Consultation Response | nancy

I thought you might be interested in the response I wrote to the Education Select Committee on how the 2014 Children and Families Act is working out from my perspective.

Obviously, as I have responded as an individual, I have a particular view that is coloured by my personal experiences, but I do wonder how much of it I share with others, both professionally and in my private life.

Anyway, here is my response – edited because it is long, and because I am not quite sure what the rules are about publishing it in a different place (so I have made it slightly different ie. shorter!). I am…

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Capacity | nancy

When I was a little girl I got involved in stuff a lot. I wouldn’t say that I was a joiner-in particularly, but when I look back, and count up the activities I did as a young person, it comes to quite a lot, especially when you consider I grew up in a Devon valley ten miles away from anywhere. For a small village, there was a lot going on, from amateur dramatics (adults and children) to gymnastics. The only fly in the ointment (for me, anyway, other children had differently inclined parents) was that if it didn’t happen in the village, it wasn’t happening for me. Hence, any dreams I had of…

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The Roman Bath | nancy

The first time we visited the Roman Bath, it was snowing. Newly married, we had booked a City Break; it snowed, R had the flu and I…well, I convinced him (through some sort of Early Marriage Force) to ignore both the weather and his internal temperature. It was not the most successful weekend away there has ever been. We squashed ourselves against an 18th Century window, I failed to convince him of the exciting ness of Jane Austen and it was some years before we attempted to take the waters again.

The next time we visited, taking a young S and an even younger A, it wasn’t so much an Austen…

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Inclusion is dead. Long live education. | nancy

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this here consultation on how the SEND reforms, in the form of the Children and Families Act, have been going (in a nutshell, not well), and I’ve been having what I like to call ‘teacher moments’. These moments are not the sort where my family entreat me to stop behaving as if I am in front of a class and they are the children; instead, they are those times when I think to myself, ‘if this was my class, this is what I would do’.

It happened to me a lot when I was in my last teaching job. Without a class of my own, I was in and out of other people’s…

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Yes, Prime Minister | nancy

I don’t know about you, but I am constantly distracted. Not, I hasten to point out, in the sense of Mrs Bennett, making declarations of distraction and waving my arms about to attract the attention of anyone who might be in the vicinity, not that sort of distraction, no. No, I mean the sort of distraction where I set out to do one thing, and end up getting sucked into doing another. It’s why tidying the house is such a trial – and also why I seem to be on a constant journey of surprise.

The other day it was diaries. I can’t remember why it was that I was digging through the drawers in my…

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The Steam Train | nancy

I consider it a strange kind of good fortune that I spent the morning out on a steam train expedition, with three teens and their gaming devices. Such is our level of privilege that I am able to indulge my son and his friends in two of his favourite pastimes (steam trains and computer games) AT THE SAME TIME for his birthday treat. Lucky, lucky me. (I don’t know how I managed to get the job of responsible adult on this particular outing, but there you go. Such is life, and parenting. (I did my best not to be Embarrassing Mother; something that seems mostly to require me not to say anything…

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How Helping Helps | nancy

It’s interesting, if you can detach yourself a little bit, to consider how the notion of having to be helped is somehow shaming. I have felt this myself (you can read a post about accepting help here and a post about what this means for concepts of manhood here), so I can relate to it; knowing with your head that there is nothing to be feared in having to be helped every so often is very different to the experience of it.

However, like anxiety, which is constantly painted in negative terms, there are reasons why being in need, being in need of help, which admittedly, in itself is not very…

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