Here is a poem I wrote, after hearing an amazing head teacher, called Jill Wood speaking about why she had taken the decision for her Year 6 Students not to take their SATS tests (compulsory exams for our 11 year old in England). She was giving her “enough now” to the detrimental effects testing can have on children. Here is what she inspired in me:
I have waited a while to write this post. It follows on in the series I started on this topic. It seems clear that the Brexit vote was about three key elements: taking control (whatever that means) of our own money, our own laws and our own immigration. I hope to write another blog on those three things another time, but in this time of transition, we must ask ourselves some questions about the kind of future we want to co-create.
I have to say that when I look at our education system, I am both heartened and dismayed. I am heartened by the amazing quality of teachers across the UK, but I am dismayed by how they are treated as a profession by our mainstream press. I am heartened by the quality of our children and young people and the hopeful possibilities they carry, but I am dismayed by the increased burden of mental health problems many of them suffer. I am heartened that there is so much great thought around education and a shared learning between nations about how to release the potential in each child, but I am dismayed by the lack of application of this learning within the UK. I am heartened that there is an increasing realisation that Ofsted reports can offer only a small snapshot of what goes on in any school and are not a fair representation of all that goes on in any one institution, but I am dismayed by our growing measurement problem. By this I mean that the constant scoring and grading of our children and young people and the comparisons made between our various schools is so detrimental to their development and achievement that we ought to seriously consider the weight it is allowed to carry in our education systems. When our children and young people are some of the least happy in Europe and live in a country where the gap between the richest and poorest, both in terms of economics and educational ‘outcomes’ is one of the worst in Europe, we have to ask ourselves some searching questions.
So, in reimagining education, let’s reaffirm that every child is unique, beautiful,
worthy of love and full of potential. Let’s also recognise that our education system now is one of the few things that has not evolved since the time of the Industrial Revolution and is itself in need of serious renewal and transformation. In Germany, they have managed to elevate practical skills and knowledge to that of intellect. This has given them the ability as a nation to have a much more diverse economy, especially investing in green technologies and manufacturing in a way that cares for the future. In Finland, they have a reverence for the teaching profession that we would do well to adopt here. We need to think of teaching as a sacred gift and it needs to be taken this seriously by those who pursue it as a career. A Head Teacher I know recently told me that she no longer needs teachers who see themselves as having a job, but those who understand that teaching is a vocation and a calling. It is about being willing to parent a generation, not just fill them with knowledge.
Our educational environments must be places where we teach our children how to think, not just what to think, how to converse, not just what to say and how to listen attentively not only hear. We must help them learn about their own personalities and gift mixes. We must help them to think about the values from which they live, speak and act, helping them therefore to shape their behaviours in line with this (Steve Peters). We must allow them to question some of the damaging ways we live (war, pollution, work-patterns) and dream of and learn to create futures of peace, sustainability and wellness. We need a vision large enough to ensure that each generation creates a seedbed of opportunity for the next.
The danger of becoming more ‘in control’ (as per our Brexit wishes) is that we become more controlling. The purpose of education is not to control but to release, not to maintain the status quo but to attain a brighter future, not to perpetuate hate and violence but to breathe love and peace, not to tear down but to build up and encourage,
not to divide but to build community, not to prepare human beings to be fodder for the economic machine but to ensure the economy serves them to be live a life of hope-filled potential. As with healthcare, we need to de-politicise the education system, hold dear in our hearts those given to teach, caring for their wellbeing and minding how we speak of them. We must partner with them and entrust them with our precious caterpillars as they hold them through the great metamorphosis that is learning before they spread their wings and make their flight to shine like stars in a future sky that the rest of us will never see.
Health and Social Care
The UK is facing an existential crisis, especially when it comes to healthcare. I think it is part of the reason why the Labour party are in such appalling disarray at the moment. When the nation state as we have known it is beginning to fall apart, what is the role of the state? The question comes into sharp focus when it comes to our beloved NHS. The financial nightmare facing the NHS is in the press everyday. How much of this has been orchestrated by a bureaucratic system that wishes to see its demise we may never know. But the fact remains, there is a whole lot of debt, an ageing population with increasingly complex health and social needs and a significant underspend in terms of GDP on health compared to most of the other ‘developed’ nations.
Although I believe that we will (and need to) see increased localism, especially when it comes to political participation and economic alternatives, discovering together entirely alternative ways of being and organising ourselves, I still believe in a more national approach to health and social care, as for me, one of the roles of leadership is to ensure provision for those most easily forgotten about or marginalised in society.
Obviously this subject matter is far vaster than a short blog can offer, but here is a starter for ten:
I would therefore increase spending on health in line with need and GDP. I would support moves through partnerships between health and education to encourage our children and young people, in particular, to exercise and eat healthily, therefore breaking some of the health inequalities we see presently in the years ahead. I would look to improve the overall wellbeing of society, as we know that both extreme poverty and extreme wealth is bad for our health. We need to talk about physical, mental, social, spiritual and systemic health. We need a 70 year vision for healthcare, not something that changes with the wind of each new parliament. People would be empowered to care for their own wellbeing and look after one another, because where people are connected to one another, they flourish more readily. I would not privatise the NHS, but keep it public, learning lessons from around the world, ensuring our systems are continually improving and accountable but providing kind and compassionate health and social care to everyone in our communities. I would amalgamate the health and social care budgets. I would invest in measures to improve the overall mental health of the nation by looking at the root causes of our unhappiness and disconnectedness, ensuring those who need psychological therapies and psychiatric expertise are able to access this. I would ensure our staff are appropriately paid and would create a culture of participatory leadership, where we care for the health and wellbeing of those who work in the system. I recognise that health is best provided in the local community and will support the growth of integrated care communities, like those in Morecambe Bay. General Practice is the bedrock of such communities and will therefore be funded appropriately. Communication training, led by patient-experience, would be compulsory. All training would be integrative, problem based and solution focussed (that could do with some unpacking – maybe another time!).
I would break the negative cycle caused by the economics of ‘payment by results (PBR)’ and create participatory shared budgets, breaking down the walls of competition between segments of the system that need to collaborate. I would create emergency care hubs, co-locating services that need to work in an integrative manor. We have to face the fact, that it would take an enormous cultural shift to stop people walking through the doors of the ED, so let’s work with it, rather than trying to change the tide. I would want to see the 5 ways to wellbeing as part of every work place environment. In hospitals, there needs to be a focus on faster discharges (something the dreadful cuts to social care budgets across our county councils will only worsen), working with community teams to enable people to be cared for in their own homes. We need a complete overhaul of our residential and nursing home sector, finding areas of best practice and raising the bar significantly in terms of how we honour and care for our elderly citizens. We need to have a philosophical shift in our approach to death – it is an emotive subject and I have vlogged on it previously on my other blog http://www.reimagininghealth.com People need to be able to die well, and far too often they die in the strange surroundings of a hospital, cared for by people they do not know, when they could have died at home or in their nursing home, surrounded by people who love them. If only we could face up to the difficulties of death, we would embrace it in a much more healthy way…..(again I recommend Atul Gawande’s book ‘Being Mortal’).
reimaginingthefuture 