Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 75 Comments

Horror Show

So our glorious leader Bonkers Boris has held his first cabinet. And it is truly glorious

  • Leadership provided by Bluffer Boris a man sacked multiple times for lying.
  • The person in charge of domestic security was sacked for fibbing about holding clandestine arms deals meetings with a foreign leader. Clearly we all accidentally bump into world leaders on holiday and the subject strays away from the beach talk to weapon deals.
  • The chap in charge of our kids education was sacked (with calls for him to face criminal prosecution) for leaking official secrets.
  • Several of the team would love to bring back hanging and fox hunting.
  • The Foreign Secretary apparently thinks feminists are obnoxious bigots.
  • A transport secretary who has his own private jet.
  • A rich member who thought a dying benefit claimant who was sanctioned for being 4 minutes late for an appointment – should learn the art of timekeeping.
  • Another who has recently been found in to be in contempt of Parliament. Something which seems to be a badge of honour.
  • The person in charge of housing loves the idea of a bedroom tax.
  • A Security Minister who spectacularly cocked up his own Parties Conference security leading to a significant personal data breach for a number of high profile targets.
  • A multi millionaire who claimed expenses of 49p for some milk yet struggled to correctly declare £400000 of outside earnings.
  • Another rich member who thinks people using food banks are not poor.
  • And this obnoxious thing

But we have hope.

In a far off realm a group of brave heroes hold their first shadow cabinet meeting. Ready to come to our countries need in its darkest hour. Modern day King Arthur and his Knights.

Ok one of the heroes clearly keeps falling asleep. But it’s hard work being this good. And not a top hat in sight. I suspect it would be shredded within seconds.

Maybe you have similar heroes who are poised to save your country. I think we all could do with special ones who are beyond reproach and who we can truly believe in. We certainly need a smile at the very least.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 96 Comments

Priorities

The U.K. newspaper the Guardian ran an article today on how Special Needs Education is breaking Council budgets. It’s underlying argument is that as special educational needs are growing the Government is simply burying its head in the ground. As our son is one of the 354,000 mentioned in the article it feels very pertinent to what I’ve been waffling on about for months. We live in times when Austerity reigns supreme. Even the Special Education Budget is seen as an increasingly easy target for cuts.

The Government and our soon to be gone PM are very keen to stress that money doesn’t grow on trees. But surely it does. How else can you explain these little facts.

  • When the current government failed to secure a majority in Parliament it needed a new friend. Friends don’t come cheap. The Government found an additional £1Billion in funding for Northern Ireland budgets which was enough to buy the support of the DUP party. Basically money appears if it means keeping the PM in a job.
  • The Government decided that due to Brexit we needed more Ferry capacity. It unbelievably awarded a £14M contract to a company that had no ferries and had never run shipping before. Basically £14M down the pan.
  • £14M wasn’t enough for this Government so they decided to ignore Procurement Rules in the award of the Ferry contract to a company that doesn’t have any ships at all. So they got challenged by another company. To avoid an embarrassing trial the Government paid another £33M out. That’s a lot of money for no Ferries especially when Brexit was delayed so we didn’t need them anyway.
  • Not quite finished yet with Ferries. The Government paid just under £1M to have Private Consultants assess the viability of a Ferry Company that had no have Ferries. You couldn’t make this up.
  • £67M per year spent on the Royal Family.
  • The Government spent £13M on consultants over two months in a failed attempt to get MPs to back the PMs doomed Brexit proposal.
  • Over £2B has been spent on planning for a no deal Brexit.
  • The Government spent £4M on advertising to try and promote its discredited Universal Credits Policy.
  • Every year taxpayers fork out just under £1M for the PM to use the Chequers Country Estate.
  • The previous Government cut the very highest tax rate from 50% to 45%. This has cost over £8.5B.
  • The Government spent £9M on a leaflet promoting the dangers of Brexit. Now essentially the same Government is promoting the benefits of Brexit.
  • Money is tight but the Government found £55Billion to essentially build a vanity high speed train set through some of our countries finest countryside.
  • £14Billion to build another runway at Heathrow. Bugger the environmental costs. A policy so mad that even the king of buffoonery Boris Johnson said “I will lie down in front of those bulldozers and stop the construction of that third runway … Heathrow is just undeliverable, and the sooner we face that the sooner our salvation“
  • The previous PM wanted his own Air Force One. So we spent £10M on one. The funny thing is that Cameron only got to fly on his plane once before he resigned.
  • Although money doesn’t grow on trees money was found to put adverts on vans and in newspapers telling potential illegal immigrants to Go Home. They then found another £200000 to pay for a study to show how good the idea was.
  • Every year Taxpayers are paying £3.7M subsidising our MPs and Lords food and drink cost when they are in Parliament. I’m still waiting for my food and drink to be subsidised.

I could go on an on but I hear you cry no more.

So the bottom line is money is available to the few when it’s needed. Sadly that does not apply to the 354,000 kids with recognised special educational needs and the countless thousands who fall through the system.

We live in hope of change. Unfortunately hope or change is not the middle name of the two chaps competing to be the new PM. They live in a different world

  • Jeremy Hunt regularly earned dividend of over £900k per year on top of his Cabinet salary. He later sold a company which earned him £15M.
  • Boris Bozo Johnson said that his cabinet salary of £141,000 was not enough for him to live on….

So no hope here then. But one day a revolution will come. We will start to get our priorities right and our society will start looking after the many and not the few…

That’s probably got me blacklisted on the American Visa system now and will certainly have pissed off several million in my own country…..

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 42 Comments

The Gerbils did it

Gerbils meeting world politics is not a usual combo. But it delivered this week with the wonderful Chelsea Owens letting me win this weeks Terrible Poetry Contest. The Gerbils celebrated by destroying a large Amazon Cardboard Packing case – hope they weren’t expecting it back.

If you fancy a bash at some terrible poetry please check out Chelsea’s latest competition. It’s good for the soul and top fun. The more the merrier.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 174 Comments

It’s rant time….

I’ve talked about walks quite a bit recently. Hopefully I won’t stray too much onto old ground on this rant. Apologies it is a rant.

One of the benefits of a walk in nature is that it helps you forget about our world, my country.

Deep breathing and it begins…..

We are so lucky to be sitting on this magical rock, in this special little place in the Universe. We live on a planet which is beautiful and can provide for all of us (if we let it).

I live in a stunning county in a once lovely and diverse country.

I used to love my country but I deeply hate what it has become.

A place where someone thinks it’s ok to string dead Jackdaws on the gates to a TV presenters house because he makes a stand for animals in our country.

A place where one of our finest and nicest politicians is stabbed to death while trying to help someone.

A place where our so called PM is not prepared to meet a 16 year old who wants to talk about the climate but falls over herself to find the time to meet leaders of regimes who regularly execute hundreds of innocent people.

A place which like many lands is slowly drowning in a sea of plastic.

A place where too many people are happy to take a risk on the world burning and happy to use up its resources today just because it’s not their problem and someone else can sort out the mess when they have gone.

A place where some people think it’s ok to poke fun and demonise kids dealing with things like Autism and Aspergers.

A place where extremist on both sides of the Brexit argument have taken control of our national agenda.

A place where you are labelled a traitor if you dare to go against a particular thought pattern. Demonised for rocking the boat.

A place where the establishment happily allow extremists promoting religious and racial intolerance to be seen as acceptable political parties.

A place where the national broadcaster happily gives air time to the views of a minority group and its leader who openly promotes violence.

A place where we continue to ignore the plight of the survivors from the Grenfell Tower disasters two years after that dreadful night.

A place where loathsome, self interested and self deluded buffoons run our country for no other reason than because of their privileged and elitist upbringing.

A place where the government thinks it ok to dismantle our health and education services because money doesn’t grow on trees. Yet is happy to spend billions on giving bungs to minority parties to safeguard their own jobs. A government happy to waste billions on administrating it’s own cock ups.

A place where food banks are our fasting growing institutions.

A place where we value the contribution of millionaire bankers above the contribution of our wonderful nurses, teachers and emergency services.

A place which worships at the alter of celebrity.

A place where growing numbers of our population cannot afford to access decent transport links.

A place where our Mental Health services are straining at the seems trying to deal with the rising numbers of people suffering in our communities. A fact ignored by the Government.

A place where a public library is now becoming a rarity.

A place where the Government tries to force the disastrous Fracking Industry on communities. Communities carefully selected to be far away from the rich and privileged.

A place where too many of our care homes are delivering shameful levels of care.

A place where we think it’s acceptable to net off potential nesting sites for birds and animals so as not to hinder building expansion plans.

A place where we continue to eat into our unspoiled wild lands yet ignore the huge disused and derelict areas in our urban sprawls.

A place where every night someone else dies from knife crime.

A place where every night homeless people die on our streets.

And on and on …..

It’s time to breathe again. It’s time to make my way to that overgrown tree trunk and focus on the beauty which still exists close by. It’s time to forget that I live in this country.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 57 Comments

Money is clearly everything.

Our local council is North Yorkshire County Council.

Over a year ago our Local Council agreed to make savings of £2m to its service budget. Unbelievably our Council decided to end free home to school transport for disabled and special needs pupils aged 16 to 18 years old.

This is the same council who does not provide any specialist support to kids with dyslexia.

This is the same council who has been cutting the size of Educational Health Care Plan grants to disabled and special needs kids who somehow manage to get through the tough pre qualification assessment. Penalising the very kids who need the highest level of support.

Today our Conservative Council – that’s the same party our Prime Minister heads, thats the Prime Minister who recently said ‘I’m on your side” – announced that the first year of the cut has resulted in a £800k saving. The Council reviewed itself on this issue and concluded that “the implementation of the policy has not had a detrimental impact on the ability of young people accessing their education”

Well that’s well earned pat on the back for the Council then. Is it just me who gets beyond severely pissed off with this – please tell me if I’m missing the point with this because I will happily crawl back into my little hole if it is just me.

Maybe some of our esteemed councillors should venture out of their plush council chambers, get into their Jaguar, BMW or Mercedes cars and actually see what the real world is like for a change.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 63 Comments

Spelling….

Some roads are straight and easy to navigate. Other roads are not….

A few years ago the U.K. Government changed the way children were taught and tested. To ensure that ‘children are better equipped for jobs a greater emphasis should be placed on spelling, grammar and punctuation’. As a result marks are now specifically set aside for these factor in exams. Labelled SPaG marking. It was argued that the previous inclusive educational approach was wrong.

The Government approach is to focus on a limited number of correctly spelt words. Let’s produce kids who can spell one word perfectly rather than have kids who can use an extended comprehension.

Where does this leave kids with dyslexia.?

Teaching Groups, Charities, Dyslexia Associations, Parenting Associations and Health Bodies objected. But what do they know….

Dyslexic Kids can apply for extra time in exams. They can apply for a scribe. They can apply to use a reading pen. They can apply to use a keyboard rather than pen. BUT.

They have to demonstrate a level of independence to gain access to the spelling, the grammar or the punctuation marks. If they can’t then the marks are not available to them.

Looking at our son’s case it probably means that when he takes his final exams if he opts for reasonable levels of assistance (as required under Equality Legislation) he will at best be able to access only 33% of the total SPaG marks available.

In my eyes this is wrong. But this is modern U.K. education policy.

Sadly it doesn’t stop there.

The Government decided to change the course content for Computing. Computing underpins everything now. The range of potential computing skills are endless. So many of our kids have passions and untapped skills here. The opportunities are boundless. Let kids tap into this. NO. The Government decided that the course should now focus on coding and structured programming.

Not often can I talk about a subject with anything other than guesswork, but computing I can get to amateur level. This is way beyond the dogmatic ideological buffoonery that underpins Government thinking. Why in God’s name have they picked the most uninspiring and regimented area to focus on. The approach seems to be let’s push out kids who can code rather than develop kids who can utilise the potential computers offer. Yes let kids have a basic grasp of coding then allow those who want to take it further the option to do so. I remember training in 3 programming languages – all becoming obsolete within 5 years.

AND yet again the Government – The Government which is on our side – have penalised kids with dyslexia. Coding and programming is built around specific commands and symbol patterns. Dyslexics struggle with this. So our son is stuck in a weekly computing lesson which focuses on programming. He flounders as he can’t spell the commands. His confidence gets battered. His struggles with spelling are cruelly exposed. His love for computing is fading. The school knows this but cannot change because it’s the set teaching method. Madness.

Sadly I could go on about other subjects and more Government interference. But the point has been made.

Education is so vital that it should not be left in the hands of our self absorbed and incompetent politicians. How about the politicians just focusing on screwing up Brexit and leaving education to the teachers, the parents, the area experts, the kids. In today’s language that probably gets me labelled as a dangerous socialist. A Traitor. Frankly I don’t care. What I care about is the kids going through our educational system. Clearly that’s something our leaders clearly can’t comprehend.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 69 Comments

Trees

What a stunning tree.

We took Captain Chaos for a walk this morning. Still trying to process yesterday’s school review meeting. Maybe it’s because I am tired but I just can’t get my head fully round it’s implications. It’s times like this when being a single parent sucks… No one to talk things through with. No voice of reason. So the ideas and words just keep swirling around.

I turned up carrying my 300 pages of notes (sorry Trees…). When I opened the paper pile a must do House DIY list dropped out. Sadly nothing can be ticked off the list from the last meeting. Where does all the time go.

The meeting lasted two hours. So many discussions. So many disagreements. So much frustration.

I suspect the best way to summarise is to see a never ending circle.

I ask for something. School confirm it’s not happened. Health Service says the need is real and should be met. School says they don’t have the resources to do this. School asks the Council for funds. Council says it’s not an education issue, it’s a health issue. Health Service says they don’t have the money and it’s an education issue. And on and on. If we give money to health to provide additional support then that has to come from the school and they then can’t even meet his minimum care standards. So Son has real unmet needs – everyone agrees on that but no one is prepared to provide the funds. Everybody at the meeting clearly cared about our son. Let’s be honest Health and Education have been hammered by our current Government. You can only cut things so far before things start falling apart.

Let’s quote our Prime Minister again

“I’m on your side….”

Just sod off. You are not on OUR SIDE. You are just looking after yourself. You don’t give a damm about kids like our son. Get back to looking at your, your husband and your friends off shore investments….

So the bottom line is Health are going to write to the Council and request additional funding. Council are going to write to the Health Managers and ask for additional funds. While our PM sits in Chequers and tries to find more desperate ways of staying in power. Go on May why don’t you bribe the DUP with billions of pounds of public funds again – while lecturing the rest of us that ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’. Madness.

More positively school are going to try some minor adjustments to see if that helps our son. They are also going to formally request exceptional one-off funding to pay for an in-depth dyslexia assessment. The funding probably won’t come but at least school now recognise the impact dyslexia is having on our son’s educational performance.

So hopefully at the next meeting we will have seen some progress and at the very least confirming that

  • Son has started getting some more tailored support,
  • I have started doing some of the DIY projects which are badly needed,
  • I will have gone paperless so more beautiful trees will be saved AND
  • our incompetent and distinctly unpleasant PM is consigned to historical ignominy…..
Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 104 Comments

Helpful Brexit

An advert on the radio caught my attention this morning

A very helpful sounding person speaking for the Government asked “If you had started thinking about Brexit yet” and helpfully suggested that “it may be worthwhile if people and businesses started to plan for it.”

Thank you very much.

Just a couple of teeny weeny points

  • It might be a tad late to remind people that as we are potentially only just over 20 days away from it,
  • Pot calling Kettle. Why don’t you shove that up your collective governmental backsides. Why don’t YOU start doing your job (rather than look after your own self interests) and actually make some decisions that allow people to know exactly what is going on.

I am putting forward our 3 gerbils as the new team to get us out of this Brexit mess.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 89 Comments

Back to school

Warning this post contains bad language and monumentally pompous stupidity.

In 2018 the Switzerland Glaciers lost 2.5% of their volume. It’s expected that they will have disappeared by 2090 – at the latest.

On Friday thousands of pupils walked out of UK School’s to protest about our Governments inaction on climate change. Good to see the positive response it got from our Leaders.

“It is important to emphasise that disruption increases teachers’ workloads and wastes lesson time that teachers have carefully prepared for,” a spokesperson for the Prime Minister said. “That time is crucial for young people, precisely so that they can develop into the top scientists, engineers and advocates we need to help tackle this problem.”

Our countries so called Education Secretary “let me be clear, missing class won’t do a thing to help the environment; all they will do is create extra work for teachers.”

The Conservative Leader of the House of Commons “It’s called truancy, not a strike“.

Well if you got your head out of your arses and took meaningful action then the kids wouldn’t need to walk out. If you didn’t pander to the fossil fuel companies, actively promote the disastrous fracking industry and cut renewable energy investment…. then you might be taken seriously. What trust do you expect the next generation to have in you when they see the monumental f*****g screwup you are making of Brexit. The entire political system has abjectly failed its primary roles of protecting the world and securing the futures of the upcoming generations.

This has to stop. The kids get it. Unfortunately our dim witted, self serving leaders don’t. It’s time for the next generation to take over and time for our politicians to go back to school. Maybe then they would see what a gigantic mess they have made of the education system as well.

Posted on by bereavedandbeingasingleparent · 54 Comments

Not PC the sequel

Maybe I can get away with a couple more animal likenesses. Sorry these are a bit UK based.

Michael Gove – UK politician. A man we can partly thank for the state of our education system and someone (god help us) now in charge of looking after our environment. Maybe a Sloth….

Sloth Day Facts

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Boris Johnson – allegedly a U.K. politician. Sorry this is a bit unfair to Orangutans.

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And again in the spirit of fairness, another one we came up for ME was

If anybody fancies a go, please feel free. We all could do with a smile today.

Let’s be safe and nice out there.