Sep 14

Children “too embarrassed” to read

A very worrying report was published last week by the National Literacy Trust and reported in the Daily Telegraph. The survey, of 21,000 children in primary and secondary education over the past few years, revealed a steady and concerning drop in the number of pupils reading in their spare time – from 38.1% in 2005 to 37.7 per cent in 2007, 32.2 per cent in 2009 and 30.8 per cent in 2011. Reasons given included an increasing lack of ability on the part of children to sustain focus, and children being worried that they would be labelled a “geek” if they were seen to read. Given that research also shows that children who read at home on a daily basis are 13 times more likely to perform above the level expected for their age in literacy, these statistics are extremely worrying.

Above all, these children who are not reading are missing out hugely – quite apart from the blow to their academic achievement, there is a whole world of imagination and fantastical happenings to which they are being denied access. Reading adds richness to young lives – to the lives of all of us, in fact.

Why is this trend occurring? A number of reasons spring to mind – the prevalence of the seductively passive ‘entertainment’ that is television; the distraction of other technologies such as computers, smartphones, X-boxes and the like; a lack of role models who read and are seen to be enjoying reading (when did you last see a picture of a ‘celebrity’ immersed in a book?); and not enough books in not enough homes – books are no longer seen, universally, as precious gateways to knowledge and understanding.

Whatever the reasons, the results of this research suggest a real poverty in our country – a poverty of creativity and imagination. We must do something about it, so … pick up a book today and show a child that you enjoy reading. Undertake to read for a few minutes a day with your son/daughter/nephew/niece/grandchild.

Reading matters. Do it.

 

Sep 11

Talking of female role models …

… what an amazing set of role models we have had in our Team GB Paralympians! With the strains of Sunday’s final Closing Ceremony still ringing in our ears, and the images of fire still dancing before our eyes, as well as the images of the thousands of people who lined the streets of London yesterday, we should spend a few moments celebrating some of them and their amazing successes. Defined in advance to some large extent by their disability and disadvantage, they have inspired us – and the generation to come, most certainly – to shed our preconceptions and to see them for the able, astonishing athletes they are. Congratulations to them all – they have indeed lived up to the watchword of London 2012. May the joy and triumph of their successes carry them – and us – into a new era of respect and inclusiveness, accompanying a genuine acknowledgement of the power of all humanity.

Two women we must never forget:

Ellie Simmonds, the 17 year old swimmer born with dwarfism, has accumulated 4 medals at the London 2012 Paralympics, and has won over people with her determination, enthusiasm and optimism. She was the youngest Briton to win either an Olympic or Paralympic medal, when she was 13 years and 9 months, she was the youngest winner of the BBC Young Sports Personality of the year in 2008, and the youngest recipient of the MBE, at the age of 14. She stands out for her utter determination.

Sarah Storey, the track cyclist, won Britain’s first gold medal at the London 2012 Paralympics, and accumulated three more, giving her a total of 11 golds including previous Paralympics, and meaning that she equals Tanni Grey-Thompson’s record. Born without a functioning left hand after her arm became entangled in the umbilical cord in the womb, she has never let this stand in her way, and competes (and wins) against able-bodied cyclists too.

They are representative of the many, many other female athletes of Team GB at these Paralympics, who deserve our admiration and praise. Thank you to them all for everything that they have given us.

 

Sep 08

Tulisa: a role model and inspiration for broken Britain?

I have been thinking a lot about female role models recently, and so was drawn to the Daily Mail online article this week which reported an interview in Look magazine with Tulisa Contostavlos, singer and X Factor judge. In the interview, she described herself as an “inspiration for broken Britain”; I was intrigued. I was particularly interested in what Tulisa had to say because – as the Daily Mail article reminded its readers – I was quoted back in June as saying that her drunken rant on Twitter (which lost her thousands of followers) had set a bad example to young people, and that people in the public eye were de facto role models, and so had a responsibility to think about the consequences of their actions on impressionable young people. Was Tulisa putting this and her rather wild past behind her, recognising that she had the power and the influence to affect what her fans, followers and viewers did and how they acted? Was she determined to be a true role model and a true inspiration?

It seemed only fair to read the whole article in Look, which I dutifully did, although I struggled to make sense of the logic of parts of the interview, including her assertion that she was “not inspiration for upper-class kids whose parents don’t want them to listen to an Eminem album. I’m inspiration for broken Britain”. This aside, however, I was struck by a number of thoughts:-

  1. Tulisa is emphatic in making the point that “people are underestimating the kids of today – they’re not stupid.” This is very true – children and teenagers are often greatly underestimated. This occurs in families, at school, and in the community, and leads to them not being challenged and stretched enough – often not enough is demanded of them, either in thought or action. Just because we underestimate them, however, does not mean that we shouldn’t actively engage in guiding and leading them. This need too is often overlooked – it is the wider responsibility of all of us to enable young people to fulfil their potential, and we don’t do that by operating a neglectful ‘sink or swim’ approach. It is not fair to them, and it is not necessary – together we can help them grow.
  2. Many readers are going to find Tulisa’s expletives offensive (even when they are neatly starred out), and this won’t do much for her role model status. Free speech, a bedrock of our liberal society, is a misunderstood concept; people forget that it doesn’t mean permission to say just anything, regardless of consequences. Free speech is limited by the need not to offend or harm others, and a key word in its practical application is that of “respect”. Good role models will always, to my mind, exhibit this quality.
  3. My heart sank when I saw the glamour shots which accompanied the article. Our young people – and especially girls – are bombarded enough by images of glamorous women; they certainly don’t need any more. Such pictures form a uniform and ubiquitous backdrop to their lives, teaching them in effect that to be successful they also need to conform to an idealised norm of sexualised female beauty. Given that it is estimated that 95% of the female population would find it physically impossible to attain this ‘norm’, they are setting themselves up for disappointment and failure. No wonder that rates of body confidence are dropping drastically. People in the public eye – and especially women – would be doing girls and young women a real service (and would be real role models) if they could find a way to communicate that individuality and difference in physical shape, size and appearance is to be celebrated.

It is hard when you have come into the public eye young, as Tulisa has, especially when you enter into a pressurised and media/publicity-fuelled industry such as the world of music. At a young age, you are still finding your feet in life, and even if you do want to move on, the internet is unforgiving. Everything you have ever done in the past – sex tapes included, in Tulisa’s case – are still there, for all to see.

That said, none of us can go backwards. The past cannot be undone. What those in the public eye need to do, as they recognise their responsibility as role models, is to seek to make amends for some parts of their past but focus more specifically on making a positive impact on those with whom they now come into contact. In turn, the public need to learn to be forgiving, and to move on too.

I am an eternal optimist about people. I truly believe that every single human being has the potential to do tremendous good, and that it would have a hugely constructive effect on society and on our world if everyone adopted this approach.

My advice to Tulisa: take this on board. Recognise your power to do something amazing for the world, and be very discerning about the advice you are being given in how you present yourself. Look up, look out, and have the humility to seek to make a positive difference in the world.

 

Sep 05

Beauty and the beast – why we should just ban beauty pageants for children

Tuesday’s report in the Daily Mail of a beauty pageant in Lincolnshire has – quite understandably – created a storm online. Beauty pageants as a formalised concept seem somehow entirely outdated these days – parades of women marked out of ten for their looks and physical appearance, with barely a nod to their ‘personality’. These shows still exist, of course, as do more subtle but equally dispiriting examples of occasions which are effectively beauty parades, in all but name – red carpet premieres, for instance, or advertisements for almost any product under the sun promoted by or for women, or photoshoots to accompany press interviews with women on any subject you can think of. Even our female Olympians were not immune to this pressure, and story after story of their post-Olympic success appeared with ‘glamorous’ shots of these sportswomen dressed up to the nines, posing provocatively, and covered in make-up – the effect being, of course, rather perversely, just to make them look like the vast majority of other women who appear in media photos, or on billboards, or in our magazines, rather than as the extraordinary athletes they are.

We have grown so used to such representations of women that they often pass us by – a real danger, of course, in itself, as we (and more poignantly, our daughters) absorb the subliminal messages that they send out about how women should look and act. But the Daily Mail report created such a storm because the pageant to which it referred did not feature women at all, but  rather children – girls – aged from 18 months to 4 years. At the risk that you might feel like a voyeur, you should look at the photos and the videos online. Some of it seems like harmless playacting, but then there are moments which will make you catch your breath, as you seen toddlers caked in make-up, parading in swimming costumes, and pouting and posing as if – quite frankly – they were on the catwalk of a seedy nightclub. The juxtaposition of childhood innocence and adult sexual poses is both shocking and terribly, terribly sad. Watching the children, you cannot fail but to have a strong sense that they are being shoehorned into an understanding of themselves as objects for the gratification of others, and as sexual beings, far ahead of the development of their own sexuality. At some stage in their lives, they are going to realise that this understanding is not sufficient for them to lead happy and well-balanced lives, but by then so much of their identity might be invested in this skewed self-perception that they will find it hard to escape.

Some of the comments made by the parents of the participants will lead you to inhale sharply. No-one expects a parent to think anything other than that his or her child is perfect and beautiful; to seek to parade that child, however, in front of others, while encouraging adult poses, seems quite simply irresponsible and an abdication of their parental duty of care to bring their children up with appropriate boundaries. I find it hard to blame the parents – where was the guidance in their own lives, or in society around them? – but surely the time has come to help these parents understand what is fundamentally wrong about statements like “the twins don’t really know what’s going on so it’s for my own personal satisfaction”, or assumptions about both their own children and others: “The children who take part are a different breed. They are kids who like the limelight. We’ve got dull, old-fashioned, apron-wearing mothers making their comments, but no one criticises them because their children are boring.”

When the self-regulating processes of an enlightened society fail, either through inadequate education, insufficiently strong family structures or the distortions which come from commercial and other pressures, then the state has to step in. These children should not be put in a situation where they are being asked to present themselves in these ways. The argument that they love it is illogical; they are young children who know no better, and it is, as Claude Knights from Kidscape pointed out, “impossible for them to be giving their consent!.

Enough is enough – stop this now. Just ban them.

 

Sep 03

Back to school …

This poem brought a little lump to my throat, but a big smile to my face when I found it recently:

WHOSE CHILD IS THIS?

Author Unknown

“Whose child is this?” I asked one day
Seeing a little one out at play
“Mine”, said the parent with a tender smile
“Mine to keep a little while
To bathe his hands and comb his hair
To tell him what he is to wear
To prepare him that he may always be good
And each day do the things he should”

“Whose child is this?” I asked again
As the door opened and someone came in
“Mine”, said the teacher with the same tender smile
“Mine, to keep just for a little while
To teach him how to be gentle and kind
To train and direct his dear little mind
To help him live by every rule
And get the best he can from school”

“Whose child is this?” I ask once more
Just as the little one entered the door
“Ours” said the parent and the teacher as they smiled
And each took the hand of the little child
“Ours to love and train together
Ours this blessed task forever.”

The start of a new school term – a new year, and often a new phase in our children’s life – is a time for parents in particular to reflect on what school is for, and why we think it is important for our children to be educated. As parents we want the very best for our children, but this does not always make it easy for us to share their upbringing with others, and – ultimately – to allow them to leave our homes and make their own, independent path through life. For any parent who is finding it hard to think of their child growing up and moving a step closer to adulthood this autumn, then take heart from this anonymous poem. Our children will always need us to help guide them through the journey that lies ahead. They need their parents, their teachers, their friends, and with all of our help, they will be best placed to make the very most of their lives.

Our task as parents is to keep our children for a little while; our task as teachers is to keep them for a little while too; our task together is to enable them to live healthy, happy, fulfilled lives in which they will make a difference in the world around them. It is a lifelong role and an eternal relationship.

Take heart from this, this week.

Aug 31

Girls are the key to solving world poverty

Advance warning: Thursday 11th October 2012 is the first ever International Day of the Girl, and watch this space for more information. Investing in girls – in their education, above all – makes an enormous difference to their lives and to their lives of their communities, and it is because I have become so convinced of this that I support with every fibre the campaign run by the international charity, Plan: ‘Because I am a Girl’. With the right support, girls have the power to free themselves, their families and their communities from poverty, and to enable them to start to make a difference in the world.

For each year a girl stays in school, her income as an adult rises by up to 20 per cent. This means, therefore, that she is better placed to support herself and her family, and to invest her earnings back into her village or community. It is a real virtuous circle, and the foundation building block of change. Girls are where it all starts.

To make this point, and to draw us all together in a shared understanding of the importance of girls in the world, Plan UK have created a new TV advert. Follow this link and you will begin to imagine what an impact an educated girl can have:

Plan UK’s ‘Because I am a Girl’ video.

Now spread the word.

Aug 28

The minefield of celebrating female achievement

I came across a fantastic site recently: a list of 22 inspirational female Australian entrepreneurs. You can find the site here; it is a blog attached – slightly anomalously – to a website about credit cards, but this doesn’t detract from the content. Here, you can read some interesting stories, including that of:

  • Gina Rinehart, the richest woman in the world, who learnt the ropes of her father’s mining business from the bottom up, and who named a mountain range after him;
  • as well as … Caroline Treacy, the managing director of the architecture firm CORE, based in Queensland, who also spends time supporting and mentoring local and young would-be architects and businesswomen;
  • and also … Michelle Wright, the owner of Mishfit, a personal training service that educates and provides safe exercise care to pregnant and post-natal women, who was prompted to develop the service when she suffered from post-natal depression herself.

All the stories are fascinating, and in themselves a celebration of women’s achievements … the statement should end there, but it doesn’t, because the introduction to the website almost undoes the good it has done. Introducing the list of female entrepreneurs, the author writes:

“Move over men! Long gone are the days when women stayed in the shadows, forging a career in ironing, cooking and childbearing. More and more women are developing their own business empires, and some are even leaving the men trailing far behind. Read on to find out about some of Australia’s female success stories. Men, be scared. Women, be inspired.”

We want women to be inspired, and we want to hear their stories. We want, too, to recognise that women should no longer stay in the shadows of life, as they have had to do in many, many cases, for centuries (and still do in some cultures). BUT … this is not a competition between the sexes. This is not about men being “scared”, but men and women working together, equally and fairly. It is also about enabling women – and men – to have choices and for us all to celebrate those choices, whether it is working inside the home or working beyond its bounds. Biologically, women bear children; it is together, however, that parents should be able to decide how to raise their children. It is together, too, that they should be able to decide on work and life patterns.

Is this an over-sensitive response? Perhaps. But it strikes me that at a time when we are still working – hard – towards real social change in how men and women are viewed and treated by our society, then we have to be sensitive to nuance, and to anything that might undermine our progress. Misunderstanding, resulting in entrenched positions and a retreat into unhelpful stereotypes, is so easy. We must be on the alert – we must be genuinely open, fair and utterly dedicated to real equality.

And then we really will be able to celebrate.

 

Aug 24

The deep horrors of motherhood. We Need to Talk About Kevin

I recently read – in one intensive, all-encompassing go – We Need to Talk About Kevin. I know that Lionel Shriver wrote it in 2003, and we are now almost a decade on, in 2012; I know too that it was made into a film last year, so I am well aware that I am behind the times. I did not read it when it was published – or even when it won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005 – and I did not see the film when it came out. But I have read it now, and it has made a deep impression; so deep that I am glad that I didn’t read it in 2003 when I was in the midst of having children, as it means that I have had nine years of innocence, not having read it, and I am glad too that I have not seen the film, because I think now that I will choose not to see it, my eyes opened by this terrible, dreadful, completely captivating and painfully engrossing tale of a mother’s relationship with her children, and with her son in particular.

It is of course extraordinarily well written – rich in nuance and story-telling, and entirely gripping. I would recommend it wholeheartedly; I hesitate only because of its awful, heart-wrenching subject content. For – as you will know if you have ever explored even just beyond the title – you will know that this is a tale of a boy who grows up to be one of a line of the now all-too-familiar ‘High School killers’ who make the headlines in the US on a depressingly – and shockingly – regular basis. It is a story of how his mother fears and suspects that his relationship with her, from even before he was born, may be at the root of his sociopathy, despite the evidence which we see to the contrary. We want to know why he did it, and as the tapestry of events unfolds before us, we desperately want to know that this could not happen to us, or to our children. Jenni Murray had it spot-on – commenting on the story, she wrote that it is “a book that acknowledges what many women worry about but never express: the fear of becoming a mother and the terror of what kind of child one might bring into the world”.

Becoming a mother means exposing yourself, rawly, in a way that you never needed to before having children. You are responsible for your child – jointly, of course, but what mother in moments of silent uncertainty or fear does not feel herself primarily responsible for how her child turns out? Fathers experience the same fears, but again, we do not dare talk of them. We work to deny bleak thoughts, to reassure ourselves that our children will turn out all right, and we fight not to drop into the blackness of ‘what if …?’ These are the horrors of motherhood – that something will happen to our child, or that we – through negligence or weakness – will cause something to go wrong, and that that ‘something’ will blight their life and ours forever. We Need to Talk About Kevin is unremitting in its exposition of a mother’s thoughts and feelings, and part of me feels that all parents should experience it, if only, through the insights it forces upon its readers, to grow in reaction the courage and determination that evil (for what other word can we give it?) shall not triumph, and that we shall together – all of us – rise to this task of making sure that our children live and contribute in the world in the way in which we know they can – with positivity, joy and compassion.

Parenting is one of the hardest jobs in the entire world. Our children can bring us heartache because of the love that they unleash in us – a love that makes us vulnerable, but a love that can make us indescribably strong too. We live in a world which buffets our parents as well as our children; we owe it to one another to reach out to share the support and care for our children. We have a collective responsibility to bring up our children, and to work to create a better world. Humbly, unassumingly, unjudging of others, but strong in our sense that there is a right and a good path ahead, we can do this. We are all in this together.

Actually, We Need to Talk About Our Children and Our World. And we need to do it now.

Aug 22

Good news about Physics … well, sort of.

Figures for this year’s A Levels, released last week, show that there has been another increase this year (on average, 3%) in the number of students taking A Level Science and Maths subjects. Physics has seen an especially positive rise: the total number of taking Physics A Level this year increased by 5%, up from 32,860 in 2011 to 34,509 in 2012. According to the BBC News website, there are a number of reasons for this, including the newsworthiness of Physics at present, with projects like the Hadron Collider about to write a more complete version than ever before of the rules that govern our existence. Physics teaches us who we are and how we exist, and is – quite simply – fascinating. Schemes to support teachers in schools to communicate this fascination are, demonstrably, working.

But not everyone has heard and acted on this sense of wonder, and while it is pleasing to note that the numbers of pupils taking the subject have increased, the final paragraph of the article is somewhat more depressing: “But one continued cause for concern is that although there has been an increase in girls studying A-level physics, the proportion compared with boys is still very low. Of the 34,509 entered for physics A-level, only 7,361 were female.” A ratio of 1:5 is not a particularly healthy one, and not much, either, to shout about.

Girls’ schools, of course, contribute significantly to the numbers of girls studying Physics. At St Mary’s Calne, a third of last year’s Year 13 leavers studied a Physical Science or Maths at A Level, way over the national average, and they all scored extremely high grades – mostly As and A*s. I sometimes fear I must sound like a stuck record when I say that girls’ schools enable girls to do anything, free of stereotypes and prejudices … but in the case of Physics, again, it is absolutely true. There is no reason whatsoever why as many girls as boys should not study Physics at A Level, and go on to further study in the subject. With all these exciting discoveries around the corner, we are going to need as many Physicists as we can get.

So … work still to be done. But at least we know we can do it.

 

Aug 20

“Women were celebrated for doing more with their bodies than model the latest clothes”

Janice Turner has written a fantastic piece in Saturday’s Times magazine, and if you have access to the Times online, then do read it. Over six pages of glorious photos of women Olympic athletes, she took us through the triumphs of these Games, which really did place women on the front pages for their achievements, not for their appearance. “In Britain, where for all the purported equality our female stock images are TOWIE airheads or actresses peacocking at premieres or wifely political help-meets, it did us good to have a whole new cast in our national soap.”

As we know, these Games were amazing for women, from the first medals for Team GB (which were earned by women), to the inclusion for the very first time of female athletes from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. For these women, just being there was a triumph: women’s sport is in effect banned in their home countries, and for them to have trained and gained permission to compete was an astonishing step forward. Leah McElrath in the Huffington Post, after interviewing Saudi women about what it meant to them to see their countrywomen compete, concluded that: “The images of two strong, courageous young Saudi women athletes will forever exist as part of Saudi history. … a bell of hope and expectation has been rung – a bell that cannot be unrung within the hearts and minds of the women and girls of Saudi Arabia.” She is right, of course, also to remind us that the battle for women’s equality has not yet been won: only “Time will tell if the leaders of the Kingdom heard it as well.”

But from a Western perspective, it was the focus on women’s achievements and not on their appearance that was so refreshing, so empowering, so liberating. These were women as real people, not clothes horses or simpering shadows of who they could be. We saw, experienced and shared their stories – real stories, with all the twists and turns that we know our own real lives bring us, but which we have been ‘Hollywoodised’ into imagining are not part of the lives of those in the public eye. Surrounded as we are by pictures of unrealistically shaped, airbrushed women, plucked and buffed to what we have been cudgelled into believing is ‘perfection’, it is not surprising that female aspirations for success have become so enmeshed with these notions of superficial beauty.

These Games have had a huge impact on how women are viewed, and we have to keep up the momentum. The vultures are circling, though – in this week’s ‘women’s lifestyle’ magazines there is a rash of stories and pictures of Team GB athletes dressed up to the nines and looking, in the words of many an edition, “hot”. There is nothing wrong with this in moderation, but there is something devastatingly wrong if we airbrush away the images and stories we have just recently been witnessing, of these real, amazing women, with their real, amazing stories of hard work, sacrifice and triumph. We need our daughters to have role models of whom we can genuinely say that we would want our daughters to be like them when they grow up. Let’s not lose this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity we have to make this happen.

My fervent hope for London 2012: that they were the Games when women chose to be who they really are.