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MARCH 2025
07 March 2025
14 March 2025
21 March 2025
28 March 2025

Friday 7 March 2025.
Richard writes

My apologies but there is not much to blog about this week. I have had friends to stay, Molly and I haven't done any filming and we got ahead of ourselves during half term.

I would like to remind you that we would love for you to support our work and become patrons which you can do by clicking this link. Have a good week and see you next week, halfway through March.

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Friday 14 March 2025.
Richard writes

This is a very important blog. We always said we could not do the School of the Air part of our project without a small amount of funding. We hoped that some of you, either users of our material or fellow believers of our view on education, would subscribe to our patreon page that is here

However we also felt that there would be some companies who might wish to support us and be associated with our efforts to help those children who could not cope with a rigid school environment or those parents who chose not to send their children to such a place.

We decided that we would begin the School of the Air in January without such funding in place and handed over the sponsor aspect to a third party. Within a few weeks we knew that what we were doing was both useful, appreciated and being enjoyed.

However the third party has, we feel, let us down and sponsorship money is still not In place. If we are to continue, it MUST be there. Simple as that.

With this in mind we feel there is no way that we can go back to chasing sponsors and carry out all the work needed to write, research, film, edit and produce the videos every day. We are therefore pausing until after Easter the videos on Monday and Wednesday. This will free Richard up to go back to trying to attain the funding we need. Molly's videos on Tuesday and Thursday for the Early Years will continue as planned. We will then catch up on those Monday and Wednesday videos by only taking a four week summer break instead of the six we planned.

We apologise for having to do this but there is no other way we could see. We will keep you informed but if you would like to become a patron or, as a business, would like to sponsor us or know a business that would, please let us know. Thank you.

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Friday 21 March 2025.
Richard writes

When I first started working in education my job, as you may have read elsewhere on our site, was to teach (didn't like the word even then) Life and Social skills to 16 and 17 year olds who had basically come out of school with not enough qualifications to find work. I was a little surprised that neither at home with their parents nor within our education system they had not learned these skills. The young people all told me they had failed at school: I told them school had failed them.

Since those long gone days, the youngsters who I helped would now be approaching 60, ............sorry just paused to have a little laugh to myself........ I have worked tirelessly to ensure that the learning young people have in their formative years is meaningful and useful to them in later life. I have always remembered the words my old headmaster said to my father on my final day at school, also not far off 60 years ago, He said that he didn't really care what qualifications pupils had when they left his school as long as he and his staff had equipped them to enjoy their lives and deal with any problems they might encounter. "I want them to believe in themselves whatever any results may tell them", he said, "because if they do that, then they will achieve everything they want".

Personally I believe we put far too much emphasis on so-called academic subjects, taught instead of being allowed to learn and don't spend enough time on helping the young with their life and social skills, on building confidence and resilience and allowing them to discover what type of learning works for them. Dare I say it again; we're all different. But let's stay like that.

Sir Gareth Southgate has made a statement recently about the effect the modern world is having on some young males. Others have made statements about the way young girls are being treated. Most seem to agree that something is seriously wrong with the way our children are experiencing life during their formative years and I believe it is all linked in. We will never get rid of social media so we need to help the young understand its advantages (there are some) but be very wary of the downside. They need to be made aware of the real world, the one we could never do without, as opposed to the one being built on their phones and tablets which to be honest we could, and did, do without.

And that takes me back to my beginnings in education or, as I prefer to look at it, as my beginnings in being there to help, support, guide and cajole a bit, the young people of today. If you go out into the adult world with fantastic academic qualifications you may find a high paid job but be unable to cope with life. If you go out into the adult world with confidence, resilience, the knowledge to know how to learn and understand and how much awe and wonder there is in the natural world, you will cope with life and most probably find a job that satisfies you. Money does not bing happiness but happiness will bring success. We desperately need to change our concept of what our young people need to learn.

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Friday 28 March 2025.
Richard writes

I listened to question time on BBC1 yesterday and once the audience and panel had stopped discussing Donald Trump and tariffs there was a question from the audience about the level and standardisation of mental health care, specifically for young people and also for those who are too anxious to go to school. Just in case you don't know it, listen here and you will discover, I was one such child. Unfortunately I was one such child 61 years ago. The provision of mental health care for children then was slightly below nil. No one had the slightest idea, in my experience, on how to deal with my problem.

Much was tried. Much was tried that probably shouldn't have been allowed but unlike most, if not all of the audience and panel last night, I have actually experienced that anxiety and feel I have a background to give an opinion. Once again the Liberal Democrat on the panel, deputy leader Daisy Cooper, put forward the view that a mental health professional should be in every school. Camilla Tominey, associate editor and executive editor of the Daily Telegraph, laid some of the blame on COVID and then smart phones reared their very ugly head. No one appears to have a workable solution and maybe there isn't one. But all I have had heard suggested is like putting an Elastoplast on a broken leg.

During COVID, and since, adults have spent a lot of time talking about how children would be, and have been stressed and how exclusion from school would harm, and now has harmed, their mental health. In our modern smart phone world, nearly every child now knows that they should, because adults have said so, be suffering mental health problems. Similar when children learn that a mental health specialist will be in every school, the natural feeling will be, oh dear I need a mental health check up.

I do agree that smart phones are the main problem but I think we may be missing out on the fact that, through them, children are being over-exposed to our (adults) incessant talk of mental health problems in the young. As a child who had such issues, which I have carried into adulthood, I would never suggest we should brush these under the carpet or tell children to toughen up and pull themselves together. The issues exist. But are they mental health issues or coping-with-life issues? Are we creating more of a problem than there need be.

I remember from a few years back people going around saying we were becoming a knowledge-based society because of the internet but we weren't. We were becoming, have become, an information based society and quite a lot of people, especially children, don't know what to make of that information and sadly there are far too many people who similarly don't know what to do with it who give forth their very public opinion. In my day, sorry but necessary, a child could only hear the opinion of an adult if it was said face-to-face, printed in a newspaper in which the whole world did not have the chance to write or see on TV on which the whole world could not appear. That has changed. I do not know the answer to improving children's metal health but I do know that the solution has to be based on treating the cause not massaging the occurrence.

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