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Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

Orchard Park Estate’

The Parks Primary School

The Meshing of Two Primary Schools written with Cathy Byrne Updated: 11 September 2004 The Parks is one of the most complete project reports on the use of the Gravesian approach anywhere in the world and many people have suggested that I must have been much more involved than the report suggests. Well, I wasn’t! This is Cathy Byrne’s story, not mine.  My RED would love to report that Cathy was on the phone to me every night asking how to do *this* and how to handle such-and-such a person. Unfortunately, it wasn’t like that. My influence, as Cathy has acknowledged widely, came through the training programme and then as an occasional adviser in the background. I like to think of the remarkable story of The Parks as being a first class example of just how much you can accomplish when you really grasp these concepts at an intuitive level. Most afternoons Cathy Byrne, Headteacher of The Parks Primary School on Hull’s Orchard Park Estate, sees her pupils off the premises with something of the pastorly air of a vicar bidding farewell to the congregation as they exit a church service. However, most mornings Cathy is also in the playground, welcoming… Read More

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

Does Hull have a Race Relations Problem?

On the evening of Friday 25 July in my home town of Hull, two groups of men – one white and composed of locals and the other said to be made up of Iraqis and Kurds – fought each other in the Spring Bank and Pryme Street area of Hull. Knives and clubs were brandished. Fortunately police intervened rather speedily and no one was seriously injured – though several cars were badly damaged. 15 arrests were made for “offences ranging from racially-motivated behaviour to carrying an offensive weapon” (Hull Daily Mail). Trouble flared again between the two groups around about 5 PM the following day (26th) and another 14 arrests were made. The trouble was supposedly sparked by the arrest earlier on the Friday of a white man in connection with an attack on an Iraqi man the previous Sunday night (20 July). In that incident the victim had been attacked by a group of white men in the Pryme Street car park and hit with a baseball bat. He ran off along Freetown Way but was knocked down by a vehicle which one of the white men drove onto the pavement to hit him. “Other cars driven by the group… 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