Two news items earlier this week: the report in Charity Today “Children’s Disability Charity Launches New Occupational Therapy and Sensory Integration Service” and the announcement by Action Cerebral Palsy of the All-Party Parliamentary Group’s report “Early identification, intervention and pathways of care of infants and young children with cerebral palsy: The case for reform and Investment”.
Charity Today has this to say: “CPotential is a one-stop-shop of rehabilitation services for children with movement disorders. The charity also offers physiotherapy, conductive education, music therapy, rebound therapy, counselling, wellbeing coaching, funding support and educational advice. Speech and language therapy and advanced hi-tech equipment are on the horizon in the Summer”.
In its Introduction, the APPG on Cerebral Palsy report states that “effective early intervention remains the exception, rather than the norm, in the UK, and families struggle to navigate complex pathways of care that often do not even meet the minimum standards”.
When it comes to conductive education, I am above all else a Dad. Our daughter was about 7 years old when her Mum and I sat with her in the Petö Institute in Budapest. We were talking with a senior conductor. In that one conversation, we knew that conductive education was a radically different understanding and practice, unlike any other that as parents of a child with a neuro-disability we had experienced in her previous six years.
One outstanding difference – far from the UK’s ‘multi-disciplinary’ world where a parent might have to engage with as many as 15 professionals on their child’s behalf (true!) - was that the education and upbringing of a child was led by a single professional, the Conductor.
Over 50 years ago, over 50 years ago, the Younghusband Report advocated an integrated uni-disciplinary approach such as offered by Conductive Education. This is how the Younghusband Report concluded its chapter on the training and supply and employment of staff … :
"We have said much about the need to improve multidisciplinary co-operation in srvices for handicapped people. It is only too easy to say that people must work together, less easy to say how this can be made possible … We would like to emphasise the part that training can play. We conclude:
- that the training of all professional people likely to have contact with handicapped children should include understanding of the functions of other related professions;
- that there should be more inter-disciplinary in-service training;
- professions working with children; [this 3rd point is incomplete. NP]
- in some instances further specialised ‘hybrid’ courses are also desirable."
The report’s first three conclusions could have found themselves in the APPG-CP report and the multi-therapy practice of CPotential. But where did the notion of ‘hybrid’ training come from, 50 long years ago? From the findings of Dame Eileen Younghusband's committee:
“Unfortunately it often happens that a spastic child, for example, has to leave the classroom on successive occasions to receive speech therapy, physiotherapy or occupational therapy. Many works in those professions recognise that there is something unsatisfactory in this situation. We have been interested to learn of experiments being carried out in this country on the Peto method of treating cerebral palsied children, which originated in Hungary. In this method, called ‘conductive education’, physical training, social training, speech therapy, and education are carried out by the same person, who naturally has to receive a long course of training. In England, where experiments with the method are being made without staff trained in conductive education …. Even without using the methods of Conductive Education, this development of team work has, we believe, much to offer to handicapped children.” Younghusband Report p272
This, allow me to repeat myself, was over 50 years ago. Fully 16 years before the setting up of the Foundation for Conductive Education in Birmingham in 1986. The year was 1970. There were still schools in England for the “Educationally Sub-Normal” (ESN). During the academic year 1969-70, I was teaching English as a Second Language in an evening class at Croydon Tech., a class that could still include 2 refugees from the Soviet Union's crushing of the Hungarian Uprising of October 1956; the Berlin Wall was then still to stand solid for another 20 years. That long ago. A world that is now largely forgotten. Along with the Younghusband Report and its notion (outside Conductive Education) of a unified professional.
Much of what Dame Eileen Younghusband’s committee recommended was incorporated into the later Warnock Report but not, crucially, the idea – one might almost say Andras Peto’s idea - of a unified professional. What a difference that would have made to countless parents, managing their child’s upbringing, negotiating and making sense of the advice (often conflicting) from the multi-disciplinary professionals we engage with, through a fog of ‘professional’ language that seems designed to exclude us – that by-and-large sees our children overwhelmingly as “patients” and not as growing, developing, social individuals – for whom parents have the first responsibility.
With that thought in mind, as a Dad if nothing else, I ask you to read again the CPotential and APPG-CP reports, the language in which they are written and the professions of those who contributed. Not for nothing did a still prominent UK Conductor once say that as a Conductor, she “saw a different child” from other professionals. Dads and Mums do, too.
Instead, as Andrew Sutton wrote in a 2005 paper presented to a conference in London (“Joining Up to the ‘Joined Up’: what can Conductive Education offer the joined up children’s agenda?”)
"But what specialist help do we presently provide (not just in the United Kingdom, but in most developed countries)? Not a service designed a priori and systemically to match their particular developmental needs but an ad hoc assembly of different professional structures, each developed originally for other purposes and each delivered by different professionals working to the requirements of their own philosophies, timetables and priorities."
If we are in any doubt, Andrew follows on, saying: "Even were everything that these professionals do within their own professional roles specifically geared to advancing the child’s development and the family’s functioning, even were all these professionals working towards common goals according to a common theoretical understanding, then the children and their families would still be confronted with services that themselves constitute a fragmented and disharmonious experience." [The emphases are mine. NP]
---------------------------------------
Links:
1. See an earlier posting on the Younghusband Report with reference to Andrew Sutton's paper.
2. You can read in full Andrew Sutton's paper:
Based upon an informal presentation to the conference
Children’s Trusts: Transforming Futures
Institute of Directors, Pall Mall, London 10 March 2005
Hosted by Paces Sheffield and the National Institute for Conductive Education in conjunction with Irwin Mitchell
3. Unfortunately, Dane Eileen Younghusband’s report is no longer readily available online.
