Are you crazy?

I surprised myself this weekend, amazed myself in fact. How long have I been retired? Ten maybe eleven years? This is the kind of thought I had when I first retired but after ten years, come on, be realistic. I thought that this kind of thinking was long gone from my daily repertoire. I’m not saying that other crazy thoughts haven’t replaced them, but this kind of thinking, don’t be ridiculous.

And now I have your attention let me tell you what my wild and crazy idea was. Put simply I thought about returning to work. No, you didn’t expect that did you? Not after ten plus years of consistently being glad I wasn’t working and having plenty of activities to engage my interest / creative needs / self-esteem etc etc.

But here I was Sunday morning reading The Observer and feeling my need for affirmation through work being tweaked all over again. Bonkers. Grow up, get a life and all that malarkey.

So what on Earth had I read that sparked this wholly unhealthy line of thought? Well, and I suppose this will puzzle those of you unfamiliar with my line of work, latterly my work as an educational psychologist involved looking at individual pupils in the context of the operation of what we called at the time, a whole school context. Not simply as individuals, ‘guilty’ or otherwise.

I won’t bore you with going into the kind of detail we thought vital for understanding and preventing children being permanently excluded from school. That’s what the article was about (see, if you can, the picture above), exclusions that is. Our work, way back then, encouraged schools (we worked with them not against them) to ensure that all was well-organised at a whole school, group level (including classrooms) and finally individual pupils.

This probably gibberish to those of you without direct experience of this field. But the good news for you is that understanding the processes involved doesn’t matter. It’s the idea that I might return to work that is truly shocking in the context of my retirement. But then again more accurately it wouldn’t be a return because I would want neither a ‘proper’ job nor paying for whatever I did. It would be closer to what is sometimes called charity work. So yes, that does put the idea in a better light but still, weird or what.

What caught my attention in the article apart from a sympathy for what the people (mainly lawyers) were trying to do, which broadly speaking is to reduce the number of permanent exclusions which have grown exponentially over the last few years for various reasons that I will not go into here, was the very last sentence – we want schools to know that if you permanently exclude, you will be scrutinised’.

Sounds fair enough but the bigger issue is, what does this mean? As written it sounds rather confrontational and the word ‘blame’ is close to the surface. This approach will not help either over-worked and under-funded schools nor the excluded pupil. Anyway I said I wasn’t going into detail but I will just say that the work we were engaged in depended on supporting schools to self-review.

So I looked at the article and increasingly had the feeling 1) that’s what we used to do and 2) maybe I could play some part in helping schools and hence pupils be better at this process to the benefit of all involved – teachers, pupils and parents at my tender age of 76 and not the man, fitness-wise, that I used to be.

Crazy, yes, I know, but why would it even appeal in this much restricted form? Just what is going on in that retired brain of mine? Go back to work? Piss off, you think I want to…