Stephen Jones - 30 Years of Social Change

30
YEARS

OF

SOCIAL
CHANGE

Edited by Stephen Jones

Foreword by Jessica Kingsley

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
London and Philadelphia

Contents

Breaking the Silence and Secrecy of
Childhood Sexual Abuse

A Brief Story of Counselling in Schools
Since 1987

Youth Work: Personal, Social and
Political Education

Changing Views on Safeguarding Children
Since 1987

30 Years in the Field of Adoption and
Foster Care

30 Years of Service User Involvement
and Advocacy

Developments in Art Therapy Over the
Past 30 Years

Occupational Therapy: Everyday Acts Become
Our Legacy

Gwen Adshead , consultant forensic psychiatrist and
psychotherapist

Charles C. Buck , acupuncture and Chinese medicine clinician, scholar and educator; past chair of the British Acupuncture
Council

Foreword

Thirty years is an arbitrary period a bit more than a generation, a bit less than a working lifetime. This small book marks 30 years of publishing here at JKP, in and around the social and behavioural sciences, with the increasingly explicit goal of helping to create positive social change.

We thought it would be interesting to ask authors from across the areas we have published to write briefly about the changes for better or worse they have seen across their area of expertise, and what they might hope (or fear) for the future. And what they say is really interesting. Mostly, things are better; with increasing understanding of conditions such as autism, discrimination and fear has reduced and the autism community (which barely existed 30 years ago) is now a thriving and dynamic source of information, friendship, and support. In social work, the last few years have seen increasing hardship and distress amongst societys poorest, particularly in the UK, but the calibre of work with communities is just amazing in its creativity and understanding of the complex issues, while changes both in the education system and in the challenges facing young people, as well as much better understanding of the requirements of special education, have had a major impact on the teaching profession. Singing Dragon authors have also seen enormous change, in attitudes to and knowledge about acupuncture and Chinese medicine and major developments in the science of aromatherapy, and of nutrition.

As publishers, we have been incredibly fortunate not just to feel that we are contributing to positive change with the books that we have published over those years, but also to work with so many interesting, energetic, and highly creative people, and to have made so many friends with shared values. We are so grateful to all the people who have published with us over the years, and most immediately to those of them who contributed their time to create this interesting book thank you all!

Jessica Kingsley

22nd September 2017

73 Collier Street, London N1 9BE

Fake News, Post-Truth and the Glimmer of Hope

Some Changes in the Educational Landscape, 19872017

PAUL COOPER

Imagine, if you can, a world without e-mail, Facebook and Twitter, where the word Amazon, for most people, conjures up images of a tropical rainforest and an absolutely enormous river, and google is (if it is anything) the kind of thing that a pre-verbal infant might say to our amusement.

Well, these were just some of the features of life in 1987. This was also a time when most of our reading material came in printed form on paper, and when if you wanted a book to read you would probably have to make a physical journey to a bookshop or library.

If you made the journey by car you would have had to pay something like 38p for a litre of petrol. You would have taken your book home to a house or flat with an average value (in the UK) of 40,000. The idea that Leicester City might one day be one of the most talked about English football clubs throughout the world would have seemed preposterous, as would the possibility that a certain Mr D. Trump might become the most powerful man in the world.

But as Bob Dylan (that surprise recipient for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016) once wrote, things have changed.

The Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Year for 2016 was post-truth, which is defined as:

Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. (Oxford Living Dictionaries 2017)

This is quite sobering. A major contender for Word (or should that be Phrase?) of the Year 2017 is fake news, which is in some ways just another version of post-truth, but with the difference that fake news involves the promotion of deliberate falsehoods while post-truth refers to what Michael Gove who is, at the time of writing, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and lets not forget, a former Secretary of State for Education ( 20102014 ) demonstrated when, during the EU referendum campaign, he stated that people in this country have had enough of experts.

Together, these words say a lot about the current zeitgeist. It might be argued that one of the greatest differences between 1987 and 2017 is that in the world of the internet, Twitter and fake news people are empowered to make confident decisions on the basis of nothing other than their own or others gut feelings. If we no longer trust experts, then we are freed from the tiresome responsibility of having to justify our opinions through an appeal to evidence. On the other hand, the blind and bland appeal to that is what the experts say is also problematic. After all, experts do not always agree. Thoughtful and informed people do not take claims from anyone at face value; they listen to trusted sources and evaluate the claims of these sources for their validity. Validity often refers to verifiable facts on which the claims are based. In the absence of verifiable factual evidence, the thoughtful person may reserve judgement. The point is that expert opinion is only as good as the evidence on which it is based. The expertise of the expert resides in his/her command of a particular field of evidence-based enquiry.

But there is a growing contempt for evidence. We see this at work in the recent resurgence in the advocacy for grammar schools in England; something that would have seemed unlikely in 1987. Though they have always had their devotees, grammar schools have been shown repeatedly, through research, to reinforce rather than ameliorate the negative effects of socio-economic disadvantage (Andrews, Hutchinson and Johnes 2016; LSE 2014; Sutton Trust 2014). It would probably have surprised people in 1987 to learn that studies of social mobility, which inevitably take considerable time to complete because of their reliance on longitudinal data, by expert organizations including the Sutton Trust in the UK, demonstrate a marked decline in social mobility since 1977 (Sutton Trust 2007).

The reasons for this are multifarious, but they tend to coalesce around what has come to be referred to as the rise of neoliberalism. This is an ideological (as opposed to evidence-based) political philosophy which applies the principles of consumerprovider economics to almost everything, including public services such as education and health. The poverty of this ideology when applied to education (and health, for that matter) lies in its bland and ignorant assumptions that the quality of outcomes is easy to define, and all consumers are equally well equipped to make the kinds of choices that make markets work.