Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

Academy Schools; The Sinister Programming of Children

Caz | 25.09.2009 11:26 | Education | Globalisation | Repression | South Coast | World

Something nasty is at work in education. Billed as a radical NuLabour rethinking of how to educate children, 47 schools are to be run as privately sponsored Academies with international corporations such as weapons giant Vosper-Thornycroft.

In a political twist, Tory Leader David Cameron has now said that if elected, the Tories will extend the NuLabour programme to Primary Schools. Cameron seems desperate to further the academy programme of Lord Adonis, Labour nee Lib Dem socialist, in yet another example of the continuation of policies in the LibLabCon one party state.

International children’s charity ARK, ‘Absolute Return for Kids’, is the major player in academy schools, and is introducing some interesting areas - Future Leaders, Extended Schools, ARK Academies, and ‘Focused academic and Behavioural support for year seven pupils.’

It now has six academies open across London. The first, Burlington Danes in Hammersmith & Fulham, opened in September 2006. King Solomon in Westminster and Walworth in Southwark, opened in September 2007. Globe Academy in Southwark, Evelyn Grace Academy in Lambeth and Ark Academy in Brent, opened in September 2008. ARK has plans for three further academies in Birmingham, Portsmouth and Redbridge – they seem unstoppable.

To date, ARK academies have enrolled more than 3,000 pupils, and by 2012, they aim to have opened 12 academies across the UK, and to have enrolled around 10,000 pupils.

Contracts sighted by UKColumn researchers indicate that after the first year of government set curriculum, ARK, and other academy schools, will be able to set their own curriculum. This appears to provide an ‘open door’ for a range of new teaching techniques and subjects.

‘Execution Ltd’ and the ‘Dream Mill’: Looking after children?

ARK itself is getting funding to support this programme from ‘Execution Ltd’ who ‘felt that this programme fitted in well with the Trust’s focus’. Another organisation, ‘The Dream Mill’, researches the behaviour change of the participants in the associated ‘Teens & Toddlers’ programme - the names themselves should give most parents nightmares.

Our research has uncovered a trail of worrying “new initiatives” in schools, particularly those associated with the new NuLabour ‘Academy’ schools programme. Initiatives range from regular ‘counselling’, to unspecified ends, to the sexualisation of children.

In the background, the UK Column is finding reference to The ‘No Outsiders’ project, being run by Dr Elizabeth Atkinson at Sunderland University. This is about ‘challenging homophobia’ and ‘challenging heteronormativity’. For those readers unsure of this ‘psychobabble’, to challenge heteronormativity is to challenge heterosexual activity as the norm for society.

Dr Atkinson and others provide advice on ‘Addressing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual And Transgender Equality In Primary Schools, together with books for use in Primary and Early Years Settings’.

For those readers who cannot believe that children are to be taught that heterosexuality is not normal, they should know that Kwabena Peat 54, a teacher, was recently suspended for challenging this statement during ‘Diversity’ training at his school.

Further evidence on the future for our children, includes the teaching of eugenics, or selective breeding. This is being done through a number of initiatives including ‘creative dance and drama’.

So that there is no understanding, the Department for Children, Schools and Families under the questionable hand of Ed Balls MP, fully approves of ARK, heteronormativity training and Neuro Linguistic Programming of children.

Another emerging programme is called ‘Project Caressing’. It encourages children and adults to discover gentle and loving communication through touching. This sounds innocent until put into context with other programmes being pushed forward.

‘Children: Our Ultimate Investment - but whose investment?
Alongside ARK, key players in the creation of the new ‘psycho’ education agenda for children includes yet another mysterious charity ‘Children: Our Ultimate Investment’, or COUI for short.

Registered in UK, No 1099782, COUI was first established in the United States in 1977 by Laura Huxley, wife of Aldous Huxley, author of ‘Brave New World’. Their website describes a 6 point plan.

• Prelude To Conception
(Teens & Toddlers)
• Conscious Conception
• Reverence for Life
• O Nobly Born!
• Meeting the World
• Project Caressing

The jargon is difficult to keep up with, and many would say provides a smokescreen to cover the real nature of this sinister mental ‘re-framing’ of children.

Concentrated Counselling for Children

‘Teens and Toddlers’ state clearly on their website that they undertake one-one confidential counselling, and intend to have two counsellors in every school, each offering 5-6 counselling sessions per day. If these are permanent staff, this amounts to 50 counselling sessions every week, in every school. We ask if this is normal?

The organisation goes on to say that they will recruit, orientate, manage and supervise the Counsellors placed in the school. “We would generally recommend two counsellors are placed per school, each offering a day of five or six counselling sessions.”

COUI will negotiate with each school in what way client and parental consent is gained. Should a parent wish to be involved in their child’s counselling, they are welcome to meet with the counsellor to discuss their child’s situation (taking in to account the client/counsellor confidentiality agreement), occasionally it may be beneficial for the counsellor to offer a session with child and parent where communication problems would benefit from a mediating intervention. Notice it is COUI who will ‘recruit, orientate, manage and supervise’, and will ‘negotiate with each school’. But why is this counselling needed?

Extraordinary things can happen in counselling sessions as describe in the book ‘The Franklin Cover-Up’, by John W. DeCamp page 154.......... “author Steve Bowman....discovered as he interviewed Boys Town graduates,that King’s activities there were scarcely anomalous.

“You would keep hearing the same thing, over and over again,” Bowman said of the graduates, many of whom were homosexually involved with Larry King. “They would invariably say, ‘I first discovered my homosexuality during counselling at Boys Town.”

ARK funds COUI, ‘Teens and Toddlers’ and the ‘Sustainability Replication Programme’. ARK also sets the programme targets.

Funding from the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation enabled COUI UK to hire a full time Research Officer for three years to evaluate the efficacy of the Teens & Toddlers project. Further funding includes: £260,000 Jack Petchey Foundation, £25,000 Equitable Charitable Trust, and £10,000 from the Charles Hayward Foundation.

For parents still unsure as to the identity of ARK and their real agenda, we can reveal ARK is: “an international charity whose purpose is to transform children’s lives. Founded in 2002 by a group of leaders in the alternative investment industry, pooling their skills and resources to improve the life chances of children, ARK delivers high social returns on philanthropic investment.”

ARK and Big Bankers

Behind this laudable sounding front is a team of international bankers and hedge fund operatives. No worries there then. Big names include Goldman Sachs, EIM, International Asset Management, Marshall Wace Asset Management, Financial Risk Management, SG Warburg & Co, AIG Financial Products, Citicorp and Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. The team claim to have experience managing £ billions for “sophisticated Institutional Investors world-wide.”

But there is more psycho-babble on the way courtesy of Dept. Children, Schools and Families as seminar topics at Exeter University show:

“What sorts of border work (Thorne, 1993) do children and teachers engage in as they work (consciously or subconsciously) to maintain the heterosexual matrix and keep the body in its place; and what shifts and negotiations does this border work require?

How might we create primary classrooms where gender-queer bodies and queer sexualities (for children and teachers) are affirmed and celebrated?

What would it take to teach queerly?”

Meanwhile in ‘The Farm Revealed’, a Channel Four Programme for schools in 2007, students were instructed to read Galton, the founder of the British Eugenics Society. Eugenics of course, form the basis of selective breeding and the nazi Aryan race.

The Ludus Dance company, funded by ‘The Wellcome Trust’ and ‘Department for Children, Schools and Families’, has also toured the UK in the past few years with the proeugenics performance ‘Perfect Eugene’.

The biblical ARK saved Noah and his family. Our children in David Cameron and Ed Balls’ academies are not likely to be so lucky. Parents need to ask questions and fast. They also need to say No! to academies, and loudly. Lobby your MP.

Caz
- e-mail: caz111@gmail.com
- Homepage: http://lifeinthemix.org.uk/ark_academies_school.html

Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech