Congratulations to Helen Somerset How for her MBE awarded in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. When the history of CE in the UK comes to be written, her role and that of the Rainbow Centre will have a very special place.
There are a couple of things I find remarkable about Helen's achievement. Firstly, she is a Mum. She has a son with cerebral palsy who is 26. As I write this, it has just turned 5.00am and my daughter, Sarah, also 26, is wide awake, keen to get on with her day. Yesterday she woke at 3.30am! Most days - or should I say nights - are not so disturbed, but they happen. And that's what I find remarkable about Helen - she has managed to combine being a Mum and a full-time carer with her work for the Rainbow Centre for 19 years!
The second thing that amazed me was to learn that nowadays Helen raises over £500,000 a year for the Rainbow Centre. Without, I read, any Government funding whatsoever, the Rainbow Centre struggles and thrives on fundraising. We struggle to raise one-tenth of that. How does she do it? Amazing. I must drive to down Fareham and take some lessons!
One wanders off in memories.
In those long-ago days, 19 years ago when the Rainbow Centre got started, I was taking my first steps in conductive education as a parent in Budapest. "Somerset How" and "Rainbow" were names that were whispered in corners and behind shut doors. Conductors were being tempted to leave the Institute, "poached" to work in England with offers of money for their services. Money! Of course, conductors who were tempted to do so would never again work at the Institute, it was said.
As I recall, I got myself into some deep water with a couple of local Sheffield families for trying something similar. Eventually, of course, we in Sheffield helped run one of the two first national summer schools in the UK, run by Scope. That was 1992. A different world! The summer schools with Scope ran for another two years, the last in 1994. Our relationship with the Institute formalised, too, with an agreement that they would provide conductors in 6 weeks blocks for the embryonic Paces Centre (as it was then).
If those were two institutional legs of the three-legged stool on which Paces was founded, the third leg was with Sheffield City Council. The name of Jill Bungay will not be a familiar one at all in the world of CE, yet she played an important part in our Sheffield story. In 1997, Jill was Head of Property Services. Jill it was who directed us to High Green Comprehensive School, by then closed for a year. We'd been pressing for about a year for help finding somewhere permanent in the city. The Sheffield College (Ken Ruddiman was the then Principle) had helped for a year with temporary accommodation on the Norton site but we needed somewhere permanent. In 1997, then, we moved in and opened Paces Campus - conductive education at the heart of a local community centre. We owe Jill a debt of thanks. But that was not the only remarkable happening in 1997. Sheffield Council not only approved our moving into a valuable property on a 5-acre site, approval was also granted for the fees to be paid for four children to attend "Paces School". Conductive Education was not then wholly new to the Education Department of Sheffield Council. The Head Teacher of Oakes Park School (for children with physical disabilities), Chester Gold, knew of CE around 1990 and attempted to encourage interest. RACE meetings were held there for instance. Oakes Park became one of Scope's early "Schools For Parents", there being a second "School for Parents" at the Ryegate Centre of Sheffield Children's Hospital. The memory raises a smile: it was with Chester Gold and consultant paediatrician Mike Smith at Ryegate, that I talked about "poaching" a conductor for Sheffield. Both are now retired, and mention of such things might be made in more than a whisper! In the event, with 'proper' partnerships, we took a more formal route than those "poachers" on the south coast!
On the way, of course, since then, my colleague Karen Hague too was awarded an MBE, (in 2004 was it?) for her work, wholly centred around introducing conductive education in Sheffield, but, of course, we who nominated her could not say so even then.
So grateful congratulations, Helen - who, among others, has helped make it a little more possible for us all to talk openly about Conductive Education.