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Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

‘Sociology’

Formation more than Education

I find that one of the more interesting aspects of my part-time return to secondary school teaching is that of being a form tutor. The role has a pastoral element built into it not obviously present in classroom teaching or general school management. For someone interested in the development of children and young people and how their psychology affects their performance at school (and beyond), the role of form tutor offers possibilities of making the kind of difference that most other roles in school life don’t. What’s more, a good form tutor can create a climate of trust that enables members of his or her tutor group to open up and confide some of the turbulence going on inside their teenage heads. Recent examples I’ve had to deal with include a 14-year old girl distraught because her mother had started calling her “fat” and “ugly” over the past few months – having previously tended to tell her daughter how beautiful she was. Investigation revealed that the catalyst for the change in Mum’s behaviour was the arrival on the scene of a new serious boyfriend. It looked pretty much to me like Mum was belittling her daughter because the daughter (who was… Read More

A Tale of 2 Councils…and the Real Challenge facing Simone Butterworth and Jim Brooks

The county of North Lincolnshire and my home town of Hull are virtually neighbours. Just 5 miles of the A63 through the East Riding of Yorkshire and a mile or so of the Humber Bridge separate them. North Lincolnshire Council has been awarded Beacon Council status. Following a damning Audit Commission report, Kingston Upon Hull City Council is under serious threat of some form of central government intervention unless, by December 2002, it can show demonstrable progress against its remedial Action Plan. Why such different scenarios for two local authorities geographically so close? Systemic thinking? Nothing symbolises the differences between the two councils more than the critical field of Education. For it is its strategies in Education that have seen North Lincolnshire achieving Beacon status in two consecutive years. (Although the Beacon award was specifically for Education, to achieve the award, the Council per se has to be perceived as a high-performing local authority.) By comparison Hull has been bottom of the GCSE league tables for 4 years out of the past 5; the year it wasn’t bottom, it was next to bottom. There are those in Hull who look enviously at the semi-affluent farming communities around Scunthorpe. They proclaim that, if… Read More

Of Cogs & Spirals…

by David Burnby I first met David Burnby of Common Purpose when he came on the second of my Introduction to Spiral Dynamics & Related Models of NLP courses June-July 2001. David was so enamoured of the material that I asked him to contribute something for my embryonic Blog. The provocative piece that follows is what he wrote for me. Hull is a great place! The quality of life is high, the folk are friendly, the pace is easy. It’s an attractive city with much to offer. Yet ask someone outside of Hull what they think of the city, what image they have of the place, and you’ll probably get a resounding ‘don’t know’ or something about fish (actually, a very small part of the local economy). Unless of course they’ve stayed here a while, in which case you’ll probably get a very different story – a very large number of Hull students, for example, fall in love with the place and stay here. Does it matter if we have a bad image – or no image at all? Yes it does. Because like any other city, Hull needs to attract inward investment, skilled and talented people, tourists: and the people of… Read More