Later this month Malcolm and Pauline Dixon will find out if they have defeated the government and can start a family, writes Jackie Kemp.
All they wanted was an ordinary family life – the kind most people take for granted. Cautious, do-it-by-the-book Malcolm Dixon and Pauline, his wife, did not foresee that their lives would be transformed to the point where they would mount a legal challenge against a government minister.
“What does it say to people about the importance of a school board, if you tell them ‘It doesn’t matter what you call it and you can set it up however you like?'” says Cathy McCulloch, chair of the school board at her son’s primary, St Mary’s in Leith, Edinburgh.
Her views are representative of many within the school boards community in Scotland, as the Executive consults on sweeping changes to the system for involving parents in education – which effectively mean the abolition of boards.
The new draft bill means schools will be able to decide for themselves how to set up their own body, how many people will be on it and what it will do and be called.
The draft legislation is too vague, according to McCulloch, who is also co-director of the children’s parliament.
The establishment want to say that everything in the educational garden is lovely and the failures are the fault of feral children and feckless parents. The politicians at the moment just seem to accept that. I don’t know why they are so lily-livered. After all, they wouldn’t be with any other industry.”
Chris Woodhead is in combative mood.
But as the mention of his name alone is enough to induce high blood pressure in many staffrooms, this is little surprise. He’s been railing against the status quo since he was chief inspector of English schools in the late 1990s.
They’re called by different names, some more acceptable than others. Child prodigies, gifted kids – in the USA they are simply nerds or geeks, and summer camps laid on for them are unashamedly known as “nerd camps”.
Whether you choose any of these terms or the more politically correct title of “able pupils”, things may be about to get better for children who have abilities beyond the normal range.
Clinical director at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh Zoe Dunhill has written back: “Yes, but there will be a special doctor there who will treat the hurting when you wake up.”
“We try to explain things in a way that is appropriate to the child, ” Dunhill explains. Soon, she hopes, the approach will help her overcome Scott’s resistance to the treatment.
Dealing with children who refuse consent to treatment which doctors and parents deem necessary is an increasingly important part of children’s medicine in Scotland.
Every month at this, one of Scotland’s flagship children’s hospitals, several children refuse to undergo procedures.
IT might have a Paisley postcode, but the island of Lismore, with its view of the west coast mountains of Morvern, is 150 miles from Glasgow. Home to just 160 people, it feels a world away from Scotland’s urban corridor; further still from Westminster. Policy wonks in the juice bars of Soho may be frothing about the coming general election, but from this distance their effervescence seems strangely flat. All the major parties are competing for the affections of a creature brought to life by today’s political myth-makers to encapsulate Britain in 2005. Where once they wooed Mondeo Man, now their quarry is Do-it-all Woman, who has a job, children and elderly relatives to care for. The election may not be the talk of Lismore’s one shop, but here, as everywhere else in Britain, there are many women – and men – whose lives are a patchwork of these different roles. So how does the prospect of a Labour third term affect them?
WHEN Rachel Brand discovered she had a brain tumour, her life was turned upside down. The management consultant, who is in her 30s, underwent surgery. Yet two years later, she had to cope with the news that the tumour was growing back and that she faced more surgery followed by radiotherapy. Not surprisingly, she has struggled with feelings of depression and isolation. But Rachel’s saving grace has been a surprising one – singing. During a period off work after her first diagnosis she decided to pursue her love of jazz and singing, an interest she had put to one side for many years. Soon she found herself heading north from her London home to Edinburgh where she took a five-day course with jazz vocalists and teachers Fionna Duncan and Sophie Bancroft. It changed her life.
AS many as 10,000 trees would have to be cut down to make way for a golf resort on an estate, local campaigners claimed yesterday.
Felling has already started at the Archerfield estate in East Lothian, and the directors of the Duke of Hamilton’s holding company, Hamilton Kinneil, will today make a final decision on whether to sign over the lease of the woods for 99 years to Renaissance Golf Design, a USbacked firm, and Tom Doak, the course designer.
Children’s health is an emotive issue, so the question of how best to improve health services for the nation’s children is a knotty problem. It is also one which some of the best brains in the NHS are currently tackling, and is viewed as the key to improving the country’s poor showing in international league tables in the years to come.
It may be freezing but “a simmering pot of volcanic ash” is hotting up and ready to explode across Britain. So said a spokesman for the protest group Fathers 4 Justice yesterday, angry about the government’s new child-access arrangements.
These men’s anger cannot be doubted. From scaling the walls of Buckingham Palace to bombarding the prime minister with powder, their protests have become increasingly fierce and desperate. Now the government in Westminster has offered some changes, which have been dismissed as mere tinkering by the group. In fact, that is all they are. The package amounts to little more than a restating of the existing position that the court must protect the rights of children. That is all very well, but it does nothing to address the men’s central complaint, which is that they say they are being systematically discriminated against.
WHAT have we lost if we lose the night sky? Spending this Christmas on the highly-developed coastal fringe of Tenerife, I looked up from my balcony into a sky no darker than whisky to see not a single star. The flashing of fluorescent Christmas decorations combined with light pouring out from a series of gigantic hotels, apartment blocks and neon bar signs completely to blot out the black.
Allison Pearson
Evening Standard, London, January 19
“[On Tuesday] the government announced plans to improve the way access to children after divorce is handled. Parents will be given more practical and emotional support. Community service orders and electronic tagging could be imposed on those who deny former partners contact with their kids.
“The plans, though well-meaning, sound both blundering and inadequate. How are kids going to feel towards their father if mum ends up wandering around like a convict with a shackled ankle? This is a fiendish area for legislation: how can you punish an uncooperative parent without hurting her child? … Every child deserves a childhood: it’s battling parents who need to grow up fast – not their innocent kids.”
IN JONATHAN Franzen’s novel, The Corrections, there is a scene where an old man gets down the family Christmas lights only to find that they are broken. He knows he can fix them, although it will be a challenge as tree lights are more complex than they once were. He also knows that what he really should do is chuck them in the bin and go to the nearest Walmart where he can replace them for the price of a packet of fishfingers. However, in a small act of defiance against the throwaway society, he devotes the rest of the day to repairing the cheap decorations.
If you were to examine Earth through a telescope you might see spinning around our blue planet any number of bits of jettisoned junk – old satellites, bits of shuttles, tools dropped by astronauts. Even space cludgies and their contents.
A friend once commented that it was the best reason she had ever heard for sending more women into space – to clear up the mess the men had left. But, joking aside, it is a sign that we live, more than ever, in a throwaway world.
BROADCASTER Sheena McDonald has revealed how the trauma of recovering from near-fatal brain injuries put pressure on her relationship with journalist partner Alan Little and drove her into a clinical depression. Ms McDonald, who was almost killed when hit by a police van driving on the wrong side of the road six years ago, told the conference in Edinburgh yesterday how her family and partner had also suffered.”Their trauma was psychological but it was perhaps even worse than mine because they were aware of everything that was happening. I don’t think they had any support at all apart from each other.”
At noon, the winter sun is still above Ladhope Hill in the Borders, throwing shadows across the playground of Yarrow Village school below. The door opens and out come three fair-haired children, backpacks and jackets on.
For Simeon, Rachel and Natan Siroky, lessons are already over for the day. After a muddy walk home beneath the rowan trees, still red with a last crop of autumn berries, they will spend the afternoon pursuing their education under the guidance of their minister father, Samuel, and home-maker mother, Ester.
Instead of getting Fran Healy of Travis to write a new anthem for Scotland, why not just stick with Why Does It Always Rain On Me? I kind of like the idea of the Tartan Army singing that before our ritual humiliation at football matches.
”Everybody’s saying everything’s all right, Still I can’t close my eyes I’m seeing a tunnel at the end of the lights,” might just about fit the bill, given our recent performances in the international arena. A majority of MSPs polled apparently want to commission a completely new anthem for Scotland – presumably from a Catalonian songwriter which will take five years to write and come in with 10 times the number of verses we expected.
Rock on, Tommy. What would the Scottish Parliament be like without Mr Sheridan? It is like asking what small Scottish towns would be like if the Italians had never arrived. They would be about as exciting as watching paint that has already dried gradually flake and fall off.
Picture a wet November night in 1850s Airdrie with the chip papers blowing across the high street like tumbleweed. Do we want Holyrood to be like that?
There are very few memorable characters in our young parliament and we simply cannot afford to lose Sheridan, who is under pressure to step back from public life in the aftermath of an expose of his private life in the News of the World.
In Agnes Owens’s hard, bright little black comedy set in Glasgow, Bad Attitudes, the anti-hero Mrs Webb enlivens her dull life by complaining to the council about her nuisance neighbours. ”Fancy him calling you a cow,” another character remarks to her. But, more concerned with regulating her neighbours’ bad behaviour than dealing with her own
problems, killjoy Mrs Webb seems emblematic of the new Scotland.
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, but he might have changed his mind had he caught the London-Edinburgh sleeper last week. A six-hour delay was compounded by the behaviour of one guard who positively delighted in shouting passengers awake and hurling them off the train at Crewe – without telling them the train we were on would be heading north a little later anyway.
My husband explained I had a migraine and the guard immediately threatened to get security to chuck us off, although his colleague had given us permission to stay put.
Delays happen with all kinds of transport, but contrast our experience with the caring service generally offered by air stewards. Buying berths earlier, I queued at Kings Cross only to be accused of being a potential fraudster as I did not have our train tickets. So I called ScotRail on my mobile, bought the berths by phone and picked up tickets from the station machine.
Telling stories is one of our most ancient pastimes, reaching back long before reading. Way before the first scribes were noting the edicts of ancient Egypt’s great and good, hunter-gatherers were enlivening their flea-picking sessions round the fire with a tall
tale or two.
This great oral tradition managed to survive rather well in Scotland, where Burns was reared by two illiterate women: his mother and her servant. Although they could not read or write, or perhaps because of it, they had minds and imaginations well stocked with remembered tales and songs.