Criminal beauty

“Oh not HIM again!’ I said to Jane. ‘Haven’t we seen more than enough of him by now? It’ll just be the same old thing - again.” I was talking about Gareth Malone and “The Choir”. Same old formula, I thought. Goes to a bunch of uninterested kids/women/workers, and magically transforms them into a choir that brings tears to everyone’s eyes. The first series was at a West London comprehensive of rough kids. Then he went to a housing estate, military wives, hospital, factory and ferry workers, a school right next to Grenfell Tower - and now he was off to Aylesbury Prison, a secure unit for the worst male young offenders. Here we go again… the same magic touch and we’ll see the teenagers transformed into a Welsh male voice choir, or more likely a swinging gospel choir.

How wrong I was! You may have seen it. We watched the two programmes on catch-up, and they were moving, largely because Gareth didn’t succeed - well, not like elsewhere. He had underestimated the scale of the mountain he and the inmates had to climb. For one thing, they weren’t petty criminals. They were there for long sentences, for crimes like armed robbery, stabbing, drug-dealing. They were violent. They formed themselves into gangs even in prison and so there were fights and injuries several times a week. Many of them were struggling with mental and personality disorders. At every point, it seemed, they and any visitors were searched for weapons. Getting a group together was impossible. The most he managed was three. “This is the hardest situation I’ve ever faced,” he said and he almost admitted defeat.

And yet, he didn’t give up. He always saw possibilities in the offenders, even though society and they themselves had written them off. Their world and their music were totally different from his. They could lose their cool at any moment and walk out. But he told them when they had “done good”; he recognised and affirmed their talents. And in the end, in an empty wing of the prison, a handful of them gave performances of work they’d written themselves to their parents, staff and visitors. It was a huge achievement for them; they realised they weren’t lost causes. Happily, although Gareth’s time there ended, the impressive female governor was going to continue a music programme building on his foundations.

However this isn’t just a story about a handful of young criminals. It’s about seeing the good in others, even when we think there isn’t any - because there IS. In everybody. We’re all made “in the image of God”, and whatever that means it must be good. Jesus called himself the Light of the World and one thing light does is reveal beauty. In those young people there was music and poetry, and a longing to be better. It’s easy to write people off. God never does. He sees beauty - and hope.

(First appeared in Grove Community News March 2020)

No! Minister, first aid won't do in schools

I hope you don’t mind, but I must get this off my chest.

There I was, sitting in the passenger seat, returning from an over-night celebration at Ashburnham Place in Sussex. It was exactly a week ago. It had been a happy and sunny time. As we often do, we had the car radio on and we were listening to Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 – Jane’s choice of course. Jane Garvey introduced an interview with the Minister for Schools, the jolly old Nick Gibb MP. Usually I enjoy whiling away the tedium of roads like the M25 with a diverting radio programme. However, not this time. This time I found my temperature rising.

As it was exam time (indeed two of our grandchildren were at that moment wrestling with maths and Spanish), the conversation was about the ever-increasing stress that young people were under with the proliferation of testing from the earliest years. This appears to be one contributory factor to the disturbing rise in young people’s mental health problems. No sooner are they out of the exam room than they are on to their phones comparing answers. But more fundamental than that is the constant focus on exams and preparing for exams throughout school careers – because of course schools are rated on exam success rate, and as a result the teaching is skewed from education to exam-performance. What a wretched perversion! I think the minister justified it by saying life was full of competition and kids need to be prepared for it.

And of course he mentioned the PISA ratings (the Programme for International Student Assessment – devised by the OECD, which tests 15-year olds in maths, reading and science and then ranks countries by their performance). He reckoned that the UK’s rating was improving. How pernicious the whole system is! Our government is obsessed by our PISA rating. It therefore puts pressure on schools by ranking them, by results. Governing bodies and heads therefore pressurise teachers to get results from their pupils. And the ones on whom all that pressure eventually falls are the students themselves. It’s the inverse of that old saying, “Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite’um; little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.” In the case of schools it’s the students who bear the weight of the pressure of the teachers, the governors, the politicians and the self-appointed OECD on their backs… And we’re surprised that they have mental health problems?

Oh, but don’t worry. The Minister had an answer. Counsellors. The Government is providing money so that schools can appoint counsellors. Now I value counsellors and therapists most highly, and I’m very pleased that there will be funding for school counselling services. I’ll be interested to hear how their recruitment gets on, though as one listener suggested they will be easier and cheaper to recruit than physics teachers. BUT it seemed to me rather like a government faced with a cholera epidemic saying, “Don’t worry. We’ll pay for a lot more nurses. Then everything will be hunky-dory.” No, in face of an epidemic, if you can, you sort out the water supply and the sanitation. You go to the source of the problem. And in the case of schools the problem is excessive academically oriented testing. 

 

Of course, Mr Gibb had an answer for this too: doing away with continuous assessment (which could be part of some courses) relieved the pressure experienced by students. I was very glad when Jane Garvey quietly pointed out that the opposite was true for some pupils for whom facing a single critical exam was far more stressful. Counsellors patching up students who have cracked under exams is not the answer, Minister. The problem is the system and that is where your attention should be focused. A very good place to start would be to jettison your obsession with arbitrary PISA rankings (as suggested in Professor Aeron Davis’s excellent and eminently readable book, Reckless Opportunists – Elites at the End of the Establishment). Our children’s well-being is more important than that.