I once was an advocate for free university education. Took part in demonstrations when student fees loomed and all that. Why? Because I was at uni, and it suited me. And I thought great education is the be all and end all for everyone.

Well, I'm able to learn and fortunately university hasn't messed me up fully. The problem with higher education is that it benefits few, is expensive and doesn't do much to tackle the real problems society faces. What are those? Disadvantage, inequality, violent crime, substance abuse, poverty. Unhappy people to put it simply.

The thing is, there may be a magic formula tackle all of these problems. It goes under the name of early years, that is the time from conception to 5. Why?

 

The key to breaking the cycle of violence and antisocial behaviour as well as poverty and inequality lies in the first years of a child's life, even the very first years. Violence develops by a combination of an external trigger and personal propensity to violence, the latter develops primarily from wrong treatment before age 3. Wrong treatment means neglect, abuse, or severe discipline combined with a primary carer who doesn't listen to the child. The ability to empathise prevents violent crime, but empathy can only develop when the primary carer attaches and attunes to the infant. I.e.: we need good parents/carers. 

 

The UK severely underperforms in ensuring child well-being in a European comparison. There is a clear link between child well-being and availability of affordable childcare and a more flexible approach to maternity/paternity leave for new parents. Give at least a year of maternity/paternity leave and subsidise good child care for children from one to school age. So invest in early years and you have happy children. Have happy children and you get economically productive and socially responsible citizens.

 

Early years work is crucial in tackling poverty. Research has shown that for every pound spend in early years, the return for the individual and society is £17 (made up of crime reduction, improved health, improved economic activity and earnings).

 

The gap in attainment between children from different backgrounds widens with formal education during the school years. Education, free schooling, thus fail to bridge the gap. However intervention in the form of support for parents and enriching child-care provision which reaches children before they start school does bridge the gap of attainment between rich and poor, disadvantaged and advantaged. If society focuses on free education only, this inadvertently contributes to increasing social inequalities.

 

“Disadvantaged children particularly benefit from pre-school provision.” “For provision for over threes, the evidence is consistent that pre-school provision for this age range is beneficial to educational and social development of the whole population.” Quality provision increases this benefit for children. So investing in the early years benefits all of us.

 

The problem is that in spite the recognition of the importance of early years work, it is undervalued, underpaid and severely underfunded. If we are serious about wanting to tackle poverty, crime, health, substance abuse, inequalities and worklessness, we need to redress this imbalance.

 

What we need is this:

• nurturing and stimulating home environments available to every child
• development of parental capacity pre and post birth
  
• availability of affordable high quality child care for all children and
• communities which provide a supportive environment for children and families.

Germany is drowning in rain, Cubling is ill, Cartside is very tired (as is the whole house or at least our immediate neighbours left, up and down if I'm allowed to guess) so the time is right for some recommendations for rainy day internet browsing.
I've added a few new links to my blogroll, and to be honest, there are too many by now. So I thought I'd introduce some of them.

www.bookmooch.com is a great site for bookworms like myself. A bit like www.readitswapit.co.uk in that you can give and receive books. While readitswapit facilitates book exchanges person to person (and in the UK only), bookmooch has a different system: for listing books you are happy to give away and for actually giving away books you get points. With these points you can get any book in the inventory, so you don't have to find a suitable book from the inventory of the person who wants to swap, but you can wait until a book you really want becomes available. It's also great because it works internationally - to make up for higher postage costs, you get more points for international swaps and there's an option of setting some conditions, e.g. for international requests, two books have to be requested before you agree to give anything away. I love it because I can get rid of books I no longer need and someone will get them who actually values them. Better than www.bookcrossing.com (where you don't know if the book will land in the bin). The listing system is hassle free (much easier than ebay) and the guy behind it also facilitates support for charities. The only quibble I would have is that the database could do with some tidying up, as the same book may come up as 10 ever so slightly different listings and it can be a bit tricky to find out which is the correct one. Of course, if like me, you're looking for books that are popular and rarely given away, you may end up accummulating points and not getting any books. Still, I love giving my books to people who actually want them.

www.etsy.com is like a niche-ebay. They host online shops of stuff that people have made themselves. And everyone can set up their own shop. Which I did. Now I only need to make things myself that I could sell. The fee structure is nicer than ebay, as it gives you a few months for each item, more suitable to crafty stuff than the 10 day on ebay. They use paypal, so it's pretty international, although of course there is the issue of postage fees which will be added (and most shops are located in the US from where this site hails). Still, a great idea and resource for special presents.

If you're interested in a green blog, this is for you: Not new year, from a family trying to survive without buying anything for a full year. A fabulous challenge, which I know I couldn't do, as much as I wish I could. It'll make you think but also gives you lots of ideas. As a long standing freecycler, I'm intrigued by the idea of Wyecycle - the town (village/hamlet/city, delete as appropriate, I'm a bit ignorant when it comes to the south of England, really sorry...) of Wye has a sort of fleemarket where everyone brings the stuff they no longer need, and it's all free, so you drop your stuff, and pick up other people's things. I quite fancy something like this in Glasgow.

Finally, Save Pollok Park is an initiative by Weegies (Glaswegians) to stop our big and lovely Pollok Country Park being turned into an ape amusement arcade. The park was donated by the Maxwell Stirling family for the people of Glasgow, not for profit making companies who let people play at monkey for a couple of hours. The family themselves have objected to the park and I applaud the Glasgow aristocracy for that. Incidentally, that's the park that would be just so perfect for a forest/nature kindergarden.

I spent some of my time in May and June working on this with the P7 pupils at Carnwadric Primary School.
It's a short clip about the 8 week activity we ran with puppeteer Shane Connolly of the Scottish Mask and Puppet Centre. This is the second time we used the medium of puppets and a puppet show, and I'm an utter convert. It's fun and gets amazing stuff out of kids, they never cease to impress me. You can also view the actual puppet show.

Now that the gods (aka directors) decided that my area of work will be shut down by the end of this year, the time has come for some navel gazing. On the one hand, it's a great organisation to work for, and conditions of employment are really the best I've ever had. Can this be enough? Because, on the other hand, they are cutting the work I feel passionate about and I feel very critical about this decision. Some questions I've been asking myself are these: Do I want to work for an organisation who abandons their work with two groups of children whose rights are most abused in the UK? Do I want to fit in with the new focus of work, and no longer work with asylum seeking/refugee children? Is there any realistic chance that I will actually be able to continue working there even if the answer to both questions is yes? Shall I stick it out, take redundancy pay and potentially "gardening leave" hoping to maybe still find a niche within the organisation while enjoying the good life in the next few months? Or is it wiser to apply for other jobs right now? Will I accept a potential pay cut when applying for other jobs (I'm not exactly overpaid as it is)?

My feelings range between anger, acceptance and disappointment. I'm living through days where I run fabulous sessions with young people that are exciting, motivating and full of promises that won't be realised because the powers in charge decided that we're not important enough and next I'm confronted with the harsh reality of winding down a programme of work which is in top gear.

Arguments go in circles. What is value? To impact on the largest number of children or to impact on the severest child rights abuses? Is it numbers we're after, nothing but numbers? Was the decision made bearing a future Tory government in mind which will make raising funds for asylum/refugee work even harder than it already is? Am I working for an organisation who only take the easy path? May they unwittingly be consolidating their status as a charity which appeals to the white upper middle class of advanced age who on the whole prefer to care  about children of darker skin colour only when they live outside of the UK?

Among the certainty of the redundancy of my work and our team, the management is talking of withdrawing with dignity and embracing the new direction with the usual determination to make the impossible happen. I'm sorry. I'm not ready to sign up for it just yet. And I don't know if I will be at some point - I need more time for the moment. As far as job applications are concerned, it's a tricky business. When is the best time to ask for flexible working hours, special leave entitlements and childcare voucher schemes?

Looking at vacancies it is disconcerting to find out how many ask for an ability and willingness to work irregular hours, weekends and nights away. In my previous life I wouldn't have thought twice about it. Now with child, such conditions effectively disqualify me - and I wonder if employers realise that they are excluding women with small children who may actually be excellent candidates for such jobs. It smells like indirect discrimination to me, similar to the unwanted side effect of the upcoming redundancies: They will to a high percentage affect the few minority ethnic staff that currently work for the organisation, making it even whiter than it already is.

See left widget. I'm doing the mini monster marathon with Cubling (in fact whole family hopefully). It's not a long distance. It's not hard, really. It might be wet though. But really it's just an excuse to get you all to donate some money for a worthy cause. Ah go on go on go on! Ah you will you will you will!

Have you sponsored me yet? No? Come on, you can do it!

I've spent the better half of my few working days the past three weeks organising a 2 hour swimming session.

That makes it a very expensive swimming session, even before you consider cost of a creche, a life guard, the venue hire, the support staff on the day and the input of my colleagues in the saga.

Why does it take so much effort?
Firstly, you need to coordinate the creche, 2 life guards (in case one drowns you need a second life guard), availability of pool, while avoiding other events in the area that might clash. To make it really tricky, most mobile creches don't do Saturdays, and most lifeguards are male, and looking for two female lifeguards for a weekend session is clearly asking for trouble.

The lifeguard issue is particularly daunting. For muslim women, it wouldn't be acceptable to have male life guard, which is partly the reason why we organise the swimming session. Local swimming pools can't even guarantee female lifeguards for women only sessions, and most pools nowadays are open to the street rather than enclosed which also doesn't exactly include muslim women. But how do you source female lifeguards? Glasgow is a big city, yet shockingly lacking in that department. I phoned every conceivable pool and finally got lucky in the neighbouring local authority, while the equalities and inclusion officer of Culture and Sport organised the second lifeguard. We literally had to pull all strings, talk our ears hot (?) on the phone and be a right pain in the bum to finally get there. 

I'm absolutely drained but have to admit with a certain amount of satisfaction hailing from the realm of defiance that on 7th June, 2-4pm, there will be a female only swimming session at a south side pool for asylum seeking and refugee mums with children under 5. All we now need to do is get the punters. That shouldn't be too hard, last time around we had an overwhelming response.

Unless something else goes wrong.

-----

And something did. In fact, two things went wrong. It's unbelievable really - Just a few days to the swimming session (remember, we're talking a one off 2 hours swimming session) the letting people advise me that the school undertakes a "backwash" every Saturday afternoon. Like, we enquired about availability for various Saturdays and never was this mentioned? Like, we asked the janitor as well to make sure there weren't any surprises?

All my pleading in vain. Either we look into another school or no let. Now, let's recap, we're planning to take asylum seeking mums of pre 5 children (who often may have older children too- I mean the mums, not the pre 5s of course) swimming. They don't have cars, no spare cash and can't afford transport. Nevermind that one bus can only ever take one pram, and buses only go every 30 mins on a Saturday. Which means that we'd have to stagger bus transport starting at 6 a.m.. Realistically, if we were to use another pool we'd have to taxi them there and back. Which kind of adds another £100 or so to the equation. When the second lifeguard decided to join the cancellation spree, I'd finally had enough.

Say it out loud and repeat after me:
I SHALL NEVER EVER TRY TO ORGANISE A SWIMMING SESSION AGAIN.

Culture and Sport, subdivision community lets, you're so fired.

I've just come across some interesting websites which I'd like to share. If Cubling sleeps tonight for a change, I might even add them to my blogroll.

Community Info Source: A Glasgow initiative with plenty of other good initiatives contributing to it.

The Glasgow Equalities Network Forum Blog: What a name. It's a GCVS initiative (that's for Glasgow Council for the Voluntary Sector). The GCVS do great stuff, and everything they do, they do well. This blog is not very exciting visually, but it's a fabulous resource for anyone interested in equalities in Glasgow and beyond.

Oh and this one, courtesy of Clairwil: Guerilla Gardening. Oh I love that one.

Last week, Save the Children launched their biggest ever campaign to stop the senseless dying of millions of children. Children who die because of lack of basic health care, no safe drinking water, no mosquito nets and because they're not breastfed. In Sierra Leone, for instance, one in four children will not live to be five. 10 million deaths of children which are preventable, so please add your voice and if you have, your money to help change these shocking statistics.

There's also a window to Kroo Bay in Sierra Leone on the site, which really gives you an idea what it's like to live there and what child mortality means in reality, and how simple it is to change things significantly.

You can also knit a baby hat if you're so inclined. I'm not quite sure yet how that's going to save a life, but I'm sure there's a reason to this... I've started knitting anyway.

This is a slightly odd blog. Odd because it's neither personal nor a themed blog. I know that it would be much better for me to have a blog on human rights/refugee issues and a personal one, because that's the way the blogosphere goes, but I'm too lazy for all that. Plus I don't think that would be a fair representation of who I am. So Cartside is a mixed bag of toys. Today now, my brain has gone through a whirlpool and been whisked all over the place and it's all a muddle now.   more »

For those of you not resident in the UK, there is a great service provided by the NHS. Health Visitors. The idea is that they provide a helping hand and in house health advice to families with young children. It kicks in straight after birth, or rather, for the first 10 days, mum and new baby is visited by a community midwife, and once all is reasonably fine, the Health Visitor takes over. Under normal circumstances, s/he will visit the new family for one month, and longer if needed. S/he is available for all questions regarding caring for a baby, but also has the task of spotting difficulties, such as postnatal depression, child protection issues, child health and safety, informing about vaccinations and how to start weaning etc. S/he is also responsible to pass on any concerns to relevant agencies, without being a social work representative.   more »