Unsatisfactory

One of my favourite lines of poetry comes near the end of T S Eliot's The Journey of the Magi:
"It was (you may say) satisfactory." It is the precisely accurate word for the magi's discovery of the baby after their cold coming at the worst time of the year. Eliot rescues the word from its debased coinage of "passable" or "mediocre", and returns it to its pristine meaning of "making enough" or "giving satisfaction".  After a good meal, when offered more, you reply, "No thank you, I am satisfied." Eliot resisted the contemporary habit of throwing in superlatives or adverbs to lend weight to a word, knowing that it merely serves to drain the original of meaning. You know the sort of thing, "That's really really good (or wicked)!" or "That's mega-cool!"

So in a way I was pleased to hear the news yesterday that Ofsted intends to scrap the "Satisfactory" category in its assessment of schools' performance. Previously there'd been four: "Outstanding - good - satisfactory - inadequate". Yesterday an Ofsted press release announced: "Ahead of a government summit on ‘coasting schools’ to be held at Downing Street later today, Ofsted’s Chief Inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw, has confirmed his intention to scrap the ‘satisfactory’ judgment for school inspections. The move is designed to tackle the number of coasting schools that have remained stubbornly ‘satisfactory’ over a number of inspections, as highlighted in Ofsted’s Annual Reports over recent years. The proposals, which will be subject to consultation, would mean that any school that does not provide a good standard of education will be given a new “requires improvement’ grade." (Pity that even Ofsted managed to make a punctuation error - which is less than satisfactory and requires improvement.) 

Sadly too Ofsted isn't acting from as disinterested a motive as restoring the power of language. So Chief HMI and former whizz-kid headteacher (credited with turning round failing schools single-handed...), Sir Michael Wilshaw, says, "Of particular concern are the 3,000 schools educating a million children that have been 'satisfactory' two inspections in a row. This is not good enough." (As I've explained, "satisfactory" precisely means "good enough".) It sounds as though the idea is to amalgamate the present "satisfactory" with "inadequate", creating an even blunter hammer to crack the nut (or the NUT perhaps). In fact, dark suspicions lurk that it's a ruse to prove how unsatisfactory state schools are after all, proving the need for academies, free schools and all the other devices for diversifying (or confusing) the system. The government might like to know, what every effective teacher knows, that workers, whether students or employees, respond better to encouragement than to threats.  


It is devoutly to be hoped that the promised "consultation" will be more of the John Lewis "forum" model (favoured by the deputy prime minister) than the commission-and-ignore approach which the government seems to be meting out to the Dilnot Report. 

A medical day

"You're having a very medical day," Jane told me on Monday. It was true: Lesley, my physio, was round in the morning for her regular check-up. I reckon she and Jane are part of the reason that my condition has not deteriorated more, them and the fact that it's that rare beast PLS - and a lot of people praying. She tells me my main problem is tightness in my adductor muscles and shortness in my hamstrings. She came up with a canny antidote to the former, which is sitting with a tightly rolled up sleeping bag between my knees - which forces them to stay apart. There's no hope of me becoming bow-legged like my revered Clifton art teacher, "Fluffy" (because of his hair) Leadbetter. He was the scourge of any cyclists who dared ride past the teaching block which housed the art school on its second floor. You were meant to get off at the gate but it was a long way to the bike sheds.... So it was tempting to risk it and stay on your bike, or at least scoot, round the corner! However, if Fluffy was in his lair, woe betide you! You'd hear a Scottish roar from on high, rooting you to the spot, followed by a thundering descent down the metal fire escape at the end of the building. I don't recall what the sanction was, but the ensuing encounter was terrifying enough.

As I say, I won't ever have knees you could fly a spitfire through, but the adductors might stop tightening. The consultant has warned/encouraged me that Jane and I probably have a long haul ahead of us; so everything that keeps me flexible is welcome. So are gizmos that make life easier - which is why my second visitor came. It was Martin from the Oxford Centre of Enablement. He came to talk about environmental control systems, i.e. technology to assist with daily living - like controlling the TV, turning lights on and off, closing curtains, summoning the lift, answering the phone and opening the door. The major need of those for me at the moment is answering and opening the door, because on the whole Jane and I have worked out a satisfactory modus operandi, which means I get on fine when she's out for some hours. However, the MND Centre tries to keep ahead of patients' deterioration, which is usually very fast. It's therefore normally hard to keep up. The system we talked about could be controlled from an iPad or iPod Touch - which was nifty - but I think had a few snags, like needing someone from the company to come and reprogramme things when you wanted to change something. So we're thinking on it. But it's another great service from the NHS.

Sadly I'm going to have to avail myself of the Health Service yet again, because, in the middle of lunch, eating a slice of home-baked bread and cheese, another tooth decided it had had enough and lost its head, i.e. the top fell off. So in a couple of weeks it's back to my nice dentist. One of my family, who's not with the NHS, is in the middle of root-canal treatment, at the cost of £450.

And of course that was like the big story of the day, the publication of the report of the Dilnot Commission. I've not read it through as I'd like to, but I gather it's factually and economically highly literate and its conclusions seem to me, at least, fair and affordable, protecting 2/3 of oldies' capital against care costs and adding no more than 1/400th GDP to public spending. As Andrew said, 'If we're not willing to spend that on caring for our elderly and younger vulnerable people, what does that say about our society?' - only more eloquently than that. Two things struck me about the news coverage of the report: one was the extraordinary authority that Andrew showed in interviews and debates. He knew it was a good report, based on sound principles. He knew he had a good "product". The other was the almost universal welcome the report received, especially from charities representing interested parties, but also from politicians (though naturally government ministers wanted a bit of wriggle room, promising us a white paper "in the spring"). The one dissenting voice I heard was from a Dr Patrick Nolan (if I remember right), an economist from the right-wing think-tank, Reform, on Channel 4, who waffled about affordability in financially straitened times, ignoring the facts that we'd spend less on it than on the Libyan expedition and that its implementation would not happen before our hoped-for economic recovery. In my view, the Commission was a job well done.

The Dilnot Commission

Yesterday I was contacted by the Guardian asking if I would like to do a piece for their Comment is free column. Sadly as you'll know I was out having a romantic lunch with my Valentine - not sad, I hasten to add, because of enjoying Jane's company, but merely because by the time I'd returned to my emails they'd found another blogger to write it instead! Fair enough: speed is all in the world of daily newspapers.

They'd wanted a piece following on from a crie de coeur piece headlined

'Life not worth living' for disabled people facing benefit cuts

Campaigners say government plans to end automatic right to state support for independent living is causing many to despair . Read full article                                                                                        

I was surprised on reading the article to discover that it was about the government's Commission on Funding for Care and Support, the Dilnot Commission for short, after its chairman, Andrew Dilnot, the former head of the IFS (Institute for Fiscal Studies), and that the consultation period was ending this week. Oh well, I thought, because by now my brain was running on overdrive, I can at least make a submission to the commission. So I was even more surprised on going to the Commission's website to discover, at the end of 22 pages, that in fact the deadline for submissions was midnight on 31st January. "Darnit!" I thought. "I don't remember that ever being publicised." So I googled it, and I couldn't find a mention of the deadline, nor even an invitation for submissions, in the news media. Clearly the disability and aged groups had been contacted. But were they really interested in what individuals thought? Not everyone is represented by a group. And ultimately, one hopes, it's about the care and support of individuals.

It so happens that we know Andrew Dilnot. In fact one of our children had digs at the top of their house once. I can't think of anyone in whom I'd have more faith to head up that commission - brilliant, humane and understanding of needs. I gave a cheer when I heard he'd been appointed chairman. But his task is immense. Originally the government gave them a fourfold remit: sustainability, fairness, choice and affordability. The Commission negotiated a fifth: ease of use. If you've been following Michael Sandel's excellent series on Justice on BBC4, you'll recognise that these are all utilitarian considerations. Even "fairness" is defined as "for individuals, families, carers, and the wider society". In other words there's a calculus to be made between the stakeholders' interest and "the wider society", reinforced in two other criteria, sustainability and affordability. Which of course are very necessary considerations for the "state" to make. But there's a question to be asked first - which is, where do we place our priority in deciding what we can afford? Ultimately where's our value-base? What do we hold as non-negotiably good in our society? That is what should determine our spending/taxation priorities.

That does mean asking some very hard questions. Of course it does. For example, is the free market economy more important than the compassionate society? Is subsidising high art a priority? Free museum entry? Financing high profile sports events... Tax breaks for billionaires, hedge-fund managers... Protected pensions for MPs...? What does fairness mean? Does it mean everyone being treated the same by the state? No winter-fuel allowances and free bus passes for the elderly? No child-benefit for those feckless enough to have babies? No subsidised bars for MPs? No allowances for the disabled?

The oldest law code I'm familiar with sets the highest priority on protecting the vulnerable: "Cursed be anyone who perverts the justice due to the sojourner (alien), the fatherless, and the widow" (Deuteronomy from the Bible). "You judge a country, and its institutions, by the way it deals with the most vulnerable - hard to argue with that," said John Humphrys on the Today programme this morning. He was introducing a discussion about the report of the Health Service Ombudsman on bad examples of care for the elderly in the NHS. Later, Professor Raymond Tallis, once of Manchester University, warned against the business model that had permeated the caring professions, so that "people only value the things that can be counted". He went on to make this point, "There's a problem more broadly in society. What do we value in society? We value glamour. What is the least glamorous thing to do, but what is the most deeply important thing to do? It is actually hands-on care. I think that society at large devalues hands-on care, and I think that is another implicit pressure." I suspect I disagree with the professor on some things, but here I reckon he's on the mark.

"The most deeply important thing to do" ... is actually hands-on care. That's the opposite of letting the vulnerable sink or swim, while the rest of us in SS Great Britain head for secure financial ground, eventually. It's not hauling up the lifeboats and saving the life-rafts in case we might need them later. Neither is it thanking God that we have our own little (or considerable) life-rafts set aside should the worst ever happen to us. "You judge a country... by the way it deals with the most vulnerable." Let's not argue with that. And, Andrew, should you happen to be reading this, could you just make that the starting place for your policy-making?