"PRIMARY school children in Oxfordshire are set to get help from mental health professionals based in their schools."
"A pilot scheme will see the trained staff attend three primary schools in Oxfordshire from September, with the potential for the programme to be rolled out across the county..."
"Experts said a combination of modern pressures on children and a decreasing taboo around mental illness meant more pupils were being identified as suffering and from a younger age."
"Windmill Primary School headteacher Lynn Knapp said she had seen evidence of primary-aged children self-harming and that mental health issues were more prominent than ever before."
"She said: `There are more demands on children such as curriculum demands and attainment pressures."
"More parents are working, there are less opportunities to talk to them at home and children are more likely to be in school from 7.30 am to 5.30 pm..."
She seems to be saying that too much school is bad for children`s mental health. The charity Restore has its own ideas and sees increasing social-economic deprivation and austerity as risk factors. The answer: put mental health professionals into schools, but really any excuse will do to get close to children.
Mindhacks questions whether there is a child mental health crises, pointing out that the data is weak, particularly for younger children.
"Are children more likely to report emotional distress in 2016 compared to 1974 even if they feel the same? Really, we don’t know...So talk of a ‘crisis in rising levels of child mental health problems’ is, on balance, an exaggeration, but we shouldn’t dismiss the trends that the data do suggest... One of the strongest is the rise in anxiety and depression in teenage girls."
"All of which brings us to the question- why is there so much talk about a ‘mental health crisis’ in young people if there is no strong data that there is one?"
UK Column 22 April 2016 [continued from previous post, and going through an excellent piece of work by David Scott.]
Speaking to David Scott, Mike Robinson says, "David, we`re starting off with GIRFEC here."
On screen appears a letter to Sally Ann Kelly, Chief Executive of Barnardo`s from the Local Government and Communities Directorate, Third Sector Unit.
"And this is a grant? £750,000 is it?"
"Yes, just under 3/4 of a million pounds and that`s gone to Barnardo`s and a few other charities and they`re running a system of integrating the third sector with the general GIRFEC framework... So this is the system of looking after children in families, through education, in healthcare, that permeates every aspect of the Scottish Government." "We`re now seeing the third sector, the charitable sector, brought into that fully in detail. So they`re involved in the planning of new developments - they`re involved in every aspect of it - there is in functional terms no difference between the government and these charities."
Mike Robinson asks: "And this is the gentleman who`s done this; is that correct?"
"This is Gareth Allen of the Scottish Government. He`s all over this. If you google, you`ll find a lot by him encouraging charities to come on board and talking to charities and you can even look at his slide show presentation which explains exactly how it`s all done and how wonderful it`s going to be in the new Scotland. Now the letter there, that award letter was written to the, then, head of Barnardo`s Sally Ann Kelly... Martin Crewe is now head of Barnardo`s... She`s moved on to another charity and this is also a charity dealing with children in Scotland, receiving Scottish Government grants, backing the Named Person scheme wholeheartedly overall for the state snooper scheme... And they are entirely in the pocket of Government. And this lady is running the show there and I`m sure she has lots of contacts which will ensure the Aberlour Trust here will see a great deal of financial support from the government."
Brian Gerrish interrupts: "David I`m fascinated by that website because again we`ve got this look. The website is very childish but, of course, it`s not designed to be read by children. It`s designed to be read by adults and so we`ve got this inversion going on; silly, childish writing about a very serious subject to do with children."
"Yes and little piggy bank for the donate button. It`s all very jolly and as though it`s child friendly but you`re quite right. It`s not there to be read by children."
Mike Robinson puts another document on screen. Funding for the Getting it Right for Every child GIRFEC third sector nationalproject. "And you wanted to highlight this:"
"This project will work with CPPs to develop an approach to GIRFEC in which there is full recognition and contribution of the Third Sector." "There are three aims which include:" "... to embed the role of the Third Sector in GIRFEC at local and national level..." "To conduct a three year project in which the Public Social Partnership will work with the Community Planning Partners to reinforce and embed the role of the Third Sector in the implementation of GIRFEC." "Right. What that means, because it`s a bit, you know, central government gobbledygook; what that means is that there`s going to be a whole series of things called Community Planning Partnerships. They will then enter into formal written agreements with central government. They will involve, not only local authorities and police.. NHS and other services but they will also involve... integrated... third sector charities ...Barnardo`s and Aberlour. So they will have a seat at the table. They will form these written agreements with central government. They will then apply government policy, including [the] Named Person, data gathering and complete state surveillance of the family." "Now the effect of this is that there is nowhere to go. If you then go to any major children`s charity in Scotland with any sort of problem - and those of us who follow the Hollie Greig case know the sort of problems those might be - then you`re dealing with the Scottish Government. You`re dealing with the state; you`re dealing with the great big singular entity that is the Scottish model of government. But it`s not just that there are no functional departments within the government ...almost the entire third sector ... has been rolled into government as well."
Gerrish responds: "This is the third sector or the Third Way which, of course, Tony Blair was absolutely boasting about back in 2001/2002 - if I`ve got my dates right. So unaccountable people in the NGOs` quasi-government systems. Now it`s all being rolled in together. This is Big Society...It`s communitarianism is the closest description I think we can get to it."
Mike Robinson continues: "Well David, tell us about Joining thedots." "Right, so Joining the dots is the core document that underpins GIRFEC. This is the Named Person and all of these things. So this is the defining document. Now you will be pleased to hear it was an independent document; it was an independent report, so that`s ok and it was headed by a former Labour MSP but she clearly didn`t write it. The person who seems to have written it is, in fact, this lady, Laura Meagher. [James Hutton Institute] Now she`s a very interesting lady... She came to Scotland ... from America, and she came to Scotland at a very interesting time, 1999. And this is not the first time I`ve found this. When you look at the people who are actually generating the ideas, they all arrive in Scotland in 1999. Why? Because we`re getting a new parliament." "What happened was people came from all round the globe - globalists if you like - to influence the policies of that new parliament because it was a clean slate. So where Scotland thinks it received a degree of independence, what`s actually happened is we`ve got globalists, think tanks and people influencing the policy behind the scenes and the change from Westminster to the Holyrood parliament simply opened up a new opportunity for these people to control what we actually do. And we`re seeing the policy of the Scottish parliament actually being set by people such as Laura Meagher." "And we`ve got a number of other people involved in producing this document. One is the Centre for Confidence and well-being. Now the Centre for Confidence and well-being is meant to be Scottish because Scots are meant to lack self confidence, ok? I don`t know if you noticed that; that`s the allegation.... [It] is in fact Common Purpose sitting on a thistle because all of the people seem to have huge Common Purpose links, including Mr Alf Young here. Very friendly looking chap. I like the smile ...and what`s his background?"
Mike Robinson says: "Well from 2007 he chaired the Glasgow Advisory board for Common Purpose."
"Yes... so what you`ve got is the import of the ideas from America [and] the UN via American universities. That`s brought in. We`ve got Common Purpose providing the organisational infrastructure to actually get everything set up and ... then we have assorted charities and quite a few PR companies ... Charities give cover and the appearance of it being from the people and the PR companies get the message out. And that`s what we`ve got. That`s the origin of GIRFEC. That`s the origin of the Named Person. It did not come from Scotland. It did not come from our politicians. It came from elsewhere."
"..unanswered questions about the rationale for the child migration policy and who drove it forward within a context of secrecy, deception and lies. "
"…need to address the relationship between the charities, the churches and the state in the implementation of this policy."
Quoting Liz Davies
"The forced migration of children as a social policy began in the 17th Century and continued for 350 years until coming to an end in 1970." "It is estimated that 130,000 child victims of 200,000 parents were sent to Canada, New Zealand, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Australia. Most child migrants had no idea of their birth families or the reason why they were sent to the colonies and parents were not told what had happened to their children. They were sent to populate the Empire with ‘good, white British stock’. Many of the children lived in large institutions and were used as cheap labour suffering abuse, cruelty and neglect..." "The Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry in Northern Ireland has already heard evidence from child migrants, as has the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse."
"It is not yet known whether the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in the UK will grant child migrants core participant status and therefore enable them to be legally represented." "It is concerning that the main IICSA public hearings are not accepting personal accounts of child abuse which are instead being presented through the Truth Project strand of the Inquiry which is not part of the legal process of prosecution and justice."
"The [Fairbridge] society was one of several child migration charities which dispatched about 100,000 impoverished British children to Australia, Canada and other far-flung parts of the Empire from the late 19th century to the 1970s."
"Unlike Barnardo’s, which has acknowledged that its child migrant scheme was `shameful` and `barbaric`, Fairbridge has refused to apologise for past injustices."
