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A picture of mental health
David Regis
The author presents some of the findings from the Schools Health Education Unit’s annual research findings, to set the record straight following misuse of the publication by the media. This report, Young People in 2000, collects information from young people, by using the Health-Related Behaviour Questionnaire, anonymously and under teacher supervision. The findings include 42% of 10-11 year old females have a fear of bullying; older pupils fear bullying less often.
Girls interrupted
Cathy Street
This article is based on the report ‘Not a Problem? Girls and School Exclusion’. It focuses on the experiences of girls in schools and the use of exclusion.
Listen up
Susan Stranks
This article discusses how radio can be beneficial to children’s learning and speech and language development, but the author states that the last 25 years have seen a reduction children’s radio broadcasting. However, she mentions the launch of a national, children’s radio network called Abracadabra.
New York, New York
Ashton Applewhite
Four months after terrorist planes demolished the World Trade Centre, the author describes how both children and adults in New York are coming to terms with what happened.
Seen and heard - helping children find a voice
Professor Al Aynsley-Green
The National Clinical Director for Children (or Children’s Czar) discusses the factors surrounding why so often children don’t receive the attention and services they require. He states that ‘the blunt truth is that, collectively, we have not been particularly effective as advocates for children’. He outlines his vision for the future and his hopes for the Children’s Taskforce and the Children’s National Service Framework.
Zero tolerance
Mary Collins
The author gives an account of how her son was excluded from school, and impact the school’s hard-line exclusion policy had on her family. She talks about how the school made them feel degraded, friends avoided them, and how they received anonymous phone calls.
Opinion: Schools out
Fiona Berry
The author argues that children are forced into schools far too early. She says that all children develop at a different rate, and that schools don’t account for this. She mentions home education as an alternative. She educated her children at home, but says that Local Education Authorities (LEAs) regard home educators as "dangerous subversives who are inflicting their unorthodox views on their children".
Opinion: The messianic tendency
Stewart Britten
The author argues that the drive to provide equal access to mental health services is resulting in long waiting lists and children and families not getting enough skilled help. He asked whether child and adolescent mental health services should be treating behaviour problems. He suggests ways of responding to increasing rates of referral and says that resources should be aimed at early intervention.
Opinion: Unreasonable defence
Hilton Dawson MP
The author states that parents or guardians can use the antiquated defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’ if they are brought before the courts, accused of physically harming their child. He argues that the abolition of smacking children would benefit both children and parents, and he says that it is time for England to ban the physical punishment of children.
Review: A ma souer!, Ghost world, Storytelling, Riding in cars with boys, and Lovely Rita
Steve Flood
This is a review of 5 films that all look at issues that effect young people. A Ma Soeur! This follows the lives of two sisters during a claustrophobic school summer holiday with their parents. The elder sister finds a boyfriend and is put under pressure to lose her virginity, whilst the younger sister lives in her sisters shadow relieving her distress by eating. Ghost World, tells the stories of two high school leavers and their struggles to maintain their friendships in a changing world. Story Telling, looks at the practice of filmmaking and film watching, which revolves around a hapless documentary maker unintentionally skewering his teenager slacker subject, Scooby. Riding in Cars with Boys, is based on a true story of a 15 year old girl who is forced into marriage as she becomes pregnant, and now aged 36 mourns her life of lost possibilities. The son grows up realising he represents the death of his mothers dreams. Finally, Lovely Rita. The main character, Rita is bullied and isolated by the girls at school. Her behaviour becomes more difficult and her parent’s response is to lock her in her room. It is a commentary on how the social institutions in which teenagers spend their lives (school, family, church etc) can so catastrophically fail to understand or care for them.
Review: Children's rights in education
Susan Rees
This book expands on the themes of the first International Conference on Children’s Rights in Education, which was held in 1998. It is a philosophical and academic discussion of the benefits to society of respecting and recognising the rights of the child.
Review: Community-based psychotherapy with young people
Roger Booker
This collection of essays was written by workers at The Brandon Centre and edited by its Director. It provides an account of how the psychoanalytic perspective underpinning their practice is being developed to meet the challenge of today’s adolescents, in particular those who have traditionally failed to respond to this approach.
Review: Father and I
Tom Whyte
The prologue of this book states that ‘You can’t change the past but, with understanding you can sometimes draw the poison out of it’. This sets the agenda for this moving account of the difficult relationship the author endured with his father.
Review: Flying sparks
Louisa Mullan
The author grew up on the edge of Las Vegas well away from the glitzy parts of this city. For children, particularly girls, abuse and sexual violence occur with shocking regularity.
Review: Getting the buggers to behave
Pande Shahov
This book is aimed at teachers who are new to the profession. The author begins with an emphasis on the teacher's first meeting with students in order to ensure a good base for future work in the class. The reviewer tried out a few of the suggestions from the book, and found that most of them worked and, hopefully will improve students’ behaviour in the long run.
Review: Jimmy Corrigan
Nick Hornby
This book is about loneliness, familial dysfunction, inadequacy and bullying. Jimmy is in his mid-thirties, a socially inadequate loner with a dull job and an overbearing mother. Out of the blue, his absent father contacts him and invites him to visit…. We learn that Jimmy’s father was similarly alienated from his father.
Review: No turning back
Juliana Lisk
This novel follows the journey of Sipho, a 12 year-old South African boy, who runs away from his abusive father and ends up on the streets of Johannesburg.
Review: Nuturing emotional literacy
Joan Baxter
This book offers a definition of emotional literacy, a framework for the assessment and nurture of one’s own emotional literacy and an approach to promoting emotional literacy through schools. It is based on an initiative led by Southampton’s Psychology Service, and is written by the authority’s principal educational psychologist.
Review: Schooling, and The new girl
Amanda Edwards
Both novels share a rites-of-passage theme and are adept at portraying the raw state of adolescence. However, they focus on different aspects of the collision between youth and adulthood. Schooling shows how knowing children can be, and The New Girl reminds us how clueless adults so often are.
Review: The breadwinner
Daniel Cohen and Benjamina Avro-Owiriwa
This book in based on a true story of life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, from the perspective of an 11 year old girl who pretends she is a boy.
Review: The careers and personal advisers' hand book 2001/2
Pat Wade
The aims of this book are twofold, firstly to provide an overview of the guidance industry during this time of transition, and secondly to be a source of reference for career advisers, and other guidance agencies.
Review: The child's world
Ceila Atherton
This book originated as part of a training and development pack to accompany The Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families. The book contains four sections, and these cover: the framework, the assessment process, assessing the developmental needs of the children, and assessing parental capacity to respond to the developmental needs of the child.
Review: The Fox boy
Catherine Gough
This is the story of a Maori boy who was abducted in 1868 at the age of about five, and brought up as the son of New Zealand’s Prime Minister. When this boy grows up, now renamed William Fox, he learns of the injustice that the Maori people suffered at the hands of the colonists and makes contact with his real family again, and helps them to defend the right of their land.
Webwatch: Relatively speaking
Paula Lavis
The author looks at websites around mental health issues, for children and young people. The author road-tested some of the websites on her young nieces.
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