Gemma Markham

@mp_1825 Great effort from every player. Thanks for taking the time to speak to my lad after the game, he was buzzing ❤️💛

Sounded brilliant last night, Newcastle fans near us were saying it was one of the best away followings they've heard in years ❤️💛 #bcafc

@BrazenJules I've been a support worker and have had some amazing colleagues who go above and beyond and some who would be like this all the time - on their phones, not engaging etc. Unfortunately it's underpaid and long hours so hard to recruit/retain the best people

Two support workers with one autistic young man on a train. Both ignoring him completely and looking at their phones. His stimming increasing and increasing. I get so angry watching such lack of support

@naomicfisher The rest of the time is dedicated to other activities like PHSE, exercise, educational trips, arts and crafts and various life skills including first aid. A lot less pressure when it comes to exams and much more valuable learning.

@naomicfisher My son is starting at a 14+ college in September. They do things totally different to a traditional secondary school, only 5 core GCSEs (Maths, English, Science, ICT and business studies). Students then choose a vocational course that they spend a full day a week on.

What a strange thing we do to our young people in this culture and time. We make them spend several years learning things which they often have no interest in, which they have not chosen and which they will in many cases never use again. We tell them that these things are vitally important. Then we sit them in rows and make them write about the things they can remember for an intense few hours. We compare what they have written down with everyone else of the same age, and then we rank them. We make them wait a couple of months and then we tell some that they are the successes, and others that they are the failures. We encourage them to hang their self-worth on how they performed. Newspapers publish pictures of the delighted, whilst the disappointed hide their heads in shame. We tell them that these results will determine the rest of their lives – and then we set up systems that make this true. We provide fewer opportunities for those who did not succeed. Those who did well can take their pick of courses, whilst those who did not are made to take the same tests again and again, just to hammer it home. We make sure that young people spend the majority of their adolescence focused on exams and pressure. Every summer, they sit in rows and try to remember. Each year, they’re told that their whole future rests on this. Many of them inevitably cave in under the pressure. They become anxious and depressed. They show signs of burnout by the age of 16. They lose their spark, and just go through the motions. Some of them retreat altogether. Then we pathologise them, say that they need mental health treatment or to become more resilient. We send them for therapy or give them medication. We say that they are the problem, whilst the system carries on unchanged. What if instead we stopped to think about what we are doing to our young people? Adolescence is a time of opportunity and vulnerability. It’s a one-off stage of life. What if we asked ourselves, should our young people really spend these years on a conveyor belt of high stakes exams? Imagine we allowed ourselves to look beyond this time and place, and to see just how strange this really is. What would we offer our young people then?

@deathofbuckley If it's 3-5 year olds it's not really school anyway, it's early years settings and a lot of them already do this. I worked in nurseries years ago and we used to get the kids to brush their teeth after lunch. No big deal, don't get why people are so stressed about it

@clhubes Also, with 3 kids very close in age, I've learnt to pick my battles 😂 If he wants a Pit Noodle for his Christmas dinner, it's fine.

@clhubes I agree. My children have been raised exactly the same way, with the same food options. Middle one will eat anything, youngest will eat most things but the oldest is one of the pickiest kids ever. It is definitely a sensory issue because certain textures make him physically gag.

@Sarah_Katilyn My son was there for his friend at his baby sister's funeral. Equally his friend was there for my son at his dad's funeral. They were both very young to be dealing with such grief and each other's presence was invaluable.

I remember when my childhood best friend was in a car accident. I was ten years old when the call came. A corded yellow landline at 2 a.m. They were hit by a drunk driver and her mother went through the windshield. She was decapitated. My friend awoke upside down and crawled through the back to reach her mother. She held her head as the ambulance arrived. I remember attending the funeral. It was weird and uncomfortable. Everyone around me wept and it smelled like lillies, which was supposed to be a happy smell, but from that moment on...it was death, and decay. While the families mingled and shared sad platitudes, I convinced her to sneak upstairs to the funeral director's office and steal the buttermints from the fancy silver footed bowl on his desk. We laughed breathlessly as we stole down the stairs, pockets full of pastel pillow mints. Giggling at our criminal mischief, oblivious to the mourners and the lillies. We sat in the front row because that's where family sat and she wouldn't let me leave her side. She let out a gutteral scream and threw herself on the casket "mommy mommy mommy". I grabbed her and hauled her back. Her horrified family gasping for air. I physically held her down while the preacher said words. Words that didn't matter because her mother was gone and the casket was closed and none of it fucking mattered. We went out back back to the cold empty playground and we swang. We swang on the stupid swings and I made her laugh with my stupid jumps and my stupid voices. And she cried. And I sat there. Upside down on a rubber swing. And we were quiet. And 30 years later she still messages me and talks about those mints, and the swings. Because the words don't matter. The platitudes and the sad side hugs. The emotions don't matter. I sucked at it. I could replicate it but it was never real and I learned that day that what matters is presence. Companionship. A steady anchor in the raging fucking storm of broken humanity. And that has always been me. I may not get it. The weeping. The screams. But I will sit with you in the darkness. I will steal the buttermints and I will swing with you in silence. And I will be. I will be.

@W6345789 @naomicfisher It can have the opposite effect though. My son's school was always good until recently. New headteacher, draconian behaviour policies = unhappy students and staff, and inadequate on all areas in their recent Ofsted

@naomicfisher Some of the things mentioned in that article sound horrific and I agree with a lot of what you say. But is it all one sided? Surely some schools that had real problems HAVE been turned around by installing a certain amount of discipline and expectations. Maybe a mixture is best?

Another account hits the news of a school implementing extremely controlling behavioural policies, in the name of turning the school around. All these pieces report similar approaches - immediate detentions escalating quickly to isolation for minor infractions, including uniform and equipment issues. Staff encouraged to be rigidly consistent, and penalised if they aren't. The results are predictable. Kids start to dislike school, parents start to protest, and undercover teachers say it's a toxic environment, but they don't dare say so in public. And then people in power say that the parents and kids are making it up and it's only one side of the story. If they are making it up, it's odd that so many of them say the same thing. Why are we hearing about so many schools punishing kids for missing green pens, or the wrong colour socks? It's down to the Broken Window theory. Sweat the small stuff and you won’t have to worry about the big stuff.  This is based on broken window policing. The idea is that if you leave the broken window in a neighbourhood people will think that it’s uncared for and not monitored, and more disorder will follow. The neighbourhood will go downhill. Mend the windows, and you can stop that from happening. It wasn’t meant to be about people. It was about the environment (and even then, the research isn’t strong). Because it turns out that when you apply it to people it has some quite troubling consequences. Lots of ‘stop and search’. Racial profiling, and deteriorating relationships between people and the police. It turns out people don’t like being jumped on for every little thing. It doesn’t make them feel more positive or pro-social. Windows and people are, after all, quite different. In some British schools, however, the idea that the way to turn a school around is to 'sweat the small stuff’ has turned into an obsession with uniform details, missing equipment and everyone doing things the same. Line ups in the morning and inspections at tutor group. Refusing to allow girls to wear socks over their tights, as Longsands school did last winter. Everyone using rulers to track reading, and having to keep books flat in the desk, as is reported happening in Astrea Academy schools.  Sending girls home en masse for skirt length, as a Welsh school did last week. Petty control, in the name of ‘sweating the small stuff’. It makes it hard for parents to complain, because schools will say it’s part of their overall strategy to turn behaviour around. Yes, no socks over tights might seem trivial, but they are the ‘broken windows’. Let them wear non-regulation socks and next thing you know they'll be dealing drugs at the school gate. The result? Schools are seeing broken windows where before there was just a pane of glass. They’re finding windows which weren’t actually broken, but are just designed differently to other windows, or perhaps were left slightly open. Behaviours which were not an issue before have become worthy of sanction. They’re looking so hard for broken windows that they are seeing them everywhere. The result is to turn (almost) all the kids into perpetrators. Even the ‘well behaved’ kids get multiple behaviour marks and instant detentions. Those who push back end up in isolation very quickly.  I spoke to one girl who said that in her large comprehensive school, only eight children made it through the whole year with no behaviour marks. Less than 1%. She knows because there was a special assembly about it. Young people and their parents say it creates a negative environment, where kids feel that they are only noticed  when they do something wrong - and it’s easy to get things wrong. Some teachers say the same. Staff are leaving and some of them are speaking out. They are scared too, just like the kids. Some kids get into a spiral of being constantly pulled up for minor infractions and pushing back. Because that is what some kids do. They push back. They want to be able to make some choices in their lives, and they resist petty control.  They say No. For them, sweating the small stuff has exactly the opposite effect that is intended. The small stuff gets bigger and bigger. Cracked windows appear in places where there weren’t even windows before. Broken glass is everywhere you look. The kids fall apart - and the same strategy continues. liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool…

@EmmaSzewczak There is a disused patch of grass in the middle of the housing estate I live on. Some of the residents clubbed together to put up goalposts and mark out a football pitch so the kids can play there rather than on the busy roads. It's caused uproar!

My kids have started playing out in the street recently and my god the hostility from random passing strangers/neighbours!

@nomdeplume000 @naomicfisher I do appreciate that but they had no grounds to search him other than his eyes being red. He explained but they didn't believe him. These kids are starting to feel like teachers don't trust them and that they'll get in trouble regardless so why bother behaving?

@gemmavward @naomicfisher The first bits are are horrible, and imo unnecessary. But please don’t demonise the second. Drugs are rife amongst teenagers atm with vaping. Assuming the best with situations such as these isn’t possible because the consequences if wrong are too great.

Today I talked to a young person who stopped going to school in Year 7. He told me, when we looked around the school they said that detentions were only for when you did something really wrong and most people didn’t get them. Then, when I got there, I found out that in nearly every lesson someone got a detention. The teachers were always giving us detentions and I was scared. He said, they really pack things into your head. You get into the class and there’s a ‘First do this’ on the board and you have to sit down and do it immediately. Then the teacher gives you more to do and it doesn’t matter if you can’t do it all, it just keeps moving on. You can’t ask your friend how they are doing it because you can’t talk. You’re always worrying about what happens next and whether you might get a detention. He said, I couldn’t do it. It made my head hurt and by lunchtime I couldn’t go on. I know I was learning a lot but I couldn’t keep going. He’s out of school now and at an alternative setting. He said, I can stay all day there, because they don’t pressure us. I couldn’t believe how relaxed they were when I started. They don’t give us detentions and I didn’t think that would really happen. I’m learning things. There’s no way for this to be fed back to the system. No one asks those of us who work in mental health what the side effects are of our local school. No one measures mental health as a key outcome of educational and behavioural policy. No one looks at children’s behaviour and attendance as feedback on the system. He’s not an isolated case. I hear stories like his all the time. Kids who cannot cope with high pressure and high control environments and who start not attending school as a result. Kids who tell me that they are constantly fearful of getting it wrong. You won’t solve that by fining or threatening their parents. We have to ask what is happening in our schools, and whether many of them are becoming environments in which children cannot thrive. Exam results aren’t enough. We have to ask about the side effects of the system.

@Ifty_ameer20 @stedavies @LeoMars75 Not necessarily lazy, a lot of families have parents who work longer hours or further from home, and the traffic is worse so they just don't have the time and it's more convenient. I'm out of the house from 8-6 and I have 3 kids, it's better for me to shop online.

@stedavies @LeoMars75 Retail parks are not the only reason for town center declines (partially responsible) a lazy society is the reason why town centers died. E.g People are ordering 2lt pop bottles off Amazon living next door to a shop. Supermarkets offering home shopping etc etc

@harrotcarrot @naomicfisher Completely agree, I think it should be a sweatshirt, plain white polo shirt and grey or black trousers/ shorts/skirt like they have in a lot of primary schools. Much cheaper for parents too. Anything else should be student choice, like hair colour.

@naomicfisher I can’t wrap my head around the concept of strict dress codes - changing appearance through nail polish, haircuts, hair colour, piercings, etc. is such a harmless way for a child to explore their identity! It’s all reversible.

If school uniform is to give children something trivial to rebel against, why make the consequences for infractions so very non-trivial (like sending them home, or putting them in isolation)? If every minute of education matters, why send a teenager to reset for having a nose piercing or send them home for the wrong shoes?

@RunSirRun @naomicfisher @jenhawk6248 Have you been to every school that exists? My son's school sent a girl home the first week of term for her trousers being too tight (supermarket school trousers). My step son got a detention because his clip on tie fell off and he didn't notice

Another day and another shoe story. This parent told me that her son came home on Wednesday with a broken shoe and clearly needed a new pair. Both parents work full time and don’t drive so couldn’t get new shoes immediately – he wears specific shoes as those are the only ones he finds comfortable. They ordered replacement shoes online and the fastest delivery would on be Saturday. She contacted the school to say that he would have to wear his all black trainers for two days as he had no other shoes to wear, but that the new ones would be there for Monday. School replied to say that he would have to spend the next two days in isolation, or else wear shoes from their facility, which means shoes worn by other students. This isn’t something that her son could tolerate and they knew that this would be the case. She spoke to the school again and they said that there was no other option other than isolation and the uniform policy must be kept to at all times. They have kept him at home rather than send him in for a day in isolation. They do not think that children should be punished or shamed because their shoes have broken and they are upset. Their son has good attendance up to this point. Many parents are contacting me to say that they are supportive of their school’s uniform, but not of the way in which it is being enforced. They say that their best attempts are not good enough, and that they find themselves blamed for things that they cannot control. Inflexible and punitive polices alienate both young people and their families, and lead to bigger problems down the line. Isolation is a serious sanction which should not be used for minor infractions. You can’t build a social contract through control.

@veckansglitter @naomicfisher Again, that's not what I said. I have no issue with the concept of a uniform but they are generally excessively strict in high school. Primary schools are usually much more relaxed so how does wearing blue socks instead of black ones suddenly affect their learning at age 11?

@gemmavward @naomicfisher Actually, it has a massive impact on learning when there are no agreed standards on what is acceptable attire.

Why is it so important for 11-16 year olds to dress in a strictly enforced uniform in order to be educated, and then totally unimportant for 16-23 year olds to do the same? If it’s about preparing for work, why is that only important when they are younger?

@veckansglitter @naomicfisher I didn't say it was, I just don't get why they need to be clones at school. Why can't my son have blue hair or my daughter wear nail varnish? It doesn't affect their learning.

@gemmavward @naomicfisher Maybe they can express themselves at the weekends? It’s not a human rights infringement.

@ttroughton @naomicfisher It's madness, I'm fortunate that we are relatively comfortable in terms of salary but I spend far more on uniform than I do on normal clothes. It must be a nightmare for a lot of parents. £8 for branded PE socks that they wear for an hour a week!

@naomicfisher How can it be legal to, and why would anyone sane, punish a child for having parents too poor to buy parts of the strictly enforced uniform?