Available from rachelbramble@yahoo.co.uk
A.E.R.O- A guide to help increase children's happiness and potential in and outside schools is devised by myself and has been used in Wolgarston High School for nearly two years.
I aim to spread this philosophy not only in other schools but across children's services as a whole.
How do we know that by being obsessed with targets we are supressing talents that could do good for the whole of society.
A student in my school yesterday, who comes to talk with me regularly because of his lack of confidence is labelled as a non intelligent child. He is in year 11 and has a job to go to when he leaves school. Through A.E.R.O he was able to describe in detail the dynamics in his classes and why school had become a burden. He still wants to learn but there are students in his class that fill most of the teachers time by their attention seeking and who he felt relished in bullying him and a few others. He agreed that they may also have talents that no one has found which get masked in their behaviour.
A.E.R.O is devised to help both him and them and next week one of those students is coming to see me.
A sample
Talents not Targets
In the early 1990’s competencies were brought into social work training, closely followed by targets in all public sector areas.
What I believe that this has lead to is a perplexed, confused work force, who are no longer encouraged to use their imagination.
You may think that they never were in the first place, but you have to think back to the history of our country and its many inventions.
For some reason private was seen as being better than public sector and more cost effective but this hasn’t really been shown to be the case.
People are different to goods. We cannot be moulded and stay in a particular shape. As well as coming in all shapes and sizes there are a multitude of things that make our individual personas.
As a child I read loads but then I was placed at secondary school to sit next to a fast reader. She was one of my friends and so there was no problem there but I couldn’t keep up and the words in the books became one sticky mess in my head.
Had the teacher given us the task beforehand I could have curled up and read the books at home but no they were just thrust at us in the lesson and my memory refused to jump to at the appropriate time.
I know what I’m best at but who else ever looked for my talents.
I was the child in the top sets who struggled there in my own estimation but no one took me aside to work out why. I was too shy to tell anyone and so one day just stopped going to school. I got the label ‘ School phobic’ but even that was disputed at the time.
I still don’t know what I was actually frightened of and wonder whether anyone at the time knew either.
They were looking for what had gone wrong in my life rather than looking for my talents.
We have had numerous governments that have continued to be stuck in this mould.
I believe that it is time not only to have TV programmes called ‘ Britain’s got talent’ which condemn individualism unless it fits an expected mould.
Lets open our eyes and explore uniqueness
lets get social workers into schools and get that soap.