Interview with Paul Cooper – Part 2: Words of wisdom for new and experienced teachers
“It is probably wise to recognise the possibility that SEBD are not only encountered in the classroom – staffrooms have their fair share…”
Tag: children’s rights
Interview with Paul Cooper – Part 1: The role of teachers in the lives of children with Social, Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties (SEBD)
“It is easy to be fooled by the apparently dismissive attitude that some young people show towards to school. It may be the case that for many students school is, indeed, ‘boring’ but this does not mean that it is unimportant to them. On the contrary, the school is the main site where young people establish their independent identities outside the family unit. From their earliest experiences of schooling, children are engaging with a key social institution as individuals in their own right. Whether they see themselves as succeeding or failing, socially and academically, they cannot escape the impact of these experiences on their developing identities. Relationships with teachers are central to this identity formation process.”
Interview: Lynn Davis on her new book, A Practical Guide to Fostering Law
“Foster carers play an absolutely crucial role in the child care system. The vast majority of looked after children live in foster care. Carers are there at the sharp end, dealing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with all of the consequences of abuse, neglect or whatever family difficulties have led children to be looked after. Yet in spite of this, in my view foster carers are underpaid and often overlooked and under-appreciated.”
Interview with Ellen Power – Part 5: My Top 5 Back-to-School Tips for Parents of Children with SEN
“My boys go back to school next week. I can’t believe how quickly the holidays have passed by! In addition to all of the usual preparation, next week I will be performing some extra tasks to make sure that the school year gets off to as smooth a start as possible. Here are my Top 5 Back-to-School Guerrilla Tips…”
Interview with Ellen Power – Part 4: How to create an educational system that fully meets the needs of children with SEN
“When you look at it on paper it is difficult to see why the current system for meeting the needs of children with SEN is so prone to failure. On paper it seems to work, but in practice there are some big weaknesses that lead to its failure.”
Interview with Ellen Power – Part 3: Where does SEN fit into the academies and free schools models?
“I have had email correspondence with our children’s school and government on this issue, and I have to say that they are all very vague about how SEN will be managed in academies and free schools.”
Interview with Ellen Power – Part 2: Picking your battles in the fight to have your child’s special educational needs met
“Prior to our children having statements, we had to fight for everything each time a problem arose, mostly without success…It was extremely labour-intensive.”
Interview with Ellen Power – Part 1: My Transformation from mild mannered parent to…GUERRILLA MUM!
“Although I could hardly believe it, it began to dawn on me that although I wanted my children to have more help at school, the school did not want to do anything ‘extra’ for them and I could not understand why…”
Fergus McNeill and Monica Barry on Youth Offending and Youth Justice
“…the preoccupation with ‘youth’ is at the expense of ‘justice’. Too readily such systems exist or at least function so as to punish and to challenge individual young people rather than to question the extent to which the wider society is as much, if not more, to blame for the disadvantages they face.”