Grapevine

Social Care Network | The Guardian

• 'Don’t expect a survivor to tell you her experience of undergoing FGM'

  Specialist social workers explain how they support women and girls affected by the practice
  

  When social worker Sam Khalid [not her real name] first began working with women affected by female genital mutilation (FGM), she found there wasn’t much awareness of the brutal practice in the UK.

  She was in her first year at university, in 2011, on a placement with a Women’s Aid team. “The service I was placed in was just starting its FGM unit, and I learned about the practice and met and spoke to many survivors,” she says.

  This article was amended on 12 December 2018. An earlier version referenced statistics from a recent Guardian article which was taken down after the Guardian was notified of a fundamental error in the official data on which it was based.

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• We want to attract the right people with the right values to social care | Caroline Dinenage

  New government recruitment campaign will raise the image and profile of the sector

  This year we are celebrating the 70th anniversary of our amazing NHS, but we must not forget that adult social care is also marking 70 years. The National Assistance Act 1948 that created many of the core elements of the modern social care system came into effect on the same day as the NHS act.

  In the NHS’s birthday month we have heard many stories of the dedicated nurses, doctors and support staff who have been saving and transforming lives across its seven decades. While these staff are rightly seen as the backbone of the NHS, hardworking care workers, nurses, social workers, managers and occupational therapists are, likewise, the foundation of the adult social care sector – and they have been on the same 70-year journey as colleagues in health. They are two sides of the same coin – inseparable and essential to each other.

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• The UK project giving refugees another chance at childhood

  Young refugees face unspeakable trauma to get here. But a cross-charity initiative is helping them to rebuild their lives
  

  It is hard to be an adult when you feel like you haven’t had the chance to be a child.

  This simple statement has stayed with me over the last 12 months of working with young refugees and asylum seekers. Among them, a 17-year-old boy forced to sleep in a railway station for months; and another who witnessed the killing of his brother and father and escaped from his home country in fear of his life.

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• UN: spend an extra £5tn by 2030 to tackle global 'care crisis'

  Report highlights risk of rising inequality against women worldwide

  The world economy faces a looming “care crisis” risking further division between men and women across the planet, according to a UN report calling for governments and companies worldwide to spend at least an extra $7tn (£5.3tn) on care by 2030.

  Making the case for spending on support for children, old people and the neediest in society to double by the end of the next decade, the UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) warned demographic changes alone mean the current path for care funding falls far short of requirements.
  

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• Theresa May got it wrong with her cash boost for the NHS. Here's why

  Assessing what the health service needs is essential before giving it more money to meet demand

  Four key things were missing from Theresa May’s announcement of extra money for the NHS.

  There was no admission that there is an NHS crisis that needs tackling. Or that money is needed now for both the the health service and social care. Without this emergency cash injection, there will be insufficient time and resource to make the necessary preparations to avoid a repeat – or indeed worsening – of last year’s winter crisis in the NHS and social care with the trail of waits, delays, suffering and extra deaths that accompanied it.

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Opinion | The Guardian

• Labour doesn't seem to like Send schools for kids like mine – but here's what we'll lose if these precious places are forgotten | John Harris

  An autism school in Wiltshire exemplifies what’s so different about education in a tailored environment, and the outcomes for children speak for themselves

  In the old Wiltshire milltown of Calne, there is an autism specialist school called the Springfields Academy. About 250 children and young people between the age of four and 19 go there. Class sizes are no larger than 12. In each room, every child has their own dedicated table. There are no end of seating options, described by the headteacher, Nicola Whitcombe, as “wobble stools, wobble cushions, ball chairs, standing desks and booths”, with “pods” elsewhere for one-to-one teaching. And across a broad, multi-level curriculum based around personal development, every lesson follows the same basic structure. “From an autistic perspective,” she says, “that’s really important: ‘I know I’m going into the same thing, so therefore I feel safe.’”

  Every year the school takes in a lot of primary school leavers who would find a mainstream secondary pretty much impossible. “If you’ve got five different lessons in a day, in five different classrooms with five different teachers, and this before we’ve talked about the corridors, and the smells, and where you have lunch – it’s overwhelming,” Whitcombe said. “So at our school, we have to get our environment right.” Over the past six years, no one who has been to Springfields has begun post-school life as a Neet (not in education, employment or training) – which is quite some achievement.

  John Harris is a Guardian columnist

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• It will surprise no one that Your Party has split. Why can’t the left stick together? | Zoe Williams

  Talk of witch-hunts and personality clashes was very publicly aired, when all we wanted to know was what the party actually stood for

  Last weekend, Your Party officially split, with 250 members voting to start a second leftwing party, the Socialist Federation. Neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Zarah Sultana represent this new faction, with both remaining in Your Party.

  While many of those members are part of “Grassroots Left”, Sultana’s faction of Your Party, she has no role in the new party, and is still technically a Your Party MP. Corbyn’s faction, “The Many”, has de facto had the reins of Your Party since he was elected its parliamentary leader by the executive committee in March. Two independent MPs who originally supported Your Party, Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed, have quit, and two – Shockat Adam and Ayoub Khan – remain.

  Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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• Trump’s failure to maintain ceasefires is part of the new world disorder – and ordinary people pay the price | Simon Tisdall

  The US president brags about ending wars but look at Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and Lebanon to see what his casual disregard for diplomacy and obsession with instant results have achieved

  There are visionary statesmen and high-minded negotiators, pragmatic mediators and professional diplomats – and then there are meddling fools. As ceasefires implode, vast numbers of civilians die or flee, and wars Donald Trump started, fuelled or pledged to resolve rage unchecked, there’s no doubt which category he belongs to. In baseball parlance, in Ukraine, Iran-Lebanon and Israel-Palestine, Trump is “0 for 3”. He boasted he alone could cut deals and bring peace. He’s delivered neither. In striking out, he mostly makes matters worse.

  The heroic age of 19th-century diplomacy, typified by Prince Metternich’s great power-balancing “concert of Europe” and Benjamin Disraeli’s Balkan “peace with honour”, is history now. But it’s not that long since Nobel-winning peacemakers such as the UN chief Kofi Annan and the Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari, or the US senator George Mitchell, who brokered Northern Ireland’s Good Friday agreement, were troubleshooting intractable conflicts the world over. Where are the successors to Desmond Tutu, Andrei Sakharov or Yitzhak Rabin when you need them?

  Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

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• Oi! You in the stalls! Put that phone away and surrender to the art | Nadia Khomami

  As Rosamund Pike found out recently on stage, many people now experience the arts simply as content to be documented for likes and shares

  Have we lost the ability to surrender to a story? Surely, if there’s any narrative that deserves our undivided attention, it’s that of a crown court judge fighting the legal system’s approach to sexual violence against women, when she discovers her own son has been accused of rape. But as Rosamund Pike discovered last weekend, even such a visceral and emotionally demanding drama wasn’t enough to keep everyone in the room absorbed.

  Pike made headlines when she walked back on stage at London’s Wyndham’s theatre after the curtain call for Inter Alia – not for a solo bow, but to remonstrate with an audience member for texting during the climax of her performance. “Maybe it was very important, and maybe you’re a doctor, and you’re saving someone’s life, and I hope you are,” she said. “But we do see these, we do feel them. I feel like I’ve got to hold you all, so when I feel that and see it, it’s hard.”

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• Vaughan Tomlinson on tried-and-tested problem-solving techniques – cartoon
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