A month or so ago, I posted about Big Bi Fun Day. Then I realised that in my enthusiasm, I’d clicked “publish” before discovering some access info, and hastily “edited to add”.

Two days later, Ian suggested in email I might remove that line, giving various reasons for why it was the wrong thing to say.

Well, I’m not a big fan of removing controversial words off blogs after some people have already seen them; i.m.e. it tends to leave later readers trying to piece together what happened. I suggested he make his criticism public & I’d respond to that instead. He wrote a comment similar to his email; see post linked above.

Since then, the access situation has actually changed anyway (in a good direction), so I wanted to make an update as well as some apologies.

This has taken a lot of thought to write, hence the delay in posting. I’m happy for people to argue back if they think I’ve got something wrong or missed something; and even if no-one does, I might have some other ideas later. But, at any rate, here’s a snapshot of some of my thoughts at the moment.

Update on access

BBFD is divided into four “zones”. When the event was first publicised, two of the zones were allocated to the upstairs space and two to the downstairs space.

It’s now changed. The “craft” zone has now moved downstairs, meaning that three zones are now downstairs and only one, the chatting zone, is upstairs.

I think, although I’ve not seen this spelt out, that the upgrade was the result of Sanji successfully negotiating some extra downstairs space with the venue; but in any case, yay for the improvement, and thanks to Sanji.

Of course ideally all the space would be wheelchair-accessible, but if one does have some inaccessible space along for the ride, then i.m.o. the least compromising use for it is as “overflow” of some kind.

In this case, anyone who can’t get upstairs would still be missing (as the description currently puts it) “interesting materials around the room”, as well as whatever unique vibe is created in the space. But at least chatting-in-general and cake are both pretty easily movable to where people are. So to me that’s noticeably better than having an inaccessible craft zone, with (if things go to plan) resources in it that people have brought.

It follows, I think, that my approximation “half” was arguably wrong. I meant two of four zones, which was numerically accurate - but looking at it again now, the chatting zone was somewhat less of a concern to me than the other. It may not have been “half” in terms of square footage, either. (I’ve not seen the building myself.) Sorry if I misled anyone.

The web page also spells out now that one of the toilets is a “proper” wheelchair-accessible one, which I hadn’t been sure of from the initial description.

Choice factors

The next morning after I posted, I’d also sent private email to the organisers’ address, asking was there still any chance of finding a more physically-accessible venue - in particular, wondering why they weren’t using the Leicester LGBT centre (which is). Sanji replied with a thoughtful and gracious email, explaining the factors which had gone into choosing this one.

Having seen the reasoning, I could get how it makes sense, given what kind of event it is. For myself, I’d have happily sacrificed the garden, but another reason not to use the LGBT centre was the fact that not everyone’s ready to be that “out”, and I recognise that as very important.

I offered to copy the full explanation here, but Sanji said it was headed for the public domain elsewhere and she’d rather I didn’t. (I’m happy to link to it if & when it becomes linkable.)

Lack of good venues

As it happens, I entirely agree that finding and booking an accessible venue in the UK in 2010 is a lot more difficult than it might appear to someone who hasn’t tried to do it.

Yes, there’s been some helpful legislation in recent years, ensuring that new building work meets certain standards; but that’s not at all the same thing as demanding that everywhere be immediately retrofitted. So it’s still the case that only a tiny percentage of non-enormous venues have proper wheelchair-accessible toilets. And those few generally have other limitations (e.g. lack of convenient public transport, or simply not having the size or number of rooms you need).

So it’s not necessarily the case that any particular town contains any venue whatsoever which meets all the criteria for a particular kind of event. Plus the acceptable places are often booked up months ahead for the “good” days.

The reality is that people usually have to compromise on one criterion or another, and the available wiggle room is in how the compromise is chosen and communicated.

So I understand why people may be sensitive to what could be interpreted as criticism of their inescapable compromise.

Clarification of my words

Regarding “The edge has gone off my joy”:

Despite how it evidently landed for some people, I wasn’t aiming that comment at the organiser(s), and it wasn’t intended to hold some kind of subtextual judgement of them. (As I’ve said above, I did ask in email whether it might be possible to use another venue; but that conversation was not this public statement. At the point of writing that line, it hadn’t even occurred to me that there might conceivably be a possibility of the venue changing.)

I meant it at face value: (a) there were some access limitations, and (b) I personally was therefore less unequivocally joyful about the event.

I have a vivid memory of a conversation a few years ago with someone who needs to use a wheelchair, and them explaining how they feel about only-partially-accessible events. Regardless of the reasons for compromising, it simply wasn’t and couldn’t be an emotionally neutral thing for them. It was a downer every time.

So when I read the details* and realised my error of omission, I was like: “Aaaah bugger. I’ve just done a public and unqualifiedly enthusiastic promotion of one of those same events that to at least one person I know would be a kick in the guts. That can’t be allowed to stand.”

* When I posted first, I’d only read the announcement email, not the event’s home page. I.e. one of my mistakes was the always-risky move of publicising, and linking to, a page I hadn’t yet read. That’s something I’d never normally do, and shall be doubly cautious of in future.

And even though I don’t know for sure that anyone in that situation is currently reading my blog, I certainly can’t assume that they’re not and never will.

Discovering the access limitations also called into question whether I‘d be OK with going to the event - this event which I’d just been getting so happy about. Over the last few years (since the conversation I mention above, and connected with some other thoughts about intersectionality and solidarity), I’ve become fairly reluctant to put energy into things that don’t have wheelchair access; and nor would I usually go to an event like this without making some kind of fairly substantial contribution to it. That’s half the fun!

So when I got the info, it was a bit like how I imagine it must be for someone vegan-on-principle to be told that their favourite chocolate bar now contains milk!

I didn’t want my post to cause that up-&-down for anyone else; I wanted the limitations to be up front with the good news.

If there was a subtext, it was something like “An event without full wheelchair access is not at all the same thing as one with“.

I’m not sure now where I’d have ended up with the “milk in my chocolate” dilemma had the situation not changed. I’m not saying now either that I’ll definitely come to the event.

But in any case, if I choose not to attend an event, it doesn’t necessarily mean I think it shouldn’t be happening. There are almost infinitely many places I could put my activism energy; prioritising some of them by my own criteria isn’t an insult to the others.

What I would like to do differently in future

In retrospect I see some ways I could have handled this episode better, and I’m sorry for any bad consequences which arose from my mistakes.

The root of it is this: I should never have assumed, without explicitly checking, that the event was fully wheelchair-accessible.

If I’d just managed to notice that gap in my knowledge before I posted, then I could have held off posting till I knew all the background facts. And then I could have written a more measured and balanced summary, less prone to interpretation as “advice” and less likely to result in anyone going “Aagh!”. Or I could simply have not bothered posting at all (as is the case for most events I hear of, however great they look like being).

I’m sorry too that I didn’t consider the organisers’ feelings (and possible interpretations) when I hastily wrote my “edited to add”.

I’m not saying that should have taken precedence over my responsibility to the people using wheelchairs. And I want it noted that what I actually wrote was neither “advice” to the organisers nor a “Yr doin it wrong”, but (a) a fact* about the event, and (b) a description of my own feelings, neither exaggerated nor disrespectfully put.

* Give or take the approximation “half”, as noted above.

But in an ideal world I’d have managed to write something that took everyone into account.

The hinterland

Without abdicating responsibility for what I said, I want to mention as well some of the territory into which my words arrived, which I suspect may have influenced some non-literal readings of them.

Part of this territory is of course the physical world and its lack of good venues. (That section above could have fitted equally well into this part of my article.) I’m also thinking here of the social territory and its rules and norms.

One of the dynamics I perceive in Ian’s warning to me is a protectiveness of anyone doing anything practical, connected with a fear that not enough people are interested in activism to sustain the community. (Quote, “it risks putting off there being such events at all”.)

I can see how, in that particular context, one might be tempted to assess every public statement about an event primarily or entirely on the basis of how it may affect the morale of current event organisers. (Ian’s comment does seem to me an example of this framing.) And in that context, it makes sense to construe publicly-expressed disappointment - or publicly-expressed anything-other-than-100%-gratitude - as mistaken or unacceptable.

I understand the underlying concern about activism energy supplies, though I wouldn’t have enacted it in the same way.

This all links up with some other UK-bi-activist-community norms around criticism and gratitude. I already knew I was at odds with some of those in some ways, though I hadn’t foreseen encountering them quite like this. I may return to that subject some time.

Thanks

Finally, thanks again to Ian for the heads-up about how my words landed in some quarters. As I hope is evident here, I’m not endorsing all your analysis of what’s most important and what I’m supposed to have meant; but I’m very glad you put it to me directly rather than grumbling behind my back. Feel free to dispute further :-)

Here, have an index…
Access at BBFD: update, clarification, apologies & thoughts
Update on access
Choice factors
Lack of good venues
Clarification of my words
What I would like to do differently in future
The hinterland
Thanks

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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.

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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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It’s called “Big Bi Fun Day”.

It is a bi event suitable for families! and not even that far from me geographically!

Hurrah!

and thank you very much to the people organising this.

Edited to add: The edge has gone off my joy as on further scrutiny I realise that half the event is up stairs and there’s no proper lift, only a chair lift.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

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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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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.

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First of all, I’ve now had a reply from Alan Simpson to my questions about the evidence base and who would know more. Here’s what he said:

Thanks for coming back to me. This isn’t something I have had data on. It comes only out of the community discussions I have had in Nottingham over the last 20 odd years. The international picture, however, is something that you might be able to take up with the Department for International Development or some of the aid NGOs. They have far greater first hand experience of the reluctances they encounter, in relation to girls’ access to education.

So, a piece of string there, pulling on which may or may not lead to something interesting :-)

Meanwhile, I also wanted to include some of the discussion the rest of us had in the meantime, from our various different perspectives. All the commentators quoted here are from EHE communities. Most of these quotes are from email lists - I got permission to copy them here. There are a few more comments on the original post too.

Girls

About “Families with a belief that girls only need to know how to raise children and keep house”, Dorothy says:

You invite comments on the above imagined scenario your MP mentioned.

I’ve never heard of it in the HE community and I’m an evangelical Christian.

Thing is, even if there *were* Christian girls being prepared *solely* for a role as wife and mother, then they would also have to be prepared for the role of future home educator (of both daughters and sons) and logically, they would need a sufficiently broad education themselves in order to do that.

However, every HE’ing Christian parent I’ve ever met (even the most traditional ones) are very aware that not all women are called to marry. Some may be called into the mission field for eg, in a medical capacity, so girls are generally prepared for as many eventualities in life as boys.

On the same point, another Mum adds:

I know we’re told that families say this, but I’ve never heard a parent either say it or demonstrate it. However, the head master of my old school in London used to say that girls didn’t need educating because we would become wives and mothers.

continuing…

Incidentally, around here it is the immigrant families who seem keen for their children, girls just as much as boys, to have a good education. And they are the ones who are prepared to spend a lot of money on it.

A couple of people told me that some Gypsy / Roma / Traveller communities (a.k.a. GRT) tend to educate girls very differently from boys. Tania has spoken to a lot of Local Authority people:

you may find that the comment about girls and childcare is about the GRT community.

I have had this said to me by 2 LAs.

However one of them said that culturally there is no emphasis on reading and writing but the girls get a good grounding in their culture (childcare etc) and the boys often go into their father’s business. Hence it can be said they are receiving an education which prepares them for life in their own community.

(That last point is relevant in law: see the judgement quoted below.)

Tania continues:

the only religious group mentioned as a ‘problem’ for LA’s has been the ultra orthodox Jewish one in Manchester and London and the LA simply CANNOT get in there!

(i.e. “problem” in this context means “declines the LAs’ interference and the LA staff don’t like it”.)

The law

Imran Shah, a home educating Dad, comments on the legal position:

I think there is provision within the 1996 Education Act and the 1989 Children Act to deal with HE that is severely restrictive in the way that Mr Simpson describes.

…

The 1989 CA is a much fairer piece of legislation than the [currently proposed] CSF Bill since there are many checks and balances to prevent LA overstepping their powers. The CSF Bill in contrast has no appeal process, and gives the LA the powers of judge and jury. The 1996 Education Act also gives parents the right to appeal, and thus a judge can determine the merits of an individual case, in answer to the question whether the education provided is suitable to the age, aptitude and ability of the child. If a girl is only being taught to cook and clean, then I would argue that that education is not suitable, since it forecloses her options later on in life.

That last phrase is an allusion to a judgement which now forms part of case law about “suitable education”. The case was R v Secretary of State for Education and Science, ex parte Talmud Torah Machzikei Hadass School Trust (1985) (Times, 12 April 1985). Mr Justice Woolf held that:

education is ’suitable’ if it primarily equips a child for life within the community of which he is a member, rather than the way of life in the country as a whole, as long as it does not foreclose the child’s options in later years to adopt some other form of life if he wishes to do so.

The hard questions

A Christian Mum asks some of the difficult questions:

I have lived with fundamentalist Islamic neighbours. His daughters were only allowed to leave the house with him. Literally could not leave the house without their father leading them down the street. They went to a private Islamic all girls’ school, where no one ever sat GCSEs.

In our two yrs as neighbours, I was never permitted to speak to them - since I was a Christian and a woman.

His daughters were covered head to toe, inc face, all the time I ever saw them in public. They were a family, living life as it mattered to them, doing what they thought was right. They were good, kind, considerate and helpful neighbours, but wanted to live their own life in their own way.

Who am I to tell them they were wrong?

Is “being British” more important than the right of parents to bring up their dc [dear children] as they wish?

And if “being British” is the more important, where do the lines get drawn? How does the state ensure that children are “British” first, and children of their parents second?

Or if parental rights are more important, then where do children’s rights come in?

(Alert readers will of course have spotted that the family in that story weren’t home edders.)

Proportionality and evidence

Several commentators picked up the theme of proportionality and evidence. Dorothy comments:

Sometimes, such scenarios as the one your MP seems concerned about are just the figment of a prejudiced imagination. Sometimes, they are based on one or two extreme situations. One or two extreme situations however, is not a good enough justification for a new law which would affect tens of thousands.

Renegade Parent has a point:

The problems they can “see” are mistaken stereotypes (and therefore too politically incorrect for politicians and civil servants to talk about honestly), unhelpfully fuelled by misperceptions of risk and risk mitigation.

Sue sums it up:

The key factor here, as you point out, is evidence. If there is evidence that some people exercising their liberty significantly interferes with the right of others to exercise theirs, and the outcomes for the majority are clearly damaging, then legislation should be considered. Otherwise government should mind its own business.

Imran puts education in context along with other ethical questions of difference and risk management:

There may be a small number of households who keep girls at home in order to limit their chances by teaching them very restrictive gender roles. The number of HErs who do that would be tiny. If I think the contact that I have had with Pakistanis in Bradford and Bengalis in Newham, that sort of restrictive education does go on, but most of it goes on with families who send their children to school. It is only a tiny number of Muslims (or of any other community) who HE their children, and I think that it would be only a tiny number of those that would educate their children this way.

You could draw an analogy with the tiny number of Muslims who are actively involved in terrorist activity. There are many more who are sympathetic, but don’t do anything, and I think that there are many more who are opposed to British policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan but do not agree that terrorist assaults are the answer. Would Mr Simpson advocate annual checks on Muslim households to ensure that no subversive activity is being engaged in? I think not.

Similarly, a lot of child sexual abuse goes on in middle class households, as it does throughout all groups. However, child sexual abuse in middle class households does not come to the attention of social services. It goes on, and is hidden, with those children suffering. Is Mr Simpson advocating annual inspections of all middle class households so that not even one child suffers? I think not.

Then there is the issue of prejudice and myth. Show me the figures. How much of this really is a problem in the HE community, and how much of it is myth and prejudice disguised as liberal concern? (Forgive my covert invective).

For hot housing my arguments are the same: most hot housing takes place with schooled kids; hot housing is not a crime; never have I heard any pronouncement from the Government that they wish to prevent families from hot-housing their children. Would that mean that Labour MP’s would not be allowed to send Junior to private school?

You may also ask Mr Simpson if his argument extends to the traveller community? How does he propose that they be brought into the mainstream fold? I doubt that he does. I am sure he would agree that the true test of a democracy is not how much it bends to the will of the majority, but by how well it protects the rights and freedoms of its minorities.

Social cohesion

Several people also commented on the question of community cohesion. Sue again:

I think you are absolutely right about the cultural issues. Except that I think ‘Britishness’ has been hijacked as a quality that will appeal to voters. There appears to be a simplistic idea going round (and I haven’t figured out where it comes from) that cultural cohesion can be achieved by forcing us to be culturally cohesive. i.e. that we all behave in the way that government thinks we should behave.

Imran continues:

With regards to combating Islamic extremism, surely Mr Simpson is aware that the best way of doing that is for the UK government to stop spending money and sending its young (mostly working class men) to foreign lands to kill Muslims? That awareness must have at least in part informed his votes against the invasion of Iraq, and for an inquiry into that atrocity.

Finally when it comes to class issues … he may not be aware that HE is the only educational approach where the working class children do as well as, or better than middle class children. How’s that for social cohesion, eh?

Here, have an index…
Gender, tradition, education: responses
Girls
The law
The hard questions
Proportionality and evidence
Social cohesion

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2009. All rights reserved.

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On Friday 4 December, I had a very illuminating and useful meeting with my MP, Alan Simpson. I’m a big fan of Alan’s for (among other things) his eco house and his stand against the war in Iraq, so I was genuinely curious about his reasons for supporting the proposed yearly licensing of (a.k.a. heavy-handed interference with) home-based education.

We had about 45 minutes’ discussion, and we didn’t waste time, so we covered a lot of ground. There was other useful stuff which I may return to in another post. But here I’ll home in on an area which felt especially helpful to me in understanding what’s going on.

Key themes

For Alan, if I understood correctly, there are two key themes of concern informing his support for the home-ed-related part of the Bill:

In principle, I agree that neither of those scenarios is ethically desirable, and also that such families and parents undoubtedly exist (though not necessarily at a higher ratio in UK home ed communities).

In practice, some questions occur to me about the girls getting inadequate education on religious/traditional grounds:

and, of course:

What did Mr Badman say?

In the Badman Report, nearly all the references to religion are about religious or philosophical beliefs as a reason to choose non-school education, including the Human Rights law relating to that choice - not about the resulting education itself.

There’s one oblique allusion to religion as a possible limitation, in section 4.8, a quote from the British Humanist Association:

some of those who choose to educate their children at home for religious reasons may not be providing schooling that is adequate, either according to the Every Child Matters agenda or the principles of Article 29 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

That’s the whole quote, and the author doesn’t elaborate on it. Note the “may”; no facts supplied.

Doing “Find in document” on terms “gender”, “girl” and “tradition” doesn’t turn up anything, so I don’t think Mr Badman addressed the subject anywhere else either, though I confess I haven’t re-read every word to check.

The Equalities Impact Assessment for the Bill makes no mention of religion; the only groups discussed are (a) children with “special educational needs” and (b) Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.

Making a connection

The evidence base and practical questions definitely warrant more investigation. But meanwhile, I went off in a slightly different direction.

You see, something about this rang a bell for me. Some time in the last couple of years, somewhere on one of the community lists, I’d read a post where someone said something like: “What the Government is really worried about is the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, but they can’t come out and say that, so they have to pretend it’s about all of us.”

Well, so this popped into my head in the meeting, and I quoted the gist of it to Alan. And he corrected me straight away: it’s not just Islam.

Which is obviously correct of course (and to be fair, I may have misremembered the original post too, especially as I was reading about Islamophobia in another context recently). There are lots of cultures which prioritise boys’ education over girls’, or steer girls away from certain areas - are there any that don’t have that in them at all? It’s part of sexism. (Example English meme: “Girls don’t need an education; they’re only going to get married so then it will go to waste”.) Conversely, it’s well known that Aisha, third wife of the Prophet, was a scholar and highly respected for her learning, and there are plenty of Muslim communities where young women get the best education within the families’ grasp.

And there are parents in at least several faiths who would rather their children weren’t influenced by “secular values”. In the US, there’s an enormous Christian home-schooling movement, which is fairly famous.

(In the UK, my impression is there is something of a Christian home-schooling contingent, but on nothing like the same scale. I’m not sure to what degree people erroneously assume it’s the same over here; I do recall a story of someone commenting in surprise that so few of the English home-edders they met had that background. I’m also not sure what the actual stats are.)

Another clue

Interestingly, the UK Government nowadays makes a point of lying to all immigrants:

The law states that children between the
ages of 5 and 16 must attend school.

That’s from page 30 of the “Life in the United Kingdom handbook”, which all immigrants “must read” as part of preparing for their “Life in the UK” test. It’s the first sentence under “Education”.

I seem to be seeing a grey thing with tusks

I find myself wondering if, for some* supporters of the home ed interference, one of the driving forces behind it is about fear of parallel non-British cultures, and fear of the role of home-based education in enabling families not to assimilate into Britishness.

(* I don’t mean that I think Alan thinks this.)

My new intuition is that for many if not most of the supporters of the Bill, their point of reference is that hypothetical girl from a religious/traditional family, whose education would be limited by sexist tradition - and maybe her brothers too. That’s whom they’re thinking of when they’re trying to invent how licensing and monitoring would work.

And for some people that’s purely about that girl’s education in the practical sense: reading, writing, history, general knowledge. But I suspect that for others, what’s behind that, or hand in hand with it, is her not being allowed to grow up unexposed to proper Britishness.

Doesn’t that just somehow seem to make more logical sense than the dramatic but non-factual justifications we have been hearing about abuse and educational outcomes?

1. School doesn’t guarantee that children won’t be abused, or even much help to stop it. Most abuse is not immediately obvious; most children won’t disclose to a teacher; many teachers say they wouldn’t know what to do if they suspected a child was being abused; and in many cases the school is the site of the abuse.

And there’s the school holidays… and there’s the fact that if you’re this worried about children “of school age” not in school, you’ve got no excuse for not doing the same checkups on children too young for school…

Yes, there are occasions when someone at a school helps a child.* But as a “safety net” for abuse, school is always going to be full of holes, and anyone who’s thought about the territory in any detail can see that.

It’s Social Services which is meant to be the primary safety net, and i.m.o. it’s misguided to be throwing millions of pounds in secondary directions before the most glaring malfunctions of that have been fixed. (Hard to say how many millions it would really be for the home ed licensing scheme, as the sums for the costs and benefits include both questionable assumptions and mistakes.)

* I haven’t been able to find UK stats comparable with these ones from the US (showing 16% of abuse investigation referrals were from teachers), but I’ve heard from someone who used to be a child protection social worker in the UK that more referrals came from neighbours or relatives than from schools. And that makes sense to me, because teachers see very little of parents actually interacting with their children. Neighbours overhear things.

2. State schools in the UK don’t guarantee children a good education. Thousands leave school with no qualifications.

(Yes, I know that qualifications aren’t the be-all and end-all - e.g. some young people move from home-based education directly into further education or employment using only portfolios and CVs. But since mainstream school is aimed very strongly at GCSEs, the lack of them is not too far-fetched a measure of how poorly school served those young people.)

What is it that school does guarantee - provided it’s a mainstream school?

School guarantees that children are exposed to mainstream culture.

Is it just me, or does that fit in like the long-lost missing piece of a jigsaw?

Social cohesion

Now I’m not saying that community cohesion isn’t a worthwhile thing to discuss. I think there are some thoughtful and wise angles to it as well as probably some pretty xenophobic ones.

What’s got me suddenly so antsy about this whole angle is the fact that, as far as I’ve noticed, it isn’t being discussed (in this context). It seems like one of those “elephant in the room which nobody’s mentioning” scenarios.

(Though, thinking about it, I have a suspicion that this motivation might become more obvious if/when the Government’s intended discussions begin about redefining “suitable education”. What’s the betting there will be some attempt to insert “British values” into that?)

Hot-housing, social levelling, other issues

I’m also not suggesting that this is the only thing which the supporters of the Bill have on their minds. People do have other reservations about home-based education too.

And of course the “must save them from being trapped in their homes with only their parents to talk to!” thing is an extremely prevalent stereotype applied to all home ed children - even the English-for-generations ones… even the ones who in fact have to specially make an effort to spend time at home because their social lives are so busy :-)

So it’s not that I think the Britishness-assimilation thing is the only force at play. I just suddenly have this feeling like it’s a significant part of the motive power, and yet we’re not talking about it.

Clunk

So even though, like I said, Alan and I discussed some other things too, this whole Britishness/immigrants/religions/traditions thing went on resonating in my mind all the way home from the meeting and all the rest of the evening, with a feeling of things clunking into place CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK.

And on the one hand I was thinking: Aaagh - if this is how they’re thinking, then nothing we can say is going to change their minds, is it? We are dooomed to this invasive and dysfunctional licensing scheme, and it’s going to be a horrible mess.

And yet on the other hand I was feeling much better because I felt so de-mystified! Like “Now I get it. This is what’s been going on.”

An underlying “social cohesion” motive would explain why the Government is so oddly unmoved by the fact that every single one of Mr Badman’s stats falls to bits as soon as you look at it! Those were only about the supposed reasons - abuse risks and educational outcomes.

And it would explain why they don’t even care that the supposed “savings” predicted in the Impact Assessment have a big glaring mistake in the sums which mean the imagined theoretical financial benefit probably doesn’t exist.

We need to talk

Now I might be wrong of course. This might all be a figment of my imagination. (And I might be wrong about being dooomed too.)

But if this is a significant factor in how legislators are thinking, we need to start talking about it. There’s limited usefulness in demonstrating how mistaken people are about issues “X” and “Y” if the sticking point is really ”Z”!

And, either way, we need to start talking specifically about the risks to girls in families of limiting religious &/or traditional gender-roles. What are the risks? And how well would a Badmanesque licensing scheme work for girls in that situation? How much good would it actually do them? I’ve seen nothing addressing that specifically.

Collateral damage

Part of the shift in how I’m perceiving the whole territory now is that I’m less sure how much of the agenda is aimed at all families in home-based education.

I mean, there doesn’t seem much doubt that some of it is; “a DfES spokesman” was quoted in 2007 as saying “we believe the best place to educate a child is actually in school.” The quote did continue “we respect a parent’s right to choose home education for their children”, but “we respect your right to do something we believe is second-best” is perhaps not the most respectful or reassuring kind of respect that there could be :-/

And I know that some people have felt that the main agenda is to put all children under the yoke of the National Curriculum and under Government control. Lord Adonis said it was an “anomaly” that “The state does not currently prescribe what form of education parents should provide.” (Or, as the Pet Shop Boys put it: “You’re not integral / to the project”.)

But now I’m wondering if, from another angle, it’s more like: the main agenda is about cultural cohesion, and anything that happens to the not-particularly-religious, English families is “collateral damage“.

Ethics, risk and evidence

Now I definitely don’t want to do some kind of “Well our children are OK so there isn’t a problem”. The one way you could convince me that licensing is a good idea is by demonstrating that the overall effect for all children collectively would be better.

Balancing risks like that includes both assessing the magnitude of the risks, and a subjective weighing-up of how they counterbalance each other. (And there’s never no risk.)

An example from breast cancer screening: Is it better for a thousand women to have unnecessary surgery and unnecessary fear so that one woman can have ten extra years of life? That’s a hard question even if you know exactly what the ratios are. People need to know the facts and then talk about those hard questions.

But if you’re not even starting with facts, the balance might be dangerously wrong.

“False positives” aren’t only bad because of the disruption and stress to the people who were OK - which in this case would be substantial. (That’s a big topic in itself and this post is long enough already, so won’t go there now.)

An equally or more important factor in the disastrous effect of “false positives” is that they’re like hoax fire alarm calls. While the fire brigade attends the false alarm, someone else somewhere else in a real fire might be burning to death. Sending social workers round to investigate children who were fine includes exactly that kind of problem, just on a slower timescale where the connections might be less obvious.

I am angry with the DCSF about the amount of lying and misdirection that’s gone on this year, arguably at the expense of talking about the real stuff. Hundreds of hours of people’s time have been wasted just getting back to zero - demonstrating that all the statistical “evidence” that Mr Badman came up with (and the DCSF so uncritically endorsed) is fictional.

If girls from some particular backgrounds are at especial risk of missing out on education, then we should have spent part of this year finding out the facts about that and then having the difficult conversations based on those facts.

What do we know about that hypothetical girl in a family of limiting gender-role traditions? What does she need? Would she get it from the currently proposed legislation? Is there a way to address her needs without it being at the expense of thousands of other children?

and how many of her are there in reality?

What next?

The “we” of “we should be finding out the facts” doesn’t mean just activists from EHE communities. It should be part of everyone’s thinking about education law. But I wonder to what degree we the activists can put this territory explicitly “onto the table”. And I wonder to what degree other people “on the side of sensibleness and truth” might pick up the factual questions.

And if none of what I’ve described is an issue, I’d appreciate it if someone could prove that to me :-)

Here, have an index…
Top of document
Key themes
What did Mr Badman say?
Making a connection
Another clue
I seem to be seeing a grey thing with tusks
Social cohesion
Hot-housing, social levelling, other issues
Clunk
We need to talk
Collateral damage
Ethics, risk and evidence
What next?

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.