Death of a Nightingale 2022

Death of a Nightingale

2022

Alan Share

Copyright © 2023 Alan Share with ispy from a Blog edited by Jan Woolf.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author and publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

ISBN: 978-1-961096-05-9 (Paperback Edition)

ISBN: 978-1-961096-06-6 (Hardcover Edition)

ISBN: 978-1-961096-04-2 (E-book Edition)

Book Ordering Information

The Regency Publishers, International

7 Bell Yard London WO2A2JR

[email protected]

www.theregencypublishers.international

+44 20 8133 0466

Printed in the United States of America

In Memory of my mother, Esther

When you meet your friend on the roadside or in the market place,

let your spirit in you move your lips and direct your tongue.

Let the voice within your voice speak to the ear of his ear.

For his soul will keep the truth of your heart as the taste of the wine is remembered

When the colour is forgotten and the vessel is no more.

The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran

Contents

2022

Preface

Prologue

Death of a Nightingale

Programme Note

Cast & crew

Act One

Act two

The Mad Hatter’s Committee Meeting

ispy – Extracts from a Blog, edited by Jan Woolf

Notes & Quotes

1 An OFSTED Report on a Special School 2010

2 An Exposé - the origins of Inclusion in the UK

3 The Case for Inclusion - The Salamanca Statement

4 Defective Academic Research

5 The dream turns sour!

6 Alarm bells ring

7 A change of policy

8 Rights

9 Pupil perceptions

10 The System

11 God - A Universal Creator

12 Music and the Mind

13 Equality

14 Pills

15 The Dome

16 School Organisation Committees

17 The Luddites

18 Helen Keller

Questions for Quiet Contemplation

The clash of human rights and Unequal Opportunity

Freedom of Expression in the UK Today?

Bibliography

A Testimonial of Substance

Alan Share

2022

I published Death of a Nightingale in 2011. It was my protest. I had witnessed the unsuccessful attempt of a local authority to close a special school for children with a physical disability and a learning difficulty against the wishes of the parents, teachers, carers, its pupils and the doctors who cared for them. The lengths they were prepared to go to, the closure of over 100 special schools in the UK was the provocation.

Today, I have to record that the school is still there, but it now caters for students aged 11-19 years with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder or complex learning difficulties. Its hydrotherapy pool is no longer required.

The rights of parents of children similar to the ones that I knew no longer exist. Their children are in mainstream schools, probably bullied, with well-meaning support, but from NTAs not from nurses and physios with hydrotherapy and from teachers with the time that they need.

Today, I see that this story is part of a larger story.

First, what should happen when human rights clash? Here Parliament had provided the right of children to mainstream education. It had also provided the right to parents of children with special needs to the school of their choice. Here every single one of them wanted a special school.

The word Equality doesn’t help here. It makes mischief! Only fair play works. Sadly, I witnessed its total absence.

I studied Jurisprudence at Oxford. I still recall the lectures on human rights given by the eminent, widely respected Professor Herbert Hart. He cautioned the way you should use the word right, sometimes legally right, sometimes morally right but not a legal entitlement, sometimes simply wouldn’t it be nice if. I do not recall him asking the question as to what should happen when human rights clash as here.

In my own life I have witnessed it on several occasions. One person’s right to strike and another person’s right to work. One person’s right to protest and another person’s right to use the public highway. My right to free expression and a lawyer’s right to protect his reputation compromised by it truthfully and fairly.

The word equality is no help here. Rights are not equal and absolute. They are relative and different.

I suggest that when human rights conflict, fair play, is the only solvent.

In the Clash of Human Rights and Unequal Opportunity I show you what happens when brute political power fortified by dogma and soundbite is the arbiter, and the media don’t interfere.

Also, in the last ten years I have realised that what I write about in relation to children with special educational needs applies equally to many other children as well, half a primary school cohort that for one reason or another does not go to university. Success and fulfilment in life does not need a degree nor does a degree guarantee it.

To be the best you can be in a fast-changing world as Michelle Obama urged pupils on a visit to England, needs an education that facilitates that. A curriculum designed to provide an opportunity to go to Uni, is not that.

I have listened to Sir Ken Robinson on YouTube. Sadly, he died a year ago and I write this in his memory. I write this up in my new book MY ENGLAND. Currently the law of copyright prevents its publication.

So, I pose here two questions.

Are some people so eager to give children an equal opportunity to go to university that they largely ignore the needs of all those who cannot or do not want to go there? They can have successful and fulfilling lives without it, with no student debt to carry for their working lives. Shouldn’t they have a curriculum suited to their needs in a fast-changing challenging world, and exams they can pass with flying colours?

And are they so fixated on equality and the mantra words inclusion and parity of esteem for some, that they ignore self-esteem that teachers should try to nurture in all their pupils? No wonder there are skill shortages.

Diversity should always come before Equality in education and the pursuit of excellence should apply to everyone.

I have just seen on my TV an advert promoting mental health: Almost half of the young struggle with anxiety. And in Michelle Obama’s latest book The Light We Carry I read Real growth begins with how gladly you’re able to see yourself. Teachers, please bin the words Parity of Esteem. Your job is to nurture Self-esteem and a sense of achievement. And the world will look after itself.

Thinking time, as you read this book.

Death of a Nightingale

with ispy – Extracts from a Blog, edited by Jan Woolf

and Alice in Blunderland – The Mad Hatters’ Committee meeting

Alan Share

Adapted for a stage performance at the New End Theatre, New End, Hampstead, London

9 March – 3 April 2011

Directed by Thomas Scott

Preface

Back in 1988 I was a local business man, and a member of my local Rotary Club. I was persuaded, as an act of Rotary service, to become a Governor of a Special School for physically disabled children with an associated learning difficulty. A year later I became its Chair of Governors, a position I held until 2002.

This was to change my life and apart from anything else, help to turn me into something of a writer - a very great surprise that I did not expect.

At Merton College, Oxford, I had planned to become a barrister, and to the extent that once a barrister always a barrister, I still am. My career at the Bar in Manchester was to last for only three years. Manchester came and went.

I was won over by Jo Grimond’s inspirational leadership of the Liberal Party, and I moved from the Bar to the Head Office of the Party in Victoria Street, London, as Executive Assistant to its Secretary. In those days the Government, as Jo Grimond once chided it, couldn’t run a sweetie shop in the Lothian Road. Would they manage it any better today? Some things have not changed very much over the years. Therein lies a part of the problem. Anyway, I worked there for three years before joining a family furniture company. I had tried to avoid that but, as it turned out, I was to enjoy the ride, and stay with it until I retired. So far as the Liberal Party was concerned, I had walked with Jo Grimond towards the sound of gunfire, but I never quite got there - nor, I fear, did he.

It is amazing how you can misread things when you are young.

I don’t, however, begrudge either of my early short lived work experiences. Both of them were learning experiences. Building bricks, I call them.

On the Northern Circuit I was privileged to have as Head of Chambers, and as my pupil master, the late C.N.Glidewell, CNG to everyone who knew him. He was a man with old fashioned integrity. He was also a master of advocacy - particularly good when he showed up the ineptitude of local planners. He also had style. All of this was somehow encapsulated in his choice of car - a Bristol - a prestigious saloon engineered with traditional British quality in its design. In all ways CNG was a cut above the ordinary.

The Law taught me the importance of two things. Firstly keep everything in writing. I have paid a heavy price for that. And secondly keep as far away from lawyers as possible. I have not always been successful in this, and sadly have found that a few can best be described as little more than gas meters constantly demanding to be fed. Not all merit that description, and I do exempt my own solicitor here.

My experience of politics encouraged me to keep as far away as possible from that too. But this has never been an easy thing for me to do.

Becoming a Governor was the start of my serious writing - a diary to keep a written record of everything. Letters, memoranda, and emails, you name it, I wrote them, and copied them into my diary. This is now ancient history.

I must record one other youthful mistake. I used to imagine that the world was a rational place. My wife, who had studied psychology at Newcastle University, put me right. I suddenly realised that reasoning usually starts in the gut, not in the brain. At Oxford, Roman law, not psychology, had been an important part of my course in Jurisprudence. A pity since this revelation has changed my way of thinking - and of writing ever since.

It has influenced the way that I have processed many words in the last twenty years.

Allow me to explain. Over a hundred special schools have been closed in recent years as successive governments moved more and more children with special needs into mainstream schools. The buzz word here was ‘Inclusion’. The future of the school I was associated with was uncertain for many years. Parents who fought to keep it open were swimming against a strongly running tide that constantly threatened to engulf it.

It would have been a great shame to close it because it was a very good school, and it certainly wasn’t cut off from the outside world. This was not just my view of it - OFSTED was of the same opinion. I have now seen a very similar report for Oak Lodge School in East Finchley that provided actors for my play.¹

I still have snapshots of the school in my mind from the time I joined it as Governor in 1988. A head teacher with a vision and a mission statement shared with his deputy "Whole School - Whole Child", warm, dedicated and committed staff, and above all bright eyed, happy purposeful children, enjoying their school days and helping each other along the way. A win, win situation for everyone included in it - parents, teachers, carers and most of all its pupils. Presentation Evenings captured it all. That is where they all came together in one joyous, celebratory event. They all had the pride of achievement - without being proud.

The parents were successful in their campaign to keep the school open and it is still in existence today.

I couldn’t have written Death of a Nightingale without that in the background, but it is not that story. I must stress that it is a piece of fiction. I dedicate it to all those people working with special needs, to children with special needs and to their parents. I came to have a huge respect for all of them. In their interests I would like to combat the stigma that moves towards Inclusion have, at times, wrongly attached to special schools. This is important since the tide towards a policy that was based upon the dogma of Inclusion and not upon its practicability and its suitability, is now on the turn.

There is a growing awareness that inclusive education is not appropriate for all children with special education needs. The Coalition Government issued a Green Paper in March 2001 stating that the bias towards mainstream schools should be ended.

The book as I published it in 2008 is now out of date. The play I wrote to be read has now been performed at the New End Theatre in Hampstead earlier in the year. It is shorter, better and different. I hope you will watch edited versions of it on my website. The Prologue in the book remains unaltered.

Prologue

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

TS Eliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding 1942

I believe in a Creator, though many do not. But I cannot see some great figure sitting astride the Universe with all its galaxies determining everything, and I cannot see someone that I can personally talk to. So I can live with ritual; but prayer is more difficult. I am envious of Emma Kirk, the music teacher in the play, who has that facility. When she finally meets her Maker, she will do so with equanimity. I hope you will warm to her as I do.

My route to my Creator is through my relationship with man, and with an awesome awareness of the incredible wonders of the Universe, of which man is but a tiny part. For me God does not replicate the attributes of man. That would deny us our freewill. And we would all be puppets on his string. Whether we are believers or non-believers we must surely not be puppets.

There is a price to be paid for that. For good or for ill, we have a choice. We can be saints or sinners, and there has never been a shortage of either. Starting way back in the Garden of Eden - or just in the distant past - we were given personal choice in our lives as our birthright. This is one of the things this book is about. How we exercise it, and how much of it we are actually allowed to exercise in the 21st Century. If you see personal choice as a bourgeois fad, you cancel out personal responsibility too, and herald authoritarianism. Is that what you want?

Fate steps in

Despite all that I think that some things have to happen. Providence takes a hand. This Prologue was the result.

Consider the following coincidence and its consequences. I am in Manhattan for a number of reasons. One is to see old friends, not least to see a beautiful lady, now in her nineties. I met her almost fifty years ago when she welcomed me to her home as a guest of her somewhat eccentric son. He must have been more than a bit eccentric. He wrote from New York offering his services to the British Liberal Party. I was also a bit eccentric at the time. I was working in Victoria Street, and I replied to his letter, asking him to call in. This was the start of many treasured trans-Atlantic friendships that I have come to enjoy.

The other reason I am in New York is to look at works of art. I have seized a rare opportunity to look in wonder at Gustav Klimt’s Adele Block-Bauer I at the Neu Galerie, and I am in a café enjoying a cup of coffee. I notice at the next table a short, stocky, bespectacled, well dressed but somewhat crumpled very senior citizen. What took my eye was that he was tucking in to a large piece of chocolate cake, a huge mound of cream, and an ice cream sundae. He was also sporting four colourful badges on his dark professional suit as well as a very lively tie and something else, which I cannot make out, dangling round his neck. This was not an everyday occurrence, even in New York.

We got into conversation and I discovered he was a retired doctor and a wise, interesting and probably lonely old bird. He had a very dry sense of humour that I warmed to. As he drew upon his reservoir of quip and anecdote, his serious face melted into a smile that was both benign and mischievous, a true raconteur. He was also a flirt with the ladies. We invited him to join us that evening for a meal, and to our great pleasure he did. I thought it would be lovely to introduce this great character to my American hostess of yesteryear. It was an idea that appeared to die a death.

Quite a few days later I was walking through Central Park on my way to see my ninety year old lady friend. As I walked down Park Avenue, who should I see but the same crumpled up character clutching a paper parcel in one hand and a broken down walking stick in the other emerging from an apartment. A moment earlier, a moment later, I would have missed him. I invited him to come with me. And so we