Andrew Sutton has a wonderfully ironic posting on his blog. I will return to this shortly and extend this posting. In the meantime, take a read. (This quick posting is by way of testing/learning how to use Trackback and whether I can make a connection with Andrew's Blogger blog).
Some days later:
As can be seen, I had intended before this to return to Andrew's posting - but that was before some form of plague invaded me. I failed also to find out how to use Trackback with Blogger. Apparently it cannot be done at this time.
In his posting, Andrew takes a report of an announcement from Andrew Adonis about autism services and, throughout, replaces autism with cerebral palsy, making a few other accommodating adjustments for the sake of sense. By this clever device, Andrew spotlights how conductive education "has fallen out of the public gaze over the years" and asks "what have the conductive people done wrong?"
To his own question, Andrew offers several possible answers "to account for the political failure of the political movement for Conductive Education in the UK": "Was it the Balkanisation of the parents’ movement, dodgy research, conductors’ failure to create a national professional presence, the destructive activity of the Spastics Society (now Scope) or what?"
Perhaps conductive education having "fallen out of the public gaze" is all a reflection of the extent to which cerebral palsy has dropped below the radar of education professionals - whether civil servants or teachers or teachers' unions? The research undertaken by Peter Gray Associates on behalf of DfES and published in mid-2006, comprehensively eliminated cerebral palsy from the 'official gaze'.
Perhaps it is a reflection of 10 years of a national policy of 'inclusion' into mainstream schooling of children with special needs? When was the last time anyone ever heard of a teachers' union conference debating the difficulties presented to classroom management and the successful learning of other pupils by the inclusion of pupils with cerebral palsy? How often, on the other hand, is the inclusion of pupils with cerebral palsy still most often approached as one of physical access and not of learning (pedagogy, curriculum)?
Perhaps it's just a sign of the (disability) times? I was taken recently by the press campaign for "Creature Discomforts", the "new ad campaign to change attitudes to disability" from Aardman Animations in association with Leonard Cheshire, which features a bull terrier in a wheelchair. The clip I saw on BBC TV and the quote I read in a newspaper (neither noted so cannot link to) both focused on a statement along the lines of "because you use this - pointing to the wheelchair - doesn't mean you are deficient up here - pointing to the head". Of course that's true. How can anyone possibly say otherwise? I wish that more people took notice of this simple advice when talking with my daughter, now in her mid-20s.
And yet .... in an oddly contradictory sense, this excellent message somehow helps make it more, not less, difficult to get appropriate services. I was in a workshop meeting this week where the person making notes apologised for their spelling - and was assured that it was not the disability (dyslexia) that mattered but the message. It brought to mind my seeing, some years ago (beyond any possibility of giving you a link), an Oprah Winfrey show where she reflected on her identity and being black: that for some years she had wanted people to be 'colour-blind' and 'see the woman, not the colour'; but that she had come to realise that being black was an important part of her identity, and that if people did not see her colour, they did not see an important part of her. Similarly, we are urged to 'see the athlete and not the disability'. And what of Oscar Pistorius, the South African athlete who is "forcing the sports world to rethink what it means to be a disabled athlete" (Wired.com March 2007), because his disability potentially represents an advantage over non-disabled athletes? Can Oscar Pretorius' disability, like Oprah's blackness, like my daughter's cerebral palsy, be ignored? Should it?
If, for instance, those carers who deliver home care to people like my daughter, or those such as classroom assistants (or teachers) who work with children with cerebral palsy, do not understand cerebral palsy, or what it means to be a person with cerebral palsy, or how cerebral palsy impacts on identity and self-esteem and sense of self-hood, how can they deliver services appropriate to need?
And before any attempt is made to answer that question, it is worth remembering that in this country we do not consider it necessary for teachers who work with children with cerebral palsy (nor anyone in the new Children's Services in local authorities) to undergo any initial training in working with children with cerebral palsy, or in understanding what cerebral palsy is, or in consideration of whether special pedagogic techniques or curricular arrangements are necessary. For what other group, other than the disabled, would it be possible to set out upon a professional career, knowing so little?
The problem with cerebral palsy is that no-one really thinks its a problem. So there's no need of a "solution". Why waste time and public resources, when there are more serious and pressing issues?
An education officer from Barnsley LEA, now retired, with whom I was having an otherwise amicable conversation a year or so ago about placements at Paces School (or rather why Barnsley LEA would not place children at Paces School) explained to me that the problem was that LEA officers relied in making these "difficult educational decisions" on input from therapists and paediatricians, who by and large, she said to me "do not agree with your understanding of cerebral palsy nor of the educational arrangements you propose." I, of course, thought that her understanding of cerebral palsy was locked in somewhere around 1860 and the discoveries of Dr Little.
All of which is perhaps, and maybe altogether too tentatively, to say that the problem lies not so much in public understanding or lack of it, of conductive education (deficient as that is), but in public understanding of cerebral palsy, which remains, after 150 years, as essentially a term in the medical lexicon, a condition discussed largely in terms of requiring surgical, or pharmacological or therapeutic "interventions".