Brutal lessons that offer fresh hope to failing kids

Posted on April 19, 2006 by simon

My friend, John, says he first met Kamal Ahmed in 1976 when he was a rather fat 11 year old. Kamal lived a life of violence. Not that he fought very much. He was more beaten up than beating.
A Bangladeshi child, one of five brothers, his everyday life at the school in Bethnal Green usually involved being attacked by joint gangs of whites and West Indians. “You’ll remember,” he says, “it was called Paki bashing. It was despicably racist and seriously violent, but no one was interested in that fact. We lived with the fear of being killed, and no one understood that.

“To most of the boys who did it, it was just a laugh. Some of them had hate, but for most of them it was just a laugh. Many of them grew up nice people. But if you speak to those kids these days they say, ‘If we knew someone was going to give us a wallop if we did that, we’d have stopped.'”

Kamal is a quietly spoken disciplinarian. But he’s no Asian Grumpy Old Man. He has what he describes as a “can do, get on with it” attitude. “That life experience at school gave me the core values on which I now stand. Faith in your principles, hard and sincere work and being focused.”

He has always been impatient. After he left school he was recruited on to an inner London education authority scheme designed to turn the kind of experience he possessed to the benefit of youth work. He worked with kids in a similar situation; he went to college. It’s a familiar story. But he moved very fast up the ranks of public service, becoming increasingly frustrated at every rung.

“I was aggressively after getting it done. And it wasn’t that easy. Local authorities as organisations are seriously political cultures. It takes a very long time to make anything happen.”

Eventually he left and went into the private sector where he now runs his own company, GSL Education, which recruits teachers and social workers . He lives a “very comfortable life. Not compared with others, perhaps, but to us it’s a dream from where I started”.

During this time something else happened. On January 6 1990, he and his friends opened the Keen Students School (KSS). “We were angry and upset. The failure of the children in Tower Hamlets was monumental. There was one school where out of 200 students, only 13 had five grade A to C GCSEs. And none of them were really employable. There was a disease in the system. There was a genuine lack of effort by those responsible.”

So they got some teachers, a room, some books and some kids who wanted to learn. That day in January, six turned up. Now there are more than 500 regulars spread across every weekday afternoon and for three hours on Saturday.

How is it that the very same kids who are disruptive and won’t learn at school then volunteer to come after school and learn? Ahmed says: “They are expected to learn. In some of the local schools, teachers have expectations of the kids they wouldn’t dream of having of their own children. They mean well. They think they’ve had a hard time and it’s difficult for them to learn. But if you think about it, it’s racist. Not directly. But if you analyse it, the end result is that the child is failing.”

So what’s different at KSS? And it doesn’t matter how often I ask the question, the answer comes snapping back: ethos, culture and expectation. “In schools,” says Ahmed, “teachers are part of an institution where messing around is the order of the day.”

It’s an awkward message. Something different is happening at KSS. In one place kids are being failed, and in the other they are volunteering to learn. It’s not money. It’s not the physical facilities. So what is it? Well it’s ethos, culture and expectation, of course. Where in schools there is often institutional decay, a crisis of leadership, low expectations and low morale, the volunteers of KSS are managing to motivate the most underachieving kids.

No one cared about Kamal when he was Paki bashed. Now when you ask him who sets the ethos at his school, he says with a laugh, “I do”. From being beaten and bruised he’s become the “guy who goes and does”. It’s not surprising his expectations of kids are so high.

Article originally appeared at:
http://society.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1756072,00.html

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What you see is what you get

Posted on April 11, 2006 by simon

Claims for the effects of the arts in school have reached dolphin-like proportions in recent years. In the same way that the fashion for swimming with dolphins led to cures for everything from dyslexia to depression, the so-called Mozart effect of the arts – in which children listen to classical music and their reading ability almost instantly improves – has led to an assumption that teaching the arts in schools improves academic results. There is no research to suggest this is the case.

But this is a great unspoken truth in a climate where an obsession with results and league tables still dominates education policy. No one dare say it in case the precarious, and often marginal, position of the arts in schools is made more so. There is certainly a battle within the education department. But no minister or civil servant will be quoted; no educational expert will speak out except off the record.

An argument rages about the significance of the different goals of the government’s education policy: standards and league tables on the one hand, and a genuine commitment to social justice and inclusion on the other.

Aesthetic outcomes

There are incontrovertible and clearly researched benefits to teaching the arts in schools, but they do not improve results. Their effects are on social skills, confidence, empathy.

Teaching the arts increases the ability of children to empathise and, perhaps most uncomfortably in a world where the arts lack self-confidence as claimants on the public purse, children’s ability to enjoy, relate to and celebrate, yes, The Arts. The outcomes are aesthetic, social, ethical, but not mathematical or related to improvements in reading or writing. And it appears that the arts are taught unimaginatively in too many schools and taught at all in too few.

This is nerve-racking for those who value the arts in schools, those who teach it, and for artists. When asked to justify themselves in schools, the arts resort to external benefits, not intrinsic ones.

But the atmosphere has begun to change. In his 2003 St Andrew’s Day speech, the first minister in Scotland, Jack McConnell, made a brave stab at putting the arts “at the core of everything we do”. Then, in May 2004, Tessa Jowell, culture secretary, published an essay, Government and the Value of Culture, in which she argued that “engagement with culture can help alleviate this poverty of aspiration”.

And only last month, the Scottish administration responded to the cultural commission by establishing “a cultural entitlement for every child in Scotland”. It remains a slightly Humpty Dumpty (“words mean what I want them to mean”) concept until someone actually defines who is entitled, what they might be entitled to, who might provide it and who will pay. None the less, as an aspiration, it’s not a bad start.

People have increasingly started to speak out about the actual effects of teaching the arts in schools. In 2000, two professors, Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland, published a groundbreaking study, Mute Those Claims, as a challenge to the burgeoning Mozart-effect industry.

Arts for arts’ sake

They started with a disclaimer: “We think the arts should be a basic component of every child’s education – and we strongly endorse any proposal to increase arts education for children.”

But, they warned, “if the arts are given a role in our schools because people believe the arts cause academic improvement, then the arts will quickly lose their position if academic improvement does not result”. “Arts educators,” they cautioned, “should never allow the arts to be justified wholly or even primarily in terms of what the arts can do for mathematics or reading. The arts must be justified in terms of what the arts can teach that no other subject can teach.”

Their research coincided with the National Foundation for Educational Research’s report on the effects and effectiveness of arts education in secondary schools. John Harland, one of the authors, draws similar conclusions to the Americans: “We couldn’t find any evidence that there was a correlation with GCSE results.”

He adds: “We also suggested that the case for the arts is best made in terms of their direct benefits – which are very rich. Particularly within drama, there is a capacity to explore social and moral issues that are crucial to children’s lives. I remember a young girl telling me during the research that after exploring loneliness in a drama class she was able to go back to her family and really understand what was happening there. And that’s a far better argument in favour of drama than ‘it will help your Sats scores’.”

Harland’s report also identified the significance of teaching skills. Patrice Baldwin, chair of the subject association National Drama, is anxious about the shortage of drama teachers. Baldwin says: “While drama is the most powerful teaching method, most teachers just don’t feel confident with it.”

Teaching through drama

National Drama has raised money from Nesta (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) and, in collaboration with the education department of Norfolk county council, has launched a research project called D4LC (Drama for Learning and Creativity) to look at drama-based teaching and learning.

Kate Fleming, a lecturer in education at Brighton University and one of the researchers, says the project is “trying to demonstrate that children can learn through drama strategies”. Fleming gives a charming example of one of her first sessions in a primary school in Norfolk, where, observed by the teacher, she invented the character of a serving wench at the banquet in Macbeth and wrote a monologue explaining to the children what had gone on that ghostly night. “The kids asked questions and they really wanted to read the scene.”

The curious thing is why all teachers aren’t teaching like that. “Well, exactly,” says Fleming, echoing the view that teachers don’t feel confident enough. “That’s why this is an action research project, starting in the schools in Norfolk but with the plan to spread over the UK.”

The arts and drama are making a bid to be a core part of the curriculum and not an add-on. While music and art hold that position, they are still marginalised and underfunded. Drama and dance are not yet in play.

These research studies are bringing a degree of clarity to an area of study too often clouded in woolly thinking, leg-warmers and the embarrassment of every child who has ever been “made to be a tree in our underpants”, as one friend characterised it to me. There is a climate of change in the debates on the significance of the arts. Education needs to grab the opportunity to assert their real value and not hide behind false claims – even if it is Mozart’s birthday year.

The National Drama Conference takes place April 11-13, 2006 in Winchester: http://www.nationaldrama.co.uk

Article originally appeared at:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/artinschools/story/0,,1750894,00.html

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Why schools need ground control to launch reforms

Posted on February 18, 2006 by simon

This is not a remarkable story about an extraordinary man. It’s a bog-standard story about a good man. Terry Creissen has three sons, a wife and a mortgage. He also has passion. In the stilted language of an Ofsted compliment, he runs a “very good school with many excellent features”. He’s not a “superhead”, a saviour, a rising star. He’s just a headteacher. And he’s totally in favour of the government’s white paper on education reform.

Creissen has been the head of the Colne Community School in Brightlingsea, Essex, since 1993. Almost immediately the school became grant maintained, a status it retained until it was abolished in 1998. “It was our greatest period of rising standards,” he says. And then he makes an unusual admission for a head: “After that, things went downhill a bit really.” Despite the fact that he was still in charge? “Yes.”

Actually, standards didn’t fall. But later I understood what he meant. The success was because “we had control over our destiny. The staff felt that they had autonomy.” He uses this language constantly. Words such as responsibility, influence and ownership pepper his narrative about the job. What he wants is for him and his staff to share the glory and take responsibility for the criticisms. If they can’t do that, he doesn’t see the point of running a school.

His father was a builder, one of 13 children. Creissen is one of six. “Dad never wanted any of us to be a builder,” he says. “It was a rotten hard life and he died at 56. We all went to grammar school and university.” None the less, he would abolish grammar schools. “I taught in a secondary modern. I saw the sense of failure in those children. The need of the most able can be met within the comprehensive system.” He is quite clear about that. Selection is damaging to children. Non-selective admissions should be statutory.

He says Colne’s top priority should be children whose parents have made it their first choice. “But parents hedge their bets,” he says. “They put the local grammar schools top, and if they don’t get their kids in there, we’re the back stop. But I believe that if you want a comprehensive education for your child, you should choose that. If you want a grammar school, you should choose that. I want parents who put us as first choice to get us as first choice.” He wants parents and children to invest in the school. It is central to his philosophy that they should own the school.

Very early on in his career he realised that what made a school work was not just the curriculum but understanding what motivated the senior management. “It is about more than the money,” he says. “When you have the head, governors, teachers and the children leading together, you don’t need anybody else interfering”. He means the local education authority (LEA).

His words remind me of my own stint as a school governor. It’s the only thing I’ve ever resigned from in sheer frustration. I realised it was simply not possible to influence the school while the LEA had so much control. Creissen puts all his emphasis on that capacity.

Why does he think that so many heads are resistant to the white paper’s recommendations? “I don’t think they see the psychological advantage,” he answers. “If we were a trust school we would have control over our success. We could get on with the job, without interference. We could offer help to other schools that needed it without having to use the happy broker of the LEA. I’m not just interested in the kids in my school, but in all kids. Now the attitude of most heads towards sink schools is: ‘Thank God it’s not me.’ My reaction is how can I help? If we were a trust school, we could.”

Expectations are high at Colne. And Creissen and the children, parents and staff want to take the glory for that. “In the end, it’s not to do with the white paper. It’s to do with passion.”

This article originally appeared at:
http://society.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1688336,00.html

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Lives beset by drama need the simplest forms of help

Posted on February 15, 2006 by simon

Rama was born in Mogadishu in 1982. She is Somalian – except it’s not that simple. There is a widespread perception that the Somalis are monocultural and monolingual, but they’re not. Rama belongs to the Benadiri people, who speak the Hamari language. It is related to Somali but quite different.

So Rama is a Somalian. Except she’s also British. She came here aged 13. When I ask if she feels British, there’s a pause, then a slightly nervous laugh. “I do, but at times I don’t,” she says. “I am constantly reminded by people in this country that I came here. I don’t feel Somali either. We Benadir are lighter skinned. Somalians say we came from somewhere else.”

She lives her life “in the middle of two cultures, trying to find my own path, sandwiched between the conflicting influences of my parents, my community and society”.

Rama has remarkable resilience. She has experienced a great deal more tragedy than a young woman should, and it has left her scarred. As a child, before she left Mogadishu, she made a friend called Faisal. He was fun, a joker, a charismatic lad. She loved being with him, but when the civil war broke out, she didn’t see him for a long time, until she met him one day by chance at the mosque. As they were talking, a sniper shot him. She watched him die.

When she came to Britain, Rama’s parents spoke no English, so she had to learn. She is the eighth of 12 children, yet when things go wrong, she is the one who looks after everyone. They have been homeless, without money, without food. When her mother went to hospital seriously ill, Rama had to choose between staying home and college. She left college.

Eventually, she got a place at university, which her father found threatening. “He thought I was getting out of hand and too westernised,” she says. Rama is very loyal to her family, but she disagreed with the tradition that Somali women must marry a man her parents choose. In the end, she gave in, and married a man she had no feelings for. It was hell. “Basically, he wanted a slave and I’m not the type of girl who believes in this rubbish.”

Her own self-respect wouldn’t allow her to stay. After having a child, she left him and went to university. “I was so happy,” she says, “that I woke up each morning as if I was reborn, looking forward to starting my new life.” Then tragedy struck again. Her beloved younger brother, Abdul Kadir, was stabbed at school, standing up to bullies. “I was very close to him; to me he was not like my brother, more like my son.”

At every turn of Rama’s life in Britain she has needed help, and it has almost never been available in the right way. The examples are legion, but when her mother was in hospital she tried to get help from social services to look after her brothers and sisters. She should talk to the hospital, they said. She did. By the time they responded, her mother was better. She should talk to the council, they said. “Whenever they talked to me, it was in English, but it made no sense to me,” she says.

Then she met Bill Bolloten and Tim Spafford, refugee support workers. Instead of seeing if she fitted this criteria or that criteria, this agency or that agency, they were advocates for her across all her problems. Forging relationships with others – such as nurses and housing workers – they guided her through the maze. “We started from the simple principle that what we do is in the interests of a family’s children,” says Spafford. “Everybody understands that. It allows us to make a relationship with a family, with parents, and with a person’s community.”

Rama’s life so far may have been punctuated by extreme drama, but that merely throws into starker relief a basic truth that she, like all of us, “is not a number”. She is Somalian, she is British, she is loyal to her family, she resists their restrictions, she is Muslim, she feels western in her thoughts and ambitions, she is determined. She is Rama. In truth, as she says, when it comes to who you are “each of us has only our name and our individuality”.

Article originally appeared at:
http://society.guardian.co.uk/asylumseekers/story/0,,1709610,00.html

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An ode to Limehouse

Posted on January 27, 2006 by simon

What is it in the air in Limehouse? Today it may be home to more lofts, designers and 4x4s than almost any other bastion of the bohemian bourgeoisie, but this east London neighbourhood has in the past 150 years given birth to three campaigns that have aimed straight for the hearts and minds of liberal Britain and changed the landscape of the country in the process.

It was the Limehouse declaration, as this week’s pictures of the remaining members of the Gang of Four reminded us, that launched the SDP in 1981. It began: “The calamitous outcome of the Labour party Wembley conference demands a new start in British politics”. Depending on who you believe, it ended either in the triumphant realignment of British politics which produced Tony Blair, or it kept the Tories in power uninterrupted for another 16 years.

The gang conducted their business at David Owen’s house because William Roger’s wife wouldn’t let them meet at hers. At the time, the fact that Sir Ian McKellen lived next door to Owen was of little political significance. But when, in December 1987, the Tories put the notorious section 28 in their local government bill, that all changed. The gay community responded to the legislation with a new articulacy, determination and effectiveness. McKellen, meanwhile, stepped into the full glare of the lights and became a theatrical knight out, so to speak. When a group of us founded Stonewall – its aim to achieve equality for lesbians and gays – we wrote its manifesto, yes you’ve guessed it, in the house next door to Owen. We jokingly called it the second Limehouse declaration.

The first draft of our intentions was headed “The Politics of the Achievable”. “There are three phases to political campaigning” we wrote. “The first is action on the streets. The second is a mainstream campaign to bring the issues on to the general political agenda. The third is a more behind- the-scenes establishment group to negotiate the settlement of the issue. The new campaign is emphatically a second/third phase organisation”. We committed ourselves to legislative and social equality, and although we set no end date, most of us have been staggered at the speed of our progress.

Quite what Dr Thomas John Barnardo would make of the success of his Limehouse-inspired achievement 140 years on, we can only guess at. In 1867, barely a few hundred yards from the Narrow Street homes of Owen and McKellen, Barnardo opened his first East End juvenile mission – “The Earnest School”. It was the start of his crusade “to rescue children from the streets”. Shameless use of photographs of destitute youngsters, which he sold in packs of 20 for five shillings or singly for 6d, each with titles such as “Once a little vagrant – Now a little workman”, plucked at the hearts of the wealthy. Today, Barnardo’s is the UK’s leading children’s charity at work in more than 370 centres in the UK. Passion must be in the water in Limehouse.

This article originally appeared at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1696157,00.html

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Flipping heck, we’re all at it now

Posted on January 18, 2006 by simon

The editor of the new Lonely Planet guide to London has warned visitors to be prepared to have their sensitivities assaulted. We’re all swearing like troopers. We’re dumbstruck without the F-word, she says. And she’s right. Swearing in public is definitely on the increase. There are few people now who, when dropping a frozen chicken on their big toe, could satisfy themselves with my late mother’s restrained, “Oh, blast.” Or George Bush’s preferred, “Aw, heck.”

The nature of swearing has changed over the years. The balance has tipped between the blasphemous and the obscene. I grew up in a household, religious in that typically middle-class, glass-of-sherry, C of E way, where it was almost more acceptable to say “fuck” than “Jesus”. Although the biggest obscenity in my teenage life would have been to call the loo the toilet.

Because the point of swearing, rather lost these days in the flurry of overuse, is to crash taboos and create offence. As religion took a less prominent role in most people’s lives, blasphemy in western Europe became a far less effective tool for bringing a flush of anger to grown-ups’ cheeks. Sex took over and obscenity became the new shocker. Although Muslims, it has to be said, don’t go a bundle on either. And different cultures swear in different ways depending on their hang-ups. Europe is big on the genito-urinary, whereas in Catholic countries they tend to major in mothers, whores and illegitimacy. And, for reasons that might make one nervous of taking a pet to the Balkans, the Slavs use a lot of animals.

What has changed is the way we have taken the private language of frustration and abuse and made it a feature of everyday inarticulacy. In the 80s, I was once at the bottom of a comedy bill that starred Alexei Sayle at the City Varieties in Leeds. The old stage manager hated the swearing on stage. To him it was utterly unacceptable. Yet, as he stood at the side complaining, a cack-handed stage-hand struggled across the rig above us and dropped a screwdriver. Without drawing breath, the old stage manager seamlessly interrupted his rant against Alexei’s swearing by yelling at the kid, “Mind what you’re fucking doing”

This article originally appeared at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/britain/article/0,,1688747,00.html

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Language of survival is what refugees need most

Posted on December 21, 2005 by simon

Luljeta arrived in Britain in 1999. She came via Italy and France, and it cost her and her husband £8,000. But she didn’t fly in first-class. She arrived in Portsmouth in the back of a truck with 50 other people from all over the world. Her home in Albania had been burnt to the ground.

She and her husband paid the money to an “agent” they’d never met before. “You are in their control,” she says. “You are their property”. Five months pregnant, and with a daughter aged two-and-half in tow, she and her husband fled the Serbs. They were aiming for America.

When they got to Portsmouth, the police were great, she says. With no fuss, they took everyone out of the truck and gave them sandwiches and coffee. She liked the police. Then social services arrived. The police told her to go with them and they would help look after the child. Luljeta refused; she had never heard of social services, and no one in Albania offered anything for free. She didn’t trust them, so she went to London with three other Kosovan families from the back of the lorry. “OK,” said the social worker, “good luck.”

The relatives of the Kosovans did know about social services. Luljeta got in touch, but was ping-ponged between two east London boroughs for weeks, for reasons no one ever quite explained. Eventually, they got a one-bedroom flat and she gave birth four months later. They had been given £70 for furniture. She spent £8 of it on a dictionary. Social services had told her they could only pay for English lessons for her children.

So she found her own language course in Upton Park. She had managed to save £22, but the college told her it was free for refugees and asylum seekers. If we want people to feel able to integrate, engage and aim for citizenship, then helping them learn English would always be a good start.

But social services didn’t seem to have twigged on to that. They moved her and her family again – with the very best of intentions, but the worst of results. Because she now had two children, the flat wasn’t big enough, so social services moved her several miles away, but omitted to tell her that she could change colleges too.

So she made two-hour trips to the original college, until one day, through a conversation with a neighbour, she found her real stepping stone in a project called Ramp – the Renewal Refugee and Migrant project. “Voluntary work saved my life,” she says simply. She made friends, changed her solicitor so she didn’t have to travel miles, greatly improved her English, and started to work. Finally, her confidence grew.

Luljeta and her family were first refused the right to stay in 2001. She spent a year in limbo, frightened, unsettled, anxiously waiting for the post every day, hoping for a change on appeal. Then, in 2003, the government declared an amnesty for Kosovans. She was still working at Ramp, and one day saw an ad on the noticeboard at work for the School for Social Entrepreneurs. She applied, got in and decided to use her time there to set up an Albanian refugee centre. And that’s what she’s done.

Her survival in the UK is because she’s a very determined woman, but her dictionary seems to have been more use to her than social services. She is very gracious about them, but let me make the points for her: people who arrive as cargo probably won’t hand over themselves or their kids, even if you are a social worker.

Services may exist in theory, but if we don’t join the dots for the Luljetas of the world, a refugee in Britain might as well be Alice in Wonderland for all the help those services will be. Social services acted for Luljeta, but it wasn’t until she got to Ramp and found her confidence that she started to act for herself.

Fortunately, Luljeta burns very brightly. Six years ago, she arrived cold and poor and without English. Now she runs the Shpresa programme. You won’t be surprised to know that Shpresa, in Albanian, means hope.

This article originally appeared at:
http://society.guardian.co.uk/asylumseekers/comment/0,,1671395,00.html

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Brotherly love

Posted on August 11, 2005 by simon

Brotherly love

As simpering, senseless queens go, Craig in Big Brother comes a close second to a gay man’s worst nightmare. As he dotes doggedly on his (apparently) straight housemate Anthony, he seems to take gay rights back about 30 years. When they cast Craig, Big Brother must have prayed that he was going to live up to their expectation of two gay stereotypes for the price of one. And he has triumphed. Not only is he the kind of central-casting lisping queen, the human embodiment of draylon slacks, that we have largely forgotten, but also, in so predictably falling for his best friend, he’s re-enacting a working-class version of the Brideshead affair between Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder, to which Waugh gave a veneer of sophistication and a whiff of subtlety. In his passion for Anthony, Craig has opted for a love that screeches its name at full volume, mauls the object of his desire when drunk (perhaps his only real opportunity – as they say the difference between straight and gay is five pints of lager) and takes any opportunity to talk sex so that he can work himself into a complete lather only to wail, “Oh, Anthony! I can’t talk about it any more. I’m getting too excited now.”

Always trying to kiss Anthony, he brings back our schooldays – for me that cute little blond called James aged five, my partner in the crocodile walk to the park in Stirling in 1964. In attaching his affection to a straight man, Craig reminds us all of those Quentin Crisp moments of the years spent underground, barely out of the shadow of the threat of prison. The popular jury seems to be out on the precise nature of Anthony’s enthusiasm for all this. While Derek, one of the now evicted housemates, accused Craig of “sexually harassing” Anthony, the object of desire seems pretty cool with Craig’s bunny-boiler aspirations; he is unfazed by being fancied by a man. On Tuesday, he quite happily agreed to the suggestion from Craig that in the Big Brother play, they play each other.

While Craig, the camp crimper, as the tabloids have dubbed him, fulfils every leering stereotype of the predatory homo from scoutmaster to camping lech, in fact, he’s just become every saddo lusting after the man or woman they cannot have. Straight, bi, everyone knows what unrequited love is, and the lesson we learn form Craig is nothing to do with sexuality, but merely that hurling yourself at people without any discretion is always humiliating.

This article originally appeared at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1546572,00.html#article_continue

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How do you chew?

Posted on June 2, 2005 by simon

How do you chew?

A finger-licking, record-breaking 1,671 people complained about a KFC advert that showed women in a call centre eating with their mouths open. It’s the highest number of complaints ever received by the Advertising Standards Authority and, yippee, it’s not about sex or violence, but about manners. The vast majority of the people who contacted the ASA were, according to the judgment it issued this week, “parents who were trying to teach their children good manners and thought the commercial undermined their efforts”. The ASA disagreed, however, and decided it was a bit of fun.

So the complainants were not old fogeys, they were young parents. And whether they thought the ad funny or not, all parents understand that the table is one of the first places a child goes through the process of learning how to be an adult and how to behave around other people. In other words, tables maketh manners.

And we have long had a taboo about eating with our mouths full. In an anthropological sense, it’s a hostile act to show teeth which are potential weapons and with which you will, if you’re a caveman or pre-knife eater, then tear apart the meat. The main thing with eating together is not to confuse the guests with either the food or the enemy – don’t eat them and don’t kill them. The KFC girls metaphorically broke that rule. They showed their teeth.

Through the centuries, western cultures have built up another big taboo – over bodily functions. Early books about manners happily put pissing and farting next to items about eating and talking. We are more squeamish and often because of technological advances. Sewers eventually made the privy private and the discovery of the TB bacillus warned us of the health risk of spitting. Gradually we came to give approval to the idea of delicacy. But we successfully build taboos around many acts that we see as anti-social. Which is why the people’s disapproval works better than the government’s. Even at riotous parties we happily enforce the rule against drink driving. And smoking is coming up fast behind.

With a record number of complaints from young parents about table manners, perhaps politeness is the new rock’n’roll. “Please” and “thank you” might even be the new black.

· Simon Fanshawe’s The Done Thing – negotiating the minefield of modern manners is published by Century today.

This article originally appeared at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1497008,00.html

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The itch to get involved

Posted on June 1, 2005 by simon

No stranger to civic duty, Simon Fanshawe often steps in to chair his local groups of activists. Here, he explains why, despite bouts of doubt and eczema, he just just can’t leave things to those in charge

There are moments when I wonder whether I am just a Lady Bountiful without a stately pile. Sometimes I think that, in a previous life, I must have been a duchess. Which makes me laugh and want to wear gloves. Indoors. I always seem to be on some committee or other. My friend Jonathan calls it “being busy”. And he doesn’t mean it as a compliment. He thinks it’s interfering.
I do wonder why I do it. Sitting on boards, wearing hats, doing my bit. Chairing things such as the Economic Partnership in Brighton and Hove (now), War on Want (in the 1980s) or joining the Regional Arts Council (most recently). Maybe I am just a terrible, self-important busybody. Am I struck by middle-class guilt? Am I trying to satisfy a deep psychological weakness for needing to be useful and wanted?

Even in my lowest moments, I don’t think so. My mother used to make marmalade for the fete. That, she used to say, was the very least you should do. I agree with her. Then again, she used to win prizes for it. Sometimes, from what I like to think is a more radical version of the same, I get eczema from the frustration. I love it with the same passion and for the opposite reason that I hate the teenage phrase “whatever”.

No. Not whatever. Choose. “Whatever” implies that nothing matters. I think most things do.

When I was a community worker, I organised a branch of the disability income group. You might remember a time when men not children wore red Kickers. It was then. Disability benefits was not an issue that Margaret Thatcher’s government took terribly seriously. So this group of disabled people decided to set up an advice service themselves. However, for most of them, middle aged and quite lonely, it was more a social thing than a rights thing.

To begin with, the hottest topic of meetings wasn’t the latest legislation. It was the sandwiches. The kind of bread, type and range of fillings, quantity. Would Rose be there for the next meeting? What about Jack? (Shall we look at the rights handbook now?) Let’s make enough for eight then and Deidre can always take what’s left over for her grandchildren. (Do you think we have a problem with benefit take-up in Hove?) Well, you can take some too Janet, if you like. Deidre doesn’t need them all.

It was interminable in the charming way that dotty aunts are fun for only an hour or so. After the bread, out came the pills. Stacks of them on the table in front of each committee member, a not too subtle bid in the not yet Olympic sport of competitive disability. I am more deserving than you, say the tablets. “Did you see Jack the other day? He was walking. And he claims mobility allowance, you know.”

Gradually, slowly, the sandwiches and the medicinal rivalry gave way to advice and advocacy. The group grew and prospered for a few years and, like these brief flares of activity often do, it then faded. But the people in the groups were changed. It’s silly, but it makes me dewy-eyed to remember meeting one of them 20 years later.

I was delivering the final bid for Brighton and Hove to win city status in 2000. (I chaired the campaign.) Standing on Westminster bridge, I was having my photo taken by the local media. Along the pavement wheeled one of the stalwarts of that disability income group.

She had been very ill 20 years before. She was still alive. Thriving, in fact. We talked briefly – both pleased but also a little embarrassed – and we both said how much knowing each other had meant to us. She had always inspired me. And, it turned out, I had given her some energy to believe that she should make a cause of her disability for others.

There are millions of these stories -and I cry at the puppy in the Andrex ads, so none of us should set any store by my moist eyes. But in the very act of engaging with her world, she had changed it. That moves me.

We have a contrary attitude to democracy in Britain. Deference and dependency seem to combine to make people think that things are better left to those in charge. They should do everything for us, including wipe grandad’s arse. But when we don’t like what they do, we shout as loud as we can and think they should listen to us. We think that is democracy. We venerate it while simultaneously regarding it with breathtaking apathy.

More than that, we believe democracy is just about voting so those entitled to have influence can only be those who are elected. Accusing fingers are jabbed at people like me as, with a sneer, they ask: ‘Who elected you?’

Well, no one really. With the Brighton and Hove city bid, I voted with my feet, offered my time and got stuck in. But I was regarded with suspicion by some of those who had been “elected” – even if it was by only three people and a dog on a wet Wednesday last August.

Councillors have this bug even worse. One of them once hurled this accusation at me just after he thought he had grabbed the moral high ground by going on an anti-war march in London. “The government should listen to us, the voice of the people,” he shouted. Then later that week he wondered sneeringly, “Who were we, the local Economic Partnership to challenge the decisions they, the elected councillors, had made about the local plan?” (We had made the modest suggestion that the council was daft to rule out on principle appropriate sites for possible development for housing and jobs just because they were north of our bypass in the green belt).

“Well,” I said (not without a touch of the smugness one always gets from scoring a good debating point), “it looks like in this case the tables are turned and you are the government and those of us protesting are the local version of the anti-war lot. Turns out I am representing the voice of the people and you are Tony Blair.” I didn’t care much about the point scoring, fun though it was. But I did care about the sites being ruled out and the voices I was representing.

Those are the times I get demoralised. The excitement comes from working for months to get people together (like we did for the city bid to tell the current story of Brighton and Hove); to find a narrative that people can share about where they live; to promote it to bits for the good of the city. That is more than satisfying.

The bits that get me down are the doubting of motives; the pouring scorn on the time local people and businesses spend involving themselves in discussions only to be accused by politicians and others that they are just self-interested and unaccountable. These people wade through rainforests of documents to try to participate in important decisions, and they should be praised for it. To involve yourself in civic life locally, regionally or nationally is to bathe deep in a swamp of jargon in the depths of acronym hell.

Last year, some Dalek-sounding official sent me a paper incomprehensively informing us all that “the floor targets are flowing from the problem trees” – at least I am still laughing.

But then I showed a bunch of public servants from a regional quango the allotments in Brighton that are a possible site for development. I said as a joke that before that would be possible the council would have to adopt a policy of “staggered de-allotmentisation”. The phrase subsequently appeared in an official report – I stopped laughing and nearly resigned.

Civic life, wearing hats and being the duchess can be frustrating at times. At others, though, it is intensely moving and inspiring. People’s engagement beyond elections is the stuff of democracy. Voting is merely the event. Participation though is a love affair with change and improvement. I guess I am in love with making the marmalade.

· Simon Fanshawe is a writer and broadcaster. The Done Thing – Negotiating the Minefield of Modern Manners is published by Random House tomorrow (price £9.99).

This article originally appeared at:
http://society.guardian.co.uk/societyguardian/story/0,,1495994,00.html

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Posted in Manners, Society, The Guardian | Leave a comment