One Size Doesn't Fit All

iPEC, the independent Personalised Education Centre in Milton Keynes, started working with students on Monday. I'm proud of the Ethos Statement that I worked on with the staff, so here it is:

One Size Doesn't Fit All

iPEC, the independent Personalised Education Centre for North Milton Keynes, is the hub of a learning community that provides inclusive, inspiring and engaging learning experiences for secondary aged students who are disaffected, excluded or at risk of exclusion from, or otherwise unable to attend, mainstream school.

We have designed iPEC’s Curriculum to prepare students for adult life, work and citizenship. We want them to be able to function as an adult in an adult world, living an honest life with dignity and pride, making life choices from within a range of options that are socially acceptable, developing a sense of social awareness and responsibility for others.

We have done so because we want to promote a fair and inclusive society. We believe all young people deserve opportunities for a rich and fulfilling life; a positive education is a key part of preparing them for that.

There is also a measure of enlightened self-interest: we want iPEC students to become good citizens. Students who do not succeed at school and leave without skills and qualifications are more likely to find it hard to gain employment and more likely to become involved in unhealthy, anti-social or criminal behaviour. We want to help them choose a pro-social path. We want them to achieve economic well-being, not become a burden or a danger to other members of society. By offering an inclusive education we aim to make our students feel valued, believing they will, in turn, be more likely to value others.

iPEC will provide personalised learning in terms of the breadth of the curriculum on offer, learned in a range of styles and through a variety of methods to suit all its students. Many school-excluded or at risk teenagers are more easily engaged and find it easier to succeed when the curriculum is relevant to their interests. Skills are easiest to learn when they play to our individual strengths. Being good at something provides a platform of confidence from which to challenge and overcome personal weaknesses.

Relationships are the key to personalisation. Without a working relationship with our students (and their parents) we would have no way to encourage them to engage; no way to understand what they might be good at and might enjoy.

For the majority of people, economic well-being means the ability to get a job. Achieving employability is a rite of passage to adulthood, providing dignity and pride in the adult world. In a real work environment iPEC students will learn that life and work requires certain functional skills - basic numeracy, confidence in reading and writing to do everyday things such as filling in forms or getting a driving license and, in most cases nowadays, familiarity with ICT.
In an increasingly fast-changing and uncertain economy it is also essential to have generic employability skills, transferable from one task or occupation to another. All employment depends on a certain level of emotional literacy: the ability to understand and work with others, and to understand oneself as part of a group. Many of iPEC’s students will lack emotional maturity. We aim to speed up their emotional development, so will offer opportunities to engage with the adult world, encouraging them to develop a sense of pride in doing so. We believe young people who experience behaviour difficulties with their peers tend to behave more like adults when among adults.

We therefore feel that an adult majority is crucial to model acceptable and professional behaviour and to modify negative peer influences. We intend to establish the KS4 programme in an environment where students are surrounded by a community of professional adults as well as teaching and support staff. Some of these adults will have direct relationships with students, as work supervisors, volunteer learning assistants and mentors. Others will exert a more subtle influence merely by their presence and casual acquaintance with the students. All will be prepared to look out for and, if necessary, engage to diffuse potential difficulties. This engagement and guidance from interested adults who are not teachers is key to helping students learn to moderate their own behaviour.

One important feature of adult life is compromise, agreement and making deals. We believe a successful relationship with our students starts with a contract. We are sensitive to what they may be giving up by engaging with iPEC and the effect it will have on them, even if we feel what they lose to be negative. They may be giving up peer relationships, status (however achieved), the language they feel comfortable using; in fact a version of themselves developed to fit their circumstances.

The result may be to isolate themselves. We must therefore be clear on what they are gaining. We want to give our students prospects, life expectations and opportunities, we want them to look at and adjust the way they see themselves, others and the way they conduct themselves. We want to offer the chance to gain a better version of themselves, with opportunities for jobs, relationships and adult respect they may not have thought open to them. We want to plant seeds in all our students to make them realise there is more on offer and they can achieve more than they previously believed possible.

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air

Thanks to Urban Ziegler of RETScreen for putting me onto this fascinating book by David JC MacKay, a Physicist at Cambridge University. Sustainable Energy - without the hot air sets out to crunch the numbers on a potential sustainable energy future for the UK. You can download the entire book (in three sections) or a 10 page summary, from the website at www.withouthotair.com, where you'll also find links to order a hard copy.

MacKay wants to know if we can get off our fossil fuel addiction but seems to be fed up with two things: firstly, the unhelpful suggestions that will save small amounts of energy but allow people to think they've done something positive. His favourite bad example is the common exhortation to unplug mobile phone chargers when not in use. He says that doing so will save as much energy in one day as you use driving your car for one second.

In other words, don't focus on the little things if you aren't going to make big changes. As he puts it, our energy consumption is huge, so 'every big helps.'

Secondly, he's angry that the discussion about renewable energy is conducted with adjectives rather than numbers. He says the latter are mainly used (especially in the media) in a confusing way for political point scoring.

His idea to cut through the fog is simple in concept, though it must have taken a while to pull all the information together. He converts all energy to the same unit (he chooses kilowatt hours per person per day) and in one column draws up a representation of the average person in the UK's usage, and in another column draws up the potential capacity for different types of generation. In this graphic way he aims to show whether renewable energy can meet our demands and get us off our fossil fuel addiction.

The result? Yes, in theory (and with some big decisions about energy efficiency, e.g. converting to electricity for all transport). However, there's a catch... we will only get there by giving over vast areas of land and sea to electricity generation or growing crops for biofuels. Really vast areas, like an area of sea twice the size of Wales for offshore wind production. He's worried, probably with justification, that the British public simply won't wear it.

So what can we do? Is the situation hopeless? MacKay doesn't think so. He just thinks there are some difficult choices ahead, and he aims to steer the conversation in the right direction for us all to take those decisions. He therefore offers a number of options of energy plans that add up. He makes some suggestions on how to reduce the demand, and proposes different mixes for low carbon supply. Some include nuclear power, some include clean coal (with carbon capture and storage technologies) and one is for the purists, using neither of these 'controversial' sources, just pure renewable energies.

There's a proviso on any such plan, he warns: without nuclear or clean coal we'll need to import renewable energy produced elsewhere. The most promising technology to his mind is concentrating solar power produced in desert regions.

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air is written in an engaging and easily readable style. It's about the UK, but MacKay hopes similar calculations will now be done for other countries. As I said at the start, it's free to download, so I don't intend to precis it any further. I recommend you go straight to the source and start thinking about your own preferred answers to those difficult questions.

Which countries mean it when they say they'll invest in a sustainable future?

HSBC Climate Change has published an interesting report on the 'Green New Deal,' looking at how much of the financial stimulus package for different countries is 'green'. My friends over at REEGLE have created some helpful graphs on their blog.

It makes for some interesting comparisons. After Obama announced his particular spending spree I remember saying to a friend I wasn't sure about his green credentials because he didn't seem to be spending enough on sustainable development. Turns out to be 12%, whereas China is spending 38%, and South Korea 81%. It's not bad, though, back in the UK, dear old Gordon thinks the future of the planet is only worth a piffling 7%.

If you forget the percentages and look at the raw figures, some of them seem immense. The US is spending 112.3 billion dollars. China is spending even more: 221 bn US dollars. But let's put that in context: what was that number that got me so riled up in my last post? Oh yeah, the oil industry needs to spend "$25 trillion over the next 20 years" on "difficult oil exploration projects." Over $1 trillion a year. More than the combined figure for 'green' investment in the economic stimulus packages of the world's major countries in exceptionally trying circumstances - the 'perfect storm' recession; the worst economic climate for 60 years - every year for the next 20 years!

Hope and oil

Everyone's hopeful all of a sudden now Obama's in power. I'll be hopeful when our political leaders have the guts to cut these fuckers off at the knees:

"BP boss Tony Hayward said a $60 to $80 price range would meet both Opec's needs and cover the cost of investing in difficult oil exploration projects.

The energy industry would have to invest $25 trillion over the next 20 years, he said during a session at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "The price of oil has to be high enough to motivate investment going forward.""

(from BBC News website)

SSE's 10 year anniversary

An open letter to SSE Fellows, students, staff and Trustees

Ten days ago I attended the tenth anniversary party of the School for Social Entrepreneurs. I found it an emotional and difficult occasion. Too many people weren't there who should have been. But I'd like to apologise to those who were. When asked to say something, all I could muster was, "I am far less optimistic about the state of the world than I was ten years ago; you'd all better work harder."

The first part has the benefit of being true, at least. I think I'm right to feel that way, too. The chances of mankind falling upon itself in a horrific and catastrophic manner during this century seem far more present than they did when we set out with an idea contained in the proposition "you can have a school for social entrepreneurs."

I was born in 1970 so grew up with World Wars long past; after the chilliest parts of the Cold War. I was only just an adult when the Berlin Wall came down. Plenty of problems, sure; spending my teenage years in a mining town in Lancashire I saw plenty of inequality. Nothing about the Falklands War gave a sense of a nation's fight for survival, though. Nothing about Iraq and Afghanistan now gives a true sense of what could happen in a planet-wide struggle for supremacy and survival when there are 9 or 10 billion people and dwindling supplies of basic resources.

But the second part of my statement's not fair. You are amongst the people who are already working hardest. I admire SSE's Fellows and students and all you have achieved and continue to achieve. I am proud of SSE. I know I'm biased, but it really does seem to be the best of the organisations set up in the UK at the end of the last millennium to support social entrepreneurs and promote social entrepreneurship: truest to purpose and genuinely focused on the benefits to its students, with no desire to grow for growth's sake.

SSE has come a long way but it seems weak compared to the problems mankind now faces. And it is working against the background of a wider social entrepreneurship movement that is disjointed. "Social entrepreneurship" has not yet become what we hoped it would when we set out back in 1995 (it took nearly three years to get SSE off the ground). Many within the movement have been distracted by governmental interest in social enterprise and getting the sector to do 'public service delivery'; others are too in thrall to the wave of business entrepreneurs and financiers who, attracted by the term, have declared an interest in the sector. They may bring resources, but too often coupled with an arrogant assumption that their market-driven methods are better than 'charity,' and lacking a basic understanding that dealing with social problems is way way harder than just making money. We've forgotten that we were supposed to be leading them to a better, more equitable path.

And I don't know the way forward. When they played a video of an interview with Michael Young at the party I had to leave the room. One of the Fellows later told me how much he had enjoyed it; how it captured Michael's mischievousness and fizzing energy. That's why I couldn't bear it. We need him now: he'd have plenty of ideas about what to do; he'd know how to rejuvenate the movement and gear it up for greater impact. Or he'd start a new one.

So I don't mean "you'd all better work harder". I mean "keep up the good work but don't underestimate the scale of the task ahead." And I also mean "I hope that SSE produces a true leader for the social entrepreneurship movement in the 21st Century." I think I've learned one or two useful things and I'm ready and willing to help, just as soon as someone works out what needs to be done.

Social entrepreneurship is not a right...

... it's more fundamental than that. Rights are about what other people or organisations should, or, more often, shouldn't do to you. Social entrepreneurship is not a right in that sense.

Nor is it a privilege. Social entrepreneurship is about what you can do, or at least try to do, without asking permission.

It doesn't matter what other people do or don't do. It's personal and it's internal and it can't be taken away from you whilst you are still alive. Whatever situation you are put in you can try to improve conditions for yourself and others around you.

Social entrepreneurship is therefore part of the very essence of being human. You can't limit someone's opportunity to try.

Asylum seekers and refugees and giving away organisations

Anyone who supports the 'War Against Terror' and also dislikes the number of asylum seekers in Britain should read the stats. Guess the two countries where the highest number of people claiming asylum in Britain in the first quarter of this year came from? Yep, Iraq and Afghanistan.

They, and everyone else, should also read this article by author Mark Haddon about the hell of being an asylum seeker in Britain today. It's a national shame.

Thankfully some people are trying to do something to improve the situation. Which segues nicely into a quick update on my own work with refugees through RAISE because I recently met some of those people.

I wrote some time back about transferring charitable activities to another organisation. Well now we're giving away the whole organisation!

Left with no activities and no money, and knowing well the Catch 22 of trying to fundraise for a new organisation, RAISE decided to look for other refugee projects which could make use of an organisational vehicle with a track record. We initially thought of something in the refugee employment field, but nothing suitable materialised.

Then I was contacted by the Refugee Crisis Intervention Service (RCIS) , which provides language-specific, community-based support services to refugees and asylum-seekers experiencing mental distress. They have operated for a few years in the London Borough of Islington as a partnership of Refugee Community Organisations (RCOs). Towards the end of 2007 they were given a grant to hire a development worker to extend the services to other refugee communities and other boroughs, which would fall outside the remit of the RCO acting as lead body for receipt and management of funds. They were planning to set up a new charitable organisation, but could see the benefit of operating through one that had an eight year track record.

A worthy cause indeed, but also somewhat outside RAISE's charitable objects. Discussions with the Charity Commission and funders ensued. The former to see if there would be any chance of amending our objects suitably, and the latter to see whether our track record would carry any weight if it was all about employment and current activities were on mental health. Both were encouraging, so we went ahead with due diligence.

In technical terms it's not quite so dramatic as 'giving the organisation away'. Last week we appointed three new trustees who are connected with RCIS and we are now making an application to the Charity Commission to widen our charitable objects. A number of the existing trustees, who were in it for the engineers, so to speak, will retire. Hopefully the organisation will continue, remade, with renewed purpose.