Nem, nem, soha

Please, a General Election that counts for 'SEN'!

Déjà vue, again?

Quite by chance I stumbled today upon a copy of an item from the magazine Special Children, from the issue of May 2001. A General Election campaign was under way, and this item began by referring back to the previous such election, in May 1997, when Tony Blair's New Labour had swept so convincingly to power. Oh goodness, how things haven't changed. In 2001, the author of this item opined:

...the election campaign is under way, in a remarkably changed atmosphere: for many voters disillusion with the Tories has moved on to disillusion with all politicians, whatever heir party, even with the political process itself.

So what to write now? The author turned for inspiration to what he had written four years before, to welcome the new Government, in May 1997. Here are  four paragraphs from what he came up with in 2001, looking back at the previous General Election and then forward to the one about to happen.

I reflected the promise of freshness and newness that many felt would now sweep through political and into the life of the nation. 'Education, education, education' was a central part of this. The concern was simply to ensure that our sector had its due share of the action. I noted that we had had to wait a whole week for the appointment of a relevant minister, and queried 'Might it be that special needs actually came last because that is exactly how high up it comes on the political agenda?'

Ever the optimist, however, I went on:' Don't ignore us, Mr Blair. Not because the hotchpotch of 'special needs in education' represents causes as humane, deserving and neglected as any in the country you now rule. But because it strikes across so many difficult and demanding areas that success – or failure – here will prove sensitive barometer of whether, having rid us of the Tories, you and your Government really can deliver the goods. So we may be the first to know....

As for 'Education, education, education'... just where are all the teachers, especially those with the additional training to understand and help children with special needs. Where are their trained assistants? For all the unimaginable sums of money thrown into Sure Start, where honestly is early intervention in this country? Where really are we in moving towards a realistic understanding of how schools might contribute practically to long-term, meaningful inclusion for the diverse population under the rubric of 'special educational needs'? What genuine choice, what human rights, do children and their parents have in practice when it comes to determining special needs and – vitally – how they should be met?

Oh dear, it goes on, all too depressing in hindsight to read. So have 'special educational needs' gone on, and on, for another nine years. Children have grown up under its shadow, parents have have been defeated by it, a whole new generation of teachers and assistants, and education bureaucrats, have forged careers under its expectations.

I suppose that I could root around and find the equivalent comment in Special Children on the election that came next, but that might be even more depressing!

Nem, nem, soha...*

Of course radical change would have been hard in 1997, and in 2001. It will be a damn sight harder in 2010. Too depressing to contemplate? No not quite, for a new General Election nearly upon us,the economic chickens are home to rust and there is no wat that the SEN jugganaught can still rumble on unchallenged and intact.

One must doubt whether those directly concerned with children growing up with disabilities or with academic problems, or with those many more just alienated from education and all its works, will be taking substantial steps over the next weeks and months to ensure that the present state of affairs is not substantively perpetuated under the next government.

Be sure, though, that at the first threats of change, a vast army of folk, dependent upon the ways that things currently are, will surely emerge to find reasons for things' remaining substantively as they are..

This must not happen,. No, no, never!

Reference

Sutton, A. (2001) Four more years of the same? Special Children, no 138, May, p.11

* Nem, nem, soha (Hung.) 'No, no, never'.

Lady Dior的DNA: 美丽和慈善

A handbag?

Last week the Chinese ezine NetEase Woman republished an old article from Elle, calling to mind some strange days for Conductive Education.

The article concerns Princess Diana and a Dior handbag. The relevant passage says something as follows:

It appeared in the media around the world. It accompanied her to a charity, the Foundation for Conductive Education Foundation in the British city of Birmingham. A little boy leaped, his arm around Diana's neck with both hands; Diana bent down from her height of over 1 meter 80 and hugged this little boy.... the little boy hugged his legs off the ground.

– (2010) Lady Dior's DNA, beautiful and charitable, NetEase Woman, 3 February

http://lady.163.com/10/0203/11/5UJHT9J600262416.html

Jayne Fincher's photograph that this original article refers to is not included in the Chinese ezine feature. At one time it enjoyed considerable circulation but appears no longer to be on the Internet.

'A handbag?'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyuoUwxCLMs

CE memorabilia news

Recently sold on eBay (for £16.00) is a large photograph of Princess Di, taken on October 1995 when the event described in Elle occurred, after she had opened the National Institute of Conductive Education.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/PRINCESS-DIANA-RARE-LARGE-PHOTOGRAPH-TAKEN-1995-PRIVATE_W0QQitemZ220534236957QQcmdZViewItemQQimsxq20100103?IMSfp=TL100103004002r2407

The future of Conductive Education in the UK

Catch the tide or miss the boat?

The future of SEN – VII.

Twenty-odd years ago the pioneers of Conductive Education in the UK, whether would-be users, professionals, media people, politicians, or individual and institutional supporters, were clear about what they were doing what they did. Despite their particular individual emphases, they were all activists. They saw Conductive Education as an catalyst for change in existing ways of construing and providing for children and adults with disabilities, for their families, and for those who offered services for their benefit.

They saw Conductive Education as a potential agent of change, but increasingly found themselves in a context where the only change was to be 'more of the same'. Now, as in many aspects of life, more radical reappraisal is on the cards. In 2010 is Conductive Education ready and able to stand forth.

This posting is the seventh in a series if seven. In the first of these, I wrote –

Readers' comments and queries will be very welcome throughout this process and I hope that these will cover not just wider issues raised but also relate to matters more specificly to do with Conductive Education.

I did not hold my breath. In the event, thank you to Norman Perrin, and Adelaide from Australia, and the journalist whom I quoted in the sixth of these postings. As for everyone else, thanks for nothing.

Inter alia, Norman commented on the third of this series of postings –

In my view this is an opportunity for CE in the UK like never before. Am I a lone voice in thinking this? If anyone reading this cares to, just contact me. I'll be happy to meet and talk.

I know that Norman too is not prone to breath-holding behaviour. I do hope that the Good Ship CE in the UK can get its act together, and act. Otherwise Norman might be better saving his breath for striking out on his own.

BRUTUS. There is a tide in the affairs of men.

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

Julius Caesar, act 4, scene 3, lines 218–224

Conductive Education awake!

Get up there with educational research

A leading education academic has warned against the growing trend of using evidence-based research to decide which classroom practice should or should not be sanctioned.

Martyn Hammersley, professor of education and social policy research at the Open University, claimed that relying on research to inform education policies would result in valuable teacher expertise being sidelined.

He said while there is a need for high-quality research, the type of extensive trials carried out in medicine - the model that some have called to be introduced in education - are expensive and not necessarily suitable in education.

Some experts have called on the education world to replicate healthcare's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, a state-funded organisation that interrogates the efficacy of medical treatments and decides whether they the NHS should fund them...

...Professor Hammersley said research could have a valuable role as one of a number of factors to be taken into account when new policies are developed

Sound familiar?

Or would you rather be a therapy?

Reference

Ward, H. (2010) Teachers not researchers know best, advises academic. Professor warns policy-makers against reliance on medicine-style evidence and trials to decide what works in classrooms, Times Educational Supplement, 22 January

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6033919

SEN – time for political decision

But, please, a measured one

The future of SEN – VI.

A journalist, who would very much like to do a story on 'special educational needs', writes to me during this last week –

I agree, the general concept (and stupidity) of SEN is an interesting one to look in to...and one that manages to baffle any half-interested media observers to the point where – even if they did have the motivation – the whole area is too muddy and vague for them to get involved...

She is so right, but what she writes is in no way specific to journalists. The same goes for politicians too. The mechanisms involved in a thoroughgoing examination of matters of disordered development – and what to do about them – are not what most people really wish to hear about (the same goes for many in the medical and paramedical professions, and even in education). Folk would much rather hear some apparently crisp, uni-factorial explanation of cause and effect (hence the immediate attraction of, say, dyslexia, or the mad panic over MMR). Multi-factorial, transactive models require time... and are not amenable to the quick-fix magic bullets that every one would so like to see,

A couple of weeks ago I heard Michael Gove remarking à propos another systemic problem within our education service, that it would take a generation, perhaps two generations to fix. Well, 'SEN' is another one.

So, what to suggest that the Conservatives do about this? Very soon they will be told by their Leader to return home and start preparing for government. As far as 'SEN' goes, presumably this Commission will have produced the third part of its report by then. Whether it does or not, the Conservative party should thank it very much, and send it home. On coming to power, a Conservative government would doubtless wish to consider implementing such things from that Report that seem seems politically apt – but in doing so, it should recognise that it will have barely set out upon the long road of needed reconstruction. The Commission's recommendations will soon be history, already foundering on the continuing operation of all those fundamental problems that it has not faced.

A Royal Commission

If one accepts that there can be no quick fix, then there is no need to rush.. So here's a solution that politicians might like, since it shows that they have done something concrete but it leaves their options open. In the meantime, others must take up the burden of critical examination of what has gone wrong, winnowing down the hard specifics of what is proposed in reponse into new generalisable, operationalisable notions more readily managed by the normal political processes.

This approach not of course involve just the evidence and interests of those implicated in present arrangements and approaches, but those of all citizens who want to contribute to the process). A Royal Commission is no informal discussion like the Conservatives' present Commission on Special Educational Needs. It is not a cheery, consensual group drawn from existing professional establishments, like Mary Warnock's Committee of Enquiry. It is not an assemblage of the usual suspects. A full-blown Royal Commission potentially brings to bear the power and the intellectual force, the independence, that those 'most vulnerable in society' require on their social case if their problems are even to be properly understood, never mind have anything effective done for them.

A sledgehammer to crack a nut?  No. There is precedent, albeit a long time ago now, when services for such children were first emerging as priorities in this county and in other advanced economies around the world. Yes, it was more than a century ago now, but social mechanisms and structures set in train in those days have now largely run their course. It is high time to start anew. Given the likelihood of the United Kingdom's having a Prime Minister who has had himself the indellible experience of parenting a disabled child, there is perhaps opportunity too. If not now, when?

What a nice election pledge a Royal Commission would be.

Footnote: Royal Commissions

In... Commonwealth realms a Royal Commission is a major government public enquiry into an issue... A Royal Commissioner has considerable powers, generally greater even than those of a judge but restricted to the 'Terms of Reference of the Commission.... Royal Commissions are called to look into matters of great importance and usually controversy. These can be matters such as government structure, the treatment of minorities, events of considerable public concern or economic questions... using the very broad coercive powers of the Royal Commissioner to defeat the protective systems that powerful, but corrupt, public officials had used to shield themselves from conventional investigation. Royal Commissions are usually chaired by one or more notable figures. Because of their quasi-judicial powers the Commissioners are often retired senior judges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Commission

1885 Royal Commission on the Blind, Deaf and Dumb set up

1889 Report of the Royal Commission on Blind, Deaf, Dumb and others.

1904 Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded set up.

1908 Report of the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded

Previous postings on this topic

The future of SEN – I.

http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/to-london.html

The future of SEN – II.

http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/conservatives-seminar.html

The future of SEN – III.

http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/document-so-far.html

The future of SEN – IV.

http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/what-was-said-on-day.html

The future of SEN – V.

http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/sen-conservatives-dilemma.html

SEN – the Conservatives' dilemma

A myth of Shangri-Lâ

Everybody seems to need one

On Laura King's blog, a thoughtful consideration of voluntary euthanasia for the elderly includes the following:

But if there is such a thing as the Peto Institute in Hungary to aid Aspberger's children into becoming more functional, why not an equivalent rehabilitation system for dementia?

Reference

King, L. (2010) The right to why, The Poet Laura-eate, 4 February

http://thepoetlaura-eate.blogspot.com/2010/02/major-debate-currently-rages-over.html

What was said on the day?

Not a lot

The future of SEN – IV.

Michael Gove MP, the likely next Secretary of State, was clearly the focus of the show. All remarks seem to be made to him. He made clear at the very outset the importance of this subject to the Conservative Party and, by extension, to the next Government of the United Kingdom:

Our Leader, David Cameron, considers that the families of children who have special needs are one of our highest priorities.

He did not have much else to say, and this for a reason, he explained:

Politicians are like walkie-talkies. They have two modes, to transmit and to receive. Today I am here to receive.

Thus far into the deliberations of the Commission – and so close to the forthcoming General Election – this offers an intriguing slant on the present situation.

Michael Gove is not just a politician. He is also a journalist. He did try to draw the meeting's attention to that fundamental dichotomy within the grand category 'SEN', the need to 'distinguish between children who have problems about behaviour rather than things that you an do nothing about'. Not terribly well put but one knows what he means. Whether or not many in the audience did, nobody rose to his challenge.

As for inclusion, he would like to see 'the best of both worlds', but did not suggest that he yet has found principles for how this might be achieved, nor did one emerge from the floor where this again seemed a generally lesser concern.

What does the Commission favour?

There seems nothing of note new since its Second Report. No mention was made of all the details that are promised for the Third.

The Commissions seems to favour encouraging parents' taking the lead in setting up new schools in the voluntary or private sectors. The potentially socially divisiveness of this did not emerge. Nor did the more directly personal implications of foisting upon often already overburdened families the Herculean task of setting up a new school from scratch.

The Commission enthuses excitedly over separating assessment from provision: 'Statements would be by independent people governed by a number of objective criteria.' The Commission does not like tribunals and adversarial proceedings, though 'there would of course be an opportunity at the end of this if it all goes wrong to go to a tribunal, or something like a tribunal, with opportunities for mediation along the way.' This and the 'objective criteria' and the 'profiles' that these will contribute to, desperately need a seminar (or two, or three!) devoted to them. Monday was not, however, the forum for this. No doubt we shall hear much more about this proposal. At an appropriate time Conductive World might look at the awkward questions that lie beneath this particular stone,

In default of discussion

How can something so wonderfully exciting and humane sound so dull? Probably when it is reduced to the murmurings of a crowd of individuals testifying to their own individual causes, without coming together around some big idea or ideas that that might sweep the whole along towards some common resolution. Without even common concepts, or even word, one is left with a host of other people's problems, strongly felt and for the most part legitimate concerns. but mostly by definition of little interest to anyone else – little tails than cannot individually wag the dog. Further, it has to be remembered, there are potentially conflicting agendas in this crowd.. For example, a headteacher described his idea of freedom under a new order: the freedom of schools from local-authority control. A laudable goal in its own right, no doubt, but not the freedom that many, perhaps most parents would prioritise.

Again and again there emerged the repeated refrain: 'funding, funding, funding' – or, as David Gove summarised it from his viewpoint: 'costs'. Raising one's eyes to the bigger economic situation it is hard to see how any policy that does not significantly cut costs has any long-term chance of being implemented. There was no indication among those who spoke that this is a factor in people's consideration. Having mentioned the dreaded word 'costs', Mr Gove kept his council. Another seminar required here too, I guess...

There were no good words from anyone for local authorities, their officials, and cynical 'inclusion' policies. Mr Gove, though, saw a problem:

In complex cases a lot of agencies might have to be involved – but how do you ensure that they don't spend all their time filling out forms? It is essential to minimise the level of bureaucracy. We need a single gateway, early in life so that all the child's needs are considered together.

Really, does nobody question the relevance or feasibility of prescriptive determination of a child's 'needs'?

Climate change

If the Conservatives win power in a few months' time, as seems likely, an interesting spectator sport will be to watch all this stuff hit the fan of the established order of special education needs in the United Kingdom, all this no doubt in the over-arching context of public-sector redundancies and budget cuts.

And what will Conductive Education in the UK do then, poor thing?

Tomorrow, though, a couple of dilemmas for the Conservative Party.

Previous items on this topic

The future of SEN – I:

http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/to-london.html

The future of SEN – II:

http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/conservatives-seminar.html

The future of SEN – III.

http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/document-so-far.html

Would you like to be a charity trustee?

Expertise and experience sought

Heritage Rainbow House in Lancashire is seeking directors and trustees from the business sector with skills to help develop its services and improve its performance. It seeks skills and contacts in the areas of business-management, finance, health and medicine, human resources, education, sport, law, marketing and more.

Directors meet four times a year.

Further information

http://www.liverpoolchamberblog.org/2010/02/04/growing-north-west-childrens-charity-seeks-business-experts/
t.daglish@thelegacy-rainbowhouse.com

http://www.thelegacy-rainbowhouse/

Very early screening

Screening initiative in San Francisco

Conductive Education

February 2, 2010.  I am a specialist in screening infants to detect even the slightest signs of motor coordination difficulties; and I am also an expert in training parents to maximally assist the development of their children. The approach that I use, Conductive Education (CE), is new in the U.S. and is highly effective. I wish to introduce this approach and my services – which can really change people's lives – in the San Francisco Bay Area. As preemies are some of the infants most at risk, my main goal is in working with them; however, I am also interested in working with young children under the age of four. Is anybody aware of an organization that would welcome Conductive Education in the Bay Area?

http://www.inspire.com/csicsi/journal/conductive-education/

Nothing new here as far as Conductive Education and preemies are concerned – and possibly nothing new within the international CE movement – what is new is this way of introducing and marketing conductive services.

The initiative comes from conductor Krisztina Abonyi Bernstein who has created Conductiva Comprehensive Conductive Education Services in San Francisco:

http://home.earthlink.net/~conductiva/staff.html

Her detailed conductor-written website makes an interesting and instructive change from the usual in this sector:

http://home.earthlink.net/~conductiva/

Perhaps it is time for a review of the very few conductor-written sites on the Internet, as a possible step towards establishing an identity for the still relatively few conductor-run consultancy programs around the world..

Terminological note

Preemies. Predominantly North American term for premature babies

More on Conductiva

Conductiva is holding a Parents' Awareness Night on Tuesday, 19 January:

http://www.php.com/node/18777/view

A document so far

The future of SEN – III

The Commission's Second Report

It has involved some difficulty to trace an online version of the Commission's Second Report. but late last night I at last found it, buried without obvious signposts deep and unsung within the Conservative Party's website:

http://www.conservatives.com/pdf/specialneedsreport2007.pdf

Those whose have any cause to be concerned for the areas that it covers whether by what it says or – probably more importantly – what it does not say, really ought to look at it.

• 
  
  This is certainly the most family-oriented document ever put forward as a guide to possible educational ad child-welfare legislation in the United Kingdom – perhaps anywhere in the world. The writers of this Report have clearly listened to the cares of certain parents and taken these very seriously to heart indeed. In this respect it is a most progressive and indeed revolutionary document, with monumental implications, an assertion of rights that parents around the world might wih to follow.
• 
  
  Technically, however, in terms of its understanding of child development and education (pedagogy and upbringing) – and the interrelationship between the two – it is from the Stone Age. One cannot blame the Report's authors for this, where might they have heard otherwise? Spot this for yourselves. You might also care to ponder all the details that are promised for inclusion in the Third Report, when it appears. That is where the Devil will appear.

Brilliant parents' (and children's) rights are of little use if they amount only to a right to a primitive and destructive technology (and I do not here mean 'technology' in the sense of gadgets and gubbins, but the technology of  pedagogic sciencey).

I suspect that there is some awareness of this problemat the higher levels of the decision-making process. Tomorrow: something of what further was said at Monday's meeting.

Reference

Balchin, R. (Chmn.) (2008) Commission on Special Needs in Education The Second Report. London, Conservative Party.

http://www.conservatives.com/pdf/specialneeds-nov2005.pdf

Previous items on this topic

The future of SEN –  I:
http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/to-london.html

The future of SEN –  II:
http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/conservatives-seminar.html

US and Canada: CE Awareness

Just three weeks now to North American Day

On Thursday 25 February member organizations of the Association for Conductive Education in North America (ACENA) will be celebrating Conductive Education Day 2010.

National Conductive Education Awareness Day

Thursday, February 25, 2010

The Association for Conductive Education in North America will launch the first ever North American .Conductive Education Awareness Day, on Thursday, February 25, 2010.

This day will provide CE Centers everywhere the opportunity to focus on their successes, publicize their programs, inform the general public, build legitimacy, gain political support, increase client base, and drive funders to the Conductive Education cause.

A CE Awareness Day Campaign Kit that provides customizable press releases, proclamation letters for local and state government, Conductive Education stats and facts, sample advertisements with a common message, and a post-campaign evaluation has been sent to all ACENA members.

Think of the power a Conductive Education Day will have where the same message is delivered in the same way on the same day in every community in North America where CE classes take place

http://www.acena.org/national-ce-awareness%20day.html

It will be most instructive at the start of 2010 to see how ACENA and the CE movement in the United States and Canada generally chose to project the image of Conductive Education – and how this comes across.

Previous item on this topic

Sutton,.A. (2009) Voices of America? What will they say? Conductive World, 1 November

http://www.conductive-world.info/2009/11/voices-of-america.html

New academic neuro-rehabilitation journal

Something for FREE

Volume 1, issue 1 of Wiley's new Interdisciplinary Review: Cognitive Science is available FREE and open-access on line:

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/123210243/home

Of particular interest to Conductive Education is the review by Barbara Wilson that, though it specifically concerns brain injury, makes some generalisable, analytic points of potential interest for those who are interested in other conditions and even in other age-groups:

Wilson, B. A. (2009) Brain injury: recovery and rehabilitation, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, vol. 1, no 1, pp. 108-118

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/123216873/HTMLSTART?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

Well worth printing off, reading, marking up and retaining.

The Conservatives' seminar

The future of SEN – II.

Setting the scene

The event was held in the Grand Committee Room of Westminster Hall, a location evoking powerful memories from the early, glory days of Conductive Education's explosion out of Hungary on the shoulders of parent-power (it may be worth returning to that occasion at a later point, but this should not divert me further here).

The Grand Committee Room is not really all that big (or really all that grand), a modest piece of Victorian Gothic (think Hammer House of Horror out of Past Times), and was well-filled by its present audience of some 125 people. I squeezed myself as far to the front as I could, particularly so that I could watch Michael Gove who, as likely next Secretary of State, was clearly the focus of the show

For those who wonder, I stayed awake for the meeting's whole hour and three-quarters.

Some 'seminar'

One should not really write 'audience' in the context of a seminar but this was not really a seminar in the proper sense. There were three fairly short addresses from the platform, a couple of set-piece presentations from the floor (about special schools) and most of the rest of the proceedings were given over to those from the floor who has something that they wished to say to Michael Gove on the platform .

The first of these, expectedly, had 'autism' clearly evident in its opening sentence but to tell the truth I was not always clear what all these individual presentations were actually about. Partly blame my diminishing hearing – but the room was not designed with acoustic properties in mind and, to be honest, not everyone who spoke was at home with this kind of presentation.

It was not of course a seminar at all, not that it could be given its circumstances. The meeting was a way for the platform to hear and call for ideas (of which more anon). There was no amplification system in operation, no written agenda nor any other distributed papers, and no list of participants. It was very interesting to watch the process and I do hope that the platform learned something useful from what it could hear at the head of that long, muffling room. What this might be, and how it might be sifted and integrated would be interesting to learn, but there will be no written report.

(To be fair, I have been to a number of such semi-public occasions over the years since Iain Duncan Smith began opening the Conservative Party up to the outside world a few years back. They have always been interesting to watch but I have always wondered whether they have really served purposes other than their stated one of enlightenment. And no, I do not know whether other parties run such shows: just that I have never been invited to one).

Each of these meetings that I have attended has been larger than the last. I did not, however, recognise anyone at this one whom I recall meeting from previous ones, no one whom I have known else where from 'special educational needs', and no one from Conductive Education.. There are several ways of understanding this, of course.

The audience was predominantly white and middle-class. I had anticipated more younger people there but the audience was primarily greying, and included some oldies. I can only guess who the people there were:

• some special-school headteachers
• some parent-campaigners (especially those who have opened their own facilities)
• some people from smaller voluntary bodies (not the big ones, they will be lobbying by other means
• some individual parents with links to the party
• some local Conservative politicians
• nobody with an apparent disability (though one man did declare himself to have attended an ESN school)
• no obvious education academics, none that I recognised anyway (but I no longer know many)
• most glaringly – and predictably –  no trace of the great majority of those whose children fall under the wide 'SEN' pseudo-category: the families and children who are poor, powerless, alienated, dispossessed and ill-educated..

I had the impression that most of these who were there do not know each other – i.e. there is no coherent lobby out there, and that these were largely individuals with their own personal concerns to advance. They too then are in their own way alienated. If converstions atprevious meetings can serve as a guide, many or most of those present hold no great truck with the Conservatives. Having given up on 'the present lot' , they have increasingly regarded a modernising Conservative Party as the next Government and the only possibility for change.

Noticeable was common accord from the platform and from the floor towards two great issues of the past, once unquestionably good things, now agreed to be bugbears and a blight on people's lives: unthinking inclusion and heartless local authorities. Schools and teachers got off quite well.

The mood was calm if insistent, People felt strongly, but they 'behaved'. It felt perhaps that they might be feeling greater cause for hope than they could remember having done previously. Why? Well, at last they were being listened to and taken seriously.

What was said?

Tomorrow this series continues with an account of some of the things that were actually said at the seminar, with particular reference to what the Commission is actually saying.

In fact, not a lot appears to be said that has not already been said in the Commission's Second Seport: I should like to offered keener readers some homework, a URL of the Second Report, but I cannot find it on line. Maybe somebody will be able to oblige.:

A copy of the Commission's 'interim recommendations', from November 2005, which seems much the same, can be found at:

http://www.conservatives.com/pdf/specialneeds-nov2005.pdf

I have no news of the Third Report.

Previous item in this series

The future of SEN –  I:
http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/02/to-london.html

Spina bifida: US surge

Summer camp welcome

Summer Conductive Education Camp for

Children with Cerebral Palsy or Spina Bifida

Countryside, Chicago and Lake Zurich.

Intensive Group Motor Training Camps

for children with physical disabilities

between the ages of two and ten years old.
9:00 am to 3:00 pm, Monday to Friday.
Shorter days for children of four years and younger.

The unique programs are based on Conductive Education, a group method of teaching children with disabilities. Activities will stress daily life skills like walking, sitting, eating and dressing independently. The program is fun! Conductive Education relies on music, games and structured activities to improve movement, life skills and, most importantly, self-reliance and self-confidence!

Eligible candidates are children between the ages of 2two and ten years whose primary disability is cerebral palsy or spina bifida. Children with physical disabilities should have fair cognitive, auditory and visual skills.

Contact Patti Herbst

pcherbst_1@msn.com

708-588-0833.

Source

The above information came this morning from WSANA, Joel Sheffel''s West Suburban Access News Association:

http://intheloopkids.com/?p=5844

Summer 2010 Activities For Children with Physical Disabilities

On this page we intend to list summer activities for

children with physical disabilities 

throughout the nation:

http://wsana.org/blog/?p=4591

CE camps and other programs in the Unites States might wish to let Joel know about what they have planned, so that he might hedlp spread the word for them.

Comments

It has become clear from recent mentions on the CE blogosphere over recent months that scattered examples of children participating in CE programs as part of groups of children with cerebral palsies is a little more common that might have been generally supposed. Perhaps this has been the case also at previous camps in Chicago. The present notification explicitly welcoming children with spina bifida may be no more than the first that I have noticed.

Granting that, this explicit invitation is a welcome one, further indication that the United States has the potential to offer a focus of attention for this important special interest within Conductive Education. Good on you, Patti, and everyone else involved.

Centers programs etc., in the rest of the world, looking to expand he benefits of Conductive Education – and not least, to attract clients and utilise staff and plant that might otherwise be under-occupied – might consider the potential for development here. That is, if they even here about it. If you know of centre or program that is having a problem filling all its spaces, or is under-occupied during the year, do let it know.

Previous item on spina bifida

http://www.conductive-world.info/2010/01/uscongratulations-due.htm

The second part of the series 'The future of SEN' should appear later today