Radicalisation?

Facebook’s timehop brought this up today.  I thought it was worth sharing.

11 October 2015 at 10:46 ·

On Friday afternoons Ferretfingers attends a local education authority Allotment Gardening course in a nearby community centre.

I am his ‘enabler’, driving him there and back and hanging around 'in case there are any issues'.  Which means I sit nearby reading, crocheting or writing a letter, because part of the point is to get him to do things rather than say, pathetically, "Mummy help".*

The other men in the group range in age from early twenties to forties.   All are learning disabled, except for Russell who is so severely physically disabled the speech he has is unintelligible.   All bar Raymond require an enabler (or two) to get them safely there to 'access' the course.

The tutor is required to incorporate British Values and Anti-Radicalisation into the curriculum.

There was loud laughter from the enablers when this was announced.

Now call me disableist (and I know we say Ferretfingers is as cunning as a bag of rats) but I'm having trouble trying to work out the likelihood of this group plotting the overthrow of Western Civilization.

You do have to wonder at the mentality of the education/council/Ofsted bureaucrats that pass down these sorts of tick-box one-size-fits-all requirements to the people who actually do the work. 

Does nobody at management level have the common sense to say "Oh for goodness sake let’s get off this daft bandwagon"?

And while we're at it

When the IRA were bombing bits of Britain in the 1970s, 80s and 90s I didn't notice people going around Catholic schools, Kilburn, Liverpool, Glasgow and other heavily Irish areas looking for 'radicalised young people' and requiring educators to include British Values in the curriculum.  Maybe then the powers that be realised it would create more problems than it solved.

*Ferretfingers is still on the course but my sitting back didn’t last long.  We work together with him doing all the heavy lifting.  Sadly it looks as though the course may not go on for much longer.  Management of the community centre has passed from the local authority into the control of a ‘child poverty charity’.  The charity intends to charge the education department for any rooms it uses in the centre.  It doesn’t look like education will pay.  So when the weather is too bad for gardening or poly tunnel work what do we do?  There is also nowhere for the tutor to leave files etc and all the required paperwork has to be done in the open public areas.   

Using the third sector to combat austerity is really working for us: isn’t it?