this mistake wasn’t the main factor, only a contributing one.

Ambiguous information on obtaining consent

The report says “It now seems to be common ground that this was a misunderstanding on her part”.

I agree insofar as it appears Miss G certainly did have the legal right to make enquiries at M’s school without the mother’s consent. Both Working Together to Safeguard Children and Information Sharing: Guidance for practitioners and managers¹⁴ agree that public interest can override the absence of consent where there’s a risk of significant harm.¹⁵

However, I’m not sure to what degree this misunderstanding originated with Miss G, versus to what degree she was misled by ambiguous information from elsewhere in the system.

A form called an Initial Assessment Record is available from the old DCSF web site.¹⁶ A note on this form states:

Parental permission to contact other agencies should be obtained unless permission seeking may itself place a child at risk of significant harm.

Asking for permission didn’t itself place the children at risk – they were already at risk – so that exception would seemingly not apply. Perhaps this note is where Miss G got the idea that she must obtain the mother’s consent?

That note closely resembles a paragraph from Working Together to Safeguard Children:

5.34 Parents’ permission, or the child’s permission where appropriate, should be sought before discussing a referral about them with other agencies, unless permission-seeking may itself place a child at increased risk of significant harm.

But there’s a significant difference: WTtSC says the parents’ permission should be sought, whereas the paraphrase on the form says it should be obtained. If WTtSC is correct, then the form is wrong and misleading.

In trying to understand the facts of this myself, I also happened upon a page on Surrey County Council’s web site with this instruction:

3.2 The process of Initial Assessment should involve:

• <snip>

• Seeking parental consent to the Initial Assessment and agreement to contact other professionals as appropriate depending on the level of risk to the child and using ‘Consent form for an Initial Assessment of my child and Family’ (Form SCS35).¹⁷ Establish if full consent or partial consent is given and record on Initial Assessment Form

Considerably further down that page in section 8, we get information about when the absence of consent may be overridden. But I can see how, from that summary taken alone, someone could easily get the initial impression that parental consent was necessary. I wonder if Miss G had read something similar.

The 7-day limit

229. … When Miss G contacted Miss M’s office she discovered that she had in fact left the department and that a new educational social worker, S S, was now dealing with the case. Unfortunately very shortly after referral was accepted and the case allocated to Miss G she went on annual leave and did not return until 18th February.

This delay too was poor practice at Social Services. WTtSC says (as quoted above) that an Initial Assessment should be carried out

within a maximum of seven working days of the date of referral.

Given that Miss G was about to go on leave (though we’re not told here exactly how soon), it seems to me problematic that she was ever allocated the case in the first place.

But again, this in my view was not the key mistake which led to Khyra’s death.

Mr H visits

Mr H, the Local Authority’s one-person elective home education division, visited on 8 February 2008, accompanied by Mr L, a “senior educational social worker”.

212. … the purpose of the visit was to ensure that the children were receiving “an efficient full time education at home.”

They were allowed into the house but did not see (or ask to see) the children.

It’s this small episode of the story which might, on the face of it, suggest a need for stronger legal powers to interfere via the LA’s home ed people. But if Mr H had had safeguarding concerns, his duty would have been to inform Social Services – who, as we see, were already aware of the family. His remit was education.

(Mr L seems to me a peripheral figure. Like Miss M, he’s not a social worker in the commonly-imagined sense of the term. He seems to have been sent out simply as “backup” to Mr H, following Miss M’s advice to Mr H that he take a second person with him.¹⁸ Paragraph 225 seems to confirm this; Mr L speaks of Mr H’s procedure and claims no role of his own in the matter.)

Risk factor confusion

230. On 18th February Miss G wrote to the mother telling her that a referral had been received from educational welfare. She said that the concern related to her having withdrawn the children from school and that so far as they were aware the children had not been seen by any professionals since December 2007. The mother was told in the letter that on 21st February at 3 o’clock a joint visit would be undertaken by her together with S S the new educational social worker.

This letter illustrates the way in which genuine risk factors can be obscured by the red herring of home-based education.

Yes, the children were at risk. But the key warning sign was not the withdrawal from school, nor the “not being seen by any professionals” for a few months. That’s true of lots of children, and it usually isn’t (or, at least, ought not to be)¹⁹ cause for concern.

The key warning sign was that even before that happened, people were noticing they were (a) thin, (b) desperate to get food and seemingly “obsessed” with it.

Plus, according to one teacher, the mother had said she deliberately sent Khyra to school in knickers the child had earlier urinated in.

A brief glimpse of three of the six children

Back to the visit of Miss G and Miss S, on 21 February 2008 (still over two months before Khyra died):

231. The visit was as unproductive as that of Miss B and the police. The mother eventually answered the door but would not allow them into the house.

232. Miss G, standing on the doorstep, tried to tell the mother about the initial assessment and that it would centre around educational issues. Miss G told the court in her written material that as the referral was, as she put it “of an educational concern as opposed to a child protection concern“, that was how she had phrased it to the mother when she saw her on 21 February 2008.

This showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the referral on Miss G’s part. The referrals did indeed come from the school and an educational social worker but they were not educational in nature. The school’s referral was unequivocal, it was issues over the children being hungry, thin and cold which were of concern, concerns shared by Miss M once she had spoken to the school and had been exposed in the telephone call on 30th January to the mother’s aggression and irrational response to her visit.

233. Miss G wrongly told the mother that her consent was necessary in order for the initial assessment to be carried out. When it became quite clear to her that the mother was not going to give that consent she told the mother that they would leave so long as the children were seen.

234. Initially the mother refused to bring the children to the door but eventually brought, I am satisfied, L, K and Z to the door.

235. There is some disagreement in the detail of this meeting as between Miss S, Miss G, the mother and JA, who was present for part of it. The detail matters not as what is incontrovertible is that the visit was made, the mother and JA refused to allow them entry to the house and refused to co-operate with any assessment. Although three of the children were brought to the door they did not on any level engage with Miss G or Miss S and hovered at the back behind their mother and were seen only for a matter of minutes. When requested to say who he was, JA refused.

236. It goes without saying that during the course of this visit Miss G did not get to the stage of the mother signing the form which she says would have permitted investigations to have been made of third parties. At the conclusion of the visit Miss G told the mother that as an assessment had been opened, she needed to see the other three children. The mother said A was asleep and the other two were at school. Finally the mother agreed for Miss G to return to the house at 4 o’clock the following day in order to see the three other children. By the time the social worker got back to the office the mother had already rung to say that Miss G was not to go the following day to see the children.

Working Together to Safeguard Children includes a helpful box (on page 113) entitled Initial assessment and enquiries: ten pitfalls and how to avoid them. The second pitfall is:

2. Not enough attention is paid to what children say, how they look and how they behave.

(Incidentally, this is not cutting-edge research; the “pitfalls” list is from a book published in 1998.²⁰)

The list’s authors advise,

Ask yourself: Have I been given appropriate access to all the children in the family? If I have not been able to see any child, is there a very good reason, and have I made arrangements to see him/her as soon as possible? How should I follow up any uneasiness about the child(ren)’s health or development? If the child is old enough and has the communication skills, what is the child’s account of events?

Depressingly, in the Ofsted report of July 2010,²¹ listening to children is still mentioned as a problem area for Birmingham:

30. … The quality of the [initial] assessments is variable … Insufficient attention is given to seeking and responding to the views of the child or young person.

The social workers let it drop

237. Miss G spoke to her manager about the mother’s refusal to allow her to go and see the other three children. Miss G said in evidence that as they knew that Education Otherwise was involved, they agreed between them that another visit to see the other children would not be necessary and that as the referral had specifically concerned the three children they had in fact seen at the house that day, they would abandon any further attempt to see them. Had the referral of G P and Miss M been treated as it should have, that is to say as having raised child protection issues as opposed to merely issues of school attendance, it is hard to imagine that such a view would have been taken.

(Note that “Education Otherwise” here doesn’t refer to the charity of that name, but according to the Court report²² is another name for the LA’s one-person home education division. On the current Birmingham Council website, it’s given its more common name of Elective Home Education (EHE) or “home education”.)

Here we see what, in my view, was a genuinely key role of non-school education in this tragedy: as an element which the social workers failed to place in its proper context. Because the social workers somehow conflated life-and-death safeguarding concerns with educational concerns, they grossly misjudged the seriousness of the case and effectively abdicated responsibility for the children.²³

The aforementioned Initial assessment and enquiries: ten pitfalls and how to avoid them casts an interesting light:

3. Attention is focused on the most visible or pressing problems and other warning signs are not appreciated.

Ask yourself: What is the most striking thing about this situation? If this feature were to be removed or changed, would I still have concerns?

The children’s educational status was not, in fact, the “most pressing problem”. But it seems to me quite possible that in the social workers’ eyes it was the most “visible” or “striking” feature of the case.

As Paul Dale describes it in his article,

the council became sidetracked on the issue of her education, when common sense should have suggested that information from teachers about the state of Khyra and her siblings – always thin, cold and so hungry – warranted a full social services investigation.

Of course any case might be mishandled if the social worker in charge of it failed to grasp the significance of the original referral information. But was Miss G perhaps also influenced by a perception that Mr H (the council’s EHE person) now had responsibility for the children’s wellbeing? How exactly did she and her supervisor lose sight of the safeguarding concerns?

Back to the narrative:

239. Miss G took the view that she had seen the children and even though it was only brief “nothing had stood out.”

240. This visit was in itself was insufficient for the purposes of even an initial assessment. The Department of Health’s Framework for Assessment known and referred to as The ‘Lilac’ Book, provides the framework which informs such assessments. Paragraph 3.1 of the ‘Lilac’ Book sets out a list of enquiries which “may be undertaken.” The only mandatory enquiry is seeing the children. The paragraph says in terms that “as part of an initial assessment the child should be seen. This includes observation and talking with the child in an age appropriate manner.”

241. … Miss G told me that despite the history, a child protection investigation would only have been triggered if she had seen the children on their own and they had made a ‘disclosure’ or she had not been allowed to see the three children subject to the referral.

(Here, too, Miss G seems to have misunderstood: neither of these circumstances is a necessary element in “reasonable cause to suspect that this child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm”.)

242. With respect to Miss G, that rather begs the question; had she seen the children or any of them as is expected and anticipated in an Initial Assessment she may have had more information, if only from the children’s physical appearance, that would have led her to conclude that a child protection investigation was necessary.

This reasoning makes sense in the light of medical evidence:

182. Professor M looked at the photographs of K in the context of the mother [claiming] that K lost virtually all the weight in the last week of her life. Looking at the photographs taken the day she died he said “this would not occur in the last few weeks. It would take many months. She has suffered from extreme emaciation. There is complete loss of subcutaneous fat and muscle wasting not just on the buttocks which go first but in all four limbs. The bony prominences are made even more prominent by the complete lack of abdomen.”

<snip>

191. I am satisfied in accordance with all the medical evidence that K died of pneumonia secondary to severe malnutrition and that all the other children suffered from malnutrition to a greater or lesser extent.

We know that M already appeared strikingly thin even by the previous September.

I wonder too what the children would have told the social workers if asked in private. (Some abused children keep the abuse a secret, but we know from the school teachers that Khyra and her sibling Z had readily admitted how hungry they were.)

243. As it was, even though an Initial Assessment is deliberately designed to be a brief assessment which is not too onerous a piece of work for social services to undertake, it was not completed but simply shelved without even speaking to the children’s schools from where the anxieties had stemmed and the referral had been made.

This seems to me the key turning point: Social Services could have made all the earlier smaller mistakes, and yet still saved Khyra’s life if they’d kept going with the promised Initial Assessment, and where it would have led.

244. The Initial Assessment was abandoned on the basis that Education Otherwise in the form of Mr. H was now to be involved. Miss G accepts that she at no stage spoke to Mr. H and that she herself agreed with the decision to abandon the assessment. She accepted that she knew the detail of the school’s concerns before the visit to the house and said in evidence that she thought in hindsight that “perhaps the welfare issues should have been considered in more detail.” In so far as I can see it, the welfare issues were not considered at all and should have been at the forefront of any social work enquiries about this family.

245. Miss G concluded her evidence by saying that as no further work was to be done on the case on the basis that Education Otherwise would be involved; her recommendation had been for the case to be closed. It was awaiting formal closure when, as she unfortunately phrased it, “this incident occurred.” The incident to which Miss G refers is the death of K.

Analysis from the Guardian and the Judge

The report closes with some analysis by the Judge, based in part on the submission of the Guardian. (The “Guardian” here is not the newspaper of that name, but a court-appointed social worker acting as an advocate and representative of the child.²⁴)

246. The Guardian has submitted to the court that K’s death was preventable. It was. Initial and core assessments are carried out by social services department according to the Framework for Assessment of Children in Need and their Families, referred earlier in this judgment as the Lilac Book. The guidance says “In practice this means in planning, preparation and coordination with professionals in other agencies in accordance with the principles in 1.23.”

247. Paragraph 1.23 sets out the principles which should guide inter-agency, inter-disciplinary work with children in need.

248. The guidance goes on in paragraph 1.51 to say: “Understanding what happened to a vulnerable child within the context of his or her family or a local community cannot be achieved as a single event. It must necessarily be a process of gathering information from a variety of sources, making sense of it with the family and very often with several professionals concerned with the child’s welfare.”

249. At paragraph 5.43 the guidance says: “When a child has special educational needs or is disabled the schools and educational psychologists will have important information about the child’s development, the level of understanding and the most effective means of communicating with the child. This information should be sought before the beginning and the end of the assessment.”

250. The Guardian submits that it should have been clear to social services what their role and that of the educational welfare services were when they received the initial referral from G S. The Guardian says that faced with the mother who was reported to be unco-operative and aggressive towards the professionals and a man who when seen by the professionals consistently refused to provide details of his name (and this court would add also the refusals to allow professionals into the house or to speak to the children) the Guardian submits that the appropriate course for the local authority should have been to consider a section 47 Children Act enquiry, that is to say

“(1) Where a local authority

(a) —

(b) have reasonable cause to suspect that a child who lives or is found in their area to be suffering or is likely to suffer significant harm,

the authority shall make or cause to be made such enquiries as they consider necessary to enable them to decide whether they should take any action to safeguard or promote the child’s welfare.”

252. I agree with the Guardian’s analysis. Social services, despite the concerns of the school and the unco-operative attitude of the mother when they visited the house, decided to rely on Mr H and the educational social worker and abandon their own investigations.

Child protection was not a responsibility which Social Services could legitimately get rid of to someone else. Working Together to Safeguard Children puts it like this:

2.17 Where a child is at risk of significant harm, children’s social care staff are responsible for co-ordinating an assessment of the child’s needs, of the parents’ capacity to keep the child safe and promote his or her welfare, and of the wider family circumstances.

In other words, Social Services could not legitimately “rely” on Mr H to do their job, which in any case he had neither the training nor the legal powers to fulfil.

Back to the Judge’s analysis:

253. As a result of each professional carrying out his or her own duties in isolation, information was not passed on and relevant connections were not made. The most glaring example being that if only anyone had asked, they would have discovered that both M’s school and the other children’s schools had largely identical concerns.

254. It seems extraordinary to me that no alarm bells rang with social services when the mother cancelled the appointment for A, B and M to be seen by Miss G. A referral had been accepted which, contrary to Miss G’s initial evidence, related not only to education but to serious welfare issues and Miss G on her own account was aware of the issues which had been raised by the school. Put at its baldest, at the very least a proper initial assessment should have been completed. The children had been withdrawn from school and the mother thereafter had been reluctant (at best) to allow the children to be seen. Added to this there was an unknown male in the house with the six young children in circumstances where he was refusing to identify himself.

255. The court is acutely conscious of the enormity of the task faced by these or any other social workers. It is also conscious that none of the professionals involved between January 2008 and May 2008 have had the benefit of legal representation or the opportunities of making submissions to this court. A serious case review is currently being conducted and no doubt the social services and educational welfare involvement will be analysed in a way that is not open to this court. It is no part of the function of this court to second guess their findings.

256. The fact remains however that M’s school was seriously concerned and the school of L, Z and K were voicing their concerns about these children, in particular their concerns relating to their belief that the children were not being fed properly. The schools did all they could to bring their concerns to the attention of the relevant authorities. These concerns were not taken sufficiently seriously and were not adequately investigated.

The role of the schools

On what’s documented here, I think it’s overstating the case to say that both schools did all they could.

2.123 Education staff have a crucial role to play in helping identify welfare concerns, and indicators of possible abuse or neglect, at an early stage. They should refer to those concerns to the appropriate organisation, normally LA children’s social care, contributing to the assessment of a child’s needs and, where appropriate, to ongoing action to meet those needs. – WTtSC²⁵

As far as I can tell from the report, the staff at M’s school – although caring for him as best they could within the school environment – didn’t pass on to Social Services his alarmingly quick weight loss, the incident where he took the apple core from the bin, and their awareness that the mother was restricting his diet. Perhaps that referral, from a separate and professional source, of another child in the same family (and without the distraction of home education) would have made some difference to Social Services’ handling of the case.

But it’s certainly clear that the staff at Khyra‘s school made their fears known. They communicated both with Social Services (in writing and several times by phone) and with Miss M. The school staff stopped pursuing the matter only after Miss M had reported back that Social Services were taking it on.

The Judge on responsibility

259. K’s death was caused by and is the responsibility of her mother and the Intervenor, but on the evidence before the court I can only conclude that in all probability had there been an adequate initial assessment and proper adherence by the educational welfare services to its guidance, K would not have died. Merely looking at the photographs of the house and the conditions in which the children were living confirms in my mind that had social services even seen the bedroom in which the children lived or the manner in which they were fed, they would undoubtedly have intervened.

In paragraph 259, I think Mrs Justice King is, to some degree, following the social workers’ mistaken impression by laying responsibility on what she calls the “educational welfare services”. (This would presumably include Miss M, Mr H and/or the EWS department as a whole.)

I think there were anomalies in how the educational enquiries were treated;²⁶ but Miss M, the “educational social worker” first involved, did report to Social Services the events leading to her concerns, correctly carrying out her key safeguarding duty. As I commented above, paragraph 211 shows Miss M actively pushing Social Services to recognise the realities of the case.

Like Miss M and the children’s teachers, Mr H had a professional duty to report any safeguarding concerns which arose in the course of his EHE job. As it happened, it was other people who raised concerns; but even if he’d had some too, it was still Social Services’ responsibility to follow up the concerns.

I would say simply “in all probability, had there been an adequate initial assessment, K would not have died.”

Parallels with the deaths of other children

The Victoria Climbié Inquiry Report (from Parliament’s Health Committee in 2003)²⁷ says this:

From Maria Colwell in 1973, to Jasmine Beckford and Tyra Henry (both in 1984), Kimberley Carlile (1986), Leanne White (1992), and Chelsea Brown in 1999, the deaths of these children all share many points of similarity. The pattern does not even end with the death of Victoria; since that time there have been at least two more high profile cases (Lauren Wright in 2000, and Ainlee Walker in 2002). In many of these cases the child has been the target of abuse from an adult who is not the natural parent (typically a step-father). While the particular circumstances of each case are different, there are also areas of considerable similarity. In particular, the following features recur time after time:

• Failure of communication between different staff and agencies.

• Inexperience and lack of skill of individual social workers.

• Failure to follow established procedures.

• Inadequate resources to meet demands.

In Khyra’s death, the factor which for me is most obvious of those four is “Failure to follow established procedures.” A key mistake – arguably the key mistake – was the social workers wrongly deciding not to complete Initial Assessments for the six children (even after saying that they would).

“Lack of skill” is right up there too, though, since it influenced that mistaken decision: how did Miss G (social worker who took the case on 31 January) fail to grasp that the school’s referral was about child protection? And I suspect that a more experienced person would have known that the mother’s consent was not necessarily required to talk to the schools.

“Failure of communication between different staff and agencies” clearly arises in various different ways. One might wonder in particular what Mr H (home ed person) might have said, if Miss G had actually asked him “So, are you happy to take on monitoring the children’s weight, food and health? seeing as you’re going to be round their house occasionally anyway?”

More fundamentally, I wonder what understanding Miss G and her manager had of

The influence of possible “inadequate resources” is not so clear to me, though I’d hesitate to conclude that it played no role. Was Miss G under time pressure due to a high caseload? Had she had enough time with her supervisor lately? What training had she been given on information-sharing and consent, or on inter-agency working? (And why was Miss G entrusted with the Initial Assessment at all, when it was due within seven days and she was shortly to go on leave?)

And when Miss C (social services referral officer) and her manager twice told (deputy head) Miss B that they wouldn’t take it further, did they have caseload & staff time on their minds at all?

Ofsted’s July 2010 report on Birmingham Social Services suggests that at present, nobody really knows what the Birmingham caseloads are:

30. … Pressures of work, capacity and capability pressures were cited as the root causes of the fundamental performance problems in the duty and assessment service. However, this could not be substantiated as no accurate data exist which show the nature and state of active caseloads. This major deficit prevents effective analysis and action by managers.

Human error and malfunctioning systems

Mrs Justice King rightly alludes to

the enormity of the task faced by these or any other social workers.

I too don’t want to rush to judgement of Miss G or her manager, or even whoever was responsible for training and supervising them. Social work is a difficult job to do well, with life-and-death responsibilities and (in practice) often not enough time to do them justice. There are probably lots of other social workers round the country who have made similar procedural mistakes, and got away with it in the sense that nobody died.

My point is that giving more and more people more and more legal powers and legal duties still can’t legislate away human error, or make malfunctioning systems²⁸ suddenly function well.

Working Together to Safeguard Children has a section on what was learned from Victoria Climbié’s death in 2000. It includes this summary:

1.7 The examination of the legislative framework for safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children set out in the Children Act 1989 found it to be basically sound: the difficulties lay not in relation to the law but in its interpretation, resources and implementation.

Summary and conclusion

To sum up: Khyra and her siblings were still in school when the problems began, her school rightly reported to Social Services their concern about the children’s nutrition, and if Social Services had followed their own procedures, she’d probably still be alive. It’s quite true that the LA’s home education person had no right to insist on seeing the children, but Social Services did have that right – given the serious nature of the concerns – and failed to exercise it due to mistakes. A well-functioning Social Services team would almost certainly have saved Khyra’s life.

So, does Khyra Ishaq’s death mean – as both Maggie Atkinson and the Times imply – that education departments need the legal powers which social workers already have, to insist on coming into people’s homes and speaking to children alone?

No, it does not. What ought to happen is simply that when an education professional (or anyone else) has evidence-based concerns about a child’s safety, the social workers who are trained for it act upon those concerns.

The laws for that system already exist; the “gap” is in reliably doing it.

Here, have an index…
Systems, people and the death of Khyra Ishaq
Introduction
Point-scoring with her name
Birmingham blame game
The Court report
Invitation for input
First signs
December 2007 and later
First approach to Social Services
The second referral
Miss M’s powers and duties
Social Services take it on
The nature of an Initial Assessment
Did Miss G need consent from the mother before talking to school staff?
Ambiguous information on obtaining consent
The 7-day limit
Mr H visits
Risk factor confusion
A brief glimpse of three of the six children
The social workers let it drop
Analysis from the Guardian and the Judge
The role of the schools
The Judge on responsibility
Parallels with the deaths of other children
Human error and malfunctioning systems
Summary and conclusion

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

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UK elections today. A quote and some thoughts of my own.

I was amused at this article by David Mitchell in the Observer last week.

“You’re sick of the government, aren’t you? So vote for me!” is how British opposition leaders have always addressed the electorate. It’s usually enough. “Why commit to policies in advance when I can win just by not being Gordon Brown?” Cameron must have thought.

<snip>

… Cameron’s strategy, to everyone’s surprise, isn’t working.

The public’s reasoning may have gone like this: “The Tories represent change, in that electing them would result in a change of government. But somehow I’m not sure they’d be a better government, just a different one. And, in fact, there’s something eerily familiar about them. Big business seems to back them. Does that mean they’re nice? Hmm.

“Oh, it doesn’t make any difference who you vote for, does it? They all use the same platitudes. I wish they could all lose. I suppose that means I want a hung parliament? People seem to think that could happen. And everyone says Nick Clegg won the first leadership debate. I only saw a bit of it myself, but I’m quite glad – he was the underdog. Maybe I’ll vote for him? That might give the LibDems a bit more influence if there’s a hung parliament. Also, it might keep the Labour/Tory [delete as applicable] candidate out in my constituency.

“Actually, wait a minute! I feel quite good about Nick Clegg now! Nick Clegg and a hung parliament! And the LibDems want proportional representation which would mean there’d always be a hung parliament. Would that matter? It seems interesting.”

Speculation about the consequences I’ll leave to those more expert, but I do think David Mitchell’s pinpointed a certain spirit of the times. “I wish they could all lose.” I was especially tickled with that bit about celebrating the underdog – that is such absolutely classic English reasoning. Hahaha.

My thoughts

Lib Dems do strike me as possibly the least worst prospect at the moment, though that doesn’t mean I’m greatly enthusiastic about them.

I went to a local hustings to get some vibes of who’s who, and I did like most of what our local Lib Dem blokie had to say. (And I do think he’s got a chance of getting in – a lot of the “Labour majority” here last time was really an “Alan Simpson is a sound bloke” majority. A.S. was a “rebel” and outspoken against the war in Iraq, and he’s standing down at this election.)

I liked a lot of what the Labour candidate said too, and I liked the look of her background – but unfortunately she’s representing the party that’s got Ed Balls in it, and he’s determined to obliviously trample on autonomous education.

Which, OK, on the one hand, minority interest, but on the other hand, deeply indicative of New Labour’s mistrust of any human beings but their well-intentioned selves. Hence bureaucratic top-down micromanagement and clunky malfunctioning “incentives”, and little or no recognition of the intrinsic satisfaction of being able to do a good job. And that reflects, I think, a fundamental strand of New Labour culture, certainly not limited to the tiny pioneering world of uncoercive education. Yes they have done some good things (yay civil partnerships, yay money towards the poorest families), but it hurts my systems-geeky sensibilities to see how partial and short-term-thinky some of their measurements are! Come and look at how your great schemes play out on the ground, people.

Plus: war in Iraq, ID cards, ContactPoint. All huge amounts of money, all highly debatable in terms of causing long-term good results.

Plus, Digital Economy Bill boshed through with widespread complacent ignorance and feeble scrutiny. One of my thoughts about the idea of a hung parliament is that perhaps it would slow down the passing of ill-thought-through poorly-designed laws. Not sure if that would actually be true, but it’s something I’ve been wondering.

(see, I care a lot more about the laws our Parliamentarians make and the processes by which they make them than I do about e.g. the famous “expenses scandal”. Not to say I approve of the latter, but it seems to me the damage caused by it is mainly to politicians’ credibility, individually and as a class, rather than to other people’s lives.)

Pretty convinced now that the Tories wouldn’t be any better though. In some ways they’re less distrustful of human beings than New Labour is, but they’ve not got a good track record on thinking about what vulnerable people need. And I hear they’ve been allying in the European Parliament with scary homophobic people, so that’s no good.

So Lib Dems it will have to be, this time – with fingers crossed that they’re no worse than I’m imagining, and a hope that they’ll be able to do something worthwhile with that teeny tiny bit of influence that is my vote.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

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So Schedule 1 is gone… for now.

The fact that it went out in the wash-up rather than being fully debated does rather give it the flavour of “Saved by the bell”. But still, at least it gives unschooling families a little bit of breathing room, in which to do yet more education on the subjects of misleading stereotypes, dubious statistics and the principles of risk management…

The “wash-up” is a phase just before an election, where there’s no time to debate properly the half-finished Bills, and so the Government and Opposition get together in private and agree which bits can just be boshed through quickly. The work of many people had ensured that the Government knew by now this wasn’t one of those bits :-)

Thanks

Among the Parliamentary people who did most to cause this commonsensical and welcome result were

Edited to add more people who helped (see comments):

Thanks all of you. Thanks for listening, and thanks for your imaginative thought about how the proposed law would play out in practice, and thanks for your willingness to question Mr Badman’s dubious stats and not take his conclusions at face value.

Thanks too to anyone else on the Parliamentary side who, unbeknown to me, contributed to this result. (Feel free to add other thanks in the comments. The list above was compiled with help from other home ed parents, but it’s not definitive. But even if we list everyone we know about, there may be people who helped without any of us knowing.)

Thanks to writers and researchers Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison for their highly relevant submission to the Select Committee.

And thanks to everyone from EHE communities who took time to do original research, crunch statistics, write, strategise, have picnics! and ultimately educate our representatives. It’s been a long hard slog to get this far and it’s not over, but hurrah for our tenacious efforts, and for how well we’ve all managed to work together despite our diverse and sometimes contradictory ideas.

Ed Balls: “we’ll be back”

So the dangerous, expensive and distressing consequences of this poorly-thought-through legislation have been staved off for a while. But according to this article in the Times, Ed Balls has already said (to Michael Gove) that Labour will resurrect it if they get back in:

It is our very clear intention to ensure that all the measures you have rejected are included in a new bill in the first session of the new Parliament.

This utter determination not to learn anything from the previous discussions unfortunately gives all unschooling families a compelling reason not to vote Labour (if there weren’t enough already…).

On the other hand, I’m wary of David Cameron too.

Slightly disconcertingly for a lifelong almost-anything-but-the-Tories voter, I’ve actually found myself agreeing with some of what he’s said (e.g. about measuring quality of life alongside GDP). And on gay rights, he’s come a long way from Mrs Thatch (though it might be a while before we hear him say “queer” or “polyamory”, and, inconsistently, he doesn’t support same-sex marriage).

But I also gather he’s super keen on building more prisons and putting people in them (though in practice they might not actually be able to afford it). I think that’s utterly wrong-headed, given how many people currently in prison should really be getting help with mental/emotional illness, and support to function in the outside world. And if he’s got that so wrong, what else has he got planned that I don’t even know about yet?

So whoever forms the next Government, I hope their majority’s going to be thin enough to make them very cautious about introducing any more half-baked schemes.

Legislate in haste, repent at leisure

However, just when we may have entertained the thought that the Labour Party was a lost cause, at least we get this stonking speech from Fiona MacTaggart MP, in the debate on the Digital Economy Bill.

Unfortunately the Digital Economy Bill did get through the washup. (Nathaniel Tapley with a writer’s perspective on why the D.E. Bill is a Bad Thing. Steve Lawson with a musician’s perspective on why the D.E. Bill is a Bad Thing. More background from Steve L.)

But F McT’s speech isn’t all about that particular Bill, anyway; it’s also about the whole process of Government.

A little extract from the Hansard transcript of it:

If we allow this Bill to go through in this way… we will demonstrate that the public are right to think that we are pretty pointless, and that we do not have the courage of our convictions.

… However important the Bill is, it will be just as easy for a new Government to say, “We will put in place these building blocks” if they are so essential. It is just not acceptable for the Opposition Front Benchers to say, “Whoops! If it doesn’t work, we’ll come back with something a month later.” They are actually saying, “We’re not prepared to do our job.”

I recommend watching the video of this speech. Even though the topic is malfunctioning processes, thus arguably not very cheery, I found it cheering and enlivening to hear sense being spoken about it, and I liked the way Ms MacT made her points. It’s just under 10 minutes long.

Badly prepared laws

That links up with this pointy article from a little while ago, based on Lord Butler’s Better Government Initiative: Ministers passing too many ‘bad’ laws, say ex mandarins. No kidding!

The report says: “There has been too much legislation in recent years, some of it has been unnecessary and too much of it has been badly prepared.”

… a higher proportion of Bills now enter Parliament incomplete, poorly explained, and requiring substantial amendment.” …

The group’s report says … governments have created “perverse incentives” and “unintended consequences of targets and performance indicators”. …

It criticises “excessive bureaucracy in prescribing new systems or procedures” and “a ‘tick-box’ culture in which complying with the rules replaces responsible judgment and individual discretion”.

Recognition of complexity

As Annette Brooke put it, in January’s debate on the Children, Schools & Families Bill:

… I understand home educators’ concerns. It is a complex topic, which needs time. We should deal with it step by step, starting with the important subjects of support and training. We should be wary of a registration scheme, which could represent the most heavy-handed approach and perhaps destroy some imaginative education.

and

… before rushing into legislating, one needs to work on the culture and training. Indeed, I cannot understand why the support that is to be introduced needs legislation.

Step by step, taking time, recognising a complex subject? That would be good.

This time… we had a lucky escape.

Index…
Top of article
Thanks
Ed Balls: “we’ll be back”
Legislate in haste, repent at leisure
Badly prepared laws
Recognition of complexity

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A theory that our ethics and scepticism are being misconstrued/misrepresented as selfish blinkered naïveté.

I wrote yesterday about the discounting of first-hand voices in favour of external “experts”. Today I want to talk about one particular flavour of discounting, applied to parents from electively home-educating families.

Can’t see beyond our own noses, allegedly

I’ve begun to think that one of the stereotypes of us is as so blinkered and self-obsessed that we can’t comprehend why other people have concerns.

It’s as if the basis of all our objections is “My kid’s all right, Jack, to hell with the others”. The implication would be that we’re too stupid and naïve to see what our stubbornness is costing other children.

When someone plays the well-known ace of trumps “If it saves even one child…”, how dare we not give in, stop arguing, and agree immediately to cooperate! What kind of callous selfish idiots must we be??!!

(This is related, I think, to why we so frequently hear the explanation “We don’t mean you of course, but what about those other families?”)

Liberty trade-offs

The fact is I do care about children-in-general as well as mine, and I completely understand the principle that sometimes a little bit of one person’s liberty has to be sacrificed to protect the liberty of someone else.

What hasn’t been demonstrated to my satisfaction – or at all! – is the necessity for (or any value in) this sacrifice of liberty: meaning the kind of expensive intrusive bureaucratic licensing-and-inspection system for EHE which is proposed in the CSF Bill.

Well-founded scepticism

On the contrary, it seems clear to me that extending the system as proposed would be damaging both to EHE children (in various ways) and to vulnerable people who actually do need help (due to sucking resources away from them).

Even for “those other families” – the very few where the parents are out of their depth, and the even fewer where the parents may have bad motivations – what’s proposed in the Bill is not a system well-designed for the children’s support.

A lot of my worst fears about the Bill becoming law are for the children who need most support – the children with special needs, who least fit the picture of what children are “supposed” to be able to accomplish at a certain age.

Remember, we’re not talking about a completely new system unknown to any of us; the Bill system closely resembles many Local Authorities’ existing ultra vires* systems, only “with added tooth-points!” and removing the option to avoid the harrow. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to realise what the Bill’s laws would look like in practice, and we do have reasons for the hypothesis that its overall effects would not be benign. Our scepticism is well-founded.

* “Ultra vires” means “beyond the powers [of the law]“. What I’m alluding to here is that many LAs in England have already taken it upon themselves to monitor EHE families in more detail than is required by law. EHE families frequently encounter LA staff who misrepresent current law; either they’re lying, or they haven’t bothered to learn the law themselves, instead making up the rules to suit their own prejudices.

Actually, I don’t even know why anyone would suppose that its effects would be benign – considering that the Government’s case for such laws rests on a load of myths and fears and inaccurate statistics. That’s not the way to make good law.

Give me evidence

I say to the Government: You want to change my mind? You want to convince me there’s a problem I don’t yet appreciate, which we need to fix? You want to convince me you’ve got the best solution to it? (or even one that doesn’t do more harm than good – that’d be a start.)

Well then, give me the evidence, include the raw numbers so that interested parties can check them without hundreds of FOI requests, and stop misleading people in order to prop up your argument. I’m eminently swayable by actual facts.

That demand isn’t coming from any blinkered selfish “we’re all right Jack” self-interest. It’s coming from a principle that truth is an essential foundation for ethical choices.

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There’s a quote which I’ve often found myself remembering lately in connection with the Children, Schools and Families Bill. It’s from a book by Jonathon Green, and the interviewee is Marcus Riggs. The interview was from a time after the Church had done some kind of report on gay people, although I don’t remember the details of that part.

… when people are trying to explore an area of human life - for instance, if you wanted to bake bread, you’d ask a baker; if you wanted to know how to put an electrical circuit in, you’d ask an electrician - but if you want to know what the experiences of gay people are like, they’re the last ones to be asked. ‘They would say that wouldn’t they, they’re gay.’ … The assumption in that report is that if you sat and talked to me, I’d give you a biased viewpoint.

But what I’d say is, ‘I’m a Christian and I’m gay and it’s caused me a lot of heartache to work through what all this means and come to some sort of way of living my life that has personal integrity. And that also enriches my relationship with God and the people around me. That I have worked very hard on.’

Who listens to whom?

The pattern is that if you’re from an oppressed or stigmatised group, people don’t want to listen to your version of your life. They want an “expert” to speak on your behalf, and “explain you” to them.

This means that other people who aren’t from your group can make a career of being an expert on your group. And the experts talk to each other and say “what do you think, Other Expert who isn’t from this group either?”

It’s a radical thing to allow someone from within the group to be in the “Expert” position. It’s a radical thing and an essential part of activism to be within the group and claim an “Expert” position.

Parallels

I’m thinking here of how cissexual doctors and policy-makers and “experts” go to conferences and talk about transsexual people, and make up rules for who should and shouldn’t get what kind of medical assistance to change their own bodies. It’s not my field, but I’m pretty sure that even now, after many years of campaigning by trans people, listening to transsexual people’s lived experience is only a small factor in making up those rules.

People with disabilities have been pioneers in challenging “experts’” opinion about them, saying “Nothing about us without us” (a slogan which many other groups have used too).

While writing this, I also remembered some writing by Charlotte Cooper, from a story about how she and a friend/colleague went as fat people to a couple of events about obesity:

I don’t think that you have to be fat to be able to say intelligent things about fat people or fat experience, there are people within the Fat Studies community for example who are not at all fat. What they have is empathy and respect for fat people, a capacity for self-reflection, a commitment to social change. They support other fat scholars, they use their power and privilege to include us … and they are not interested in building careers that denigrate fat people.

… most obesity researchers, including those I saw speak this week, are so alien to this kind of ethical position that they don’t even recognise that they themselves are part of the problem, they truly believe that they represent the solution, that they are the good guys.

When fat people are absent from events such as Body Image: The Impact of Magazines and Size Matters, we are abstracted and made Other. No wonder Ogden referred to fat people as “those people” throughout her presentation. …

… Who on those panels would be able to listen to somebody who they have already stereotyped and dehumanised?

Similarly, from an article about an academic book on fatness:

… works like Fat Economics make fat people abstract. These are works that do not include accounts by fat people, they are not written by fat people, and fat people have absolutely no voice in these works. … Research like this contributes to the notion of fat people as passive and stupid, people whose lives need mediating and explaining by thin ‘experts’ who arrogantly eye us as interesting scum in a petri dish.

Living it

I feel that some of the CSF Bill’s supporters are relating to people from unschooling families in a way similar to what Marcus Riggs describes:

“You would say that, you’re home educators”.

Our first-hand experience is being dismissed as bias unfitting us to perceive the issues correctly.

Not like “Well, you are the people actually living this, so we should listen deeply to what you have to tell us from your rich and varied experience of how it all works.”

At the Bill Committee

Chloë Watson, 17-year-old Chair of the Home Education Youth Council, put the challenge to the Bill Committee on 19 January:

… why not listen to the people who know what they are talking about - the people who are doing the home educating, who live it, who live with the consequences of what they do?

… Why not listen to the people who are saying, “This will wreck my child’s life”? Why not take notice of that, over and above the people who think, “Oh well, maybe in a few cases something might go wrong”?

(In Gill’s commentary on the Bill Committee, she includes a clip of Chloë speaking – second clip from the bottom. It’s worth a listen; there’s a wealth of additional meaning in the off-hand tone in which Chloë does the “Oh well, maybe in a few cases…”.)

What if…?

If the DCSF had employed someone from within the EHE communities to write what became the Badman Report, that person would still have had to do research to establish the facts. It’s not that being part of a community automatically gives you all the answers.

But what would be different?

Our input is vital

We – the unschooling families, collectively – have a close-up view of both non-school education and the existing system for interfering with it. As Kipling famously put it,

The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where each tooth-point goes.

That insight is vital if the Government actually wants to create a workable system.

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I’m a fan of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It’s a while since I read any of her books, but my quotes collection includes a good crop of thought-provoking ideas from her.

Found myself thinking about this one, from the book Tendencies:

Knowledge is not itself power, although it is the magnetic field of power. Ignorance and opacity collude or compete with it in mobilizing the flows of energy, desire, goods, persons. If M. Mitterand knows English but Mr. Reagan lacks French, it is the urbane M. Mitterand who must negotiate in an acquired tongue, the ignorant Mr. Reagan who may dilate in his native one.

Autonomous education in the Badman Review

This is reminding me of Mr Badman’s persistent lack of understanding of autonomous education (AE). As we said in AEUK’s submission to the Select Enquiry,

The author’s call for further research into AE sits oddly with his disregard of the available material.

When Mr Badman was meeting people in the process of “researching” his Review, various people told him about AE. And there are plenty of books and research relevant to it. But this information received almost no acknowledgement in the Review, and as far as I can tell, had little or no influence on Mr Badman’s own understanding either.

As a result, the Badman Review completely fails to recognise the incompatibility of autonomous education with Mr Badman’s proposed monitoring scheme.

If Mr Badman and his team had allowed themselves to learn about AE, it would have been most inconvenient for their beliefs about monitoring.

Maths

I’m thinking too of Mr Badman’s statistics on Child Protection Plans (CPPs). The other week at the Bill Committee, he was still talking about these stats as though they prove something, despite Graham Stuart MP carefully explaining to him back in October that they don’t.

The following exchange is taken from Question 85 at the Bill Committee on Tuesday 19 January 2010:

Graham Stuart MP: I must say that I am rather disappointed that, following our exchange at the Select Committee sitting, you have not reflected in any way on the child protection plan figures …

Graham Badman: I reflected a great deal on our exchange of views, I promise you. I did go back and look at the figures and I came up with exactly the same conclusion.

That session also produced this little gem:

Graham Badman: I fear we are in danger of going round in the same circle. I am afraid I fundamentally disagree with you. You think I am wrong; I think you are wrong.

Graham Stuart: It is maths.

(Hilarious or tragic? You decide.)

I’ve spent a quite preposterously enormous amount of time looking at those CPP statistics, and I assure the reader that they don’t warrant Mr Badman’s faith in them. (Details to follow when I’ve finished writing about it.)

But if Mr Badman and his team had allowed themselves to learn how statistics actually work, it would have been most inconvenient for their ability to convince other people that EHE children were at higher risk. It sounds so much more convincing when you throw in a few numbers!

It’s a human thing

It’s a very human thing to find it uncomfortable and unsettling to have your ideas overturned. Even though in principle I’m a great believer in finding out the truth, I’m sure I’ve felt that feeling a few times, and perhaps been somewhat reluctant to consider a new idea because of it.

(I wouldn’t claim to have done it quite so persistently, and certainly not in the context of being paid thousands of pounds in a professional capacity to report what’s true and known. But, “nothing human being alien to me”, I can empathise with the temptation.)

In my family of origin, this kind of behaviour would be satirised with the phrase “I have made up my mind; do not confuse me with the facts“ :-)

It can be especially painful for humans to have to “climb down” when they’ve taken a position in public and gone on and on about it. In this respect I have some compassion for Mr Badman, even while feeling cross and impatient with him. I wonder if he does actually know at some level that he’s got some things wrong, and just can’t contemplate the loss of face that would be involved in admitting it. It might not be very popular with the people who hired him, either.

But you see, one of the advantages of maintaining ignorance is that you never have to climb down like that.

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On the defence of elective home-based education from heavy-handed expensive intrusive bureaucracy, we have…

Not unrelatedly,

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This arose out of a discussion about how compulsory school can be used to protect children from being made to work (in the economic/ money-earning/ survival sense).

Could championing the right to non-school education for our own children indirectly expose other children to the risk of being coerced into labour?

If so, that would raise an ethical question, which one writer framed in terms of prioritising our own identies: parent vs global citizen. Louisa returns to this framing in the last paragraph.

Note that we were talking about children being made to work; none of the discussion included suggesting that children shouldn’t be allowed to earn money or otherwise contribute to their households by their own choice. That can be in itself an important part of someone’s learning and self-expression.

By Louisa

The way I see it is that to force a child to labour is to initiate force against the child’s life and liberty. The forced labour is not the disease, merely the symptom of the disease. The disease is the coercion of human beings by human beings.

To force a child to abandon the pursuit of his own life, identity and values and force them to attend school where they are required to internalise the values and priorities of the state is also an act of violence against the life and integrity of the child. It is another symptom of the same disease.

Ironically, one of the grounds on which we are being attacked is the assertion that home education is a means by which some parents force their children to internalise the values, beliefs and priorities of the parent.

It seems to me that most of those who make this argument against home ed (Daniel Monk for example) are patently unable to accept or unwilling to admit that the state is not neutral in this respect. The state does not attack home ed in order to protect the child’s right to pursue his *own* life, beliefs, priorities and values – though it claims to – the state attacks home ed in order to neutralise the percieved competition – parents.

It seems to me that many libertarians lose their way here, because they assume the state to have a benign or neutral interest when nothing could be further from the truth! The state does not wish to protect the integrity of the child: it wishes to ensure that the child internalises the values of the state and not the parent! It has no interest in defending the liberty of the child to form his own.

So what I’m kind of trying to get at, in my convoluted way, is that if we champion self-sovereignty and individual liberty, if we champion the right of the child not have force or fraud enacted against his life, liberty or property then we will always be on the “right” side.

We don’t have to choose between unregulated home ed and exploited children. We can instead choose and argue and campaign for individual liberty and self-ownership.

Children will always be abused, enslaved, coerced or exploited by either parents or state so long as either party believes it has a right to do so. This in my view is the disease that needs to change.

When we cure this sickness, symptoms of exploitation like child labour, child abuse, schools in their current form etc will all disappear. We don’t have to prioritise our identities. We can simply enact freedom and self-sovereignty for all citizens of the world. Starting with ourselves.

Thanks to Louisa for letting me share this here.

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Big thanks to Ciaran for telling me about it, and making it sound so intriguing that I went straight online to see if the library had it :-)

First of all I must say: if any of this interests you, and certainly if you’re in the habit of following news via any mainstream media, then time spent reading this book will not be wasted. It’s readily available; I got a copy from the library. It’s pretty gripping in places, with lots of real life stories.

Nick Davies is a journalist himself: “a Guardian man”, he says. The book focuses primarily on print media in the UK, but includes enough on TV, radio and other countries to show that similar patterns repeat there.

I’m going to start by quoting some largish chunks from the book, to lay out some relevant territory. (Bold bits added by me.) And then after that, I’ll say a few things I’ve been thinking about after reading it.

Then and now

Historically, the clearest threats to press freedom (i.e. the freedom to tell the truth) have come from outside of newsrooms; and they have tended to bring pressure to bear at the point of publication. The state did this through formal censorship, reinforced by secrecy, legal restraint and physical intimidation. Media owners, as we have seen, did this through direct and sustained interference. Both threats remain, albeit in more subtle form than in the past.

But now we are deep into a third age of falsehood and distortion, in which the primary obstacles to truth-telling lie inside the newsrooms, with the internal mechanics of an industry which has been deeply damaged. The problem now is not merely at the point of publication but also at the earlier and even more important stage of gathering and testing raw information. (p22-23.)

To put things in perspective, the author estimates a percentage of problems which nowadays come from owners’ and advertisers’ interference:

Journalists with whom I have discussed this agree that if you could quantify it, you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact of these two forms of interference. (p22.)

So what’s the big problem nowadays, if not deliberate interference?

It’s time, and behind that, money.

More stories, less time

In preparing the book, the author commissioned some research from a team at Cardiff University. They estimate that since 1985, staffing levels on the national papers have slightly fallen, whereas the amount of editorial space they’re filling has trebled. (p63.)

At the same time, local papers and local news agencies were going out of business, depriving the national papers of the network of local journalists who in past times would have been feeding stories in.

… the Cardiff researchers surveyed national news reporters. Two-thirds of them said they were now producing more stories; and two-thirds of them said they were now doing less checking. … One told them: ‘Newspapers have turned into copy factories. This leaves less time for real investigations, or meeting and developing contacts. The arrival of online editions has also increased demand for quick copy, reducing the time available for checking facts.’

Another, from a different paper, said: ‘I think the time available to be thorough has decreased … The main consequence of that is that if things require lots of work, they are less likely to be embarked on.’ … And another: ‘I insist on making at least two check calls on every story, but this is becoming increasingly difficult to do, because of time constraints.’ (p64.)

The health editor of the Times, Nigel Hawkes, captured the view of many: ‘We are churning stories today, not writing them. Almost everything is recycled from another source … Actually knowing enough to identify the stories is no longer important. The work has been deskilled. (p59.)

The author asked a young graduate to write a diary of “one week in his working life on a regional daily tabloid”. At the end of the week, the young reporter counts up:

Number of stories: 48 (9.6 per day)
People spoken to: 26
People seen face to face: 4 out of 26
Total hours out of office: 3 out of 45.5 (p59.)

The author comments:

This is life in a news factory. No reporter who is turning out nearly ten stories every shift can possibly do his or her job properly. No reporter who spends only three hours out of the office in an entire working week can possibily develop enough good leads or build enough good contacts. No reporter who speaks to only twenty-six people in researching forty-eight stories can possibly be checking their truth. (p59.)

Recycled stories

The researchers also chose two random weeks and analysed all the stories in the Times, Independent, Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, to find out how many were original.

At the end of this unique investigation, they came up with a striking finding – that the most respected media outlets in the country are routinely recycling unchecked second-hand material. … this tends to come from two primary sources; wire agencies like the Press Association, and public-relations activity which is promoting some commercial or political interest.

…

… only 1% of wire stories which were carried by Fleet Street papers admitted the source. Most carried misleading bylines, ‘by a staff reporter’ or even by a named reporter who had rewritten the agency copy. The denial of PR input is at least as thorough… ‘We found many stories apparently written by one of the newspaper’s own reporters that seem to have been cut and pasted from elsewhere.’ (p52-53.)

Many weren’t properly checked before being recycled:

The researchers went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of fact and found that with a staggering 70% of them, the claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only 12% of these stories showed evidence that the central statement had been thoroughly checked. (p53.)

And these percentages left out the tabloids and various other sources of even lower quality:

These were simply the stories that were being presented by the best daily newspapers in the UK as an account of the most important or interesting events in the country over the preceding twenty-four hours. (p53.)

Relying on agencies

One common practice is to use something “off the wire”, i.e. from an agency such as Reuters or the Press Association (PA).

As one national newspaper correspondent told the Cardiff researchers: ‘Checking information has decreased, and what is worse, it is not expected by the news desk. I cannot tell you the number of times I am told to “take it off the wires and knock it into shape“, which is just terrible.’ … A section editor on a national daily told them: ‘We’ve always been reliant on wire copy, but we use it a hell of a lot more these days. It’s quite common for us to cut and paste a story off PA, renose it a bit to mask where it’s come from and then put it out there as our own.’ (p75.)

But the agency may not have checked it, either:

PA reporters told me they routinely start the day by writing stories from press releases and other newspapers and, since they may do this at six or seven in the morning, they cannot possibly find anybody to check them with. One of their senior editors agreed that this happens. He had previously worked for a regional newspaper and told me ‘We used to take what we were given from PA and accept it as fact but once I went to work there, I realised that we couldn’t.’

…

Another agency man told [the Cardiff researchers]: ‘My father was a journalist for Reuters for twenty-five years, and the working conditions were completely different. Stories would take much longer to put together, but when they were, they were more likely to be accurate and close to the truth.’ (p82.)

The author sums up in a line:

Journalism without checking is like a human body without an immune system. (p51.)

Truth and truth

And when you’re using agency sources, there’s another vital missing link: Reporting accurately what someone says is not the same as reporting the truth.

PA is a news agency, not a newspaper. It is not attempting, nor does it claim to be attempting, to tell people the truth about the world. As its editor, Jonathan Grun, put it to us: ‘What we do is report what people say and accurately.’ The PA reporter goes to the press conference with the intention of captruring an accurate record of what is said. Whether what is said is itself a truthful account of the world is simply not their business. … Sleuthing, Grun told us, is not PA’s role. ‘Our role is attributable journalism – what someone has got to say. What is important is in quote marks.’ If the Prime Minister says there are chemical weapons in Iraq, that is what the good news agency will report. (p83.)

No-one was watching

Moreover, the agencies don’t have enough journalists any more to properly cover the whole country, so important stories get missed entirely – e.g. from local governments, courts and even Parliament. No-one’s watching!

When I looked into this in the late 1990s, I found a criminal trial which had been running for three months at Leicester Crown Court, without a word of national coverage, even though it had unearthed Scotland Yard’s involvement in unlawfully importing Yardie gangsters from Jamaica who were used as informants and effectively given a licence to commint crime in London. (p78.)

As to Government:

Chris Moncrieff, who has covered Parliament for PA since 1962, told us … that PA now covers far fewer political meetings and speeches than it used to and relies far more on government press releases. ‘They’ve won’, he said. ‘If they put out in advance a copy of the speech, then we will not go. We now print what they want us to print. We go to far fewer meetings or not at all.’ (p80.)

And more…

I must say I finished the book thinking “What’s the point of reading a newspaper ever again? Most of what’s in it can’t be trusted anyway”.

There’s a lot more to it, which I haven’t cited here: the dynamics of which stories are likely to be chosen for print and which ignored; the money poured into public relations companies nowadays, and what they do; the success of organisations like Greenpeace in shaping stories; and a series of fascinating “case study”-type chapters, looking at different newspapers, different stories etc.

(Some of the stories are covered in even more depth at the web site connected with the book, www.flatearthnews.net.)

But what I found particularly illuminating was that whole scenario I’ve been describing via the quotes above: less and less time to research, understand or check the facts.

My own little case study

As I was reading, I kept thinking of that story in the Guardian back in October, reproducing some of the dodgy stats from Graham Badman’s work.

Now doesn’t that look like a perfect case study of the kind of thing Nick Davies talks about in the book?

So, given all that…

To sum up: the story shows no sign of having been written for the purpose of telling the truth.

It did forward the Government’s agenda and fill up some space in the paper, though. :-/

I wonder… if Jessica Shepherd even worked on the story at all – or if someone else stuck her name on it.

I wonder… who put which words of the article together at which points. Maybe it was based on a Govt press release, plus an Education Otherwise press release for Fiona’s quote? Maybe it was cobbled together at the Guardian, or maybe before that at the Press Association or Reuters?

Implications and possibly opportunities

I think this territory is important for activists to know and understand.

For one thing, it’ll give us a more realistic perspective on what we can expect from the Press.

Nick Davies again:

Most of the time, most journalists do not know what they are talking about. Their stories may be right, or they may be wrong: they don’t know. … They [now] work in structures which positively prevent them from discovering the truth. (p28.)

But also, there are opportunities here.

It’s not that I want journalism to be compromised like it is. In the case of the Children, Schools & Families Bill, and the plan to interfere with non-school education, I think we’d be infinitely better off with a Press which had time to find out and understand what was really happening.

(Or, failing that, at least we could do with something like the Center for Public Integrity, an independently funded organisation for investigative journalism in the States – also mentioned in the book.)

And the same is true for the world in general: truth is just generally helpful in doing good in the world, and lies generally are not.

But as long as the media does work that way, we should be learning how to take advantage of it like the other “players” do. Why shouldn’t it be our press releases that find their way in?

(Well, OK, one answer to that is it’s more risky for the Press to print things which go against current “received wisdom” – that’s another thing that the author talks about – but still, there are things we could say that wouldn’t hit that filter.)

Here’s another quote from that young journalist’s diary, from the book. Remember, this is about working on a regional daily paper:

Come in at eight to find the desk asking for a lead story, two 60-line basements [for the foot of a page] and 100 lines of nibs [news in briefs]. And they have no leads. I usually find some stories on my weekend off, but I’ve had a horrible cold. They tell me to check progress with a building being knocked down in the centre of town. They like stories with pictures, because they fill more space. I phone the developer and the council and turn it into a story. I take my first ever lunch break, wander the streets, copying down details of posters advertising car-boot sales, meditation evenings, whatever. Back in the office, I start turning them into stories. The desk panic because they still have no front-page lead. They steal an old story off the sports desk …

…

Then they tell me to do the Smilies: every day, on page seven, we run three happy, smiling stories, to make the readers feel good, complete with pics. No leads. I call my mum, who lives nearby, and she reads out bits from another local paper. I turn them into Smilies.

…

A real story walks in the front door: a young woman who has had her children taken into care because they say she has learning disabilities so can’t make a decent mum. She is desperate, been standing in the rain waiting for the doors to open. I tell her I’ll call her. I know I won’t; the desk aren’t interested. … No leads at all. I recycle some old stuff from my notebook and download a few upcoming events off the council website. (p56-57.)

Papers like that probably aren’t going to be interested in the politics we’d like them to report. But a couple of phrases stick in my mind.

They like stories with pictures, because they fill more space.

happy, smiling stories, to make the readers feel good, complete with pics.

Does anyone else see an opportunity here for some awareness-raising of non-school education? I can’t help wondering whether we could be in our local papers almost as often as we like, with very little effort, just by making a point of taking a few good-quality pix whenever we do anything interesting.

OK, not every child will want to have their photo in the paper, and not every family is prepared to risk bringing the attention of the Local Authority upon them in these times of prejudice and ultra vires practice. But still… remember the picnics with the bubble-blowing?

As for queer activism, I imagine local papers may not be quite as open to that, what with homophobia/biphobia and all; but still I’m pondering the use of photos in helping to get more bi news into Gay Times, Diva or the Pink, or any queer activism into the mainstream papers. Remember BiCon 2002 and the pix in Diva? or BiCon 2003 and the pix in the Big Issue?

And a last word

yeah, so I recommend reading this book :-)

Linky index…
Top of document
Then and now
More stories, less time
Recycled stories
Relying on agencies
Truth and truth
No-one was watching
And more…
My own little case study
Implications and possibly opportunities
And a last word

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

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At the start of 2009, I never guessed how much of it I’d spend on home ed activism. It’s not something I wanted or went looking for; it feels more like something that the universe decided to put in front of me, like it or not, and a case of “choose what you’ve got”.

It was 1995 when I recognised/reclassified myself as bi and jumped into queer politics, and I’ve always lived as approximately female (even though I rarely feel gendered in & of myself). But for whatever reasons (which is probably an article in itself, and certainly including significant amounts of racial/ability/financial/educational privilege), I haven’t generally had an acute visceral feeling of those oppressions like I’ve had this year with the home ed stuff. I’ve been present at times to other people’s fears and hatreds of gay people and other people’s misogyny, but until this year I’d very rarely had the sense of being a tiny inconsequential ant under the big oblivious looming boot of the State.

Section 28

Jill wrote an essay recently about the parallels between Section 28 and the current anti-home-ed legislation plans, and the similarity had occurred to me too. Lying lies, taking advantage of the general public’s ignorance of gayness to misrepresent our real lives and make prejudice look reasonable (to some people). And, in the guise of “protecting children”, in fact betraying them.

(In my opinion, schools still haven’t recovered from how wary teachers were in those years of doing anything to challenge homophobic bullying. My heart goes out to the young lesbian/bi/gay/trans people who survived school in those times – and the ones still in school now.)

But at the time of Section 28, everyone I knew agreed that it was completely wrong! (Or at least, that’s how it seemed.) And even when homophobia and biphobia were very obvious in the world, it mostly felt like “This will get better; the work is being done; prejudice is slowly slowly being overcome”. The Labour Government were less homophobic than Mrs Thatcher’s lot too, so that felt like an improvement. (In fact I often had a sense that they’d be doing even more to help if they didn’t have to take into account the power of the Daily Mail.) So I was always cushioned from despair by a sense that the climate was changing in our favour – as well as by having a strong community around me.

whereas now in 2009 when the Government or the media tell lies about non-school education, I don’t have the same sense that most people “get it” or realise how much misrepresentation is going on. (or indeed how close to their own families the Govt are skating, with their plans for us; the phrase “First they came for the home educators…” has gone through my mind many times in recent months.)

And although it’s true that home ed is widely misrepresented and often thought to be a bit weird, still I don’t get any sense that the Govt is being pushed by public opinion into its present agenda of top-down control and interference; on the contrary, they’ve been doing a pretty effective job of manipulating public opinion by publishing lies.

A new dawn

I still remember how elated I felt when Tony Blair’s government got elected. After Section 28 and the Poll Tax, it seemed like a new dawn. I’d stayed up all night at a friend’s house nearby at a watch-the-election party, and walked home along a nearly-deserted street in the early daylight. And this bloke was coming the other way, no-one I knew, and as we got near each other we both just grinned in sheer delight. Hurrah!

To give them credit, they did bring in the Civil Partnerships legislation; it’s not equality, but it’s enabled some good friends of mine to transform an international relationship into a happy domestic one. Can’t knock that.

But oh Labour. Little did we know. Little did we guess of your titanic databases and micromanagement and ingenious dossiers of misleadingness. On that day of joy and optimism in 1997, this is not what I thought we were getting.

Buddhism

I was reading some books about Buddhism this week. I’d written down a title of Pema Chödrön’s (maybe a recommendation from a friend, can’t remember now) and so ended up looking on that shelf at the library, and found some other interesting things while I was there.

The Buddhists say suffering is part of life – although I didn’t realise till I read these books that the word used for “suffering” could equally be translated as “pervasive unsatisfactoriness”. For some reason that amuses me! and makes more sense as well.

Anyway, so a big theme of Buddhism is how you relate to suffering (or “pervasive unsatisfactoriness”) in all its forms. And one of the things mentioned a few times was how, if you have grief or pain or any other feeling that’s hard for you to be with, one of the ways you can transform it is by thinking of all the other people around the world who are having the same feeling, and sending them loving-kindness. It’s not that that’ll necessarily make you feel better – although it might – it’s that your suffering becomes a channel towards more compassion for, and connection with, other humans.

I like that idea. I like the idea that when I feel despair about the whole situation, I can send love to everyone having the same feelings. There are so many people round the world struggling to make themselves heard in the face of unlistening power over their lives, some in much more terrible circumstances than this.

Learning

Actually I had already been doing something a bit similar to that with the home ed stuff. When I’ve awoken at night thinking “This is heading in a bad direction, and the Government isn’t listening to us” or being angry/upset about the lies, every now and again I’ve been remembering to think “This is what it’s like to be oppressed; remember this situation, remember this feeling.” Like a sort of “This will not be wasted if I can learn from it.” And thinking of other oppressed people, and telling myself “You’ve never really known this feeling before, and that’s how privileged you are; well, now you know, and don’t forget.”

A silver lining

An unexpected silver lining for me is that in the last few weeks I seem to have really “got on a roll” with writing for this blog. That’s something else that I hadn’t foreseen at the start of 2009; I’d settled into a rhythm of maybe one post a month or so.

I was reasonably content with that, but it wasn’t quite how I’d originally envisaged the blog. Part of the original point of it was so that not so much of my daily online writing would happen in ephemeral contexts where neither I nor anyone else would be likely ever to re-read it (such as in comments on someone else’s friends-locked post).

But what I noticed was that even when I had the blog, I was still doing most of my writing in other places. What I hadn’t taken into account was the degree to which my writing is in response to other people’s. Often what I was writing was an answer to someone else. And then its natural home was in the thread with the other person’s writing, and not here. And if I posted here, I thought “people reading here won’t have the context, so it won’t be as good”. So in fact not a lot had changed.

Somehow in the last few months, and especially the last few weeks, I’ve stopped worrying about that. I’ve had things to say, I’ve wanted to use the blog to publish them, and I’ve switched my default position to “I will write, and people will get it, or they won’t”. I mean, I’m never oblivious of my audience’s various points of view – that’s partly why it takes me so long to write things – but I’m trusting that the people reading here will either have enough background context already to make sense of things, or be able to make a reasonable guess, or learn it as they go along.

So I feel like some kind of change has been catalysed there in my relationship to the blog, and I’m thinking there’s a good chance that I’ll continue to publish more even after the wave of urgency/intensity passes which is associated with the current Bill. If my writing takes another channel, that’s fine too, but I like the idea of cranking out more of it, one way or another.

Sustainable activism

Something else I found a while back (and have already shared with a few people) is this extract from a speech by Linda Bacon. She’s an advocate of “Health at every size“, and wrote a book of that name. You can find the whole speech at her web site.

I forget how I happened upon this speech exactly, but it might have been via Charlotte Cooper’s blog Obesity Timebomb (which I recommend b.t.w.). But anyway, it has some wise things in it about sustainable activism.

It may just be that we don’t eradicate fat oppression. I’d like to have faith in the inevitability of justice being done, of good triumphing evil, but I need to be honest here and acknowledge that I’m just not confident that’s going to happen. The civil rights movement based on race began long ago, and while some of the more explicit forms of racism are less tolerated, racism still permeates our psyches.

…

But before you get down on me for pessimism, I challenge you to look at it in a different way, because it can be very liberating to reframe it. Maybe the point isn’t victory, as much as we would like to see that done. Maybe the real issue is that through the effort to achieve freedom and equality we get our humanity.

Desmond Tutu offered this advice as rationale for the work of a freedom fighter: “You don’t do the things you do because others will necessarily join you in doing them, nor because they will ultimately prove successful. You do the things you do because the things you do are right.”

I don’t know the future of fat rights. I don’t know whether anything I do, or write, or teach, will make a difference. But I do it, write it, teach it anyway, because it’s the right thing to do. And as uncertain as the outcome may be, the outcome of silence is clear. Change doesn’t happen if you don’t try. And given the choice between the uncertainty of taking action and the certainty of non-action, I opt for trying. It allows me to sleep at night and it gives me hope.

Letting go of the preoccupation with outcome, even while we fight for it, makes us more effective. If you require payoff, you’ll burn out quickly. But if you are committed to the struggle, you can keep on keeping on. Even when you don’t “win,” there is fulfillment in your involvement in something worthwhile.

So here’s the final advice I’d like to leave you with. Your primary source of power lies within you. Strive for integrity. Your value system has to come from you, not just something you’ve absorbed from your culture. Exorcise the oppressor’s values lodged in your psyche.

This is not an easy task I am recommending. It is tough sifting out what’s legitimately right and good and in the best interest of you and our community, and ridding yourself of the ugliness of fatism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and all the other toxins in our environment. Have compassion for yourself throughout your journey. Recognize that it may be a destination you never get to, but it is the journey that is important.

Remember that those that have power currently are really quite vulnerable. Their power depends on the obedience of others. The military cannot be sustained if the soldiers refuse to fight. And each soldier that opts out weakens the troop. Your individual journey is important. When you take pride in your beautiful body, you opt out of the war. It will have its impact. Clichéd as it may be, Ghandi was right: we need to be the change we wish to see in the world.

Here, have an index…
Top of page
Section 28
A new dawn
Buddhism
Learning
A silver lining
Sustainable activism

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2009. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.