Teachers for Supply

In recent weeks, the continued allegations of historical sexual abuse at Chetham’s School of Music have put many aspects of music education under intense public scrutiny (Music school abuse inquiry identifies nine ‘key suspects’, 19 February). Following the conviction of the previous director of music, Michael Brewer, the tragic death of Frances Andrade, and extensive testimonies within the press of different abuse, it can be clear that there should now be a whole independent inquiry into the alleged sexual and psychological abuse by Chetham’s staff because the establishment of the institution as a music school in 1969. Such an inquiry would ideally extend to other institutions to boot, a number of that have also been the topic of allegations of abuse.

Recent press reports have suggested that in this time many students complained to senior members of staff concerning the sexually abusive behaviour of a few Chetham’s teachers, but that no satisfactory action was taken. While it really is of primary concern that folks that stand accused must be investigated once possible, if these allegations are shown to be correct, it will be significant to realise the broader implications of a college culture which facilitated such abuses of trust, and afforded alleged offenders long-term protection. Thus, we ask senior members of staff from that point to account for what seems to be the severe failure of the college system to offer protection to its pupils from folks that exploited their positions of power.

The prevalence of sexual abuse, which appears to have continued unhindered over decades, suggests an alarming loss of responsibility and competence within the management of a college which had, particularly, an obligation to guard the welfare of its students and to nurture the artistic potential of each pupil. That Chetham’s appears to have failed on this respect, and with such devastating consequences for the private and professional lives of the alleged victims, now requires some considerable explanation from folks that held senior positions of authority.
Paul Lewis Pianist (Chetham’s alumnus 1986-1990)
Tim Horton Pianist (Chetham’s alumnus 1983-1992)
Ian Pace Lecturer in music, City University (Chetham’s alumnus 1978-1986; Juilliard School 1991-1992)
Peter Donohoe Pianist (Chetham’s alumnus 1964-71)
Daniel Harding Conductor (Chetham’s alumnus 1988-93)
Imogen Cooper Pianist
Steven Isserlis Cellist
Mark Padmore Tenor
Martin Roscoe Pianist
Lisa Batiashvili Violinist

Ex-Chetham’s students:

Elaine Ackers (1981-1983)
Robert Agnew (1982-1989)
Colin Akers (1982-1984)
Julie Alderton (1974-1979)
Bernadette Anguige, nee Warburton (1989-1996)
Mark Ashford (1984-1990)
Nicholas Ashton (1973-1980)
Nadine Bacon, nee Wiltshier (1980-1990)
Alicia Bailey (1985-1995)
Phil Bailey (1989-1993)
Brendan Ball (1981-1984)
Richard Bamping (1979-1987)
James Banbury (1984-1986)
Sarah Barnes (1980-1987)
Matthew Barley (1981-1983; GSMD, 1983-1987)
Patrick Bennett (1985-1988)
Helena Bidder née Brewin (1986-1988)
Emma Black (1983-1987)

Full list of signatories here

Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-right Front National party, was greeted by an anti-fascist protest as she addressed a Cambridge University debating group on Tuesday.

The daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who took over the party leadership from her father in 2011, spoke to students on the Cambridge Union Society in the afternoon.

Her appearance led the gang Unite Against Fascism to organise an indication of about 200 people outside the venue. Officers from Cambridgeshire police attended.

Le Pen, 44, who have been an MEP since 2004, spoke in regards to the way forward for the european and French politics. A spokesman for the Union Society defended the call to ask her to chat.

“We welcome the chance to speak about, debate, and challenge somebody who has had an unquestionable impact on French and European politics,” he said. “Whether you settle together with her politics or not, this event represents among the only a few opportunities a British audience has needed to directly engage with Mrs Le Pen, who finished third within the last French presidential election, behind Hollande and Sarkozy, and who currently sits within the European parliament as a democratically elected representative.”

Student Rights, a collection supporting equality, democracy and freedom from extremism on university campuses, called for Cambridge University to enquire the verdict to ask Le Pen to speak.

In a press release, it added: “Universities do have an obligation to uphold freedom of speech, but they’re no place for the promotion of fascist views, and university authorities have an obligation of care to their students to guard them from people who would promote hatred.”

Previous controversial speakers on the Union Society have included Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Julian Assange.

The Dechen Phodrang monastery sits on top of a steep hill overlooking the Bhutanese capital, Thimphu. Because the 16th century, prayer flags have fluttered inside the hills around Dechen Phodrang, certainly one of thousands of monastic orders scattered throughout this tiny Himalayan kingdom.

The Buddhist faith is tightly woven into the material of Bhutan’s fiercely protected national identity. Monks are still revered by large sections of the population and for lots remain a vital part of daily life, performing birth and death rituals and presiding over prayers at national holidays.

For centuries, the monasteries have provided a house and an education to thousands of Bhutan’s poorest children. Greater than 4,000 live and study in monasteries around the country, usually sent by parents who can’t afford to feed their large families or pay for the uniforms and textbooks required by government schools. Officially, the monasteries take children of 7 and older. Actually, many take children as young as five after they have nowhere else to head.

Since 1971, Dechen Phodrang have been home to about 450 student monks, many coming to the monastery from villages within the mountainous interior. Living conditions are basic. The youngsters sleep on mats at the floor of the drafty classrooms, and respiratory infections, lice and scabies are a part of life. The monastery struggles to give basic sanitation facilities and adequate food for the lads.

“Lots of these children who come here arrive because their situation at house is desperate. We strive to do the suitable we will for them,” says Kencho Tshering, principal of Dechen Phodrang’s monastic school. “Most don’t see their families for most months, or maybe years, as many families can’t afford the adventure. There’s an understanding that after the men enter the monastery, their lives at the moment are committed to religious knowledge.”

Until three months ago, the monastic students here were bring to an end from state or social welfare programmes. The govt. rarely intervenes within the monastic orders, and the monasteries have their very own courts, which operate outside the state penal system.

Now, a groundbreaking project is entering this closed-off world. a toddler protection framework is being organize in the monastic school system. Designed and funded by Unicef Bhutan, it aims to instil the theory of kid rights into the monastic orders and, more practically, provide children within the monasteries with a manner of reporting violence, neglect, mistreatment or abuse. It aims to forge links between the monastic orders, the police and state child welfare services.

“The concept these children have basic rights – to be protected against harm, to good health, sanitation – is a brand new concept to a few of the monks who’ve themselves passed through a monastic education, where there’s an emphasis on hard discipline and on total integration into spiritual life,” says Dorji Wangdi, child protection officer at Unicef Bhutan.

Dechen Phodrang was selected as one of many test sites for the scheme. All teachers, senior monks and pupils have attended child rights workshops, and a baby protection officer is now housed permanently at Dechen Phodrang to behave as a bridge between the monastery and state child welfare services.

“Before, the lay and monastic systems were very separate, except in cases of significant criminal activities, but now any response to any child rights issue is co-ordinated between the monastic and federal justice systems,” says Wangdi. “Simply because a baby has entered the monastic order doesn’t mean they need to not get the identical protection as the other child in Bhutan. The authorities here should remember that the child’s welfare is the responsibility of the state to boot.”

Wangdi says the consequences are already showing. Caused by child rights workshops, corporal punishment – banned within the remainder of Bhutan’s schools but still used widely in monastic ones – has stopped at Dechen Phodrang.

When Phub Gyeltshen, a shy 16-year-old, first came to the college three years ago, he had already spent years within the state education system. His family took him to the monastery after struggling to feed him and his four sisters.

“The primary months were very hard,” he says. “I missed school and my family and learning English. i used to be also bullied and beaten by the older boys, and in addition at school , but i assumed this was just something I needed to bear as i used to be by myself.

“Now i do know that there are things i will be able to do, there’s someone here on the monastery who has told us that we will go and tell him if anything is inaccurate and they will hearken to us. Things are better now, and i am glad that they have got put these items in to assist us.”

While the project is seen to were successful at Dechen Phodrang, the key challenge is scaling up this initiative on a countrywide scale. Bhutan is essentially mountainous, with many smaller monastic schools in isolated and remote locations removed from the capital city.

“We’re often not likely ready to assess conditions at a lot of the smaller schools, especially in the course of the winter months,” says Wangdi. “Putting this programme of kid rights and adequate reporting chains into these monastic schools goes to be an incredible problem. It should be difficult gaining the boldness of both the monks and likewise the kids as there won’t always be someone accessible to be some extent of contact – so we need to find ways of ensuring rights at the moment are implemented.”

Despite the question marks that hang over the way forward for the fledgling child protection scheme, it’s being heralded because the first step in preventing Bhutan’s 4,000 child monks from falling throughout the gaps.

“It’s hard because, in our culture, the pupils listed here are already monks, they’re here to immerse themselves within the spiritual world,” says Tshering. “However the world has changed and we need to change too, and ensure that each one the kids listed here are treated equally to these within the outside world.”

At the British Academy last week we released a report called Languages: State of the Nation. It analyses the worrying state of the present demand and provide of language skills in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and is the most recent in a chain of news and position papers we’ve dedicated in recent times to the declining status of languages in our colleges and universities. The purpose of all our work is to drive home the message that languages are vital for the overall healthiness of the education and research base, for UK business competitiveness and political standing, and for people and society at large.

The report draws on new data from a survey of UK employers and Labour Market Intelligence and demonstrates how we’re affected by a growing deficit in foreign language skills just at a time when the worldwide demand for language skills is expanding. Worse still, inside the words of the report, we’re trapped in a “vicious circle of monolingualism”. Employers reply to the weak supply of those skills in a single of 2 ways. The 1st is to realign their market, choosing to deal only with people who speak English, and therefore remove language requirements from their job adverts. Alternatively, in the event that they are really pushed, they train existing staff with language skills or hire native speakers. Either way there aren’t any market incentives for learners and little pressure on government to prioritise these skills.

Luckily, it is not all bad news. We are able to and will celebrate the variety in our schoolchildren, in addition to in our world-leading educational institutions. There’s a plentiful supply of multilingual skills in UK society – one in six school children in England speak a foreign language as a mother tongue. Census data released just last month confirm just how plentiful this resource is within the UK. More must to be done to unlock this talent. We have to make sure that our education system enables and enhances the UK’s aspirations for growth and global influence. Demand already exceeds our current capacity.

And we must ensure that the perfect messages are becoming through to children in schools if we’re to bridge the space between the education and employment sectors.

We need too with the intention that, regardless of the precise form the English Baccalaureate Certificates or its successor takes, languages have a prominent place as disciplines within that scheme, whether those are the most important European languages traditionally taught in our faculties or languages like Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Hindi and Indonesian that allows you to surely have an ever increasing presence on earth today’s children will live and work in. And we must reverse the disturbing trend for those languages to become the preserve of the associated fee-paying schools and Russell Group universities.

Last week we launched our second year of faculties Language Awards. The awards aim to encourage excellence in language learning in schools within the UK. Applicants from both mainstream and supplementary schools are invited to illustrate innovative and attainable plans for making improvements to take-up and exuberance for language learning beyond the age of 16.

The 2012 National Winner, Dallam School, impressed the judging panel with its bilingual groups in years 7, 8 and 9, where PSHE and diverse humanities lessons are run entirely in another language. This ensures that scholars get extra exposure to that language on an afternoon-to-day basis, including daily routines and informal banter in these busy, mixed ability groups. That’s supplemented by bilingual activities inclusive of Europe and international days, adventure learning, spelling bees, film studies, French cookery days, visiting and exchange opportunities to countries and additional time with foreign language assistants.

In short, we want a brand new strategic technique to stimulate both demand and provide. We must find better ways of identifying and expressing the desire for languages. But we’re not ranging from scratch. Our best challenge lies in building at the firm foundations that exist already in our society in order that we will be able to reply to the opportunities that the long run holds.

Professor Nigel Vincent is vp on the British Academy for the arts and Social Sciences.

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