'Affordable Childcare' - parents?

The nationalisation of parenting continues apace: 

‘High quality affordable childcare’: all parties are promising it in various degrees. The Conservatives wish to extend wrap-around childcare at school and holidays for working parents. Labour promises an extension to 30hrs a week for two to four year olds and to extend provision for one year olds and the Lib Dems promise to deliver the best start in life for children by extending childcare provision at 9 months.

All these so called ‘family friendly policies’ are offered to mothers only if they agree to hand over care of their children to external settings and get out of the home. Care, which was once done for love and supported through family tax allowances, is now only recognised and supported if it is a traded commodity and measured as growth.

High quality long-term committed stable child care is a mother at home or a father or a grandmother – even a childminder in a home setting, but none of these qualify for any support. Economic pressures aside, spending more time with their children is what the vast majority of mothers want, and I daresay if one year olds could speak (some scream at the nursery door at being wrenched from their mother) is what they would prefer too.

But their voices are ignored at best or at worst misrepresented in political debate and policy circles. One freedom the ordinary mother no longer has is to choose to care for her own children: Mothers say choice is ‘virtually eradicated’ (Netmums: Great Work Debate) . 88 per cent of mothers with very young children said the main reason for returning to work was financial pressure’, according to the Centre for Social Justice.

And yet there is a clamour for childcare and a desperate need to help families struggling with debt, rising rents and living costs. Families are drowning and asking for a helping hand. They are not asking how they got into the river: they are too busy swimming to survive, and ‘affordable childcare’ appears to be a way to enable the mother to work to plug the income gap.

But is ‘affordable childcare’ the answer to relief from poverty? It is not – and unfortunately families will find out all too late that both parents are working very hard for very little extra disposable income. What they will have lost is family time; time with their children, which they cannot recover.

read the rest here. 

Warning Signs

Some pretty stark findings from a Girl Guides survey on how young girls see themselves, confirming what the Childrens Society reported a couple of months ago:

Among the 559 seven- to 10-year-olds who took part in the survey:

• 36% said they were made to feel the most important thing about them was their looks
• 38% felt they were not pretty enough
• 35% agreed women were judged more on their appearance than their abilities
• 23% felt they needed to be perfect

And these feelings were far more prevalent among the more than 1,000 11- to 21-year-olds who took part:

• 80% felt their looks were the most important thing about them
• 66% felt they were not pretty enough
• 93% agreed women were judged more on appearance than ability
• 47% believed their looks held them back most of the time
• 61% felt the need to be perfect

This follows on from last weeks news that 26% of women aged 16-24 are reporting symptoms of mental illness. Not so long ago, that was the lifetime figure - how many of us over our lifetime might suffer from depression, anxiety or other mental illness. 

This is a major crisis. Philip Hammond was highlighting 'productivity' yesterday, and wanted the Conservative conference to believe that by investing in a few key parts of the economy, we'd get it sorted. Perhaps the problem is something much more fundamental, and the solution something much more radical. No matter how well educated we are, or how fast our broadband speed, we are a nation in the grip of a mental health epidemic. It affects our relationships, parenting, rates of substance abuse, and workplace productivity, along with a whole host of other things. 

Time to Change is a commendable campaign to end mental health stigma, but don't lets pretend that once we've done that, all will be well. On the same day as the Guides survey came out, the Royal College of Surgeons issued patient guidelines for people wanting to have cosmetic surgery. This is a symptom of the same disease - women who learn to hate their appearance when children will be the customers of the cosmetic industry when they're older. 

The Bishop of Gloucesters campaign on body image among girls is timely, but there is a whole industry that needs taking out here. After Justin Welby prophetically spoke and acted on payday loan companies, the Welby Effect has been quite dramatic. It will take something bigger to undermine the structure of an image industry which involves surgeons, dentists, magazines, music, film, TV, Kim Kardashian, social media, selfie sticks, the cosmetics firms, advertising, and the devil - who doesn't wear Prada, but wants women to believe that their lives are incomplete without a brand name.

In an image-dominated society, the cultural flow is towards appearance and presentation. How do we bring into the cultural mainstream the idea that beauty is a quality of character, rather than an advertisers dog whistle? "Stop judging by mere appearances and make a right judgement" (John 7:24). We are so far gone it's almost impossible to imagine what UK society would look like if we took these words of Jesus seriously

We are also incredibly conflicted about this - the Paralympics (remember them?) does a great job for promoting a positive image of people with disabilities, but at the same time we enshrine in law a procedure which will lead to the abortions of more disabled children. A sense of value is based on externals - what people can do, contribute, look like, produce, or achieve (anyone for Grammar Schools?) - is spiritually and emotionally toxic. I'm not sure if a post-Christian society is actually able to come up with anything better than this, the signs are that any cultural sense of intrinsic worth as people uniquely loved and made in God's image is decaying fast. 'Because I'm worth it' is a marketing slogan, not a philosophical truth - the irony is that the slogan undermines self-worth at the moment it's delivered. 

Final thought: feminism needs to be reclaimed from capitalism. It has been colonised and trivialised. Imagine if you can the early Suffragettes sitting at the NFL final, watching Beyonce and her army of half-dressed minions waving their bottoms at the crowd, then turning to each other and saying "ladies, our work is complete." No, me neither. 

From the Girl Guides report: From as young as seven, girls feel the impact of daily sexist images of women and girls in the media, online and around them. Girls tell us that sexist objectification of women in the media makes them feel disempowered and that gender stereotypes make them feel that their gender will hold them back in life. They tell us they have to confront intense and unobtainable appearance pressures to be perfect and many say they feel they’re not good enough. 

Childrens mental health - 60% of referrals get no treatment

...figures, obtained under freedom of information legislation from 15 mental health trusts, showed that 61% of children and young people referred for help from CAMHS in 2015 received no treatment. A third were not even assessed for it. Only 20% of under-18s referred to Norfolk and Suffolk NHS foundation trust ended up undergoing treatment, a sharp fall from the 46% who did so in 2013. At Leeds and York Partnership NHS foundation trust it had fallen from 42% to 26% over the same period.

full article here, on the shocking state of mental health services for under-18s. The percentage of referrals getting treatment is actually declining over time, despite government promises to invest more, and put mental health on a par with physical health. 

Just imagine for a moment, 61% of children with a broken leg not getting an x ray or a cast, or 61% of children with asthma not getting an inhaler. Some of this stuff is life threatening. How bad does it have to get?

School tests create surge in new medical conditions

In recent weeks teachers have noticed a number of new illnesses among their students. Little is known about many of these diseases, but there is a strong suspicion they are linked to government testing. Here is the latest list of new disorders:

Adverbal diarrhoea

Burst apostrophe

Checking pox - spontanous outburst of pimples occurring when a student notices with 1 minute to go that they've misread the question

Compound fracture - inability to hold 2 parts of a word together. Most common in teenagers.

Conjunctiontivitis

Consonantipation - usually due to a blockage in the vowels

Tense future - usually afflicts children the week before SATS tests

Homophonia - fear of words which sound the same. There is a related strain occurring in foreign languages, which is an irrational fear of two nouns of the same gender occurring too close to each other in a sentence.

Severe inflection: this could take the form of Phonemonia, or Pluralisy, which usually affects several parts of the body at once

Passive tense - the student is so stressed they are unable to get out of bed

Past tense - Ofsted was last week

Possessive Compulsive Disorder - someone who finds it difficult to share a pencil during an exam.

Prolapsed pronoun

Punctuated ulcer - in extreme cases, the patient ends up in a comma.

Many of these seem to be mutations of previously harmless bits of grammar. Kept in isolation, or small groups, grammar is benign, but large swarms of grammatical terms seem to exhibit different behaviour, and have a toxic effect on those using them. The misplaced apostrophe has always been capable, on it's own, of exciting high levels of stress and rage, but this is the first time we have seen such dramatic effects in other sections of the English language.

Suffer the children: Conservative Compassion Calculus

An attempt to offer sanctuary to 3,000 unaccompanied children was defeated yesterday in the House of Commons. Proposed as an amendment to the Immigration Bill by Labour, it was backed by everyone except the government. The main argument was, get this, that it was in the best interests of children not to help.

The minister said: "Our starting principle is that we must put the best interests of children first and avoid any policy that places children at additional risk or encourages them to place their lives in the hands of people traffickers and criminal gangs.

"In any response we need to be careful not to inadvertently create a situation in which families see an advantage in sending children ahead, alone and in the hands of traffickers, putting their lives at risk by attempting treacherous sea crossings to Europe."

The 'pull factor' argument, that if we take some children, more will be put at risk. That's the logic of taking refugees directly from camps around Syria, and there is a certain amount of truth to it. But only a bit, just imagine if we applied that logic to the rest of national life, the results could be spectacular:

 - Stop treating sports-related injuries in hospital. After all, it only encourages people to play sport, knowing that they'll be patched up by the NHS if they get a boot in the head. Result: fewer people playing sport, fewer sports related injuries, less pressure on the NHS. Sorted. 

 - Close down the stock market and commodities exchanges. We need to be careful not to inadvertently create a situation in which traders see an advantage in speculation, alone and in the hands of performance-related bonuses, putting jobs and pensions at risk by attempting treacherous deals.

 - Close down all shops selling anything of any value. We need to be careful not to inadvertently create a situation in which families see an advantage in sending children in ahead, alone and in the hands of criminal gangs, putting their welfare at risk by attempting to steal the Beyonce CD.

 - Scrap Street Pastors, who create a situation where people feel safer going to nightclubs. It would be better and more compassionate to let the clubbers lie in their own vomit and find their own way home at 3am after getting separated from their friends. That would discourage other people from getting drunk, falling over, or going out after dark. 

 - Rewrite the Good Samaritan. Helping people by the roadside only encourages people to use a known dangerous route, and encourages the criminals who prey on them. Leaving the odd corpse will discourage people from travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho, and puts the best interests of travellers first. In the new story, the priest and the Levite are the compassionate Conservatives, who walk past proudly and confidently, knowing that by leaving the man to suffer they are, in fact, doing the right thing. 

Childrens Mental Health treatment: Free, but 55,000 miles to the point of delivery.

You might find the following account hard to believe in the UK in 2016, but it's the real ordeal of a local family, whose teenage daughter developed mental health problems after bullying. They live in Yeovil, but just look at the places where their child ended up for 'care'....

"We've had to section her on seven occasions, the first being in September 2013 - that was at Sevenoaks in Kent, she was there for about eight weeks."

Since her first admission, she has spent periods in mental health hospitals in Southampton, Manchester, Woking, Norwich and finally Orpington in Kent.

She has had to be treated hundreds of miles away from her home because there are no inpatient beds available in Somerset.

Her parents have visited her virtually every weekend as she was battling her illness, spending £25,000 and racking up 55,000 miles of travel just to see her.

"She would get put in different hospitals - from Southampton she was moved to Manchester for a weekend, and then spent four months in Woking. Many of these mental health hospitals are privately owned, they're profit-making organisations. Often it appears they never have enough staff."

Her mother said that it was "heartbreaking" to be separated from their daughter by such huge distances. She said: "I feel as though I've missed out on two and a half years of our daughter growing up. You get a phone-call at night and she's crying her eyes out and you're like 250 miles away and you know there's nothing you can do to help her."

"We've spent £25,000 over the last three years just to see our daughter - that's food, accommodation, petrol, taking her out to places, everything. A lot of other people can't afford to do that. We were told that either the NHS or the county council would reimburse transport costs, but we've heard nothing from either. There's no continuity of care. We've never been back to the same hospital; it's always a different psychiatrist or a different doctor, and it's soul-destroying."

This is scandalous. It's enough of an ordeal to have an ill child, but how on earth is all of that supposed to help the child recover? 

This is not a one-off, it's happening repeatedly to adults as well as children, and school heads are now flagging up mental illness as a major concern. 

Broken News: Hey, Media, Leave Them Heads Alone

ITV are dangling some outrage bait this morning with another story based on a school newsletter. This follows a nearby school last week which hit first the local, then the national papers, and a story about pyjama-wearing parents at a school in the North-East. All 3 stories were based on newsletters for parents, sent home with children.

As a parent, communication with the school is key, in both directions. It would be a real problem if the school didn't feel it could talk honestly with me about our children, and the life of the school. Headteachers around the country will be looking at this latest media bandwagon and wondering if it's still possible to communicate with parents, without their words ending up quoted in the Daily Mail and fed to the social media outrage machine.

Parents with an issue over what a school has said need to take it up with the school, not leak it to the press. Using the media to settle scores undermines the parent-school relationship for everyone. School newsletters are for the school community, they are not press releases. If there is a serious problem, then there are proper channels to go through.

Local media have a responsibility here too - in the short term, you might get a bit more web traffic, but at what cost? Not every attention-grabbing headline needs to be published. It clearly suits ITV to sex the story up: head 'demands' - really? 'apparent bid to boost attendance' - nudge nudge! Conflict generates clicks, harmony doesn't. But web traffic and sales data aren't a reliable moral compass.

And for any complaint, Jesus has some good advice: “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ 'School and Parent work together' won't make any headlines in your local paper (more's the pity), but then that's not the point is it?

Ofsted Sunday School Raids: Disappointing News

Schools inspectors will not be allowed to raid Sunday schools, Scouts' meetings or Christian summer camps, David Cameron has promised MPs. (source)

Awww, what a shame. Imagine the frisson it would add to the average Sunday school if it had the chance of being raided at any moment by besuited people with clipboards. 

Jesus radicalised his disciples: they left everything to follow him, and 10 out of the 12 died as a martyr, one other died in exile, because of Jesus. So I hope any inspector would detect signs of radicalisation, and be able to recognise that being radical comes in more than 1 form. 

What Do Children Actually Want for Christmas?

Ok its an advert, but one every parent should spend 2 minutes with before they spend hours and £100s on Christmas shopping.

Our Education Secretary Has Forgotten What Schools are For

Bring back Michael Gove, all is forgiven.....

Speaking at the Conservative party conference, Ms Morgan said: "We're going to give more working parents something the best schools already do."

"We will be giving families in thousands of schools a 'right to request' their school provides childcare for a full working day, before and after school and during the school holidays.

"If enough parents call for childcare at their local school, we will expect the school to take reasonable steps to accommodate it, in a way that works for them.

"Because we want working parents to have the confidence their child is in a happy and safe environment."

Schools are places of education, they are not a babysitting service. Nicky Morgan has forgotten what schools are for. The schools should exercise their 'right to refuse' this silly policy. I despair that the Conservatives have picked up where Labour left off: the more time parents can spend at work, and the less time with their children, the better. As the school day expands, and free nursery places get pushed back to a younger and younger age, there'll come a point where the government simply seize our children at birth and kick us out of hospital to go and find a job.

Unholy Statistics: British Humanist Society and Schools

The British Humanist Association has published a report on faith schools, 'Unholy Mess', claiming that As many as hundreds of thousands of children have been unlawfully denied access to religiously selective state schools in England

That's a big claim, there are 4700 Church of England state schools alone, with over 1 million children attending them. According to the BHA "almost all of (them) are failing to comply" with the official Schools Admission Code. 

Ok, just imagine this. A village of 4700 people. 70 people are interviewed. Some of them don't even live in the village, but are from a similar village down the road. If 43 of them had a significant weight problem, would you deduce that 'almost all' of the people in the village are fat?

Church of England schools were only 1/3 of the schools in the 43, yet the results are extrapolated to every CofE school, primary and secondary.  There are clearly some practices which need sorting out, but it looks very much as though the evidence has been interpreted to fit the BHAs agenda. 

The BHA's solution is not to recommend that the schools get in line with standard admissions criteria, but that they be scrapped completely. As a VW owner, I'm just glad they're not in the used car market, or they'd be calling for 1.2m German motors to be melted down tomorrow.

Update: a couple of responses
 Reverend Nigel Genders, the Church of England’s chief education officer, said: “We would strongly refute any suggestion that our schools have a near universal noncompliance with the code. The OSA annual report tells a very different story to this over-exaggerated report, which equates small administrative errors or minuscule technicalities with major systemic failure. If schools were able to focus more time on getting on running their schools, rather than responding to these sorts of campaigns, children would be better served.

“The majority of Church of England schools do not prioritise their places on the basis of church attendance, and most of those that do still make places available for children in the school’s immediate community. Our secondary schools have an average of 10 per cent selection by religious criteria – this is based on church attendance only. We also have as many pupils on free school meals as the national average, some much higher."

A Department for Education spokeswoman said: "We want every child to have access to the best education possible, and where there is evidence a school does not have fair and transparent admissions arrangements, swift action will be taken.

"We will consider the findings of BHA's report carefully. All of the objections they have listed have now been resolved."

i.e. all the issues can be sorted within the current system, rather than by scrapping it.  

Not in front of the children

I'm sure there's a perfectly sensible proposal behind this report on reforms to CofE communion practice, but how about this for a paragraph:

It comes despite fears from the Church’s most senior liturgical body that children could spill communion wine, which represents the blood of Christ. It would also mean children being invited to distribute alcohol in churches - almost a decade before they could legally drink it in a pub

a) adults can spill communion wine too. I know, I have. Maybe we should refuse to give it to people who have Parkinsons too? 

b) hopefully communion is closer to a family meal than a consumer transaction. I would hope that most children are involved in preparing and serving the food and drink of a meal by the age of 9 at home. So why not in church? 

c) my theology may be a little ropey, but for those who think transubstantiation actually happens, surely the wine is no longer alcoholic in that case? 

we really do tie ourselves in knots over some silly things. God is more offended by children being driven into poverty by welfare reforms than he is by them spilling communion wine. 

Make Lunch

Such a simple, but brilliant idea

13 weeks a year when 3.5 million children who get free school meals, don't get free meals. 1000s of churches with kitchens and volunteers. Make Lunch.

For anyone wondering how to get started, the Cinnamon Network give micro grants of up to £1k to pump prime community projects like this one.

And if you're not sure about catering quantities, you're in good company, Jesus was rubbish at it. Put him in charge of the kitchen, and there's a trail of leftovers - Cana, feeding of the 5000, Emmaus,....

Halloween: Parental Guidance

I was at a well attended public sports event Up North last week, with lots of children present. It was 31st October, so there was a Hallowe'en theme, including a fancy dress competition and the home team playing in themed shirts (which were then raffled off). During a rest period in the match, we were treated to Michael Jacksons 'Thriller' video. The uncut one that they wouldn't play on Top of the Pops, which has a 15 rating (originally 18).

Neither of my kids are anywhere near 15, and neither were scores of other children present. I've emailed the host venue to highlight the issue, and also BBFC to ask about the legality or otherwise of showing a 15 certificate film in a public venue with no warning or parental advisory.

Hallowe'en is getting worse by the year - this years pulling of mental patient 'costumes' by big high street names is the tip of the iceberg, there is a gruesome window display greeting you as you turn into the centre of Yeovil, zombies are murderers are taking over from pumpkins. Even Angry Birds has gone into overkill (sorry for the pun) with 4 weeks of Halloween (i.e. zombie pig) themed games on its Facebook app running deep into November.

I'm not an angry bird, just a parent feeling protective and besieged in equal measure. Hallowe'en is becoming a celebration of gold and gore, can I say 'enough' without being called a killjoy?

update: the BBFC have responded and are looking into it, no reply from the venue yet.

update 2: still no response from the venue, but here's the BBFC's email -
Dear David,

Thank you again for your query regarding the screening of a sequence from Thriller at an ice hockey match.

As the venue was not a cinema we would advise you to send your comments to the organisers of the event. If you don't get a satisfactory response then you may wish to contact the appropriate local council as they should be able to advise you on the matter.

I hope this information is helpful.

odd that the BBFC can't advise me on whether this was legal. 

Safeguarding - are we missing something?

The Church of England and the Methodist church are currently updating their safeguarding policies to keep abreast of the change from CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) to DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks. DBS checks will have 'portability', which means an individual only needs one, rather than a separate check for every role they have in working with children and vulnerable adults.

Following guidance from the Charity Commissioners, the CofE has published its latest guidance for Dioceses and parishes.

Along with 13,000 other parishes, we're trying to process what all this means. This paragraph (from p42) is of particular interest:

Members of the Parochial Church Council (PCC), church council or circuit meeting

Where the parish, church or circuit works with children and/ or vulnerable adults, then all  members of these governing bodies, as Charity Trustees, are deemed to be in Group 2 and as such are eligible for a criminal record check. The detailed justification for this is that prior to the Protection of Freedoms Act they were engaged in Regulated Activity according to the previous definition, and therefore remain eligible for a criminal record check without barring information.

....A minimum of three checks should always be undertaken: the safeguarding lead person and the two church wardens (C of E) or senior stewards (MC). For the other members, the meeting can decide on what checks are appropriate. It would not normally be deemed necessary to require checks from the all trustees.

This is a bit confusing: Our PCC has a membership of just over 20, and we have a children and families worker (employed by the PCC), midweek childrens groups and Junior Church on Sunday.  Will PCC members, even if they have no direct involvement with childrens work, now have to be vetted? It's not actually that clear - they are eligible, but not required? When would checks be required? How can the meeting decide what is appropriate? Multiply that by 13,000 Anglican parishes, plus all the Methodist circuits (and equivalents in other churches) and that's a lot of paperwork.

Does there comes a point at which a system designed to protect children and vulnerable adults actually begins to do more harm than good? We rightly are getting much more vigilant about abuse and the kind of behaviour that safeguarding is aiming to stamp out. But no tally is kept of the childrens and vulnerable adults activities which close, or never open, and the volunteers who don't materialise, because of the quantities of paperwork and bureaucracy. And where does it stop? Every one of the 102 adults at our church on Sunday had contact with children. Our regular members have regular contact with children - will they all need vetting too?

The irony is that the best thing the government could do to safeguard children is to invest in parenting. Whilst volunteers jump through more hoops than a dog agility champion, parents are simply left to their own devices, with occasionally tragic results.

We recently recruited a number of volunteers to do pastoral visiting on behalf of the church. Wider church safeguarding policy rightly required us to use a 'safe recruitment form'. All well and good, except that using the form might have recruited us people who were 'safe', but there was no scope to ask about  pastoral competence or gifts, we had to reinvent the form to make it fit for purpose.

This is symptomatic of the bigger picture. It seems absurd to me that so much time and effort will go into vetting volunteers, some of whom are going to have no contact at all with the people we are trying to protect, whilst there is no national policy or framework for equipping mums and dads with the basic skills of good parenting and relationships. We may even get to a point where statistically, the safest place for a child to be is away from their parents. Are we straining out gnats and swallowing camels?

Absent Fathers Day

'The family' is in rapid flux - the traditional father/sole earner combination of the early to mid 1900s is dying out, and the traditional dual parent family is rapidly following.

Fractured Families, a report issued earlier this week by the Centre for Social Justice, observes:

One in two children born today will not grow up with both their parents and every year an additional 20,000 people, mainly women, join the throngs of those raising children more or less singlehandedly. One million children have no meaningful contact at all with their fathers, and that’s a conservative estimate.

The personal and social costs are huge:

Such breakdown would matter not a lot if the human and economic costs were insignificant. But they are in fact devastating. Children with separated, single or step-parents are 50 per cent more likely to fail at school, have low self-esteem, struggle to make friends and with their behaviour. They often battle with anxiety or depression throughout the rest of their lives. 

Adults’ mental and physical health can take a huge knock when relationships crumble, making it much harder for them to achieve at work and be the parents they want to be. The costs are eye-watering – rising to £49 billion per annum by the end of this Parliament, it’s more than the Government’s whole defence budget.

There is an epidemic of family breakdown, and whilst the government showers sticking plasters at the symptoms (mental health problems, educational failure, substance abuse etc.) nothing is done about the illness. Government after government has shied away from significant investment in family stability, investing in relationships & marriage and encouraging people to stay together.

92% of lone parent families are headed by the mother. Even at birth, 20% of children live with only 1 parent, by the time they are teenagers this is nearly 50%. For up to 3 million children tomorrow will be Absent Fathers Day, and here are some of the the consequences:

Children who experience family breakdown are more likely to 

• experience behavioural problems; 
• perform less well in school; 
• need more medical treatment;
• leave school and home earlier; 
• become sexually active, pregnant or a parent at an early age; 
• and report more depressive symptoms and higher levels of smoking, drinking and other drug use during adolescence and adulthood.

The report points out the structural issues, as well as the personal ones. At the more dramatic end of the scale Fathers4Justice highlight the way that family support often leaves dads out of the picture. Our experience of ante-natal classes was a lot of stuff about the mechanics of birth and feeding the baby, and nothing at all about how to parent together and support each other as mother and father, even though it was a prime opportunity to support new parents in that way. In other cases the father simply walks away. The overall effect is that over 1 million children in the UK never see their father, and up to a million more have little or no meaningful contact.

The UK is near the bottom of international leagues on this. It's peculiar that in some areas of childrens policy, league tables are assiduously compiled and published (education) but in others they are completely ignored.

The full report goes into a lot of detail, statistics, and analysis;

 -  for example that cohabiting couples are 2 to 2.5 times more likely than married couples to break up, which in turn has consequences for the nearly 2m (and rising) number of children in 2-parent cohabiting households.  

 - Or that for every £6,000 in reactive spending to family breakdown, the government spends only £1 on prevention. 

 - Or that 76% of young people in custody have an absent father. 

It's not a simple issue, there are multiple causes, from culture to cost (the sheer cost of getting married makes it unavailable to low-income families). Whatever you think about same-sex marriage, in the light of the above, is that really the top priority in family policy? Shouldn't we be debating all this instead? 

So pray for us dads, absent and present, on Fathers day, for mums, for children. And pray that this will be the generation where the tide of family breakdown turns back, and we get the political and civil and cultural leadership to make that happen. 

Wacky BaccE?

With the resumption of the political football season, education is getting the usual kicking around. Michael Gove's announcement of the scrapping of GCSE's for an exam-based EBacc (if it's English, why not use an English word for it?); Nick Clegg's apology over tuition fees, and strong words from the Bishop of Oxford about the marking fiasco this summer.

An O-level style, final exam system bases success on a number of skills:
 - accumulating knowledge
 - short term memory
 - ability to think clearly under stress
 - exam technique (e.g. spotting questions)

one friend at theological college went into his exams armed with 6 7-letter words, an acronym for each question which was likely to turn up. It worked, he got a first.

I've been mulling over whether continuous assesment or a final test is more Biblical. Probably neither/both: the bible does talk about a final judgement, some kind of test where everything is evaluated. At the same time there is continuous assesment - Jesus continuously reviews his ministry and priorities in prayer, the Psalmist asks God to search his heart.

More Christian thinkers and leaders are writing about discipleship, and best practice in discipleship - for the development of skills, character and holiness - is about 'a long obedience in the same direction'. The church has centuries of experience of 'continuous assesment', though whether the confessional, or the daily examen of Ignatius, produced the fruit of holiness is questionable. Methodists had their class meetings to help one another grow in Christian virtues.

It all depends what we want to happen in education. If it's merely about knowledge and fact retention, exams are fine (up to a point). But what about growth in skills and character? Instruments are learned through regular practice, tutorials, and a series of grade exams, it's the same with sporting skills like swimming and gymnastics. Together with those go the character qualities of patience, perseverance, coping with success and failure. On the one hand it will be good to remove from students the pressure of continuous assesment, some learning is best done in a more leisurely way, rather than cramming facts in order to pass a test/assignment. But continuous assesment also gives the opportunity to develop skills and character in a way that exams don't.

I've recently become a 'Training Minister' on STETS, a local training course for church leaders in the CofE, Methodists and elsewhere. I've been impressed by their course structure - the academic is integrated with personal spiritual disciplines and growth in character. All three are addressed together. This is a million miles from the segmentation of my own training in the 1990s, where character and holiness issues were hardly ever addressed. And guess what? Most of the ministers dropping out of parish life, year in year out, are doing so not because they can't do the job, but because of character and personal issues.

One other thought: as a political football education is now much bigger than it was, as successive governments have tried to wrestle children from their parents at an earlier and earlier age. This is partly to get parents back into the job market, and partly to offer a better environment for growing up than some of the more troubled homes. Parenting is being progressively nationalised. But children still go home at the end of the day, and parents are still the prime educators. There shouldn't be a rigid division of labour between home and school (facts at school, character at home), but it's hard to build a partnership approach without a shared public ethos of what a good life and a whole person actually looks like.

General Synod: What You Might Have Missed

In between deciding nothing in particular about women bishops, and spannering the Weddings Project, there were some good initiatives announced at General Synod this week:

Worship Workshop, a new website for schools and children to use to create their own liturgy. Also worth a look for harvesting the links - some good ones under the 'engaging resource' section. Press release here.

How2Help is a new community action website, arising from a motion to Synod in 2010, which seeks to catalyse and resource local churches in serving their communities, and spreading ideas about what works, and how to do it.

from the press release:
The Church of England has a wealth of experience and skill in serving local communities, built up over decades of Christian witness and action for stronger bonds between people and for supporting the lonely and vulnerable. People can now go into the website, starting with the question or issue that motivates them, and find answers, ideas and examples. They can learn from the mistakes of others and discover what approaches work best

and finally, I hadn't realised the Queen was ill. The Synod opened with the National Anthem and prayers for HM The Queen and for members of the Synod who were unwell.  

Prayer Spaces in Schools

Prayer Spaces in Schools Teaser from Prayer Spaces In Schools on Vimeo.

An excellent new website, packed full of ideas and information about how to set up prayer spaces in primary and secondary schools. It's emerged from grassroots practice, and seems to be catching on all over the place. From the site:

In the UK, prayer spaces are spreading, and they're spreading fast.

Schools and youth workers are finding that these creative, prayer/reflective spaces provide a simple, effective way to communicate and to welcome children and young people into an experience of the Christian faith. They offer an invitation to 'belong' without requiring any particular 'belief'.

"I’ve never seen prayer displayed or experienced like this before. It’s made me realise how many different ways prayer can be appreciated. it’s opened up religion into my life. Thank you!"

Teachers and other educational staff are finding that prayer spaces (or 'soul spaces' or 'sacred spaces' or whatever other names they're being given) fit well with different curriculum areas - R.E. and Citizenship being the most obvious, but not the only ones - as well as with wider aspects of school life.

"Thank you for the amazing prayer experience that you have given us as staff, parents and for the students. It will have a totally transformational effect for many people. We are so appreciative of all that you have done for our school community, for all the unsociable hours, for the energy and strength you’ve injected to our spiritual life."

There are separate sections with ideas on prayer stations (interactive places for prayer), lessons and curriculum links.

And because they can be used by children, they can be used by adults too, so if you're after some creative ideas for prayer in regular worship, Messy Church, all-age worship, in the home or for your cell group, it's worth a browse as well.
A full version of the video above is being posted on 8th Feb.

Clegg on Marriage Part 2: We'll Take Your Toddlers

Following on from yesterdays post about Nick Cleggs views on marriage, there's also a deep contradiction at the heart of Cleggs speech on how to spend government money. Take this:

...I have made clear that intergenerational social mobility is the principal objective of the Coalition’s social policy. And why I have been so determined to increase our investment in the vital early years, including, recently, by extending the new two-year old offer to an additional 130,000 toddlers in working families

and a reminder of what Clegg said about state finance and marriage:
We can all agree that strong relationships between parents are important, but not agree that the state should use the tax system to encourage a particular family form.

Now I may be being thick here, but I can't actually see the difference between using state money to encourage marriage and using state money to encourage a particular model of childcare. Both are using state money to incentivise/encourage/nudge (pick your own) a particular family form.

In the first case, the family form is of two working parents, and the state picking up more of the childcare. This has various benefits for the government: a more flexible labour market, a chance to get it's OFSTED-regulated hands on the children of 'problem families' at an earlier stage, and some good headlines about spending money on kids. It also has benefits for families where both parents want to work (or need to work to pay for mortgage, student fees, fuel bills, you name it) it's less costly to do so with small children. It also extends the pressure on new mums to go back to paid work, and basically says that the government would prefer them doing this than the work of parenting.

So this isn't actually about whether the government should subsidise or incentivise a particular family form. It's politics: being sniffy about marriage puts clear yellow water between Clegg and the Tories, spending money on kids is like motherhood and apple pie. Unless your a mother of course, because you're being told that what you do doesn't matter as much as if you were on the checkout at Tesco. Clegg is simply continuing the social engineering begun under New Labour: let the state raise your children, now you go find your place in the economic machine.

If Clegg really wanted to be radical, he would make the offer of free childcare conditional. Not means-tested, but linked to some form of parenting support and training, such as Positive Parenting (used extensively by our local Sure Start centre). That would incentivise a social good (good parenting), whilst promoting the governments aim of early intervention in troubled families.