Institutional deafness to the obvious

Yesterday I ran a workshop explaining to parents how we assess children and how we work to overcome barriers to good cognition so that children could learn effectively and engage well with the world around them. I had great feedback. I was in Croydon surrounded by my own community who like straight talking and want to know how to take control of their lives to ensure that their children can achieve the most in life. Many came up to me at the end and thanked me for helping them to make so much more sense of the world that they are trapped in with children with special educational needs issues.

As usual, I explained to them that all children need to go through the same stages of development and we went through:

A list of basic motor skills activities, including primary relexes and explained how those relate to development and how if they do not develop properly they affect later cognitive development.

The importance of sound processing and vestibular integration and we looked at screenshots of sound processing - of course none of them had seen anything like it, nor had it been suggested that sound processing could be significantly changed to any of them. Further, that by changing sound processing that will impact on motor skills and vision. Also how sound processing affects learning.

We talked about visual processing and the importance of binocular vision and we looked at screenshots of eye movements - of course none of them had seen anything like it before, nor had it been suggested to them that binocular vision could be significantly improved. Further that by improving binocular vision and the ability of children to process from eye to brain that would impact on their motor skills and sound processing. Also learning and behaviour would improve.

Then the child would be able to understand the world better and be able to play with more complex puzzles and ideas.

Within the last week I have also run a workshop at a conference for Maths teachers. Few turned up for my workshop most went to more Maths sounding lectures. The students that were helping to host the conference assured me that they did now study child development and that they were a far better trained generation of teachers than mine had been. Alas when I asked them if they knew about the importance of suppressing primary reflexes to the understanding of Maths they did not know they had no understanding of primary reflexes at all. They were keen to learn and they brought their friends back for resources; but it is still worrying that a full and comprehensive understanding of child development is not absolutely central to our teacher training.

Note: if children do not suppress their primary reflexes then they struggle to integrate their left and right sides. I often see children who can fudge their way round a 12 piece jigsaw then fall apart when they need to bring together the 2 halves of the puzzle - left and right sides of the body are not working together, that needs to be resolved and everyone can do that eventually, unless they are extremely disabled.

I had a really exciting and inspiring meeting with Dr Elizabeth McClelland of Move4words who has done a lot of work that parrallels my own. We shared our understanding and our excitement at the potential of this work to completely change the learning paradigm in the UK. We also shared our despair at the astonishing levels of ignorance and prejudice against anything to do with addressing holistic child development thoroughly. How difficult it is to get research in this area funded and how funders and the Establishment are tied in thinking and funding siloes of knowledge.

Last night I went to the Westminster University's event: Children lost in a fractured system: "A Courageous Conversation". It was well attended. It had a star studded line up of leaders in their fields on the panel. Dave Hill President of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services; Simon Bailey Lead for National Chief’s Council on Children and Child Protection; Dr. Peter Green Chair of the National Network for Designated Health Professionals; Stephanie Brivio Assistant Director for Child Protection for the Department of Education; Rex Howling Family Law QC at 4PB; Michelle Lee-Izu National Director for Projects, England and Wales, Barnardos. Plus a young person's panel. When I raised understanding of child development as fundamental to an understanding of safeguarding only Barnardoes understood that it was important. All agencies dealing with children need to be properly and thoroughly trained in child development - if they are not they cannot possibly make any sense of a child's behaviour.

Child development for children in Care and in the criminal justice system) is essential to monitor because: (a) child development will be disrupted if a child grows up in a disrputed manner and has attachment issues (b) all of those issues can be overcome if they are thoroughly addressed and the child can move on in life with access to a full range of emotions and cognitive skills (c) if those issues are not addressed the child will go through life struggling with various learning or inter-personal skills (d) if those issues get worse it is a good indicator that the child is at risk somehow and should be investigated (e) it is a lot cheaper and fairer if all our children are allowed access to good child development.

The Social Mobility Commission's Report for 2016 is out today,https://www.gov.uk/government/news/state-of-the-nation-report-on-social-mobility-in-great-britain . It is a catalogue of growing inequality. To be honest from my experience of working in my own community very little of it does not boil down to poor understanding of child development. As a Country we have no outcomes for P.E. (it took the Poles at yesterday's conference a long time to get their heads round that as it is the key focus of their first three years of education - not numeracy and literacy); we have a very long tail of educational under-achievement, our current generation of children are leaving school with lower skills than their parents. Our planning and house building takes no account of the need for children to play outside for long hours. Checking children's ability to process sound and vision is just not happening. Yet we have a skills shortage of highly skilled workers - firms like Delloittes are threatening to relocate work elsewhere if they cannot import skilled workers; I wish they would put the same lobbying effort to improving understanding of child development.

Politicians in the press this morning were blaming all sorts of things, but no-one was committed to good long-term understanding of child development. The long-term cost to our nation of such failure of leadership is huge. When my community left yesterday many of them took my card and asked how they could get involved to widen the understanding of the essentials of child development. We all need to take responsibility.