If I were to tell you that Giles Coren, the Sunday Times columnist and food critic, may no longer be able to play Eton fives at Westminster School, you might well wonder what the sporting pastime of a former pupil of one of the UK's top private schools has to do with conductive education.
If I suggested that you should be concerned, you might well suspect that I had, as has often been rumoured, finally flipped. But you would be wrong.
You see, the fives courts at Winchester School, which are behind the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, are accessed through the school. And there's the rub. Coren and his fellow players have now been told that they must undergo Criminal Record Bureau checks in line with safeguarding legislation because of the possibility that players going to the fives courts might "come into 'unsupervised contact' with the pupils". The school, Coren says, has done its best "but there appears to be no way round the problem." Coren's fives team is likely to cease playing.
Now, this post is not a rant about some of the idiocies of safeguarding.
When, in 1994, we first conceived of Paces Campus as an inclusive environment for the conductive education of children and adults with cerebral palsy and their families, we had no notion of 'safeguarding' and its eventual reach into our Vision and practice. Back then, as parents who were already beginning to experience the isolation that can come with having a severely disabled child, we did not wish to set up a segragated special school to isolate our children and ourselves further. However, we did recognise that the group-based model of conducive education did need children to come together. How did we attempt to square this circle of being separate but not separated? Our answer was to co-locate our services within an ordinary local community centre, where there would be a range of inclusive activities for our children and families. Like a small village, as someone described it, our children would be able to go safely about their business, sharing many of the same spaces as other people, including the public spaces. Ours is a collaborative and inclusive model. But the reality today is that we have been required (or, like self-censorship, we have required of ourselves), gradually to increase the barriers around our children and 'vulnerable adults'.
My interest just at the moment is not to debate the rights and wrongs of this but to search out what others do in similar mixed-use settings. The Government wants school buildings to be more available for community use; they and we want our facilities to be more available for others in the community. How are we to do this and comply with safeguarding regulation? I'd be glad to hear.
Perhaps an answer lies with Extended Schools and Children's Centres - both later developments under New Labour than Paces Campus. How do they manage the co-location of activities? How do they draft safeguarding and other policies whilst at the same time being an open and welcoming community? And what does that say about our Values?
The well-worn saying "It takes a whole village to raise a child" may be apocryphal but the grain of truth it contains resonates across the world - but not if we segregate our children behind numeric key pads, fences and locked doors. Giles Coren and his team of fives players might be more important than we care to admit.
