Former DfE official calls for council oversight on academies - Fri, 18 May 2012
Academics brand categorisation of ethnic pupils 'almost useless' - Fri, 18 May 2012
Fears over police powers to 'swipe' children's phones - Fri, 18 May 2012
Cameron says parenting classes will instil ‘right values’ in next generation - Fri, 18 May 2012
Week-long version of National Citizen Service to be trialled - Thu, 17 May 2012
Refugee children missing out on legal advice, says report - Thu, 17 May 2012
Childminders opposed to lighter regulation, finds major survey - Thu, 17 May 2012
Young people's views to influence transport review - Thu, 17 May 2012
Trusts needing bailout support almost double in 2011-12 - Thu, 17 May 2012
Thirty-one trusts received bailout payments in 2011-12, information released to HSJ under the Freedom of Information Act reveals.
Nurses and midwives face 60pc hike in registration fee - Thu, 17 May 2012
The Nursing and Midwifery Council has proposed increasing the annual registrants’ fee to £120 from the start of next year.
CCGs choose in-house commissioning support ahead of outsourced services - Wed, 16 May 2012
Clinical commissioning groups are opting to host support functions in-house rather than outsource to “unproven” commissioning support services.
Information strategy details: Lansley promises online GP access to 'end 8am rush' - Sun, 20 May 2012
The health secretary was today due to promise patients easier interaction with GP practices, ahead of the publication of an NHS information strategy tomorrow.
Night discharges controversy down to coding, says Barnet and Chase Farm - Fri, 18 May 2012
PERFORMANCE: The north London hospital trust was asked, like every other acute trust, to assess the number of discharges at night, in light of a report in The Times.
Burns go-ahead for 2012 clinical excellence awards - Fri, 18 May 2012
NHS doctors will be able to get their 2012 round of Clinical Excellence Awards after health minister Simon Burns gave the go ahead.
Half of learning disability services not meeting core standards - Fri, 18 May 2012
Half of the learning disability services inspected by the Care Quality Commission in the wake of Winterbourne View are not meeting essential standards on safeguarding residents and caring for them. The CQC said the findings were a cause for concern.
Burstow urges social workers to overhaul 'crisis' care system - Fri, 18 May 2012
The care services minister has put social workers at the heart of his plans to transform social care from a "high-dependency service" to one that supports people to stay independent.
Concern as government 'disbands' safeguarding advisory body - Tue, 15 May 2012
The Department of Health risks losing out on vital sector expertise on adult safeguarding after it 'disbanded' a key advisory group, weeks before the publication of reforms to the system. The DH denies the claims.
Social workers could enter prisons on safeguarding probes - Tue, 15 May 2012
Social workers could be asked to go into prisons to respond to suspected abuse cases under moves to help inmates receive similar levels of protection to people living in the community.
Councils attack government's 'misleading' adoption scorecards - Fri, 11 May 2012
Controversial adoption scorecards, published for the first time today, find nearly half of councils have failed to meet national targets.
Scorsese and Fox head up US Protecting our Children remake - Sun, 01 Apr 2012
The BBC’s Protecting our Children social work documentary is to get a star-studded American makeover, after Hollywood executives struck a six-figure deal for the movie rights to the popular series, Community Care can reveal.
Gove slams SCR into 'torture' case for failure of analysis - Thu, 29 Mar 2012
Michael Gove has slammed the serious case review into the 'torture' of two boys by two looked-after children for failing to adequately analyse what went wrong, after a redacted version of the overview report was published today.
Social worker deprivation of liberty assessments unmonitored - Tue, 27 Mar 2012
The Care Quality Commission has raised concerns over the protection of vulnerable adults because of its inability to monitor deprivation of liberty assessments by social workers and other professionals. (Image: Milton Montenegro/Photodisc/Getty Images)
Use 'overdose cure' naloxone more widely, drugs advisory council urges - Sat, 19 May 2012
Call for health minister to make potentially lifesaving treatment available without prescription prompts fears in some quarters that addicts will be tempted into riskier habits
An antidote to heroin overdoses should be made widely available without prescription, according to controversial advice from the government's drugs advisory body.
Critics claim that the distribution of naloxone would create a "safety net" for drug users and potentially encourage greater use of class A drugs. But the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) has written to health minister Anne Milton to argue that people working with the UK's estimated 300,000 heroin addicts will be able to save lives if they are given access to the drug.
When a heroin user has an overdose, one injection of naloxone revives them from unconsciousness and gives them enough time for medical help to arrive. It is already used by ambulance crews, casualty staff and out-of-hours GPs.
But the drug is only available on prescription, which means people working with drug users cannot keep stocks or carry them in case of emergency.
The government will be under pressure to ignore the advice, with some claiming naloxone encourages users to indulge in even riskier drug-taking. Others have warned that up to 3% of those receiving naloxone suffer potentially life-threatening side-effects and even that it can be used as a weapon in fights between users.
However, the chairman of the advisory council, Professor Les Iversen, told Milton: "The ACMD is not aware of any significant body of evidence that naloxone provision encourages increased heroin use.
"The ACMD concludes that naloxone provision is an evidence-based intervention, which can save lives. Naloxone provision fits with other measures to promote recovery by encouraging drug users to engage with treatment services, and, ultimately, keep them alive until they are in recovery."
Mike Pattinson, a former probation officer and now the director of operations at the Brighton-based health and social care charity CRI, said: "We know that if people in constant contact with heroin users are able to carry this drug that they will save lives. We would hope that the government acts on this advice because it is compelling."
Trevor Ball, 40, a recovering heroin addict, said he had been saved by naloxone when paramedics had been called but believed others could have been rescued from overdoses if it had been more widely accessible. He said: "Drug users don't think about life and death when they take heroin. It is a case of 'it will never happen to me'', so the idea that access to naloxone will encourage drug use is a nonsense. I have been saved by it and I have seen others go blue, go over, and been saved by it."
Regulations concerning the distribution of naloxone have already been relaxed in Scotland, where the devolved government is funding the distribution of 10,000 units.
Why blight Indian women with our body fascism? | Barbara Ellen - Sat, 19 May 2012
Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan is the latest victim of postnatal body facism
Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, once called "the most beautiful woman in the world" by Julia Roberts, has caused outrage in India by not losing her baby weight quickly enough. A website, Desimad.com, produced a feature depicting Bachchan with elephant sound-effects in the background. Many are raging that she is a disgrace to Indian womanhood and should set an example, "like Victoria Beckham," by getting back into shape.
When did Bachchan give birth? Seven months ago. What is her reason for not focusing all her energies on "snapping straight back into those pre-pregnancy jeans!", as the parlance goes? Bachchan says she just wants to "enjoy motherhood". What kind of lame excuse is that? Except it isn't. Rather, it's a nod to a saner time, before post-pregnancy was turned into another torture zone for the modern female.
People are forgetting that this used to be the norm. The aftermath of pregnancy was a time when women were freed from "looking sexy" in the conventional way. A sainted space when women could tell lookist society to take a hike – they were busy, OK? They needed to concentrate on their baby.
Then arrived the concept of the Yummy Mummy. Suddenly, body fascism crept into the postnatal experience, hunkering down among the nipple pads and Pampers, like some evil, squawking cuckoo. Women had to worry about not only shedding weight, but also shedding it quickly enough. What had always been viewed as a becalmed, no-pressure marathon transformed into a self-loathing sprint. From now on, the ideal would be to look as though, physically, the pregnancy never happened – that one's children were magically discovered beneath the Slimming World gooseberry bush or delivered by the Dukan stork.
If further illustration were needed, look at Carla Bruni, being unfavourably compared with her successor, Valérie Trierweiler, at a recent public event. The photos showed Bruni, who gave birth eight months ago, looking slightly heavier than a working supermodel, but mainly looking like she couldn't be razzed to pose or preen. She had that "I'm busy, OK?" new mum thing going on. Which didn't stop her being described as "frumpy", in her "ill-fitting suit".
But we're so far gone in the west, we probably expect ourselves to behave like this. So when did India start joining in? I don't pretend to be an expert on their societal mores, but I don't recall them being plagued by size zero or "thinspirations". Maybe I'm mistaken, but I always thought that Indian culture rather mocked western hysterics over body image. Certainly, looking at a list of "Indian beauties who conquered the world" (Zeenat Aman, Lara Dutta, Sushmita Sen), jutting ribs and clavicles do not seem to be in abundance.
Looking at the attacks on Bachchan, a terrible thought occurs –have we exported this to the subcontinent, the bad fairy of the west, hobbling over with its beribboned gift of institutionalised body fascism? It's depressing enough that the west makes gloating sideswipes at women failing to lose baby weight quickly enough, but the fact that it's gone international, all the way to India, is guilt-inducing. "Like Victoria Beckham" they say? This means that body fascism could be one of the west's most successful exports. Well done, us!
Perhaps we could learn from what happened to Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. Maybe it's time to try to return to the days when women were afforded a bit of time out while they adjusted to motherhood. Just the freedom to stick on a smock-top and relax, without the world shouting: "Shame on you, strange and terrible beast!" or pelting them with WeightWatchers leaflets, and boxes of Alli.
As for the hideous pressure to "snap straight back into those pre-pregnancy jeans!" – perhaps it would be best just to burn them in the first trimester.
OK, Denise, we know it's been bad…
Actress and presenter Denise Welch says that, after ending her marriage to the actor Tim Healy, she was treated "like Osama bin Laden". I'm sorry, but this just isn't true. Welch wasn't held responsible for the 9/11 attacks, pursued for years and finally gunned down by US operatives, watched by President Obama and Hillary Clinton. Therefore she wasn't treated "like Osama bin Laden" in any way, shape or form. I could double-check with the FBI and the US Navy Seals, if you absolutely insist, but just this once, perhaps you could take my word for it.
This is an example of what I'd term the Celebrity Hyperbole Mega-Defence. This is when someone feels badly treated, judged, perhaps even persecuted, and makes an outrageous claim of victimhoodthat has no basis in reality.
Another example of CHMD was when Heather Mills wept on the GMTV sofa that she was being treated "worse than a paedophile or murderer". Again, however much Mills was vilified, this simply did not happen. Paedophiles and murderers can expect to be locked up in high-security prison wings, sometimes for life, the former with "Nonce" scrawled on their forehead in marker pen. To my knowledge, Mills was not treated "worse" than this.
To an extent, perhaps we should sympathise – when modern fame turns sour, it looks about as much fun as a daily public colonoscopy. It's also nice to see a bit of imagination thrown into the run-of-the-mill celebrity whinge. However, too much CHMD (say, the sudden appearance of Bin Laden) and the message is fatally undermined. What these people actually mean is that they feel picked on and over-criticised. Which all sounds highly unpleasant, but ramping it up never helps.
This time, the BBC really has gone too far
Blue Peter is being dropped from BBC1. This is heresy. They'll be saying everyone was stoned on Play School next (what's that you say?… oh, I see).
The BBC's position seems to be that showing its longest-running children's programme only on CBBC is a wise and pragmatic move. Is that all they've got? Hearts and minds, people!
Let's be honest, children won't care – they know their way around the digital channels. It's the parents who'll be upset – especially the dads, with their memories of crushes on JanetEllis.
On a wider level, in some hazy but crucial way, Blue Peter belongs on BBC1. It's not just any old programme, it's the manifestation of teatime Britain. It's almost as if, just as the Grinch stole Christmas, the BBC has stolen our kids' teatime, not as an actual meal but as a concept, atradition.
Some shows are like that – acting as televised replacement shakes for the traditional family meal or get-together. Blue Peter has always been a national treasure, with or without the defecating elephants. It should be left where it is, for all time, fixed there with sticky-backed plastic if necessary.
Parenting classes are a good idea. But families need so much more | Observer editorial - Sat, 19 May 2012
The prime minister's parenting initiatives should offer something for everyone, not just those we see as 'problem' families
The arrival of a baby is, more often than not, an occasion for celebration and joy. Ensuring that he or she develops into a rounded human being, capable of giving and receiving love, holding down a job and generally getting on with life without causing undue grief to others, can be an altogether more taxing process.
Parenting is anarchic. The skills clumsily acquired by trial and error can fluctuate alarmingly from one child to another in the same family and during the course of each offspring's childhood, as the willing and docile toddler turns into a stubborn four-year-old who knows best. Then there is adolescence.
Of course, parents have muddled through for centuries with a modicum of advice and interference from nearest and dearest, so is there any reason why today's mother, father, guardian and carer should turn to the government for help?
David Cameron believes there is. New parents are to be given advice "from teething to tantrums", including tips on changing nappies and "baby talk", under a multimillion-pound initiative. A £3.4m digital information service already provides free email alerts and text messages. In addition, free parenting classes will be available to parents of under-fives in three trial areas, to be rolled out nationally if effective, and relationship support for first-time parents will also be offered in pilots from this summer. Cameron has said it is "ludicrous" that parents receive more training in how to drive a car than how to raise children: "This not the nanny state; it is the sensible state."
Government entering the private domain of family life isn't new. Labour promised practical help that eventually transformed into a parenting strategy. Every local authority appointed a parenting commissioner who oversaw help, from a light touch (eg a call to a helpline) to voluntary parenting courses and, finally, compulsory parenting classes backed with parenting orders. Unfortunately, these last clad much of the enterprise in stigma.
What Labour's efforts did signal is how family life has changed. The golden era, when father worked and mother was a full-time domestic engineer on permanent standby for her thriving brood, is a figment of a propagandist's imagination. Upper-class parents banished offspring to the nursery and the nanny; working-class parents directed their (often many) sons and daughters to the street. Some parents got it right, others didn't. But the extended family was available to soften the blows and offer direction, distraction and hands-on help.
Now, with divorce and separation, the arrival of the "blended" step-family, women's move into employment, the shrinking of the family unit and the distance from support networks, parenting can be a very lonely exercise. While guide books and television programmes exist in abundance, they aren't that much help in the heat of the moment, at the heart of the crisis. The miracle is that, according to research conducted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the majority of parents in all income brackets don't do a bad job, often against the odds.
However, these are difficult times. Financial crises, unemployment, sexualised culture and the internet jungle all add to the parental challenge. So Mr Cameron's initiative has a place. If, that is, the support offered is of the highest quality (does a consensus exist, for instance, around what constitutes "good enough" parenting?). If too, the role of fathers is supported as strongly as that of mothers and the wellbeing and mental health of both is taken into account. If there is an investment in a buddying system to encourage the less confident to sign up, otherwise those whoreceive the benefit will be those who need itleast.
Crucially, what also matters is for the coalition to focus more effectively on what makes a family strong, namely a fair income, employment, decent neighbourhoods, good, affordable childcare, excellent schools and the right kind of interventions early enough to make a positive difference to the 2% of families who are deemed the most chaotic.
So, if Mr Cameron's initiative makes it normal to seek help to make the good times better and the rougher periods manageable, then he will have achieved an admirable step-change: a universal understanding that support isn't for the "bad' parent, it is for anyone who wants to make the very best of raising a child.
Anger as lone parents face benefit cuts - Sat, 19 May 2012
Short notice of welfare shake-up hits 124,000 now under increased pressure to find work
Charities have spoken of their fury over changes to the welfare system which from tomorrow will force unemployed single parents with children about to start school to find a job or risk losing part or all of their benefits.
These 124,000 single parents with children aged five and six were given only eight weeks notice of the fact that they would have to move from income support to jobseeker's allowance (JSA). Previously, lone parents of older children have been given up to 12 months notice, giving them a greater chance of planning ahead and improving their skills and qualifications.
According to research to be published by the charity Gingerbread on Monday, single parents moving to JSA now also face a much harsher time finding "a family-friendly job in a hostile labour market characterised by low economic growth and high unemployment".
While the definition of their availability for work must take their childcare responsibilities into account, a lone parent could risk losing part of his or her benefits for up to three years if they are judged to be seeking work with insufficient vigour. The Department for Work and Pensions estimates that only 20% of the 124,000 are expected to find employment.
In a report called It's Off To Work We Go? Gingerbread's Philippa Newis points out that the absence of good affordable childcare, the dearth of part-time jobs and the fragile health and wellbeing of some children requiring parents to take time off work have all presented challenges to each group of single parents who have been required to find employment since the age threshold first began to be lowered in 2008. Then, single parents with children aged 12 and older had to seek employment. However, the current rate of unemployment – six people applying for each vacancy – along with insufficient help with childcare costs until the implementation of the universal credit next year and the end of financial help for some education courses for parents on income support as they prepare to move on to JSA means that the parents of these school-starters will face still further obstacles.
Level 3 is the highest vocational qualification that an individual can hold – and it significantly improves earnings mobility. Only 25% of those aged 25 to 29 who hold a level 3 qualification earn £7 an hour or less compared with 55% of those with level 1. Financial support for training is available on JSA, but a parent might have to leave a course if offered a job.
"This is a waste of public money," Newis said. "Not only in respect to loss of fees but also in light of future potential for earnings." Gingerbread has collected data from parents of children aged seven or older who have already made the transition to JSA. While many found the soon-to-be defunct lone parent advisers at Jobcentre Plus to be highly effective, other advisers "failed to grasp the added complication of trying to find a job when caring for children alone. This left [parents] feeling stigmatised and intimidated," said Newis.
A longitudinal study by Single Parent Action Network (Span) published last week, followed 50 single parents for three years and supports this view. The parents found work through friends, networks and cold calling companies but none via support from Jobcentre Plus.
A spokesperson for the DWP said: "The Work Programme is also available providing people with individualised, tailored support to find and stay in employment."
Among the recommendations that Gingerbread makes is better help to improve qualifications without losing benefits; realistic support with childcare costs; employers offering higher qualified part-time jobs and more effective advisers at Jobcentre Plus.
Fiona Weir, chief executive of Gingerbread, said: "Most single parents want to work but struggle to find family-friendly jobs that pay enough to lift their family out of poverty. Government needs to take a longer-term approach and support single parents to skill up and improve their prospects of a decent job."
Migraines: they are all in the head - Sat, 19 May 2012
They start with a spinning black penny, retch-inducing smells, impaired thought and speech. But migraines bring odd pleasures with their pain
The first time it happened Iwas in bed with a book, aged maybe 10. And I remember going over the same line again and again, with rising levels of panic, as I realised I had forgotten how to read. I didn't think it was something you could just forget. Something that, having picked up, you could then one day drop again. I see now it was my first migraine.
Today migraines are in the news and they're in my head, tightening around my crown like an alice band. The NHS is considering offering Botox to patients with chronic migraines. They don't know quite how it helps, but they've decided it does. The blocking of muscle contraction, which is what the botulinum toxin does to those stunning their wrinkles, hasn't been proved to relieve headaches, but two clinical trials did conclude that it led to a 10% reduction in the number of patients' headachey days. In addition, I imagine, to a laboratory paved with clingfilmed foreheads.
I'm writing now through day four of this month's headache, one that began (as do many) with a flickering blind spot in the centre of my vision. It starts small, a spinning black penny in the middle of a page. I slump in my seat as it spreads darkly over my sight like jam, and I can't see, or think, orentirely understand speech. It's the film melting in my projector – it'sa bit like falling. Smells slay me. Noise, fine, but smells – Angel perfume in alift, for instance, or that dirty spitting rain you get in cities, the kindthat smells of apocalypse – will make me retch. And minutes later the headache comes.
The author Siri Hustvedt wrote about a migraine aura phenomenon called Alice in Wonderland syndrome – the migraineur feels parts of their body ballooning or shrinking. For me it's often my hand. I'll lie in bed and under my cheek it'll swell to the size of a football, or a room, or shrink until it's dust. These episodes when my reality wobbles are not entirely unpleasant.
I half-enjoy the days preceding a migraine when everything feels like déjà vu. When walking home, a series of sights – asmoking schoolgirl, achained-up bike – areoverwhelming in their impact. Everything I see reminds meof something else, but something justout of reach. It reminds me that it's reminding me, but notwhat it's reminding me of. In its un-graspableness, this feeling is similar to one of the factors that brings these migraines on – the reflections from the Regent's Canal that play on the ceiling above my desk. Ripples of light lead to ripples in my reality, this warmtightness behind my eyes,agrim ache in my jaw.
The pain is sometimes awful, but more often it's medicated and so simply… saddening. I take these lovelypainkillers, so it's rare I'll feel the blinding sharpness. Rather than being slammed into a wall, it feels as if my head is stuck in a closing door. It's the dull agony of a deadline looming, of a nagging phobia, of goingup in alift as your vertigo builds. But I miss stuff. Parties, dinners, often meanings – I'll be interviewing somebody in a brightly lit room and will find myself two thoughts behind, my eyes scrunched in concentration, praising Olympus for the reliability of its dictaphones.
I realise, though, that it's these vibrations on the drum skin of my life that make me me. I see the worldthrough a smoky, migrainous filter. And like somebody teetering on the edge of a depressive episode, not yet fallen, I'm able to stand outside it and look around, curiously.Medicating with Botox seems like an apt metaphor – in ironing out the migraineur's wrinkles, the doctor smooths their reality. No more hands the size of houses. No more fainting as an effect of sunlightspearing through dark trees. So I've learned to embrace this gentle madness. In succumbing to a migraine, I get to test what's real.
In the Making by GF Green – review - Sat, 19 May 2012
First published in the early 1950s, Green's story of developing adolescent sexuality remains a brave work of fiction
Set partly in an upper-middle-class English home and partly in a boarding school, GF Green's novel describes the early youth and adolescence of Randal Thane. A coddled, sensitive child, Randal develops strong attachments – first to his sister, Katherine, then a boy named Felton – only to discover the pain of disappointment when the strictures of convention force his separation from the object of desire.
Green himself chafed at those conventions. Posted with the British army to Ceylon as a PR man, he took up a life of "verandahism", drinking and taking Benzedrine. He was ultimately cashiered after being "caught in flagrante with a Sinhalese rickshaw-puller". Safe to say, he was not suited to the army.
For a while it seemed he was not suited to writing either, until a course of psychoanalysis helped him recover his talent and the will to write. The result was In the Making, a novel which, veering between Proustian reverie and Jamesian analysis, must have felt a little dated, even when it was published in the early 1950s. Thereis something strange about its lack of reference to world war or its effects. But in its direct treatment of the development of adolescent sexuality, Green's novel was and remains a brave and surprising work of fiction.
Bashing the poor still thrives unabashed | Kevin McKenna - Sat, 19 May 2012
Holyrood witchfinders never rest from finding new ways to persecute those in poverty
In the immediate aftermath of the Scottish Reformation, life was hazardous for those who liked malarkey and frolics. If you were lucky, you were merely made to sit on the penitent's stool for the duration of the Sunday worship. If, on the other hand, your libidinous transgression had inflamed the righteous when their blood was up, you risked being accused of witchcraft and dooked to death in the nearest river.
Scotland, cradle of the Enlightenment and fount of the new democratic Christianity, nevertheless seemed to have attracted so many witches and demons that Satan must have seriously considered reviewing his employment practices. Scotland was easily scandalised at this time in our history. Any person with an independent mind, a nonchalant attitude to organised religion, and a fondness for a right good drink and some cheerful debauchery, was flirting with catastrophe. They were, as AC/DC would later sing, on the highway to hell. Nowadays, we call them students and journalists, but in 16th-century Scotland there was no way of accounting for such abnormal behaviour, so the women we called witches and the men blasphemers.
Apart from being socially gregarious, what they also had in common was poverty. Deprivation and cheap wine had made them unpleasant to behold and also made them prematurely old. Their very existence made civilised citizens feel guilty, so what better way to deal with them than to blame the Devil and make them dead?
They were accused of conversing with animals – proof that they had been given diabolic gifts. As I know from personal experience, though, very often it was just the drink talking. Rather than contemplate the notion of a benevolent and all-loving God being responsible for the crops failing or the cattle dying, they would instead blame the scapegoats in their midst: poor, ignorant, ugly and badly behaved women. Having been left on the margins by society, who could blame them if they sought solace in proscribed pleasures?
More than 400 years later, the poor, the ugly, the ignorant and the irresponsible are still being penalised. In 16th-century Scotland, you were quite often taxed with your life or your liberty if you enjoyed yourself too much; in the 21st century, we just tax you or put it beyond your reach. Every post-devolution Scottish government seems to be obsessed with how poor people behave and this one is following the trend.
Last week, the Holyrood prohibitionists and witchfinders who run our country all filled their boots. Making good on their promise to place the demon drink out of the reach of the feckless poor, they imposed a minimum price of 50p per unit on supermarket booze. In the same week, it was announced that they are giving serious consideration to arming our police force with tasers. This is the same police force that will be largely unaccountable in a new, single, nationwide, private army. And that, over the last few months, has been found to contain senior officers who are corrupt, incompetent, racist and violent.
The same class of people who are making this legislation also basked in the glory of telling us how many of those nasty, poor people had been locked up for saying sectarian things to each other. And just to cap a bad week for the poor, there was also an appearance by one of those clowns that Scotland likes to call "benevolent" millionaires. This time it was Sir Tom Hunter.
Depending on how many companies he's either bought or wound up that week, Sir Tom is referred to as a millionaire or a multimillionaire. For the last decade or so, possibly because he is bored, Hunter has specialised in taking bright people from poor communities into the hills and filling the gaps that the lamentable comprehensive education system leaves. That means they get two weeks of transcendental meditation, paintballing, ice baths and group hugs. Perhaps too, a wee fire-walk.
Last week, he handed down to us his musings on the revelation that in some parts of Glasgow's East End almost nine out of 10 people receive state benefits. There is too much of a handout culture, says one of the richest men in the country.
Since devolution, no Scottish government has achieved any success whatsoever in alleviating inner-city poverty and deprivation. The life expectancy of people from the most deprived areas continues to plunge.
We could introduce a new monthly lottery in these areas. Each week, we are asked to predict the six magic numbers. These are: average male life expectancy; average female life expectancy; heart disease numbers; percentage with no school qualifications; percentage of unemployed; percentage of those with no car. It's easy to play as there has been very little change in the figures from month to month in the last 20 years.
There has been no radical thinking on how to improve failing inner-city comprehensives and no serious attempts to find the root causes of multi-generational poverty. Such projects of course, if properly pursued, would take far longer than the life of a single government. And Scotland has yet to see the professional politician who starts a project for which he can't claim credit a few years later.
So, having done absolutely nothing of any consequence to address the obscenity of poverty and deprivation, we now deny them the opportunity to escape from time to time.
Extract from the Diary of an Unemployed, Once Law-abiding Citizen Living in Shettleston: Sir Tom Hunter in Daily Record slagging me for claiming benefits. Need a bevvy. Happy hour banned in pub. Sought solace in Lidl. A fiver for six cans and 15 quid for cheap vodka? Blew disability allowance. Got sparkled with the bevvy. Felt good. Sang a few bars of The Sash. Zapped by police cattle prodder. Shat myself. Back of a meat wagon. To London Road police station. Nice warm cell. Food good. I could get used to this. Can they do you for singing the Bangers'n'Mash if you're already in custody?
'What will you feel when you have no children left to wave goodbye to?' - Sat, 19 May 2012
Children are about to take their final school exams and leave the nest. Nicci Gerrard recalls tears when the moment arrived – and the chance to turn a time of loss into a new sense of liberation
About a year ago, a few months before she left sixth-form college, my youngest daughter asked cheerily: "What will you feel when you have no one left to wave goodbye to in the morning?" And as if someone had pressed a button, I burst into snorting floods oftears.
It felt like a sea of sorrow; I didn't know how I would ever stop. I didn't even know why I was weeping with such abandon: because she was leaving; because the other three had already left; because I missed them so; because I missed the person I was when they were all young; because their childhoods were over and had been happy; because I couldn't recover those days when I knew I could make them safe and protect them from the world; because I was scared of who I would be without them…
And now, all over the country, teenagers are about to take their A-levels and so begins the goodbye, and all over the country parents like me are appalled by an event they must always have known would come. We don't want them to stay; it's shockingly painful to let go.
I sometimes think I'm like scaffolding erected around a building and now the building has gone and just the scaffolding is left. Although I have always worked, since September 1987 when my son was born, the shape of my life has been dictated by my children, their needs and moods (there's a saying that's like a curse: "you're only as happy as your least happy child").
Sleepless nights, early mornings, bottles and bibs, nappies, potty-training, the small thrashing body in your bed, night terrors, dirty clothes, hot, cross, overcrowded cars, mashed-up meals, buggies, bath time, first days at nursery, scraped knees, tantrums, a warm hand in yours, nits, German measles and colds on a loop, sandcastles, school concerts and parents' evenings, childcare and the regular collapse of childcare, the call at work to say they're ill, reading to them at bedtime, shouting to them in the supermarket, helping them with homework, lunch boxes, reports, exams, friendship problems, lost socks, lost PEkit, lost coursework, lost everything, banging doors, bedrooms that throb with mess, late-night calls asking to be collected, beer cans on the lawn, vodka bottles on the lawn, first romances, first holidays away from you, first festivals, first heartbreak, the gradual realisation that they have secrets, the gradual sense that you can no longer make everything all right, theendless juggle that is called parenthood and that you only realise when it's over is also, perhaps, called happiness.
And then, if things go the way you want, if you're lucky, they leave. I have been lucky and they've left – and like a machine evolved to process the daily churn of their needs, I continue spinning uselessly in their absence.
I have been quite taken aback by the strength of my missing, but also by how so many of my friends feel exactly the same, and how physical it is. Missing hurts.
We talk about going into the empty bedrooms – the room whose mess we used to complain about – and about the days that were for years crammed with thankless domestic tasks and now have a kind of spaciousness about them. I have the time I longed for; I can read books, go for walks, see friends, grow chilli plants, paint badly, think about learning a language – but my mind hasn't grasped my new freedom yet.
When a tiny child calls for its mother, I still turn round. The heart takes time to catch up with change that feels like a cinematic jump-cut. You're young and starting out and, all of a sudden, you're middle-aged: a crumpled, creased, pouchy face gazes in startled outrage from the mirror.
The problem is not that they go; it's that you stay behind, in a life that suddenly feels the wrong shape. The terrible story of Georgie Fame's wife, Nicolette Powell, who in 1993 jumped to her death from Clifton Suspension Bridge after her children left, is an extreme example of how for many parents, particularly mothers, the transition can feel like a bereavement, a redundancy, a sudden loss of purpose and worth.
How to turn such loss into adventure and liberation? I know a couple who built a house together when their last child went; others who have gone on long trips, changed jobs, taken up new passions and learned new skills. It feels important to be reckless, selfish and young again – open to change.
For myself, I've been learning how to throw pots on a wheel and last year I trained to become a humanist celebrant. I can now conduct funerals, ritualising farewells, trying to help people to say goodbye to those they have loved. Yet in spite of my best efforts I still often wake in the night with a sense of heart-thumping dread. When the tide goes out, nasty things are found on the sand.
However, I also know that this empty-nest syndrome is a form of happiness. It's an ache of love, a good and proper sadness. And you don't really want them back! Never mind empty-nest syndrome – what about full-nest syndrome, just as problematic? This ache is not a real bereavement, though for a while the heart can be misleading. The children have grown up and gone, as they should and as you in your turn went – but they haven't died and they haven't gone missing. They're probably round the corner with their dirty laundry.
Some young people do go missing, though. That catastrophe lies at the heart of my novel, Missing Persons, which tells of a young man who disappears and the impact this has on his family and his friends. One of the emotional sources of the novel (alongside my general soggy melancholy and anxiety as the last child prepared to leave) was the trial of Rosemary West, which I covered for this newspaper.
Beneath the sheer gothic horror of what the couple did lay the desolating stories of many of their victims: young women with blighted lives who were barely missed and who had fallen out of view long before they disappeared into 25 Cromwell Street. I felt that I had been previously blind to all the people who live like ghosts among us, and to the anguish of those who search for them, wait for them.
When I was writing Missing Persons, I took long walks through London, seeing with new eyes. Doorways, bridges, churchyards, park benches; hands stretched out for money; bodies curled in sleeping bags; people we don't look at. I visited Missing People, a terrific organisation that's a lifeline for those that run away, for multiple reasons, and a support for those left behind. I read stories about the young people who had disappeared.
Every year 250,000 people go missing: that's the population of a town like Brighton. Of course, most of them come back, but how many of them never do and where are they? How many tens of thousands of people have dimmed and darkened from sight?
I read about the number of young people who kill themselves. It is, shockingly, the biggest killer of men under 35 in the UK: it is thought that men are less able than women to communicate their feelings of despair or to seek help for debilitating depression and are therefore more at risk.
I tried – still try – not to ignore the men and women who are homeless in the streets; it's horribly easy, out of discomfort, to dehumanise them – stepping round them as if they were obstacles, not meeting their eye. I think we tend to moralise luck, as if we deserve ours and they are to blame for theirs. This seems truer than ever, in these spooky economic times. We all walk on thin ice and pretend we're on solid ground.
Next Friday, 25 May, is Missing Children's Day, which aims to raise awareness of those who have vanished.For the parents who have reallylost a child, the ordinary sadness of the empty nest would be an unimaginable joy.
Nicci Gerrard's Missing Persons is published by Penguin on 24 May
