Taking Out The Trash

Listen again to the Childhood and the Media conference

The Childhood and the Media Conference which took place at Bath Spa University (and which led to the Daily Mail story detailed in the earlier blog post),was organised by David Niven Associates in association with the university.

It featured a range of speakers looking at issues around the representation of young people and the media. You can open a PDF about the conference by clicking here.

I've clipped some of the talks from the conference and you can listen to them below. I've not kept in the Q&As because the quality is not good enough.

First up is Simon Milner who is UK Policy Director for Facebook with an 11 minute talk covering its safety policy and young people.

Milner

Then there is Naomi Gummer who is UK Public Policy Analyst at Google with an 11 minute talk on protecting people online.

Gummer

After Naomi comes Mike Jempson, director of MediaWise and a fellow journalism lecturer at the University of the West of England, with a 15 minute talk about representations of young people in the media.

Jempson

Then there is a series of short talks totalling 25 minutes from Charlotte Dewar, head of complaints at the Press Complaints Commission, followed by Dr Fleur Fisher, chair of the Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel, and finally Sue Steel who is the co-ordinator of the Anti-Bullying Alliance.

First panel

They 30 minute keynote talk was given by Jim Gamble who resigned as head of Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre after a row with Home Secretary Theresa May over its future.

Gamble

Finally, David Niven (click here for a pdf outlining his wealth of experience in child protection and parenting) wrapped up events on the day over 9 minutes.

Niven

 

Educating the children of military families

The Big Issue in the North has published a news story of mine about how the state educates the children of military families.

A fuller feature on this topic appears in the latest edition of Families Journal, the magazine of the Army Families Federation.

Two local authorities (North Yorkshire and Wiltshire) are making particular efforts to improve the way they deal with the particular needs of service children. For instance; they often arrive at schools at late notice making the planning of provision difficult. They often have a parent absent for long periods (obvious, I know, but the impact of service children is not something that is recorded by Ofsted). There is an impact on children who are required to lose and make friends quickly.  There is, unfortunately, the question of bereavement.

However, what is surprising, is that basic information is lacking. Data on the performance of service children is patchy. It is not even clear how many children from military families are being educated in the state sector at any one time. The census run by the Department of Education has a section asking LEAs to list their number - but it is not mandatory and the results are suspect. Wales and Scotland don't bother counting at all.

As one education official said: “They say that one of the most stressful things is moving house, another is moving to a new country or moving to a new job. Service children can go through all of that and the education sector just expects them to cope.”

One rule....

Just a little addendum to my post yesterday about private schools.
While researching something else I came across this from the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Public authorities, including state education providers, must comply with certain legal responsibilities set out in the following duties:

• The race equality duty
• The disability equality duty
• The gender equality duty

The duties apply to the governing bodies of all maintained schools (community schools, foundation schools, voluntary aided and voluntary controlled schools), city technology colleges, city colleges for the arts, city colleges for technology and city academies.

 Are independent or private schools subject to these duties?
Private or independent schools are not required to comply with the equality duties, although they are strongly encouraged to do so as it will help them to establish and maintain good practice in promoting equality.

So, go private if want to less protection from discrimination: can't see that appearing in any of their brochures.

private school myths

I'm not usually a fan of the I, I, I school of journalism (especially set in London) but Arabella Weir has good piece in today's Guardian about why middle class families in the capital choose private over state for their child's education.

A friend of mine who lives in London and has a boy approaching school years was shocked at the snobbery which suddenly surfaced among her fellow mums. Let alone the sudden Catholic conversions.

You can see some of the same divisions even in my village. There are people for whom the primary school (which is not a star performer but absolutely fine) is not even on their radar. Freedom of choice for parents is something that middle class families exercise to the detriment or working class ones by creating an apartheid between the 'will argue' and 'wilfully ignored'.

And if you can't afford private then where's the choice? (Don't even get me started on the charitable status of private schools).

Anyhow Francis Beckett, in a sidebar to the main piece in the Guardian, answers some myths about private versus state education which is well worth a look.

Those on the right go on about class envy and the left hating people wanting to succeed. If anything breeds class hatred it's a segragated education system which rewards people because of where they were born. I don't hate the parents of pupils at public schools for wanting their children to succeed - I hate the waste of talent that happens because working class children don't get the same opportunities.

The title of this blog comes from an episode of The West Wing and there's a nice line Sam Seaborn has in one when asked about education policy.

"...education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes. We need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense."

(Just for fun trivia fans: which episode did Sam utter these words?)