The Riots: who’s right – Cameron or Blair?

 celebrity, civil unrest, community, crime, government, heroes and inspirational figures, human rights, morality, politics, Psychology, science, society, Sociology  6 Responses »
Aug 232011
 

Today what appears to be the final battle to overthrow Colonel Muammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya is rightly dominating the news - as it probably will for several days, as stories of valour, celebration, desperation and atrocity are told from the streets of Tripoli. There will also be much speculation about what kind of Libya will emerge from the civil war - even whether the rebels can hold off splintering into their own warring factions. And, inevitably, since the West invested so much in the NATO bombs that so potently aided the rebel victory, there will be speculation as to what the West can do to help build a new Libya that is friendly to the West and accepting of its interests in North Africa and the Middle East.

In and amidst this focus on Libya, we also need continue the debate about what brought violent rioters and looters onto the streets of London and other cities just a fortnight back and what we should do about these issues.

Both David Cameron and Tony Blair had key articles in this weekend’s Sunday newspapers, setting out their positions.

Moral decline, moral panic and folk devils
As you might expect for a piece in the Sunday Express, Cameron was aiming squarely at the traditional grass roots Tories who make up a substantial element of the Express’ readership. In a piece so right wing, he’s almost certainly not comfortable with it, Cameron wrote: “…a social fightback means instilling in our children and young people the decency, discipline and sense of duty that make good citizens.

The first place people learn these values is in the home. That is why I make no apology for talking about the importance of family and marriage. Every government policy must pass what I call the family test: does this make life better for families or worse? Does this make it easier to bring up well-behaved children or harder? Family is back at the top of the agenda.

Children also learn values in schools. Every school should be a place where children learn manners and morals but that is only possible when there is order in the classroom. So we are taking action to restore authority and boundaries, with teachers able to discipline pupils as they see fit and heads having the freedom to set uniform and behaviour policies and enforce them.

But I believe we can and should do more. When we see events as shocking as the riots and so many young people whose lives have no shape beyond the shape of their gang, no purpose beyond the next time they get smashed on drink or drugs, it is clear that the need to restore values calls for something new. That is why this Government is establishing National Citizen Service.”

Though he doesn’t actually use the term ‘moral decline’ in the Express, the tone of the piece is about reversing it and the term is being widely attributed to him and other senior Tory ministers, particularly Iain Duncan Smith. Attributing the term to Cameron and Duncan Smith in the context of blame for the riots fits with the ‘broken Britain’ theme which the likes of Cameron and Duncan Smith have been playing since at least 2007.

With their emphasis on broken - even ‘sick’ – Britain, Cameron and Duncan Smith are playing the old ‘moral panic’ card, first named by Stanley Cohen (1973) in his famous study of media reaction to events like the mods-‘n’-rockers beach fights in the early 1960s. And when Duncan Smith goes on about gangs and gang culture, he’s making them into what Cohen terms ‘folk devils’.

Cohen identifies the process as the media whip themselves up into a frenzy, creating a moral panic and exaggerating the menace of the folk devils so everyone is terrified o them - and this forces the police, local authorities, central government, etc , etc, into strong action to tame the folk devils and quiet the moral panic.

Which is not to say that there hasn’t been a change in morality and attitudes towards “decency, discipline and sense of duty”. As I pointed out in the Blog post, ‘Is Britain really broken?’, in January last year there have been considerable changes in public morality and consequent behaviour over the past 50 years, with the result that many institutions of society - especially the family and education - have changed considerably. Behaviours that were once relatively rare - eg: taking recreational drugs, men and women cohabiting as an alternative to marriage, young women having children outside of marriage, people conducting same sex relationships openly - are now fairly common and some of these changed behaviours are now so accepted they have become the norm.

Nor is this to deny that there is a problem in a number of areas with gang culture. Much of London’s rise in gun crime over the past 5 years has been unequivocally linked to gangs. Clearly there were organised gangs at work carrying out some of the looting during the riots.

Nor is this to belittle any of what went on during the riots. A handful of people died, many more were injured - some very seriously - and many, many more were traumatised by their experiences. Property was damaged and, in some cases, destroyed; and livelihoods were wiped out.

But were the riots really just the result of a changed public morality? If so, why hasn’t the whole country descended into arson and looting anarchy?

Blair and the Underclass
Writing in The Observer allowed Blair to present a more reasonable and reasoned argument to the so-called ‘chattering classes’. His article, ‘Blaming a Moral Decline for the Riots makes Good Headlines but Bad Policy’, is clearly aimed at presenting the Cameron-Duncan Smith approach as over-simplistic. He writes: “The big cause is the group of alienated, disaffected youth who are outside the social mainstream and who live in a culture at odds with any canons of proper behaviour. And here’s where I simply don’t agree with much of the commentary. In my experience they are an absolutely specific problem that requires a deeply specific solution.

The left says they’re victims of social deprivation, the right says they need to take personal responsibility for their actions; both just miss the point. A conventional social programme won’t help them; neither – on its own – will tougher penalties.

“The key is to understand that they aren’t symptomatic of society at large. Failure to get this leads to a completely muddle-headed analysis of what has gone wrong. Britain as a whole is not in the grip of some general ‘moral decline’…

This is a hard thing to say, and I am of course aware that this too is generalisation. But the truth is that many of these people are from families that are profoundly dysfunctional, operating on completely different terms from the rest of society, either middle class or poor.”

Though he never actually uses the term, Blair is clearly referring to the ‘Underclass’ - those of (usually petty) criminal attitudes and behaviour, living beyond the fringes of society. Benefit cheats, prostitutes, small-time drug dealers, burglars, etc, etc, – the kind of characters you see on Shameless - are the kind of people who fit Charles Murray’s (1989) criteria for the Underclass. (See: Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism in the Society section of the main web site.)

The fact that the looting was largely of luxury goods, not basic essentials, indicates that those looters were not the desperately poor; they already had the basics of life sorted - perhaps through fraudulent benefits claims and/or ‘black market’ jobs and/or petty criminal activity. These looters were people who wanted more and had no hesitation in using serious criminal means to get it.

So far so good for Blair’s theory of the Underclass being a large element in the rioting: the profiles fit.

That is, until you start looking at the statistics on the occupations of those who were processed through the courts in the week after the riots. The most common occupation cited was ‘student’. Despite the best efforts of Lib Dem Deputy Leader Simon Hughes to point out that there are some benefits in the way university tuition fees are to be funded from 2012, undoubtedly the next tranche of potential university students do feel pretty aggrieved. But what excuse do the current ‘students’ have for causing such mayhem? Other occupations noted included soldier, scaffolder, chef, lifeguard, postman, hairdresser, forklift driver, electrician, journalist and an Olympic ambassador. There was even the 19-year-old daughter of millionaire parents in the dock!

An estimated 1 in 5 of the rioters were under the age of 17.

Sorry, Tony! While there can be little doubt a sizeable percentage of the rioters were from the Underclass, there were many who weren’t.

Andrew Gilligan, in the previous week’s Observer, wrote: “There were broadly three groups of rioters – organised career criminals targeting specific high value merchandise; semi-organised youths wanting ‘pure terror’ and whatever they could lay their hands on; and those who got carried away in the excitement. Many of those turned out to be very far from the stereotype of the hopeless underclass.”

A context for the riots
To explore the issues of who and how further, let’s do a bit of scene setting - because, as Gilligan illustrates, it’s a hugely complex issue which neither Cameron’s article nor Blair’s get to grips with successfully.

The country is still struggling to emerge from recession. Public sector cuts are beginning to bite deeply, with hundreds of thousands having either lost their jobs already, about to lose them or worry they are likely to. The private sector, which was meant to pick up the slack of the unemployed from the public sector, is largely not doing this. The rate of business liquidation is still high and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands are being wiped off the stock markets virtually each day. Some ministers, like business secretary Vince Cable and justice secretary Ken Clarke are warning this misery could go on for years and years.

Everybody it seems who understands anything of finance and economics - except Ed Balls! - agrees the cuts are necessary. It’s just the details - how far, how fast - on which most of the major politicians quibble. David Cameron (and Nick Clegg), when first announcing the cuts, promised that everyone would feel the pain equally - that we were all in this together. Except now it seems the bankers who are widely perceived to have precipitated the whole crisis in the first place. They’re back to getting enormous bonuses…even when their banks are mostly-owned by the taxpayer! And then what about the ‘super rich’ - including the multi-six-figure salary civil servants? (Especially those who buy their groceries on their department credit cards!?) There aren’t many stories of 16-bedroom mansions being repossessed or Ferraris and Bentleys being returned to the showrooms because their owners can’t keep up the repayments….

And George Osborne talks of reducing the top rate of tax from 50p in £1 to 45p?!? Has the man no common sense at all? Osborne may well be right when he says that, in the grand scheme of things, the amount recovered by the Exchequer in that 5p difference has little real effect on the country’s finances but that it does scare off many top wealth generators to other more tax-friendly countries…but, George, it’s a matter of perception! While the common folk suffer, the Tories are seen to look after their rich pals and the Lib Dems are seen as weak wimps unable to restrain the Tory greed.

Of course, it’s not that simple; but that’s the kind of message that takes hold not just in the real Underclass but among both those who are genuinely disadvantaged by the cuts and those who aren’t but perceive the way the Government is handling things to be grossly unfair. In Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) terms, the club of the ‘Seduced’ is becoming more and more exclusive while more and more of us, even those don’t sink completely into the Underclass, join the ranks of the excluded ‘Repressed’, no longer able to afford a foreign holiday or buy the kid the latest PlayStation. While we suffer, through the likes of OK! and Hello! and various TV shows about celebrities and the wealthy, we can wind ourselves up with seething jealousy of those whose opulent lifestyles are not in the slightest compromised by the cuts.

Everyone sharing the pain equally…? I don’t think so, Dave!

In vMEMETIC terms, BLUE is disillusioned because people who pay their taxes, conform to the best nuclear family tradition, try to bring their children up ‘decently’ and vote Conservative - in other words, they do everything they’re meant to - only to lose their job through no fault of their own. That destabilises PURPLE, with money worries and a lack of purpose for the newly unemployed putting immense pressure on family life.

And, as anyone who has studied Spiral Dynamics knows, when BLUE order falls apart, the RED vMEME comes roaring through which means power, not order, determines what happens.

An explosion of RED
So now locate yourself, reader, in the late afternoon of Saturday 6 August outside Tottenham police station as the peaceful protest over the police shooting of Mark Duggan turns nasty, just as it seemed to be petering out. Undoubtedly there was real anger at the shooting of Duggan - rumours were flying around that he had been effectively executed! - and at the police being unable to give the protesters the information they wanted about the investigation into the shooting. From reports about him, Duggan’s profile would fit ‘Underclass gang member’ and the protestors could probably be categorised as a mix of Underclass and community/political activists.

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Burning police car, Tottenham, 6 August [Copyright © 2011 ITN/Channel 4

It’s not yet been revealed who it was set the 2 police cars on fire; but, as soon as the police failed to deal with those incidents, they signalled the weakness of BLUE. What followed over the next 3 nights in London was an orgy of RED destruction, self-indulgence and wilful criminality. The more the police failed to control it, the more RED felt free from BLUE’s shackles and able to do exactly what it wanted.

With the ORANGE instant and mostly monitoring-proof technology of Blackberry Messenger (BBM), rioters and looters were able to organise incredibly quickly, easily outstretching those police units that did deploy. Other units failed to deploy properly, watching impotently from hundreds of yards away as rioters and looters tore apart and burned shops.

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Police watching a burning bus, Tottenham, 6 August [Copyright © 2011 Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Through BBM, the Internet and TV news, the ineffectiveness of BLUE to contain RED was flashed around the country. By the third night, there were copycat riots in various other parts of England - although in Birmingham and Manchester, there appeared to be little burning - more, it was just outright smashing and looting.

Where the BLUE vMEME appeared strongest in some of the London riots was not in the police attempting to maintain order but in the meticulous planning with which some of the looting was carried out.

In the week afterwards the Metropolitan Police came in for considerable criticism. Clearly the Met were caught out by the scale of the violence and there was confusion in their command - journalists David Barrett & Patrick Hennessy claim they were told by some frontline officers that they were instructed not to advance on rioters. Barrett & Hennessy also offer evidence that some officers were reluctant to battle the rioters without assurance that they would be immune from prosecution and/or being sued if rioters were seriously injured in the confrontations. That assurance was not forthcoming apparently. The bizarre situation where police officers were reluctant to do their job through fear of being suspended or sued by violent lawbreakers is the work of the GREEN vMEME, with its positive discrimination to protect the rights of all, including lawbreakers.

The short-term fix: stopping the violence
If we want to make sure nothing like the Tottenham riot of 6 August escalating into a series of riots and looting sprees over 4 days ever happens again, then policing needs to be much more robust. For a start, that means intelligence on those in both the Underclass and the professional criminal networks of whom there is serious reason to believe would jump at the chance of exploiting a riot to loot high value goods. As soon as something like the protest of the 6 August starts, they need to be picked up and held in cells until the protest is over

Then the police response to violent protests must be able to curtail them. Standing back while shops and homes are looted and burned is not an option. As soon as they do that, they signal BLUE has failed and liberate RED to do whatever it wants. If water cannon and rubber bullets are needed, they must be used. In the extreme, when the lives of innocent people are clearly at risk, then the police must be authorised to use live ammunition. If the police cannot curtail the violence, then the army should be brought in.

BLUE must not be perceived to have failed. If it has, then not only does it liberate RED to commit wanton mayhem – but those who are threatened by the mayhem are given the de facto right to take the law into their own hands to protect their families and their property. Vigilantism. When BLUE fails to protect, RED can also dominate in those who seek to fight off the lawbreakers – even though they may trash the law themselves in the way they defend themselves. (See the Society feature ‘When BLUE fails, call for Clint!’ ) We saw proto-vigilantism in the Turkish men who defended their shops with baseball bats and knives and in the Sikhs who rushed to defend their temple from rioters and looters. If not for the calming appeal of the magnificent Tariq Jahan, father of one of the 3 young men killed by a rioter’s car in Birmingham, vigilantism may well have led to some very ugly reprisals and further escalation of the violence.

Do the kind of tactics I am advocating impinge upon the human rights of individuals? Most certainly…but the protection of the community has to be of greater importance than several hours inconvenience for a handful of individuals. Would the kind of tactics I am advocating require additional legislation? Most certainly…then get on with it!

Do police officers still need to be accountable for their actions in what might effectively be a pitched battle? Of course…but, in the heat of battle, you need RED daring much more than BLUE caution. And it must be remembered that the rioters and looters deliberately put themselves in harm’s way. Police officers committing abuses on prisoners after a battle would need to be prosecuted in the usual way.

Would such tactics cost extra money? Of course; but as London mayor Boris Johnson has pointed out to David Cameron, he urgently needs to rethink the Coalition’s policy on cuts to the police forces.

BLUE order must be maintained.

The longer-term: healing sick Britain
Firstly, David Cameron has got to get his head around image management. As was illustrated last May-June by 10 Downing Street hiring a personal photographer for Cameron in the same week he first talked about just how savage the cuts were going to be, he doesn’t always think about how his behaviour may be meta-stated by others.

Allowing Osborne to propose lowering the top rate of tax in the same week as the riots was a public relations blunder of epic proportions!

People in general are much more likely to ‘grin and bear it’ if they really do think everyone is feeling the pain equally. Bankers’ bonuses and ‘fat cat’ public sector salaries being seen to be protected or even championed by government ministers is to invite dissent!

Secondly, as discussed in Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism, we need to develop 2nd Tier perspectives on how Capitalism operates in the Western world because ORANGES’s combination of drive for profits and labour-reducing technology is putting more and more people out of work or into low-paid menial jobs - with some of those people sinking into the Underclass and swelling its numbers. The ever-widening gap between rich and poor is a recipe for violent disorder. As Gadhafi’s regime enters its death throes, it’s worth remembering that the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions were initially ignited by poverty and economic hopelessness. Allowing that gap to widen ever further could well lead to more and more violence in the UK.

We need a country where reward in life is related fairly to contribution to society, where there are opportunities for everybody to contribute and where there are clear routes for social mobility. The Underclass then should be small in size, despised by the vast majority of citizens and relatively manageable.

Using the 4Q/8L model, we can see that addresses the lower right quadrant but we also need to address the left quadrants, focusing on culture and individual responsibility.

It’s not possible to turn the clock back to the 1950s and restore those values but we can - indeed, we must – restore the strength of the BLUE vMEME at a cultural level so that it is perceived as a good thing to take responsibility and to support the structures of society. That support should not be unquestioning but, if we are working towards a fair society, then questioning and drive for change should possible from within. As Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) point out, when discussing spiral wizardry, in managing any kind of institution, you need to scan constantly for change - because change is inevitable. Therefore, you need to have strategies to accommodate and incorporate change, rather than suppress it.

In the UK we have a mixed message culture - typified by The Sun regularly engaging in moral panics and calling for draconian measures to deal with the folk devils (RED/BLUE zealotry) while also showing topless girls on Page 3 and female celebrities flashing their knickers in the Entertainment section (ORANGE unashamedly milking RED’s thirst for ‘naughtiness’ and excitement). If we are to change people’s values, then we need to be crystal clear in the messages that are sent out. If the mindset of many is governed by RED, then we can’t demand it instantly change it to BLUE. Clare W Graves showed years ago that changes in motivation don’t work that way. But there are things we can do to encourage vMEMETIC change. Eg:-

  • Reward those who marry – Cameron’s idea of tax breaks for people who marry is one way of doing it
  • Show in simple, layman’s terms the psychological science which demonstrates time and time again that, generally speaking and exceptions apart, people in long-term relationships with a partner are happier (overall), usually healthier and often live longer – and their children tend to do better emotionally, socially and academically
  • Make it cool to conform to ‘family values’ by getting the media to focus on public figures and big name celebrities who do exactly that – thus, making them role models for younger people

Designing the future of the United Kingdom – which is what we’re really talking about - is, however, a remit way beyond this Blog. That’s for the Centre of Human Emergence UK , the academics and the various think tanks, using a MeshWORK process. But what is needed is a common understanding of the sociopsychological forces which have brought us to this present state of being.

In their key articles in the Sunday newspapers, David Cameron and Tony Blair each saw some of the problems; they didn’t see the complete picture. Consequently they could only offer partial solutions which may not work much, or even at all, because the problems are all so interconnected. As Ken Wilber (1996) says, we must ‘transcend and include’ the partial views and solutions to create the full picture of what is going on. Only then can we create sustainable long-term solutions.

Why we must win in Afghanistan

 Afghanistan, American Foreign Policy, cross-cultural, government, human rights, international conflict, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  11 Responses »
Jul 152009
 

The West simply cannot afford to lose its war in Afghanistan. As the soldiers’ bodies come home in ever-increasing numbers, pressure will inevitably grow for a withdrawal. Already an unpopular war in continental Europe, it will become increasingly difficult for the American and British governments to keep their resolve if media and public pressure focus on the costs in terms of lives and money and there is little sign of real progress.

Unfortunately military experts anticipate 2-3 years of hard combat and several more years of Western military presence if the South of the country is to be stabilised. But, if we don’t pay those costs, then the Taliban are likely to take over government again in Kabul. It is thought that, in spite of their apparent significant defeat in the Swat Valley, their eyes are set next on Islamabad and the prize of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Even if Pakistan doesn’t fall, Afghanistan will continue to flood the West with heroin (in spite of the Taliban officially being against opium production!) and it will almost certainly go back to being a training camp for al-Qaeda terrorists.

What do we need – another 9/11 or 7/7 – to remind us what British and American troops are fighting and dying for?

Part of the problem: the nature of the Taliban
When the Americans smashed the Taliban in 2001, they were perceived by many Afghans to be liberators. The Taliban’s 5 year regime had been brutal, repressive (particularly for women and non-Muslims) and economically disastrous.

What should have been the opportunity for the West to be seen as helping the Afghans rebuild their shattered country was fumbled when George W Bush decided to bring down Saddam Hussein. American energy went into first of all justifying an assault and then pursuing a war that turned into a bitter, costly and lengthy occupation. Not only did the reconstruction of Afghanistan go very much on the back burner; but increasingly the war in Iraq was seen as an anti-Muslim war in most Muslim countries – with the result that many young Muslims from relatively moderate backgrounds were radicalised. The mess in Iraq helped breathe new life into the Taliban who began to creep back in force while the Americans were too busy trying to prevent outright civil war in Iraq.

What also helped the Taliban come back was that the government structure the West helped set up and is now trying to sustain is demonstrably corrupt – arguably from Hamid Karzai down. It needs to be remembered that many officials, especially in local government, were once the bandit leaders of the Northern Alliance which the Americans used as their ground troops in 2001. Using the Northern Alliance that way certainly saved thousands of American soldiers’ lives but it also opened the door into legitimate government for those who were ruthless robbers and murderers. In Spiral Dynamics, terms the RED vMEME was given the opportunity to use BLUE structures for its own ends – so all but inevitably it lined its own pockets! In the South of the country locals say they prefer to use Taliban judges rather than their government counterparts because they are more honest.

In the South (and across the border in Pakistan) the Taliban are increasingly becoming indistinguishable from the Pashtun people. The Pashtun tribes are a good home for the Taliban. For the most part, rural, poor and religious, the Pushtans have little in common with the urban elites of Kabul – looking to gain from the Westernisation of their country – or the other tribes from the North. The Pushtans are primarily dominated by PURPLE tribalism, undoubtedly led by leaders with strong RED while the mullahs peddle a RED-BLUE hardline form of Islamic zealotry. The BLUE-ORANGE-GREEN values the West wants to promote of respect for human rights, gender equality, religious moderation and one person/one (secret) vote Democracy simply don’t fit with the Taliban/Pushtan mindset. The values mismatch is huge.

When the Americans smashed the Taliban, they drove out what little BLUE culture there was in Afghanistan. As we know all too well, when BLUE goes, RED steps into the vacuum. No wonder Afghanistan is a violent and corrupt place! When the Taliban started to creep back, they offered some sense of order against the corruption and secularisation emanating from Kabul. If the Americans had hoped ORANGE-driven modernisation would take root in Kabul and spread from that centre, it was a clear lack of understanding that, for healthy ORANGE to grow, there needs to be foundation of strong, healthy BLUE. Although they were very different countries, the collapse of Communism in the USSR and Yugoslavia did not open the door to ORANGE’s MacDonaldisation strategies; instead the loss of that BLUE superstructure let loose RED gangsterism and PURPLE tribal enmities. If anyone in the White House or the Pentagon had thought it through, what has happened with the resurgence of the Taliban was, in fact, predictable.

The problem with the convergence of  ‘Taliban’ and ‘Pushtan’ is that the Pushtans comprise around 40% of Afghanistan’s population and are the largest single ethnic group. That’s an awful lot of people to fight.

Part of the Problem: the West is confused
What do we want in Afghanistan – other than for our soldiers not to be killed and our much-needed money to be haemorrhaging away? (It is estimated that the war will cost Britain £3.4 billion this year alone.) And once our objectives are clear, do we know what we have to do to achieve them?

Beyond ‘winning’ – presumably meaning breaking the Taliban for good? denying al-Qaeda the use of Afghanistan? – and getting out, it’s not entirely clear just what the objectives are. Certainly, as in Iraq, not enough thought has been given to the post-invasion reconstruction – and what thought has been given has been based on erroneous assumptions. Ie: that with a little money and a little effort, we can make them just like us – capitalist consumers. It’s a mistake the West has been making repeatedly ever since Walt Rostow (1960) came up with his 5-stage Modernisation Theory for saving the Third World from Communism.

What Spiral Dynamics shows us is that we have to work with where people are at – and, if the Pashtuns aren’t ready yet for gender equality, then we need to put that on the back burner until they’re ready to grow into it. Offending their values is just going to get them reaching for their AK47s.

Our objectives need to include helping develop an Afghanistan where the tribes can co-exist peacefully, where people can take pride in being Afghan, where there is respect for a universal and fairly-applied legal system. Gender equality and one person/one (secret) vote Democracy can come further down the line. What matters now is that people feel safe, have respect for themselves and others and there is confidence in the government and the law. And, of course, that law needs to be compatible with a form of Islam that emphasises charity, faith and order. Such an Afghanistan would be distinctly unappealing to the Taliban who feed on dissatisfaction.

Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg recognised some of this when he said NATO should not be over-ambitious “by trying to import overnight a Western-style democracy in a country that has never had a functional government” but instead should aim to stabilise Afghanistan “to provide a space for the state to grow.”

If we are clear on our objectives, then can we implement the strategies to achieve them?

Because it contributed significantly to the relative calming of Iraq, the concept of high visibility patrolling the streets with the overtly-stated aim of protecting the ordinary citizens from the insurgents (Taliban) is being tried now in Afghanistan. High visibility, of course, means easy target – and that’s one of the reasons the British casualties have increased. (Apart from the fact the troops claim to be significantly under-resourced – attributed by many commentators to be result of big cuts in defence spending. (A lack of big picture thinking in BLUE-ORANGE short-sighteness!)

Lord Paddy Ashdown, himself a former royal marine, thinks the protect-the-citizens strategy is an error – saying: “The army’s job in a war is to find and kill the enemy.”

Actually we need both strategies. Protectors of those who are reasonable and want to be safe and proud. Killers of those who are determined to kill us and cannot be reasoned with. But no more robot drones wiping out innocents at wedding parties! Thankfully, all of this – including avoiding civilian deaths – is endorsed by the new NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.

We must find ways of removing the dissatisfaction that the Taliban feed off. Strong support in Afghanistan for an Islam that emphasises charity and justice for all. Rebuilding the physical infrastructure. Redeveloping the economy, including crops that are a viable alternative to opium poppies. Creating hope. Building a sense of national identity. Etc. Etc.

As part of building a national identity, we need to find ways to demerge ‘Taliban’ and ‘Pashtun’. As a people the Pashtuns have a proud and ancient heritage, their traditional Pashtunwali code of honour promoting self-respect, independence, justice, hospitality, love, forgiveness and tolerance. It’s a stain on that code that they allow the brutal and repressive ways of the Taliban to influence them to such an extent. Like many peoples in our troubled world, the Pashtuns need to rediscover themselves.

Some of what is needed in Afghanistan, I have mentioned above. But what is needed really is a full MeshWORK analysis, looking through 4Q/8L at the health of all the vMEMES in play and then deciding what needs to be done. Multiple strategies will need to be employed simultaneously so that nothing is missed. And, as much as possible, the decisions and actions need to be undertaken by Afghans – otherwise they are the work of an occupying force. And, if the decision-making isn’t ‘democratic’ but the Afghan way (tribal/feudal), then we westerners need to allow them to be that way.

Yes, it will be hellishly expensive – in both money and lives – but we are in a war and wars are costly. The sooner Britain and the United States – and Europe, for that matter –, accept we are at war, the better. Plus, it is a war we have to win. But it is a war of hearts and minds as well as bullets and bombs.

Behaviour in schools: more needed than Steer proposes

 Africa, community, education, government, Psychology, regeneration, society, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Feb 212009
 

So the government’s ‘behaviour tsar’, Sir Alan Steer, has now published the fourth and final part of his review into behaviour in schools in England. And Secretary of State Ed Balls has signalled that he will support Steer’s recommendations. Among these are the ideas that schools should club together to provide social workers for disruptive students and support groups for the parents of such students.

The first response of National Association of Headteachers general secretary Mick Brookes was to point out that 3/10 of teachers leave the profession due to student behaviour problems while NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates has criticised behaviour management training as being ‘inadequate’.

Clearly student behaviour is a major issue that the government is not tackling successfully.

My own experience in the 9 years I’ve been back (part-time) in teaching is that there has been a general collapse in standards of discipline right across the secondary sector and reaching deep into Key Stage 2. In many schools, classes below the topmost sets in Key Stages 3 and 4 are often little more than battle zones.

There is, of course, in the popular imagination, a mythical Ealing Films-style ‘golden age’ when young teenagers were only mildly pranksterish in their misdemeanours and primary school children were uniformly well-behaved ‘little darlings’. In reality, that mythical golden age never existed and researchers from David Hargreaves (1967) on have been fairly consistent in painting classrooms – especially secondary – as places where there is a significant difference between what the teacher is charged with accomplishing (ie: a learning environment) and what the ‘students’ will accept as relevant to their existence.

Beyond the recent lurid headlines – even in the ‘serious papers’ – of primary students being expelled for bringing knives to school, is student behaviour actually getting worse? Are things more problematic than they were in Hargreaves’ day? If union statistics on teachers citing behaviour problems as their principal reason for leaving the profession can trusted, then the answer is Yes. Things are actually going from bad to worse.

It needs to be stated that there are schools where the majority of students are well-behaved and motivated to learn. Healing on the outskirts of Grimsby and Frederick Gough in a lower middle class/upper working class district of Scunthorpe are just two schools I’ve taught in and been impressed with the behaviour and attitudes of students. However, even in Harrogate, the affluent middle-class town I have called home for the past 4 years, all the schools experience some degree of behaviour problems and students being temporarily (and sometimes permanently) excluded is not exactly uncommon.

What’s going wrong?
8 years ago I created ‘A Downward Spiral…’ as an analysis of what was going wrong in Britain’s classrooms. As an overall view, it stands the test of time extremely well. Nothing it has to say about the roots of bad behaviour amongst children and the effect that has on classroom discipline and performance has dated at all. That I can say that with confidence is an indicator of how much the Government has failed to get to grips with problem behaviour amongst young people – in spite of all the money they have thrown at it.

Of course, ‘A Downward Spiral…’ deals with themes and makes generalisations. So individual circumstances and individual qualities such as temperament are not taken into account.. The big omission is the gender difference in behaviour – boys tending to have some degree or other of the impulsiveness and compulsiveness of Psychoticism (attributed by Hans J Eysenck & Sybil Eysenck (1976) to the effects of high levels of the male sex hormone testosterone.). Of course, girls do behave badly and some develop strongly habituated patterns of bad behaviour. However, it is boys who cause the bulk of disruptive behaviour in schools – it tends to be boys populating the school isolation units and boys who get excluded more often than not.

In children going through puberty and beyond, the RED vMEME, usually after playing second fiddle to PURPLE throughout early childhood, comes into its own as the driver to assert self and move the individual towards independence from their parents and old family as a prelude to establishing their own, new family as part of the next generation.

However, RED’s desire to assert self can be a real problem for others attempting to inhibit that person’s self-expressive behaviour. If, in a boy, RED settles into a Psychoticist temperament and forms a RED-Psychoticism centre of gravity or ‘lock’, then the self-expression will be impulsive and compulsive. 12 and 13-year-old boys are often at a loss to explain cognitively – in any way that makes any kind of rational sense – why they thumped the child next to them or persisted in shouting out the answer despite the teacher demanding the standard hands-up-in-silence routine for answering questions. What they’re experiencing is the unholy alliance in their psyches of RED and Psychoticism. They are truly, in that moment, effectively out of control.

It’s also worth noting here that, the more pre-puberty PURPLE fails to get its safety-in-belonging needs met, the more RED will emerge in an unhealthy way, perceiving the world as a ‘jungle’ where no one is safe and the only the strongest and toughest survive. Thus, it’s no surprise that the first ‘knifers’ in a school often come from one-parent homes suffering poverty and deprivation. The meme gets modelled and spread and more and more knifers appear as emergent RED in other kids fastens onto the knife as a means of asserting power.

And, as a final factor in our all too brief analysis of what’s going wrong, we need to consider the values parents give their children about school – the memes they infect them with. Since, pre-puberty, parents are the primary socialisers of their children, it is hardly surprising that, if parents don’t have positive values about school and education, their children don’t.

What to do?
Sir Alan Steers has recommended social workers for unruly students and support groups for their parents. On the face of it, this sounds expensive, bureaucratic and unlikely to be very effective. In fact, it seems like more of the GREEN vMEME’s failed policy of trying to create understanding and consideration – from which insights will presumably lead to respect and co-operation. It usually doesn’t. How many ‘problem children’ already have social workers attached to them, with little positive effect…?

Steers’ GREEN might just be blinding him to reality. In an interview in the Guardian last September, he said: “The vast majority of children don’t arrive at school in the morning thinking: oh, good, I’m going to get into trouble.” No, some actually do because of the kudos it brings them from other ‘bad boys’ – Nicolas Emler (1984) called this ‘reputation management’; if they can’t get esteem from academic success, their RED will lead them down other routes to get it. Plenty more drift into disruptive behaviour via that potent mix of RED and Psychoticism. All it needs is a few minutes of boredom and the child next to them gets kicked or otherwise provoked – a move made without thought of consequences other than to relieve the brief tedium. And bad behaviour easily becomes habituated if it is rewarded by other students. (Research – eg: P R Constanzo & M E Shaw (1966), A Palmonari, M I Pomberri & E Kirchner (1989), T O Harris (1997) – has shown consistently that teenagers are socialised more by their peers than anyone else.)

Steers rightly places great emphasis on improving the quality of teaching and learning and engaging students with interesting and relevant topics. However, making topics interesting and relevant can be an almighty challenge given what the ‘system’ says they should learn and what is actually really relevant to the lives of many children.

A personal anecdote…

Several years ago when teaching History at a secondary school in a highly deprived area of a town where the main industry, fishing, was mostly gone, I was tasked with teaching Year 8s (13-year-olds) about the Reformation. How was this relevant to teenagers whose fathers, uncles and grandfathers had worked the trawlers until the fishing industry had all but collapsed…teenagers, most of whom had never left that part of town and fewer even who had ever been in church??? (I polled one class and found that only one student had ever seen a Bible!) Even an attempt at turning the story of Henry VIII’s wives into an Eastenders-style soap met with only very limited success. My proposal that we should develop a local history module around the town’s fishing history – which would allow the Year 8s to collect personal anecdotes from family members – thus feeding PURPLE’s love of the oral tradition – along with the more standard ways of doing History was rejected on the grounds that we could only teach what the National Curriculum specified.

Most of the students at that school didn’t want to be there – saw no value in it because their parents saw no value in it (memetic infection) – and tried not to be there. Truancy rates were extremely high and the school’s Education Welfare Officer was forever cajoling and then threatening parents, to force them to send their teenage children to school.

To return to Steers’ recommendations, support groups for parents generally have a better track record than social workers attached to problem children – especially where there is an element of training in parenting skills involved. The biggest hurdle seems to be actually getting the parents of problem children committed to a support group and sticking with it. Such parents often have social, emotional and economic problems themselves and are already known to the police and social services in their own right.

Sir Alan Steers is one of the most successful headteachers of his generation and there is much of merit in his report. Undoubtedly there are major roles for social workers and support groups in improving behaviour; but, much, much more is needed. When we consider just the brief, partial analysis I have offered it is obvious that social workers and support groups are like trying to use high quality, expensive sticking plaster on a massive, gaping wound. If applied correctly as part of a raft of other measures, it might help make a difference. And so it is with Steers’ reported proposals. On their own, they are nothing like enough.

8 years ago I created ‘Potential Spiral Solutions’ as an action-oriented companion piece to ‘A Downward Spiral…’. Again there is nothing I would change…but there are a number of things I would add.

The strategies in ‘Potential Spiral Solutions’ need to form the core of a full-scale MeshWORK.

The MeshWORK concept was delineated retrospectively by Don Beck from his part in bringing Apartheid to an end in early-mid-1990s South Africa. By using what was shortly thereafter termed Spiral Dynamics, Beck helped turn the focus from colour of skin to who thought in what way. As was once put to me (perhaps over-optimistically?) by some white undergraduate students from the Boer-dominated Transvaal, Beck succeeded in taking racism out of South African politics…?!?!?

Put rather simplistically, Beck’s MeshWORKS concept involves bringing together all interested parties to look down the ‘spine of the Spiral’ at the relative health of each vMEME as a cultural operator – ie: at the relevant macro level – and then decide what to do about it in the interests of the Spiral as a whole.

The MeshWORK concept is at its most effective when designed through the 4Q/8L construct!

A MeshWORK will address the needs of each vMEME of all players in all contexts with regard to the health of the Spiral as a whole.

Making OFSTED useful
If Sir Alan Steers and his team really want to resolve the issue of disruptive students and the hellishly damaging impact they have on both teachers and other students, then they need to undertake a full MeshWORK process with all interested parties – teachers, police, social workers, parents and students, etc. They need to look at the health and well-being of each vMEME through the lens of each Quadrant and also how the vMEMES in each Quadrant relate to the vMEMES in the other Quadrants.

Strategies can then be developed to meet the needs of each vMEME in each Quadrant in a way that is conducive to the well-being of the Spiral as a whole.

And, because each school in each area will be unique, each school will need its own MeshWORK. Certainly, methodologies and strategies will be transferable between schools but the working assumption will need to be that every school requires a unique diagnosis and unique treatments.

Developing the mechanisms to put in place a MeshWORK for every school in the UK , obviously, would be very expensive. But, surely, the positive effect of learning how to inhibit the stimuli for negative behaviour and create positive classroom environments that will enable the vast majority of students to engage with the learning  process is a key part of the Government’s much vaunted Every Child Matters policy?

Plus, there are cost-savings to be gained in terms of reduded stress-induced absenteeism amongst teachers and reduced levels of crime and vandalism amongst children and teenagers.

Plus, the kind of network of MeshWORKS I’m proposing needn’t be that expensive. In OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services & Skills) there already exists a body and a framework for conducting a MeshWORK in every school in the country. After all, OSTED already have huge amounts of valuable data on every school and they are responsible (in terms of oversight) for ensuring that every educational institution and children’s service enables the children who use it to maximise their potential.

Of course, there would need to be some expansion of OFSTED’s remit beyind inspection and regulation to include support and guidance – but many OFSTED inspectors offer this informally anyway. The mindset of OFSTED would have to move way beyond BLUE to gain the holistic sense necessary to understand how learning really happens and what motivates people to learn. But the benefits to our young people – indeed, society as a whole – would far outweigh the costs of putting the mechanisms in place.

NEETs – are the Tories on the right path?

 community, education, Psychology, schemas & memes, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  2 Responses »
Jul 222008
 

What a pleasure when, from a sociopsychological point of view, some of the politicians appear to be getting it right for once. Or at least partly right! Taking some tentative steps on the right path, maybe….

David Cameron and David Willets have declared they want to solve the ‘NEET problem’ as part of the Conservatives’ plans to sort out ‘Broken Britain’.

In case you’re not familiar with ‘NEET’, it’s the acronym for ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’ – and the London School of Economics says that 18% of 16-17-year-olds are NEETs. (Department of Children, Familes & Schools (DCFS) data about a year ago had the figure at around 11%. Although we didn’t call them NEETs back then, the focus of the HemsMESH project 1999-2001 was how to make unemployed teenagers more employable. The national average then was said to be 14%.)

According to research by think tank Reform, NEETs are more likely than their peers to use drugs, be involved in crime, have poor health and have children young – nearly two-thirds of NEET females were mothers by the age of 21, 6 times the rate in the rest of the population.

Willets, Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities & Skills, has drawn increased attention to NEETs this week, with a particular emphasis on their negative impact on family life. It seems that many young women are preferring to raise their children as single mothers rather than be partnered long-term with a man who had no means of support and no apparent prospects.

According to Willets, “One of the things some lone parents say is, where are the reliable men with whom they can have a stable relationship?”

Willets has been influenced by William Julius Wilson (1987) who has been studying this problem in depth in American cities. Wilson is concerned that, via a combination of drugs, prison and being on welfare, the ‘marriageable pool’ of men in some US cities is now dangerously low.

So Cameron and Willets are proposing a £100M fund to allow social enterprises such as charities to provide vocational training. The latter says, “There is a particular problem about white, working class men and we are not providing them with the first steps to useful skills. When we do that, I believe we could make them much better bets as a partner. When these young men have got a useful skill and are then holding down a job, at that point they will also be able to hold down a relationship. They will be people who can then live up to family responsibilities.”

On the face of it, the Cameron-Willets proposal seems to add little to the bill introduced to Parliament in January by Ed Balls, DCFS Secretary of State, which will extend the school leaving age to 18 by 2015 and force schools to extend the range of vocational qualifications on offer to Sixth Formers. Balls’ proposals  would oblige all 16-18-year-olds either to stay on at school or undertake a full-time college course or enter employment which also provided accredited training. They even included a £100M ‘safety net’ for NEETs!

What does seem to be different about the Cameron-Willets proposal is allowing for social enterprises previously outside the education system to deliver vocational training.

And, of course, Willet’s highlighting of the effect the ‘NEETs problem’ is having on the formation – non-formation?  – of stable male-female relationships at the young and poor end of the social spectrum.

Do they really want to be there?

In 2004 the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) was introduced. This means-tested benefit gave poorer students up to £30 a week to encourage 16-year-olds either to stay on in the 6th Form or study full-time at a further education college.

At the same time a number of secondary schools began surreptitiously lowering the entry standards for Sixth Form. Generally speaking, most schools formally set the bar at five A*-C GCSEs (including Maths and English)  but they have the discretion to consider individual cases on their own merits – and when each individual case comes with funding….

For many young peopel EMA was a real lifeline from relative poverty to educational opportunity. For others, it was a ‘doss’ – the chance to not have to go out to work and have an extra two years at school not doing very much at all. For yet others, who lacked the wherewithal to find and impress a would-be employer, it was perhaps the only alternative to the dole.

As a part-time secondary school teacher, I saw the quality of 6th Form students plummet – in both attitude and aptitude –as the take-up of EMA increased. My classes now divided broadly into three groups:-

  1. Bright, highly capable students who wanted to be successful
  2. Fairly clever but uninterested students who would deal with their boredom by being disruptive – sometimes they would truant and then try to persuade the class teachers to sign their EMA forms to say they had attended!
  3. Fairly limited students who could be persuaded to work hard sometimes but who were too easily distracted by the second group

It was frustrating to find the opportunities of the bright and committed students reduced by the disruptive behaviour of the uninterested students. It was heartbreaking to see the limited students struggling with material beyond them and interesting to see how many teachers would find ways to cheat – particularly on coursework – in the interests of their students.

There has been for some years now a growing emphasis on vocational education – usually (but not always) targeted at the more academically-limited students and usually in the form of National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) or some variation thereof. However, there are serious doubts about the ‘economic value’ of NVQs. Alison Wolf of think tank Policy Exchange said in January this year: “Low-level vocational qualifications, notably NVQs, have, on average, absolutely no significant economic value to their holders. This is especially true if they were gained on a Government-financed scheme. These are also the qualifications which will be offered to most of the 16 and 17-year-olds forcibly obliged, under current proposals, to continue education and training.”

While much of the Cameron-Willets proposal seems merely to reflect well-advanced Government plans, David Willets does seem to favour a more hands-on form of vocational training – apprenticeships of some kind? – provided through means other than schools and colleges. He is of the view that many NEETS have already dropped out of school and do not want to study for anything remotely involving any form of exam.

The detail of the Cameron-Willets proposal is yet to come – but, going by the sketchy interviews and discussions so far, it might just be that, on this occasion, the Tories’ thinking is actually closer to the values of the people they are concerned with than is the Labour Government.

We don’t need no education!

The words of the Pink Floyd classic, ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, really do ring true for a small but significant minority of youngsters – the NEETs?

 

At least they don’t want the education being offered by the ‘system’. It’s one of the biggest fallacies in contemporary policy-making to think that truants are missing out on their education. Not true! They’re learning how to take drugs, have sex, steal from shops, find their position in gang hierarchies, etc, etc – and just generally survive, often on dangerous estates that really are ‘concrete jungles’. They’re getting an education alright – but not the one most of society wants them to have!

 

School often doesn’t work for these children because they enter it with their parents’ values – infected with their parents’ memes. Their parents don’t value education as such – so it’s no surprise they don’t. Failure to conform – in everything from dress to not doing homework to thumping that really annoying kid on the next desk (just like Dad told you to!) – results in punishment and the reinforcing of the schema that school isn’t where you want to be. Academic failure usually follows behavioural difficulties and then the only way then to gain the esteem of others for the emerging RED vMEME is via what Nicholas Emler (1984) calls negative reputation….How many times can you cause the teacher to stop the lesson? How many detentions can you rack up? How many times can you get dragged off to be shouted at by the headteacher. And, if you feel like a break, really push it and get yourself excluded for a day or two! What a hero you are to your fellow ‘bad lads’!

 

As Robert Dilts (1990) shows clearly with his Neurological Levels model, it is Identity and Values & Beliefs which drive Behaviour. You can try to pump all the Skills & Knowledge possible into them but it’s unlikely to be taken on board if it doesn’t fit with what’s really important – and it certainly won’t change Behaviour.

 

If either Ed Balls or David Willets really wants to deal with the ‘NEETs problem’, then, as 4Q/8L shows, they have to find a way of working with the values not just of individuals (Upper Left) but the entire culture (Lower Left) and social institutions (Lower Right) of the areas these children live in.

 

Willets at least recognises, however indirectly, that values are involved in tackling this issue. But a £100M and some social enterprise-run vocational schemes are only a drop in the ocean of what’s needed.

 

A MeshWORK Approach

What is required is a large-scale fully-coordinated/joined-up MeshWORK programme which works with the young people, the schools, the parents, the youth workers, local employers, the local NHS, etc, etc, etc, to examine and treat the health of each vMEME at both cultural and individual levels.

 

There are encouraging signs that the politicians are beginning to link things up. David Cameron has said the Conservatives will support the Government’s newly-announced welfare-to-work reforms. These will pressurise some of the NEETS into going on training schemes as a precursor to work. For some, the welfare reforms will actually bring them to a point of contemplating their own survival – and there’s no vMEME more powerful in motivating action than BEIGE! (After all, why else should NEETS go on Willets’ vocational training?) A few weeks back Gordon Brown announced financial incentives for poor parents who enrolled their children in schemes to improve their development.

 

But it all needs drawing together into a cohesive superordinate MeshWORK package that can, in a planned way, address a multiplicity of issues on several different levels at the same time. A whole-scale systemic solution, if you will.

 

A part of that MeshWORK package needs to take a Structural Functionalist (Lower Right) view of what type of work is and could be possible and what we want schools to do in relation to preparation for work. British industry once employed huge numbers of low ability, poorly-skilled manual labourers – the kind of work many young people who are now NEETs would have gone into when they left school at 14. While the work was sometimes dangerous and often poorly paid, it at least gave the men purpose and some kind of living, with the status of ‘wage-earner’ – a key to healthy PURPLE in a Western lower working class culture. Now those kinds of jobs are in short supply and we are told we need highly-skilled, flexible workers capable of at least semi-autonomous thinking ahead. In other words, we’re demanding the level of ORANGE in complexity of thinking for many ‘ordinary’ workers.

 

Only today’s ‘ordinary’ is very different from the ‘ordinary’ of 40 years ago. For many grandchildren of miners, seamen, farm labourers, conveyer belt workers, etc, it is just too far a jump in values without substantial assistance.

 

Brown and Balls are taking steps in the right direction. Cameron and Willets, the detail depending, may have even better steps to take. And, for these steps, the politicians should be acknowledged. But it’s still some considerable way from providing the systemic solutions that will really make the difference.

Iraq – time to stand aside…and let them get on with it?

 American Foreign Policy, international conflict, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  1 Response »
May 222007
 
We – the Coalition of the United States and Britain - invaded Iraq in 2003 and thereby triggered the progressive deterioration in intercommunal relations in that country. Against the express wishes of the United Nations and most governments in the world – and (especially in Britain!) the express wishes of large parts of our civilian populations, we invaded a sovereign state (an undeniable act of war!) and overthrew its government. The supposed justification for this unprovoked aggression was ‘intelligence’ that Iraq still had hidden stockpiles of ’weapons of mass destruction’ and was not co-operating with the United Nations weapons inspectors. While the actual intent in these respects of the then-Iraqi government is still a matter of contentious debate, the post-war search for these ‘WMD’ failed completely to find anything remotely resembling a capable ’weapon of mass destruction’. There remains much speculation that the American and British governments manipulated the available ‘intelligence’ to make ‘the case for war’.
 

So, as we have watched the near-daily slaughter escalate over the past four years, I have felt that, because we triggered the mess – ie: at root, it’s our fault! - our troops should stay and try to contain the deteriorating situation while ‘political solutions’ were sought. Unfortunately those who were doing the trying and imposing of ‘solutions’ seemed to have little idea of what might actually work.

 

Reluctantly, over the past couple of months, as the much-vaunted American ‘surge’ in Baghdad has succeeded only in displacing insurgents to wreak havoc in areas outside the city (as well as deadly effective bombs inside it), I’ve begun to think that maybe it is time to stand the troops down and let the factions get on with their bloodbaths. That, for the time being at least, Iraq is lost.

 

In April 2007, 12 British soliders died, 104 American troops and approximately 1,500 Iraqi civilians.

 

The latest Chatham House Middle East briefing paper is ‘Accepting Realities in Iraq’ by Gareth Stansfield. It notes the following:-

# In the South British troops are fighting Shia militia loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr; 
# Also in the South there is much in-fighting amongst Shia groups;
# In Baghdad there is effectively a Sunni-Shia mini-civil war;
# In the centre Sunni tribesmen and insurgents are fighting Sunni forces linked to al-Qaeda;
# In the North and the centre the Americans are fighting a Sunni militia;
# In the North Kurds are fighting non-Kurds (Sunnis, Shias and Americans if they get in the way);
# In and amongst this bands of criminals operate across the county with virtual impunity.

There simply appears to be no end – and no possible end – to the killing in sight.  

What are the options?
The United States military is the most awesome force ever conceived this side of a science fiction blockbuster. It does have the technology and the firepower to close and hold down a country even the size of Iraq.

 

What the US lacks is the willpower. No President wants to preside over bodybags arriving home by the planeload on an hourly basis – and how would he or she stop the media reporting the sheer brutality of the methods used and the hundreds of thousands – possibly millions – of Iraqi lives such an endeavour would cost? And how would America square its strategies with both the resultant horror and anger in the Islamic world fuelling new wave after new wave of anti-Western terrorism and the repugnance in much of the rest of the world at such measures?

 

With no understanding of how to create workable political solutions, American forces could be tied up on such a colossal basis for years, leaving the country vulnerable militarily and drained financially even to the point where it ended up no longer an economic superpower. 

 

The status quo is not an option because there is no status quo. The US and Britain are losing – both politically and in lives – with Iraq sliding almost daily into greater turmoil. The Coalition needs to throw a lot more lives at the problem before they make any kind of positive difference.

 

Nor is complete withdrawal any answer – no matter how much certain politicians and sections of the media call for it. And no matter how much significant numbers of the general public want it too.

 

For one thing the Middle East has massive geopolitical importance – not least because of the massive oil deposits along the Gulf of Arabia. Maintaining influence on – if not outright control of – that oil is a key strand in America’s strategies to maintain its economic lead in the world.

 

Then there is the cause of the United States’ friend, Israel, surrounded by implicitly-hostile countries like Egypt and explicitly-hostile ones such as Syria. No American President can afford to offend the ultra-powerful Jewish lobby in Washington while Israel tends to champion American interests in the Middle East. The prospect of Iran developing an offensive nuclear weapons capability is something neither Washington nor Tel Aviv will countenance. If the Americans don’t take care of it either diplomatically or through a ’surgical’ military strike, then Israel will. Given the Israelis’ past record on these sorts of things, it would be doubtful if their strike would be anything like as ‘surgical’ as an American one.

 

Then there is the problem of ‘Kurdistan’. If the Americans abanoned Iraq, that would effectively give the Kurds in the North the green light to break away from Iraq and seek to entice the Kurds in the South-East of Turkey to join them in creating Kurdistan. Such moves would almost certainly bring military intervention from Turkey and could lead to destabilisation of that country, a member of NATO.

 

If the Coalition withdraw completely, there is every likelihood Iran would intervene actively to support the Shias in Iraq – possibly even to the point of seeing Iranian tanks on Iraqi soil. There is little chace Saudi Arabia would stand by while Iraqi Sunnis were massacred in large numbers by Iranians or the country became a satellite of Tehran. Of course, the Saudis don’t have much in the way of military capability (relatively speaking) but their money and their oil have made them powerful friends, most notably the United States. And here’s where the Americans are caught on the horns of yet another dilemma: if they don’t play the Saudis’ game, that will almost certainly result in the dreaded al-Qaeda increasing their influence in the country.

 

So, no win for the Americans there. Withdrawing completely is not a feasible option.

 

That probably leaves the best short-term option as standing by and letting them get on with it – ‘holding the ring’ as it were by keeping the Iranians and other interested parties out while the Iraqis resolve their internal disputes in blood. The Americans have the technology to monitor Iraq’s borders and the resources to mount interventions from carriers in the Gulf and air bases in Saudi Arabia, Oman and Turkey to prevent outside interference. It might be possible to wind Colation troop levels inside Iraq down to near-nominal level while strengthening a sort of ‘ring of steel’ around the country to minimise outside intervention.

 

Effectively the option I’m (somewhat reluctantly) advocating here is to throw the various Iraqi factions into a secured bear pit and say, “Fight!”

 

Horrible! Hundreds of thousands – possibly millions! - will die. Many more will be injured and maimed; and most likely tens of millions of people will be displaced. The country would be devastated for the best part of a decade.

 

But Western military casualties should be relatively light; and it should be possible, for the most part, to keep the Iranians, the Syrians, the Saudis and al-Qaeda out.

In face of such an apolyptic prospect, many Iraqis may blink and step back from the abyss, withdrawing their support for the extremists and isolating them. Hopefully many of them would do that sooner, rather than later.

 

It may be that media reporting of the unrestrained bloodletting shames many governments in the rest of the world into providing sufficient support to the Americans in troops and logistics that a truly comprehensive and sustainable occupation of Iraq could be implemented.

 

It could be that, after several years of largescale carnage, enough Iraqis to make a difference tire of the killing and start demanding peace. (Conflict after conflict, from the American withdrawal from Vietnam to the collapse of terrorism in Northern Ireland, has shown so often that when the bulk of the general population grow weary of the bloodshed and withdraw their support from extremist positions, then is the best chance to work for peace.)

 

How ever Iraq comes to the point where enough of the population want peace for it to be feasible, rather than a fantasy, then those who started this and have enough firepower to enforce a peace at least in the very short term – ie the Americans -must be ready to step in with political and social mechanisms that the Iraqis understand, want and can use.

 

To find your way around, it helps to have a map
It is now generally acknowledged that, when the Coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003, the military planners knew how to win the war – which they did in fairly spectacular style – but few people in the Washington decision-making loops seemed to have much idea how to win the peace.

 

Beyond expecting Iraqis to greet the incoming troops as ‘liberating’ them from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime – which initially many Iraqis did – little thought seems to have been given to how to rebuild the country with a form of politics the majority of people could subscribe to.

 

There has been much speculation as to how such sophisticated and advanced thinkers as the analysts and strategists working for the White House, the Pentagon, the Defense Department, the State Department and 10 Downing Street could have got it so badly wrong. Clearly there was a lack of 2nd Tier thinking. But the more limited 1st Tier approaches were reinforced by the phenomenon Irving Janis (1972) named ‘groupthink’. Key decisions were taken by George W Bush, Donald Rumpsfeld, Tony Blair and small self-contained groups who rarely referenced outside their own immediate circles but instead played back to each other their ever more fantastical conceptions of what is and what should be. It is common knowledge that Blair (who himself was kept out of some of Bush’s decision-making loops) ignored the majority of his Cabinet’s reservations about going to war with Saddam and tended to discuss it almost only with those who reinforced his views.

 

Thus, the American planners made little attempt to understand the complexities of the very different Iraqi society – societies? - and instead assumed a minimalist force of occupation could set up Western style democratic institutions.

 

If the planners had used the Spiral Dynamics map of emergent motivational systems to understand Iraqi culture(s), attitudes and behaviours as part of their pre-invasion planning, they would have seen that a quite different politcal set-up was required to the Western democracy model.

 

John Berry (1969), the acclaimed psychologist specialising in cross-cultural studies, would consider the attempt to impose Western democracy an imposed etic. In other words, we have assumed the values, practices, traditions and other characteristics of our culture are the universal norm and, as such, are applicable to all cultures.

 

The alternative – at least politically - is the concept of Stratified Democracy put forward by Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck (2002). (See: Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory) This proposes that different cultures and sub-cultures will be at differing stages of social development and, therefore, need different forms of representative (ie: democratic) governance, economic distribution, etc. Achieving the most appropriate form of Stratified Democracy for a culture or sub-culture will, in Beck’s view, be an output of a MeshWORK mapping process.

Let’s apply a brief and basic hypthetical MeshWORK analysis approach to Iraq…

# BEIGE
Basic foodstuffs and clean drinking water are in short supply in some areas while electric power is often intermittent at best.

Conditions in the hospitals are primitive by Western standards, with anaesthetics and many medicines in short supply. Emergency wards are frequently overwhelmed in the aftermath of a bombing.

In many parts of the country there is no or little work, making it difficult to get the means to stay alive. As a result many men are driven by economic necssity to join the police. Hence the attraction of lengthy and slow-moving police recruiting lines for bombers.

Personal security is frequently at risk in many parts of the country. Indiscriminate bombings, sectarian killings (often prededed by torturing the victims) and both political and criminal kidnappings are the main hazards.

The Coalition and the Shia-dominated governments they have propped up have been fairly slow and largely ineffectual in establishing the basic necessities of ‘civilised’ life in Iraq. So it’s hardly suprising that life in the worst-hit parts of Iraq is pretty ‘uncivilised’. (The Americans and the British made similar mistakes in the southern part of Aghanistan and are paying for them with a resurgence of the Taliban.) Talk of ‘democracy’, ‘the political process’ and ‘the vote’ tends to be pretty irrelevant to people who are preoccupied with surviving and being safe unless such politics is going to have a fairly immediate impact upon having such vital needs met.

# PURPLE
This vMEME is big in Iraqi culture. Its focus on group identity and its territorial nature mean it defends its turf against outsiders – and the more pressure it is under the more aggressive it becomes. Thus the ever-increasing segregation in Baghdad. Wherever the American and British go, they are resisted as they are always outsiders on someone else’s turf. The ‘liberators’ were very quickly seen as ‘occupiers’ on land that didn’t belong to them.

Tribal culture is still dominant in much of Iraq. What the tribal elder says is relevant and to be honoured; what some American or some ‘Government spokesman’ says on the television is just an ugly noise to be ignored or despised. So, if the tribespeople vote, they vote according to tribal affiliations and how the elders tell them to vote.

‘One man, one vote, think for yourself’ politics is way removed from the daily reality of most of these people. Trying to impose it is a futile and dangerous exercise – not least because it challenges the traditions of the tribe and portrays them as somehow deficient.

# PURPLE / BLUE Harmonic
The BLUE vMEME has brought religious affiliation to PURPLE to create the super-tribal and very dangerous identities of Sunni and Shia. Now, the other lot are not only ‘of a different tribe’ but they are heretics defiling the one true religion. Thus, they are dehumanised and criminalised further, making their death and destruction that much easier.

With the Kurds BLUE has played the nationalism card so that all real Kurds now should aspire to bring the great goal of Kurdistan into existence.

# RED / BLUE Harmonic
As has been seen in the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia and now Iraq, when BLUE structure and order break down, RED’s ‘power pecking order’ tends to come in to replace it.

 
The Iraq of Saddam Hussein was more of a RED Mediaeval kingdom (with Saddam’s generals in the role of the King’s scheming ‘noble lords’) but there was a degree of BLUE social infrastructure. Saddam used this BLUE infrastructure (in tandem with PURPLE tribal loyalties) to control his people in ways not altogether dissimilar – eg: police state apparatus – to those of the Soviet oligarchs. However, the dominant vMEME in Iraq was RED, exemplified in the cult of personality Saddam revelled in and his government promoted.
 
Just as in Mediaeval kingdoms, the death of the King often created a power vaccuum, so has Saddam’s deposition (and death). Hence, the struggle for power, supported by competing tribal loyalties (PURPLE) and religious denunciations of others (BLUE).
 
Again, ‘One man, one vote, think for yourself’ democracy is pretty much irrelevant in situations where who has the power is what matters.

BLUE (and beyond)
It would seem nodal BLUE, outside of the universities, industry and religion is in short supply. For example, the police – stalwart BLUE in most Western countries - are notoriously corrupt and riddled with PURPLE/RED partisan loyalties.

There’s not much evidence of ORANGE other than the Western businesspeople out to control Iraq’s oil. And quite possibly GREEN’s only representatives are the brave/foolish aid workers still in the country.

Reconstructing Iraq for the Iraqis
If the option of ‘holding the ring’ while the factions slaughter each other – how ever horrific and unpalatable – appears to be the only viable one in the short/mid-term, then the Americans and the British need to prepare quickly for negotiations to create a new social and political Iraq. It needs to be done quickly as one can only hope a critical mass of Iraqis wanting peace builds rapidly, rather than takes years and years of carnage.
 
As soon as there is anything like a significant ‘window of opportunity’, the Coalition need to be ready with strategies that will work.

To do this, the Americans and the British need to work with where much of Iraq is at – ie: PURPLE and RED – not where they themselves are at – ie: BLUE, ORANGE and some GREEN. In other words, they need to use Stratified Democracy.

This may mean working with tribal elders and Islamic clerics and accepting that they will tell their unthinking followers what to do. In their context, that is what is more likely to be right for them than exhorting everyone to cast a considered but anonymous vote in a polling booth.

It may be that government in Iraq needs to be restructured in line with tribal identities and territories. It may be that the country needs splitting into 3 or more federated states. It may be that Iraq actually needs to be broken up, with 3 or more autonomous states emerging from the wreckage. It may be that a new supraordinate ‘Iraqi identity’ can be created that all Iraqis can buy into.

How ever it works out, the solution(s) must fit with the values of the vast mass of the Iraqi people and be something that Iraq’s neighbours will respect.

In this sense, as well as working with their client groups on the ground, the Coalition will almost certainly need some form of dialogue with Syria and Iran (as the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report of December 2006 recommended). These are the two major Arab military and political players in the area; both have anti-Western agendas but have reasons to co-operate with the West. (Syria wants help getting the Golan Heights back from Israel; Iran needs to find a non-military resolution to the impasse over its nuclear ambitions.) Both understand the PURPLE-BLUE Islamic loyalties, rivalries and tensions intuitively in a way few Western diplomats could even dream of.

Getting the cooperation of Syria and Iran in presenting new realistic opportunities for Iraq could also be tied in with intiatives to resolve other linked-in problems in the region – not least the status of the Palestinian territories, the ‘Kurdistan issue’ and the role of regional superpower Iran in a realigned Middle East.

So, opportunity is not lost in the longer term. Indeed, there seems every opportunity and everything to play for. But in the short term only death, destruction, injury and misery for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis.

It is abhorrent, not at all a pleasant prospect. But it seems there may be no other real option. Only when the bulk of the Iraqi nation no longer support the extremists and stand up against them will there be a real chance for peace.

Of course, while holding the ring, the United States and Britain must be developing new, realistic initiatives based on real Iraqi values and looking for and recruiting influential Iraqis to their cause. Then, when war weariness starts to set in, they are ready with the right men and the right intiatives to start building a momentum for a genuine and sustainable peace. 

 

Healthy School Dinners – at last!

 community, education, mental health, Psychology, society, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
May 212006
 

I  have been teaching A-Level Psychology part-time in a depressed East Yorkshire town for nearly 3 years. The headteacher, has often said at the end of yet another week of classes being disrupted by appalling behaviour: “Our students don’t seem to do afternoons.”

The behaviour incident reports and the logs of unruly students being removed from classes by Senior Management show a definite increase in poor and bad behaviour after lunchtime almost every day. Many of the teachers attribute this surge in unacceptable behaviour, in part at least, to the kind of food the school canteen serves up – chips, baked beans, fried sausages and fish fingers and other so-called ‘junk food’ full of additives - not to mention the crisps, sugary snacks and fizzy drinks available from the school vending machine.

So it seems to me the measures Education Secretary Alan Johnson announced on Friday 19 May, regarding the implementation of national nutrition guidelines in schools from September this year, are a major step in the right direction. For which the Government is to be applauded.

Deep-fried food will be offered only twice a week under the new guidelines while fruit and vegetables must be made available a “minimum” of 2 days a week and sugary snack foods and fizzy drinks will be banned from vending machines. By September 2008 primary schools will have to demonstrate compliance to having a minimum content of vitamins and minerals in food offered to children. This requirement will apply to secondary schools from September 2009.

There are, of course, problems with the initiative. There are some doubts the £280M the Government promised when former Education Secretary Ruth Kelly first proposed the scheme at last year’s Labour Party Conference will be enough to pay for the extra canteen staff hours and training that will be required. National Association of Headteachers General Secretary Mick Brookes has pointed out that children, who dislike the new dietary regime, will simply circumvent it either by bringing food they do like into school (‘pack ups’) or leaving school at lunchtime to go to the ‘chippie’ or fast food servers like Macdonalds and KFC.

Brookes’ concerns hint at other critical issues. However, the relationship between diet and attitudes and behaviour – and the effect of poor diet in its contribution to bad behaviour – is just too important not to proceed with an initiative such as Alan Johnson’s guidelines.

Children’s futures are at stake!

Diet affects Thought
How what we eat affects our thought and behaviour processes, when set against the vast amount of biological and psychological research over the past 50 years, is relatively under-investigated. The consequent scarcity of hard evidence has enabled governments of all persuasions to simply ignore the issues in favour of taxing the substantial profits made by the junk food industries and the advertising industries which promote them.

However, there have been increased concerns in recent times about diet on the development of mental capacity and attitudes – and popular tv chef Jamie Oliver has done much via his ‘Jamie’s School Dinners’ Channel 4 programme to raise public awareness and put pressure for change on the Government. Significant resarch in the past few years has given the likes of Oliver the scientific clout to argue the case.

Arguably the most important is the work of Bernard Gesch of the University of Oxford, published in 2002. In a small-scale study of 231 inmates between the ages of 18 and 31, Gesch et al  found that supplementing the usual junk foodish prison meals with vitamins and minerals over 4 months contributed to a 26% decrease in minor breaches of prison rules and a huge 40% decrease in serious breaches, particularly involving the use of violence.  Reputedly, serious breaches by the prisoners returned to previous levels within a month of so of the supplementation being discontinued.

Although Gesch has been at pains to avoid the attribution of a simple cause-and-effect between nutrition and behaviour, his research demonstrates clearly that nutrition is a significant factor.

Unfortunately, when Gesch approached his funders at the Home Office to continue and extend his research, the money was not made available. However, in Holland Ap Zaalberg at the Ministry of Justice was sufficiently impressed with Gesch’s study to initiate a longer-term replication in 14 prisons across The Netherlands. Reportedly, the British Home Office is now considering plans for a large-scale study in British prisons, pending the Dutch results.

There’s a sense in which Gesch’s findings merely confirm those of Stephen Schoenthaler of California State University in Stanislaus whose work in schools and youth detention centres has shown that replacing junk food and snacks with fresh food alternatives contributes to better behaviour, higher IQ grades and better test scores. Schoenthaler’s work has not been taken as seriously as it should have been because flaws were found in his research procedures. However, no one has been able to find any fault with Gesch’s findings.

The research of Schoenthaler and Gesch gives ample weight to the concerns Don Beck, co-developer of Spiral Dynamics, has been expressing for several years now. Based on the 4 Quadrants framework of Ken Wilber (1995), Beck is concerned that pollutants and damaging foodstuffs we ingest inhibit the brain’s ability (Upper Right Quadrant) to develop and stimulate appropriate vMEME activity (Upper Left Quadrant) to deal appropriately with the circumstances (the Lower Quadrants) in which we find ourselves.

The underpinning issue
Mick Brookes’ reservations about the new initiative are valid. Students will bring their own food or go out at lunchtime if they don’t like what’s on offer in the school canteen. However, many students prefer to go out at lunchtime anyway – escaping the confines of school with its rules and procedures, so that they can do what they want. (RED freeing itself from BLUE structure, in Spiral Dynamics terms.)

At my school the Senior Mangement have instigated a policy of not allowing students out at lunchtime unless they have written parental approval. Enforcing this policy has meant Senior Management and volunteer class teachers manning gates and checking students’ passes. It has worked to a considerable degree. So students can be more or less contained, if the school management has the will.

The problems then lie with parents who either give their children permission to go out at lunchtime, knowing they will buy junk food, or else provide sugary and fatty items for pack-up. This makes it a cultural matter because parents either don’t understand or don’t value their children eating healthily.

Cathy Byrne, whose Parks Primary School in Hull is a case study in the Services section of this web site, introduced a healthy eating programme for her young students in 2004 (ahead of Jamie Oliver’s campaign). She met some notable parental opposition - “I was accused by several parents of ‘forcing’ their children to eat vegetables!”

Anecdotal evidence like this hints at the real problem which underpins Mick Brookes’ concerns: parental shortcomings. All too often inadequate parenting is the real issue behind behaviour problems – and allowing their children to have unhealthy foodstuffs or wander the streets at lunchtime is just one symptom of this. For example, staying on the food theme, it is not uncommon – especially in areas of deprivation such as Goole and other industrial towns in the Humber sub-region with which I am familiar - for children to go without a proper breakfast. Which may contribute to some bad behaviour at the start of the school day and which a number of schools are attempting to tackle through hosting ‘breakfast clubs’.

Poor parenting per se is by no means related purely to areas of deprivation. There are plenty of inadequate parents in the affluent middle class suburbs – but the ways in which they are inadequate tend to be different and the scale of inadequate parents as a percentage of the local population is usually much lower.

The worst areas are usually those where traditionally there has been a culture of low educational aspiration due to the dominant industries depending on unskilled/low-sklll male labour – eg: fishing (Hull, Grimsby), docks (Hull, Immingham, Goole), mining (Barnsley, Selby and the pit villages of South and West Yorkshire). Enough numeracy to count your wages and enough literacy to sign for them was as much as some of them needed. What was more important was having the grit to tackle what were dangerous and unpleasant jobs. These conditions suited  memes the PURPLE (mutual dependency) and RED (be powerful) vMEMES relate to. The memes favoured by BLUE (conform to the expectations of a higher authority) and ORANGE (achievement and goals orientation) propounded by the education system for the past 50+ years are largely foreign to them. As the traditional unskilled/low-skill male labour-dependent industries have gone into decline and unemployment has soared, so PURPLE’s demarcation of gender roles has been undermined by the loss of the traditional male ‘breadwinner’ role. That, in itself, has undermined self-esteem for many such men, resulting either in hopelessness or their RED finding new, often nihilistic ways, to assert self. Either way, their sons are not provided with healthy male role models. (And the statistics show unequivocally that most behaviour incidents involve boys – though testosterone-fuelled Psychoticism will be an additional factor to parenting issues in many of these instances.)

If indequate parenting is a major factor in the behaviour problems in so many British school classrooms – and OFSTED (the Office for Standards in Education) went public for the first time 2-3 years ago on its concerns about the effect of inadequate parenting on academic performance – then the question is: what to do about it?

Understanding the nature of the problem
There are far more factors involved in classroom behaviour problems than I can do possibly do justice to in the space of this short Blog. The quality of teaching, the school’s rewards and punishment systems, the innate temperaments of the children, etc, etc, will all have a part to play. However, the quality of parenting has much to do with the calibre of the ‘raw material’ that schools work with – the children and the values, attitudes and behaviour they bring into the classroom.

In the kinds of areas of deprivation I have described - the populations usually dominated by the PURPLE and RED vMEMES in their thinking - levels of literacy are low and awareness of global issues is often low too. Thus, parents from these areas frequently are, to put it bluntly, ignorant. They tend not to watch current affairs programmes on TV and, if they do read a newspaper, it’s more likely to be The Sun or the Daily Mirror than The Daily Telegraph or The Guardian. PURPLE, with its preference for oral communication over the written word, lends itself to the ‘village gossip mentality’ more than the formal presentation of information. Meanwhile, RED has little sense of consequences beyond what is immediate.

Thus, even taking into account relative and sometimes very real poverty, it is no surprise that the people in these areas tend to be more unhealthy, both physically and mentally, and they often have shorter life expectancies than the general population. More people per head of population tend to smoke in these areas; there is more alcoholism and use of dangerous drugs such as low grade heroin. And diet generally is more unhealthy, with higher consumption of fatty and sugary foods with lots of additives.

So, if the parents tend to eat like this, it’s no wonder they are not concerned about their children’s diets and may even oppose attempts to make them eat healthily. Then, working from the research of Bernard Gesch and Stephen Schoenthaler and considering the concerns of Don Beck, we can only guess at the effects of the parents’ diets and lifestyles on their mental ability to cope with their circumstances.

Thus, inadequately-functioning parents give inadequate care to their offspring who all too often fail at school and go on to become the next generation of inadequately-functioning parents. Cycles of failure and deprivation at the levels of PURPLE and RED are fostered, increasingly out of touch with the fast-changing bigger world driven by ORANGE technology and global capitalism.

In this context, the initiative announced by Alan Johnson is a critical intervention which will undoubtedly assist significantly in the healthy development of hundreds of thousands of children. However, in the grand scheme of things, it is no more than a key piece in the proverbial jigsaw and, on its own, will not deal with the worst classroom disruptors who will still be on the streets at lunchtime, eating chips & burgers and drinking fizzy pop.

A MeshWORK approach is needed
Don Beck developed the MeshWORK concept from his work in South Africa, leading up to and through the transition of the early-mid 1990s – see Don Beck & South Africa. The core of a MeshWORK is the bringing together of all pertient parties in a context and to seek to address all needs at all levels as far is possible.

This means accepting where people are at on the Spiral of vMEMES and enabling them to meet their needs at that level on their terms. It works from the basic principle enshrined in the work of Abraham Maslow (1956): that meeting needs at one level creates the capacity for upward progress to have needs met at a more complex level. This is a multi-dimensional approach that leaves both the ‘top down’ imposition and attempts to develop ‘bottom up’ initiatives looking decidedly limited. It means speaking to people in language and terminology they can deal with. Thus, it’s no use lamenting the fact that most people in areas of high deprivation, whose thinking is often dominated by PURPLE and RED, don’t watch reports on diet on ‘Horizon’ and ‘Panorama’ created by BLUE, ORANGE and GREEN thinking. Far better to sneak it into an ‘Eastenders’ or ‘Coronation Street’ storyline - or, indeed, get an expert celebrity with the ‘common touch’ such as Jamie Oliver to promote the idea in simple, basic terms.

What is needed is for Johnson’s nutrition guidelines to be just a part of a co-ordinated raft of regeneration measures, aimed at changing the way whole communities think about themselves and their worlds – but done through the natural processes of meeting needs at sequentially more complex levels and communicating to them in their languages and about their issues. 

This will require joined-up thinking across Government departments, an understanding of the way the thinking of individuals and communities develops and the will to set aside what should be done in favour of what needs to be done given where people are at. Polticians need to jettison rhetoric and ideals for understanding and pragmatism. Only then will they really be able to see what needs to be done.

So Alan Johnson gets a B+ for his school dinners initiative. Very good work but needs to see the bigger picture!

Formation more than Education

 education, Neurological Levels, NLP, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Jan 242004
 

I find that one of the more interesting aspects of my part-time return to secondary school teaching is that of being a form tutor.

The role has a pastoral element built into it not obviously present in classroom teaching or general schooIl management.

For someone interested in the development of children and young people and how their psychology affects their performance at school (and beyond), the role of form tutor offers possibilities of making the kind of difference that most other roles in school life don’t.

What’s more, a good form tutor can create a climate of trust that enables members of his or her tutor group to open up and confide some of the turbulence going on inside their teenage heads.

Recent examples I’ve had to deal with include a 14-year old girl distraught because her mother had started calling her “fat” and “ugly” over the past few months – having previously tended to tell her daughter how beautiful she was. Investigation revealed that the catalyst for the change in Mum’s behaviour was the arrival on the scene of a new serious boyfriend. It looked pretty much to me like Mum was belittling her daughter because the daughter (who was quite well-developed for her age!) could be seen as competition for the attentions of the new male on the scene. If that may sound far-fetched to some, evolutionary psychologists have found much evidence for this kind of behaviour. The mother’s intent was almost certainly subconscious but the flattening of her budding sexuality caused a lot of damage to the girl’s RED self-esteem.

Discussions around the intense feelings aroused by first falling in-love and telling the daughter that Mum’s emotions were likely to balance out a little more after the first phase gave her some reassurance. What really made the difference though was telling her how I had overheard some Year 10 boys saying how much they fancied her. That put a smile back on her face!

On another occasion one of the girls in my tutor group approached me somewhat hesitantly to say how she felt one of the other teachers was victimising her in class. For a student to initiate a serious complaint about one teacher to another is no easy thing. Students – particulary Years 8-10 (when RED is pretty much to the fore) – tend to perceive teachers in ‘us-and-them’ terms and, indeed, the ethic encouraged among teachers is to close ranks and defend colleagues. (Given how vulnerable teachers are to accusations of impropriety and/or unprofessional conduct, this is hardly suprising.) Assuring the girl that her complaint would be taken seriously and offering advice on how to handle her relationship with the teacher in question in the short term enabled the girl to at least function after a fashion in that class while the matter was investigated.

And then there are relationships with parents which develop in ways they often don’t from the classroom teacher perspective.

Unfortunately BLUE’s Procedures meta-programme means that much of tutor time is spent on administrative tasks – chasing up absences and checking whether planners have been signed and homework recorded. Important as these tasks are, they can take away from relationship building.

The Bigger Picture…?
Since the mid-1980s successive secretaries of state (of whatever political persuasion) at the Department of Education have been – not altogether incorrectly! – obsessed with academic performance.

Undoubtedly some of the strategies – most notably the introduction of numeracy and literacy hours in primary schools – have produced impressive results. However, many of the initiatives have failed to have the desired effect. There is serious concern whether the Education Action Zones have provided value for money and criticism is starting to build over the successor Excellence in Cities schemes. (There is now even some evidence that improvements in literacy in primary schools may have peaked and there may even be something of a backwards slide.)

There is perhaps more debate than ever over what to do to improve academic attainment. There has been some relaxation of the National Curriculum in England and Wales. In Scotland it has been dumped as a statutory requirement. Wales has axed Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) at Key Stage 1 and is considering the same for Key Stages 2 and 3. And the January 2003 publication of ‘14-19: Opportunity & Excellence’, along with the establishment of the Pathfinder concept, is starting a process of massive change in the way education and training for that age group is delivered.

Yet there is still relatively little on the pastoral side. Connexions is the Government’s big idea and the fact that the service is oversubscribed in many schools is indicative of just how needed action is on this front.

Children in the early years tend to carry their parents’ memes. Memes – a concept developed by Richard Dawkins (1976) – are transmittable values, beliefs, attitudes and even memories. Parents’ memes will be reflected in children’s behaviours. As an example, one of the teachers at my school recently rang home to dicuss a Year 7 boy who was consistenly underperforming and misbehaving and who displayed a couldn’t-care-less attitude. His mother’s response was: “Well, I didn’t do well at school either and it hasn’t done me any harm.” Hardly surprising then that achieving in the classroom is not on this boy’s list of priorities!

It’s also no coincidence that the majority of parents who attend parents’ evenings – ie: they are concerned enough about their children’s progress at school to make the time and effort – are those whose children tend to work hard and do at least reasonably well in class.

Evidence shows that, in the teenage years, young people tend to be socialised more by their peers – often going through a partial rejection of their parents’ values. This is a normal and in some respects quite healthy part of the RED vMEME’s journey to establish personal identity beyond the PURPLE belonging of the family. This was termed ‘Negative Identity’ by psychologist Erik Erikson (1964), an element of ‘Identity Diffusion’ which the adolescent must overcome to achieve his/her own ‘Identity’.

Even when undergoing a partial (and usually temporary) rejection of the family, the young person’s PURPLE vMEME still has belonging needs. So now the young person tends to find a new degree of belonging in a peer group. But with RED predominant in the mix, the task is to build self-esteem often through recognition within the group.

How that building of self-esteem takes place will depend to a great extent on whether the dominant memes held by the group are those compatible with and including academic success or more centred on delinquency and anti-social behaviour. In his famous study of 14-15 year olds back in 1967 David Hargreaves established that it tends to go one way or the other. The RED vMEME’s drive for recognition and self-esteem does not stop because of the failure to achieve academic success. Rather, it finds ways to ways to achieve its goals through less ‘socially-acceptable’ means. Most teachers in most secondary schools are familiar with this model: the poor performers academically who score kudos with other poor performers by the trouble they cause in class and around the school building. Detentions then replace merits as badges of this kind of success. Nicholas Emler (1984) calls this ‘Reputation Management’.

Thus, the parents’ memes brought into primary school will often be predictors for the kind of memes displayed in secondary school. The child entering infant school, whose parents place no value in formal education, will most likely be an academic failure by the time of leaving junior school and a truant/disruptive student by mid-secondary school.

This isn’t, of course, a route set in stone. All kinds of things can bring about a change in values and, therefore, a change in attitude. For example, Frederick Gough Comprehensive, a school I know in Scunthorpe, is located in a fairly ‘rough’ part of the town. Its school population is not the type one would readily associate normally with good behaviour and academic success. Yet Frederick Gough has been doing substantially better than another, neighbouring secondary which draws upon largely the same catchement area but has had severe behavioural problems and low academic attainment. (A litmus test of a school’s ability to manage behaviour is the willingness of supply teachers to service it! In fairness, it should be pointed out that the other secondary has recently acquired a new headteacher and the description here of the school hopefully will soon be obsolete.)

So what is the secret of Frederick Gough’s relative success? One factor may be that there is a significant emphasis on pastoral care: every student receives a number of one-to-one sessions with his/her form tutor. These function with varying degrees of success, with some form tutors clearly more effective than others and some students memetically more ‘damaged’ than others. Nonetheless, considering its natural population, Frederick Gough does rather well and the emphasis on pastoral care is almost certainly a significant factor.

Where, for all its reforms and intended reforms, the Government is still largely missing the point is that they are targeting ‘education’ at the levels of ‘Skills & Knowledge’. The Neurological Levels model of Robert Dilts (1990) allows for change at any level to impact upon the other levels but makes the case clearly that, for change to be really effective, it has to be at the upper levels of ‘Values & Beliefs’ and Identity. That means dealing with memes – preferably the earlier in childhood the better.

Understanding ‘Formation’…?
Giving pastoral care takes a teacher beyond education and into ‘formation’ – the forming of the character and the personality.

We often hear or read terms like ‘formative influences’ or ‘formative years’ – but how often do we really think through what they mean?

I personally didn’t have a clue what formation meant until I was involved on a quality systems project with the Hospitaller Order of St John of God in the mid-1990s.

A worldwide Roman Catholic lay order dedicated to health care – especially of the ‘disadvantaged’ – the English Province had been pioneering new ways of helping people with severe learning disabilities maximise their quality of life. As the number of ‘brothers’ in the English Province was in marked decline, most of the management and delivery of services was carried out by ‘civilians’ – some of whom were not even Christians, let alone Catholics!

In this situation I found myself fascinated with the few new recruits the brothers did have and how they inducted them into lifelong formation which meant for them celibacy, service both to God and to mankind, no personal possessions, religious study, etc, etc – essentially a life of ‘active monasticism’. But note: this was not ‘lifelong learning’; this was ‘lifelong formation’.

Formal education and training, important as they were, were just part of the formation. The brothers were concerned with the development of the whole person. The character and nature of the inner person, if you will, was the centre of this. The brothers were operating at the levels of Identity and Values & Beliefs. How successful they were was reflected in how rare it was for a brother to leave the Order. Not unknown but very, very rare.

As my knowledge and understanding of Spiral Dynamics and related Psychology has grown over the intervening years – and particularly since my part-time return to teaching in 2001 – this concept of formation has seemed more and more relevant.

If we are to be successful in dealing with people, then we have to deal with the whole man or woman. Not just their training and education.

If we take the example of back-to-work schemes for the unemployed in places like Hull’s Bransholme estate, it’s no wonder they are relatively unsuccessful because the training provided is aimed at the Skills & Knowledge level. If the values of the intended recipient are not in accord with the values embedded in the scheme, then there is a memetic discrepancy. While employable skills are obviously important, bringing about change so that people actually value having a job is the key to take-up of these schemes.

The earlier one can make memetic interventions in a person’s life the better. Cathy Byrne, Headteacher of The Parks Primary School (on Hull’s Orchard Park Estate) – featured as a Services case study – has stated that she believes interventions should begin (where necessary) at nursery school age and possibly even younger.

If we are to transform our schools and enable them to actually hit all those targets the Department of Education burdens them with – if, indeed, we are to transform our society (greater prosperity, less crime, less drug and alcohol abuse, happier and more sustainable families, etc, etc) – then we have to go beyond education and training. We have to deal with lifelong formation.

To do that, we have to go beyond single institutions or sectors. A cross-boundary approach is needed which can address all relevant aspects which impinge upon the people and issues in question..

Back in 1999 Richard Dunn, then Headteacher of Hemsworth High, near Pontefract, agreed to let a team, in which I was involved, work with the school on what became known as the HemsMESH  project. This was the first attempt to use Spiral Dynamics on a macro level in the UK. Dunn’s rationale for this was that he and his staff had improved the school’s score of 5 A*-C GCSEs as much as they could via internal actions at the school. He recognised now the need to engage parents and the wider community – which the MeshWORK approach offered. Though the term wasn’t used at the time, Dunn knew that further improvement in student performance was a formation issue.

As the pace of change in Western societies grows ever quicker – often stimulated by ORANGE’s development and manipulation of new technologies – frequently bringing with it both huge benefits and immense social dislocation, creating what seem to be ever-widening ‘values gaps’, the need to address formation gets overlooked all too often in the drive to train skills and implant knowledge.

Yet formation is clearly the key to what kind of people we are, both as individuals and as societies.

Hull OFSTED hits the mark – but misses the point!

 education, Neurological Levels, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Jan 192003
 

After months of speculation in the media and undoubtedly trepidation at the Guildhall (seat of Kingston Upon Hull City Council) and in Essex House (the headquarters of Hull’s Local Education Authority), the results of the inspection last September by the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) have been made public.

2002 was a bad year for Hull Education. The city returned to the bottom of Britain’s GCSE league tables after managing one place above bottom the previous year and slumped 11 places down the primary league tables.

Director of Learning Peter Fletcher, in post only a year or so, held Hull’s headteachers accountable for the GCSE league table performances last Summer while the Hull Daily Mail screamed out its headline, ‘Do you care?’  at parents who allowed and even facilitated truanting by their children.

The OFSTED report has largely upheld these two positions. Fletcher and Essex House get off pretty lightly while headteachers are criticised for not being focussed enough. However, it is parents and the truancy issue which seems to have most vexed the inspectors. Since the LEA is considered to be pursuing a robust anti-truancy policy – truancy sweeps in conjunction with Humberside Police have made local headlines several times – the inescapable conclusion is that it is parents who are the problem.

Since, in most children’s lives. the parents are the single biggest influence until well into the teenage years, OFSTED have undoubtedly got the right people in their sights. If you can’t get the kids into school, then you can’t teach them. they can’t take exams and the Government targets can’t be met. So doing something about the parents who can’t or won’t ensure regular attendance by their children is clearly a major issue.

Unfortunately, while OFSTED have hit the mark, the inspectors appear to have missed the point.

Truancy, like attendance, is a Behaviour. As the Neurological Levels model clearly shows, Behaviours are driven by Values & Beliefs – and Values in turn are underpinned by a sense of Identity.

If the formal school education of the child is not a foremost Value for the parent, then other priorities – taking the day off to buy the child a new pair of trainers, going on an out-of-season holday, keeping the child at home to do chores and errands while the parent is ill, etc, etc – can easily take precedence. And, since people are driven by Values, the parent who condones and even facilitates truancy in such circumstances, sees nothing wrong with what he or she has done.

Of course, having police officers bringing truanting children home or having an Education Welfare Officer knocking on the door to enquire about unacceptable absences can change the priorities of the parent somewhat.

When such a parent, under such pressure, changes behaviour and now insists the child goes to school, is it because the parent now recognises that conforming to expectations and sending the child to school is the right thing to do – in Spiral Dynamics terms, BLUE – in which case the parent may now be on the way to recognising the Value of formal school education? Or is it a fear-driven RED response to a greater power (‘The Law’) he or she cannot fight? – in which case, there will be little or no Value in the child receiving a formal education – the Value lies instead in avoiding a real threat (fines, possibly even a custodial sentence)?

If the motivation comes from RED fear of a greater power, rather than BLUE conformity to expectation, then, since RED thinking has little sense of consequences, once the threat has been removed, the parent will be vulnerable to other priorities overtaking sending the child to school.

What the OFSTED inspectors missed – as do many in the management of Education – is that, to bring about real sustainable changes in behaviour, there have to be changes in Values.

And in the Classroom…?
Here’s an unpalatable truth for many education strategists: many, many teachers breathe a sigh of relief when a problem child truants – some even rejoice! It means they have more chance of teaching the class than wasting large amounts of the lesson in ineffective behaviour management.

Of course, it’s ‘politically incorrect’ for teachers to think this way – they should be obsessed with (GREEN-derived) ‘inclusion’ the same way as the strategists and the ‘gurus’ are! But, if the strategists and gurus could be flys-on-the-wall in school staffrooms, they would pick up conversation after conversation about how relieved teachers are when a problem child is absent or how they wish such a child when present could be somehow spirited away!

Most classroom teachers recognise when a child has Value in his or her school education – and, since most children reflect their parents’ Values, they can soon discern whether the parents have Value in their child’s school education.

The child who doesn’t have enough Value in his or her formal education to actually bother to come to school is unlikely to become a model student once forced into class. Since he sees little or no relevance in what is being taught, winding up other students or even the teacher becomes an entertaining way of passing what is effectively a jail sentence – and RED, which is where the thinking of most of the seriously-disruptive children is at, bores very easily indeed. (I once asked an abusive Year 11 what such behaviour accomplished. Her reply was: “It’s got me thorugh five years of this hell hole. Now, fuck off!”)

Getting the truants into school is only a part of the solution – as Malet Lambert School found out when they improved attendance in 2001-2002 but actually expereinced slippage down the GCSE league tables.

So truancy and bad behaviour are symptoms of the formal school system having a lack of relevance to the Values of those children and their parents.

And it is a complete misapprehension to suggest that truanting children are not learning. They are learning to improve their skills at Playstation games and improvised sports, they are learning gang leadership and relationship skills, they are learning to shoplift, steal cars and break into houses, to take drugs and drink alchohol, etc, etc – often to live on their wits independently, without proper support from adults. What they are not doing by absenting themselves from school is learning what the system says they should and which they consider irrelevant.

A couple of years ago, I was teaching History in a secondary school in a deprived area of a port which had largely lost its fishing industry. The area was largely populated by the former fisherfolk. (Hull gets all the brickbats because its demographics give it such a strong concentration of ‘problem schools’, but there are schools throughout the rest of Humberside – for that matter, thoughtout Britain! – equally as problematic as any in Hull.)

As part of the curriculum, I was obliged to teach the Protestant Reformation of the Middle Ages to a class of low ability Year 8s. About half of them had never been out of the town, nearly 90% had never been in a church and only one had ever opened a Bible. What relevance did the Reformation have in the eyes of such children?

If we were going to interest such children in History, I suggested we develop a local history module around the port’s fishing fleet, thus enabling those children to explore their PURPLE heritage in a positive way, through talking to grandparents and other relatives, etc, to find out what part they had played in the port’s glory days of the fishing boats. I was told that the pressures to conform to the National Curriculum would not give us time or scope to do this.

Has Education lost its Way?
Numerous Key Stage 2 teachers have told me that Year 6 is not about Education; it is about getting high Standard Assessment Test (SAT) scores. Anything that will not actively contribute towards the children doing well in the SATs is likely to get jettisoned.

The desire to measure progress towards goals and targets comes from ORANGE thinking and is laudible in itself. The problem comes when BLUE thinking institutionalises the targets as standards and the targets then become ends in themselves.

That not all of Hull’s headteachers share the same obsession with targets as the Department of Education & Skills and OFSTED may be a recognition that Education is about a lot more than just meeting the targets – and that is no bad thing!

While the school systems perpetuate BLUE values of conformity, discipline and linear thinking and ORANGE goals of  future achievement, our society has changed dramatically in the last half-century in ways which the systems are not addressing adequately. The advent of large-scale GREEN permissiveness (in everything from dress and language to sexual mores), channelled through ORANGE consumerism, has fed RED self-indulgence and destabilised PURPLE family units. (The early 1990s campaigns of John Major around ‘family values’ and ‘back to basics’ were hopelessly naive but at least he recognised some of the damage done.)

It is a basic principle established by Abraham Maslow and reinforced by the work of Clare Graves, Don Beck & Chris Cowan, etc, that, when the lower levels of thinking are compromised, people leave the higher levels to sort out their problems at the lower levels. (Indeed the higher levels may collapse completely – ie: the individual ceases to think at the higher levels until the problems at the lower levels are solved.)

Thus, if a child’s PURPLE safety-in-belonging is compromised because the parents split up or the young person is unable to find him/herself as a unique human being – RED self-expression – then the higher disciplines of BLUE and the strategic forward-thinking of ORANGE mean little or nothing.

The school system, in demanding that everyone should conform to its BLUE-ORANGE ethos, is not serving the needs of many parents and children whose thinking is in PURPLE or RED. No wonder they don’t find it relevant!

The school system needs to become part of a broader system that addresses all the needs of all people in all their ways of thinking. This will require a seismic shift in thinking amongst politicians and education and social strategists. However, there are some encouraging signs that some forward thinkers are starting to move in that kind of direction.

Last year’s Parliamentary green paper on 14-19 Education, helmed by then-Education Secretary Estelle Morris, was a brave admission that vocational education – usually (though not always) more suited to people whose thinking is in PURPLE, RED or BLUE – needs to be developed on a par with academic education – usually (though not always) suited to BLUE., ORANGE and beyond.

More locally, in this past week Simone Butterworth, Leader of Hull City Council, stated in a letter to the Hull Daily Mail that the thinking of the Cabinet in deciding on a management restructure, which would appoint new Directors with a cross-Council remit, was a recognition that issues such as Education performance were beyond the Directorate of Learning as a stand-alone department. Social Services, Housing, Regeneration and whole raft of other services would need to link up to provide a broad based approach to developing the young people of the city – with Education performance as a key consideration.

This is radical stuff – and exciting! It would appear that Ms Butterworth is inching her way towards developing the breadth axis necessary for a large-scale MeshWORK. What must follow, though, is the developing of the understanding to provide the depth axis. so that all ways of thinking can be taken into consideration. Without the depth axis and the common understanding it provides, the breadth axis will fail to gel as conflicting personalities and departmental agendas fight for domination.

Making Education relevant to the needs of the people it is meant to serve is the key to educational performance. If that can be accomplished, then truancy – while it is unlikely ever to be entirely eliminated – will become largely a thing of the past.

The more the needs of the people are different from the ‘solutions’ Education offers,the more truancy there will be. Close that gap and truancy will diminish accordingly.

OFSTED may have identified the behaviours inhibiting progress in Hull Education, but it will require much more sophisticated thinking to understand and deal with the causes of such behaviours.

A Tale of 2 Councils…and the real challenge facing Simone Butterworth and Jim Brooks

 education, regeneration, Spiral Dynamics  4 Responses »
Oct 212002
 

The county of North Lincolnshire and my home town of Hull are virtually neighbours. Just 5 miles of the A63 through the East Riding of Yorkshire and a mile or so of the Humber Bridge separate them.

North Lincolnshire Council has been awarded Beacon Council status. Following a damning Audit Commission report, Kingston Upon Hull City Council is under serious threat of some form of central government intervention unless, by December 2002, it can show demonstrable progress against its remedial Action Plan.

Why such different scenarios for two local authorities geographically so close?

Systemic Thinking?
Nothing symbolises the differences between the two councils more than the critical field of Education.

For it is its strategies in Education that have seen North Lincolnshire achieving Beacon status in two consecutive years. (Although the Beacon award was specifically for Education, to achieve the award, the Council per se has to be perceived as a high-performing local authority.) By comparison Hull has been bottom of the GCSE league tables for 4 years out of the past 5; the year it wasn’t bottom, it ws next to bottom.

There are those in Hull who look enviously at the semi-affluent farming communities around Scunthorpe. They proclaim that, if only Hull could take in those semi-affluent, middle-class dominated villages of the East Riding on the city borders – Cottingham, Willerby, Anlaby – then the increased weight of more gifted pupils with more supportive parents would put Hull on more of an equal footing. Gleefully, they point out that Thomas Sumpter in urban Scunthorpe is just as troubled a school as Andrew Marvell, David Lister or Sir Henry Cooper in Hull. However, Fredrick Gough in urban Scunthorpe is a fairly-successful school in spite of its difficulties – just as Malet Lambert in Hull is. Demographics obviously do play a part; but they don’t provide a complete explanation.

Let me throw a slightly-different light on this. North Lincolnshire has more varied groupings of population types than Hull, requiring a wider range of strategies. Perhaps the Leadership and the Senior Management at North Lincolnshire are better at understanding the varying needs of their constitutents?

I recently conducted a Spiral Dynamics Organisation Culture Survey within the Community Investment Team at North Lincolnshire. (Click here to view the case study resulting from that project.) The BLUE procedural thinking one usually expects to find in councils was, of course, there in abundance. However, I was totally taken aback by the sheer amount of YELLOW (systemic, integral, flexible) thinking ascribed by members of the CIT to the Leadership of the Council.

As strong as YELLOW was, RED demagogusih/power-god thinking was perceived as very low. RED is often rampant in local authorities, particularly among elected representatives – and the bullying culture and financial short-sightedness Hull is accused of are symptomatic of excessive RED.

Of course, the Spiral Dynamics survey in North Lincolnshire was carried out on a very small sample and may not be truly representative. Nevertheless, middle management of a key department considering their local authority to be led by a high degree of systemic, integral thinking at a time that authority is awarded Beacon status does invite a cause & effect analysis.

And what of Hull…?
Hull, of course, has a new council. After decades of Labour rule, the people of Hull threw them out in May 2002 and a new Liberal Democrat-led Council somewhat nervously took its place in the Guildhall’s corridors of power.

New Council Leader Simone Butterworth has told me that she appreciates the criticality of having a values-based approach (such as that required for a MeshWORK). And there does seem to be something going on at the Council in terms of a values shift, reflected in the appointment of Jim Brooks – with the private sector-sounding title of ‘Managing Director’.  Previously his position carried the more traditional title of ‘Chief Executive’.

In the media – and especially over Education – Councillor Butterworth has made a number of statements to the effect that parts of the Council need to take a more private sector goal-oriented approach. Is Simone attempting to move the Council away from RED power games and beyond BLUE bureaucracy to a more ORANGE achievement-oriented culture?

Elsewhere some of the signs are not so good. The media reports of enraged parents and pupils protesting at the gates against the proposed closure of Kinloss Primary School in the Bransholme estate look like a replay of the debacle last year at nearby Coleford Primary. (This time let’s hope the Deputy Director of Learning doesn’t run a protesting teenager’s foot over while trying to escape the mob!)

Have they learned nothing?

Of course, Hull Council has to reduce the number of surplus school desks – just as it has to do something about surplus housing stock. These are pre-conditions to avoiding central government intervention in 2003. It may be that closing Kinloss really is the least harmful option.

But how the Council goes about persuading its disgruntled constituents of the need for action is a different matter. It would appear that little or nothing has been learned from Coleford or, for that matter, the protests over the closure of the Orchard Park estate’s Shaw Park Primary last Summer.

The ‘so far-so good’ merger of the Danepark and Court Park primaries on Orchard Park – where Spiral Dynamics was used to look at how to meet all the stakeholder needs and expectations – shows that rationalisation processes need not always be that painful. (Click here to view a case study of the merger.)

So, while the change in administration at the Guildhall seems to hold out the promise of some new ideas, in at least one key area little seems to have changed.

The Real Challenge…
Of course, just how much YELLOW-level leadership there really is at North Lincolnshire is highly debatable. That there is perceived to be any, though is quite remarkable.

Spiral Dynamics co-developers Don Beck and Chris Cowan have each expressed concern at the serious lack of YELLOW/2nd Tier leadership amongst our politicians. (And it was this concern that led Don to stage the October 2002 Integral Leadership Conference in London.)

If Simone Butterworth and Jim Brooks really want the Council to take the lead in breaking Hull out of its descent into deprivation, under-attainment, under-performance and general disillusionment, then they have to recognise that developing an ORANGE achievement culture in the Council itself is only part of the picture.

They have to develop the capacity to understand all levels and their needs and to create strategies which take into account the needs at all levels yet serve the good of the whole. Only a MeshWORK approach – whether that particular appellation is used or not – can do that.

The effective disgracing of the previous administration and the pressure from central government for reform gives Butterworth and Brooks a unique opportunity to tear away those Council strategies and units which don’t work – on the basis that they are so bad they can’t be salvaged – and to bring in new ideas and new constructs. The opportunity is there to break the mould and become a truly radical, transforming, whole system local authority.

Let’s hope they use this opportunity this way. Otherwise Hull is likely to spend many more years bumping along the bottom.

Needed: new ideas for Hull Education

 education, Neurological Levels, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Aug 262002
 

So Hull, the city where I live, is back at the bottom of the UK’s GCSE league tables, Education Director Peter Fletcher is arranging for the headteachers of the city’s 15 secondary schools to appear before the leaders of the City Council and the Hull Daily Mail is once again devoting acres of space to what it terms a “devastating blow” and hinting darkly at retribution.

After four consecutive years of being the worst-performing local education authority in the country, Hull climbed up one place in 2001 to leave Knowsley in Merseyside languishing at the bottom. This year Knowsley “leapfrogged” (according to the Mail) over Hull, to put the city back at the bottom.

The furore, though, masks an important point. Hull schools and their Year 11 students actually improved over 2001′s performance. Only by 1.1% – but an improvement nonetheless!

Knowsley simply improved more than Hull and thus managed to lift itself off the bottom. This, however, should not take away from the fact that Hull did improve.

An undoubted contribution to this improvement has been the performance of Kingswood High School. Located on the sprawling and troubled Bransholme Estate, two years ago Kingswood was Britain’s single worst-performing school. Now the school is out of OFSTED Special Measures and this year improved its GCSE results significantly. Headteacher Kevin Beaton went out on something of a limb, trying radical new ideas such as Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983) to make teaching more effective and learning more fun. That, combined with a vigorous anti-truancy policy, has paid off – and Kevin is to be congratulated.

The league tables, of course, do have their detractors.

In Spiral Dynamics terms, they were born out of ORANGE’s desire to measure progress: but BLUE thinking uses them to identify and punish the ‘failures’. (Just read the comments in the Mail about accountability and failure to meet targets!)

So doing well in the exams, meeting the targets and scoring well on the tables easily become ends in themselves. I’ve met several primary school teachers in the past couple of years who have complained that Year 6 is not about educating children but simply about getting good results in the Key Stage 2 Standard Assessment Tests (SATs).

As a part-time supply teacher, I’ve had Year 9s complaining to me about the pressures other teachers put them under to do well in the Key Stage 3 SATs.

And it’s less than a couple of months ago since the national media were carrying stories about children facing too many exams, illustrated by stories of students walking out of GCSE, AS and A-level exams because they were simply overloaded!

In the overall scheme of things, then, if some of the value of the league tables is in doubt, does it really matter if Hull is bottom of the league?

Well, to quote David Burnby, from last year’s ‘Of Cogs & Spirals…’  guest blog, “People will not feel positive about their city when they live in sub-standard housing, when they feel unsafe in their own homes, when they are constantly reminded about how their children are failing in school and when traditional jobs and livelihoods have vanished.”

Something New?
As they work out what to do next, Peter Fletcher and Hull City Council leader Simone Butterworth have the luxury of being new to their respective jobs, with the blame for the mess passing implicity (or otherwise!) to their predecessors. The long-running Labour administration which preceded the present Liberal Democrat-led coalition at Hull’s Guildhall, has been effectively disgraced by the Audit Commission while Fletcher’s predecessor, Joan Taylor, was hounded out of office 15 months ago via a campaign led by the Hull Daily Mail.

Butterworth and Fletcher are new…so they are expected to try something new. But what will that ‘something new’ be?

If they follow the usual Flatland thinking favoured by most politicians and local government officers – ‘Flatland’ is a derisory term coined by Ken Wilber (1995) to describe one-dimensional viewpoints – then Hull will get more of the one-size-fits-all piecemeal solutions which only partly work.

A great emphasis – rightly! – has been placed on reducing truancy rates in Hull, and that has resulted on schools like Kingswood doing better. However, Malet Lambert School had good attendance rates but still saw a drop in grades achieved. Clearly the problems are multi-dimensional.

What is needed is a systemic approach which can take into account all needs in all dimensions – which is what the MeshWORK approach of applying the Spiral Dynamics ‘map’ offers.

A MeshWORK analysis of what is going wrong in many classrooms in Hull – and, for that matter, in Bridlington, Withernsea, Grimsby, Scunthorpe and other parts of Humberside – is given in the schematic, A Downward Spiral…, in the Learning section of this site. (Interestingly enough, when Malet Lambert Deputy Head John Cornelius attended one of my Spiral Dynamics & Related Models of NLP workshop programmes recently, he said he recognised much of what this schematic showed as applying to his school.)

‘A Downward Spiral…’ shows that the problems in schools are to do with far more than simply what is going on in the schools themselves – critical though that is.

Richard Dunn, the Headteacher at Hemsworth High School (Pontefract) at the time of HemsMESH (the first Spiral Dynamics-based Education project in the UK), said in 2000, after several years of improving against GCSE targets: “It is unlikely that we can improve academic standards without engaging the broader community.”

Cultural Values
From his 24 August Hull Daily Mail interview, it appears that Peter Fletcher clearly recognises some of the cultural barriers he is facing:-

“We need a culture where the whole community is helping learning.

“It is a long, long process that will not be completed in my working life.

“In some cases you are working against perhaps three generations of unemployment.

“It is hard to make people see education is important if they don’t believe they will get a job anyway.

“Schools have to reach out into the community. A lot of the work going into adult learning will  play a role too.

“Hull has very low skills levels among many adults, with high levels of illiteracy.

“But if we can get those people doing courses and qualifications, it raises aspirations and shows them the value of education, which they will pass onto their children.”

With these statements, Mr Fletcher is close to the heart of the problem.

Using the Neurological Levels model, we can see that, if adults or youngsters don’t place Value in Education, then they are not going to Behave appropriately in relation to the Environment of schools or other ‘places of learning’.

Put simply, this is the root cause of truancy and bad behaviour in classrooms.

We need the Spiral Dynamics map to understand why some people don’t place Value in Education – or, to be more specific, Education as delivered by the ‘education system’ – because those adults with “very low skills levels” and the truanting kids who don’t get their GCSE passes are still learning. They just learn different thigns than the ‘education system’ wants them to!

How to get people to place Value in the kind of learning the ‘education system’ delivers is the problem Peter Fletcher faces and appears to understand. Whether that kind of Education is relevant to the Environment/Life Conditions of those people, as they perceive them, is a moot point. The fact that those people reject (or, at best, ignore!) the ‘education system’ but do learn how to survive and even prosper on the tough streets of Orchard Park or Bransholme suggests that they don’t think it is.

It is a basic principle of the work of Abraham Maslow that people cannot move onto higher ‘Levels of Existence’ until problems at the current level are resolved.

So, in Spiral Dynamics terms, if a youngster’s issues, for example, are concerned with a broken home (PURPLE level) and making his/her mark amongst the street gangs of an estate (purple/RED levels), then the BLUE/orange structure of the ‘education system’ is unlikely to have much immediate relevance.

What is needed is a MeshWORK approach, working not just in the schools but throughout the client communities, which addresses the needs of all levels in all ways – and can align the Neurological Levels of Identity and Values with that of the Environment to produce appropriate Behaviour.

The schematic, Potential Spiral Strategies – based partly on a Spiral modelling of how Paul Edwards turned around Knottingley High School (Pontefract) in the mid-90s – offers some ideas on how a school-based MeshWORK might be developed. It must be stressed, however, that the strategies for a MeshWORK must be developed uniquely in response to a Spiral analysis such as that which 4Q/8L offers and not from some pre-determined templates.

If Hull Local Education Authority really doesn’t want to waste more years playing leapfrog with Knowsley at the bottom of the league, then it needs to develop whole system MeshWORKS.