Lessons from swapping schools

Jane and I have just finished catching up with Channel 4’s The Great British School Swap. If you’ve not seen it, the series is definitely worth a watch. You’ve just over a fortnight on catch-up. https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-great-british-school-swap. Clearly there’s some artificiality about the whole project. You sense the film-makers wanting to find (or create) storylines. You realise that a fortnight’s schooling being condensed into three 45-minute programmes leaves a lot of room for creative editing. However one senses that two school headteachers involved are genuinely invested in the scheme.

Having acknowledged that, I still believe there are lessons to be learned from these stimulating programmes. I gather that the show was commissioned after a 2017 report revealed more than a quarter of primary and four in ten secondary schools are ethnically divided. The show was filmed in two Midlands schools which are just 15 miles apart: Tamworth Enterprise Academy in Staffordshire and Saltley Academy in Birmingham, the one almost exclusively white, the other equally Muslim. We saw 12 students from Tamworth being bused to spend a week in Saltley and the reverse happening a week later. It was clear that all the parents had agreed and all the students had volunteered to take part in the swap.

The programmes began with their preconceptions of the other community. For many of the Saltley Academy pupils, they view their white peers as "bacon-loving, lazy, fat poshos", who enjoyed nudist beaches. The Tamworth view was that their Muslim peers were burqa-wearing “Pakis” who were not nice, or even terrorists, and they’d be afraid to walk in an immigrant area for fear of being set upon.

Photo from Birmingham Mail

Many of the prejudices of course are inherited from parents. And the schools go out of their way to involve the parents in the process, and so we see four families exchanging meals – with touching results. The final programme sees the final celebration of the swap, a sort of graduation, and then a carefully planned party, negotiated between the liberal laissez-faire modern style and the stricter traditional Muslim code. The tensions have been honestly faced and a solution which satisfies all found. The final comments of both students and parents about the whole experiment are all positive. Some lasting friendships across the barriers seem to have been forged – in a fortnight!

As the head of Tamworth, Simon Turvey, says at the start, “Now is not the time to be building fences; now is the time for knocking them down.” In our country some popular politicians are the cheerleading fence-builders. They should be ashamed, and resisted. The Great British School Swap demonstrates that not only is this divisive, it is also counter-productive. One of the most telling incidents is when the students have a shared careers lesson. The aspirations of the conventionally poorly achieving white working-class boys are raised to a higher level by their immigrant counterparts. Not only is integration possible, it is enriching for all the community. It is a pernicious myth that immigration and integration harm a country; in fact they enhance it. One thing is needed: and that is inspiring leaders (or teachers in the programme) who believe in the benefits and will hold their nerve when things don’t go smoothly. Nothing worthwhile is achieved without difficulties. The series is, for once, aptly titled The Great British School Swap.

(By the way, a long time ago I taught in an ethnically mixed school, and I think nothing but good came from the mutual understanding which that brought.)

One hot Friday afternoon

Having recovered from the tremors of the General Election and having found a replacement for my coffee-drowned laptop, I'm returning to my blogging. I'm not arrogant enough to imagine my pearls have been missed!

It was a somewhat strange afternoon yesterday. I'd been catching up with Question Time, which began with questions about immigration and the National Health Service. The discussion on the latter was about 24/7 doctors. Owen Jones made a fair point about GP training taking seven years and the government taking credit for an increase in their number. A woman in the audience was saying that private care was the solution to that. Then we had to cut it short to go to the MNDA Branch meeting at the Holiday Inn at the infamous Peartree Round on the north edge of Oxford.

As we approached the Oxford ring road, the traffic tailed back and on the ring road it was nose-to-tail stationary. We made the snap decision to drive through the centre of Oxford, which seemed wise, until we reached half a mile from our destination and yet another traffic jam. As a result we arrived a good quarter of an hour after the talk had begun. That means that the comments which follow may not be justified, but this is the impression I received. A private physiotherapist who had previously worked for the NHS was talking about how physiotherapists can help people with Motor Neurone Disease.

I suspect she had asked how many people knew about the Oxfordshire PDPS (People with Disabilities Physiotherapy Service), and I guess there was a sparse response. That may not be surprising: I for one had never heard it called that. But I had been referred to a specialist neurology physio immediately I'd been diagnosed 12 years ago, and all my friends in this area, dead or alive, also have had their physios. And, because it's easier to say, we call them neuro-physios. So I'm personally not so sure how much substance there was to her implication - which is where Jane wheeled me in - that people with MND were not referred to a physio and were poorly served by the PDPS. It's true that the neuro-physios in Oxfordshire are thinly spread and that we might have a wait to see one, but I am pretty sure that the excellent Oxford MND Centre would see to it that the physio service is alerted to the most urgent cases. My level of care from my physio has been above reproach. We must not allow the NHS to become a second-class service or to be regarded as one.

One thing I reacted against was the habit of both the private physios there to refer to patients as "clients". For some reason it seemed utterly impersonal and underlined that private medicine is more in the world of business than of care. There's a widespread preference in the MND community to be referred to as people, people with MND.

On the plus side, there were two carers at the meeting, both, I think, from abroad - part of this undesirable surge of immigration (sic, UKIP). The quality of their care and attention to the people they had brought was lovely to see. One of our friends whom we've known for years looked better and happier than when we first met - which considering she, like me, has a degenerative condition is amazing. Her carer is an EU immigrant, from Poland. She's employed by an agency and no doubt gets paid poorly, too little to attract carers of a similar calibre from this country. I doubt she'd be classed as a skilled worker - but she makes a world of difference to one person with a rather nasty disease.

As we drove home, without let or hindrance on the roads, I reflected how grateful I was for the National Health Service, what a benefit immigration had been to this country and how very careful we should be before we tampered with either. And how holding meetings on a half-term Friday in May might not be such a good idea!

Migration panic

Oh for goodness’ sake! When will our politicians and pressmen stop frantically whipping up this pernicious xenophobia which apparently lurks like a virus just beneath the skin of us little Britons? Scarcely a day passes when the spectre of an island overrun with scarcely human “foreigners” is conjured up by the three main party leaders, like Macbeth’s witches, with Nigel Farage like a malign Hecate pulling the strings, abetted by the oh-so reasonable Sir (no less) Andrew Green of the avowedly “non-political” Migration Watch.

Ken Clarke, one of the few Tory ministers with guts enough to resist the populist tide, asserting that immigrants had made Britain “far more exciting and healthier”, had No 10 Downing Street (presumably his nibs himself) quickly ticking him off, and at the same Nick Clegg (Lib Dem) and Rachel Reeves (one of Labour’s rising stars) denouncing the supposed epidemic of benefit immigration. Our Ken had it about right when he said, “The idea that you can have some fundamental debate that somehow stops all these foreigners coming here is rather typical rightwing, nationalist escapism, I think.”

Mt Kenya from Chogoria

What a sad day it is when we have reached the point of closing what used to be known as our bowels of mercy because of someone’s skin-colour or language or preferences in food – and country of origin! Continually closing your bowels leads to constipation. I was reminded watching Simon Reeve’s The Tea Trail on BBC last night, traveling through Kenya from Mombasa to Kericho, of my gap year which I spent on the east side of Mount Kenya. It was within very few years of the end of the Mau Mau internments – about which I remember one of my fellow-teachers had family experience. He and many in that part of Kenya would have had good reason to hate an Englishman like me. And yet he was consistently kind and friendly to me, and wherever I went I was welcomed with the utmost hospitality. If one of the teachers' cars came a cropper on the potholed murrain roads, there was no lack of willing hands to rescue us. It’s a sobering fact that “Great Britain” is now less hospitable than the former colony, which we once sought to civilise. Our policy-makers now are seeking to make conditions on access to medical help or social care for the alien and sojourner. We consider such things our right and ours alone. We seem to have lost any humanity we once possessed, and become introspectively constipated. 

Keep administering the laxative of common sense, Mr Clarke, and common humanity. As Charles Kingsley put it, "Do as you would be done by."

Bizarre

There was an ironic, bizarre even, juxtaposition of news items yesterday. There was Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, publishing the names of 16 of the 22 people she's banned from entry into the UK. 'I believe in free speech. I want to defend that, but I don't think that free speech should be a licence to preach or to promote hatred, or to exhort other people to carry out criminal acts,' she said. At the same time we heard that the Australian campaigner for voluntary euthanasia, Dr Nitschke, had been questioned at immigration but ultimately allowed to enter for a series of meetings. Presumably the authorities were checking with the Home Office whether euthanasia or assisting suicide are criminal acts. Last time I heard they were. Seems to be a case of double standards, I'm afraid.

However, I'm not opposed to the debate about euthanasia. It's clearly a hot topic. There is a campaign to legalise it, allied to a movement to legalise assisted suicide for the terminally ill. It seems reasonable to say, 'It's my life, and my choice when to end it.' I spent yesterday talking about it with three severely disabled women in Southwark. All of us were agreed that legalising it would be dangerous and undesirable. Before long you should see the outcome of the day on a DVD from Care Not Killing. They've already made one with doctors talking, which I think people ought to watch before deciding the issue. And I hope that the campaign will fail. Instead let's improve palliative care, caring for the dying.