to think Camila Batmanghelidjh is fucking awesome?

[bejeezus]

I saw her talk on a news programme last night...

shes so composed and articulate, and clear-sighted and insightful and compassionate and calm and stylish and unique...

and the work she does/ what she acheives is OUTSTANDING..

heres a link to her wiki page...but it doesnt do her any justice

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camila_Batmanghelidjh

Werkz, you are certainly right on the idea of the 'expert' and the propensity of the media to seek a simple, responsive name for their contact books, without much due diligence. And also the appropriation of dress as a semiotic marker here - I have said more than once that if she wore a navy suit from M and S, would she have made such headway?

Things I would like to know.

1. What's with the Warwick University claims? Many students these days have allowances for dyslexia and record lectures, etc, but all are still required to (somehow) read books, read journal articles and write essays. You can't get a degree orally, even blind students would have to produce written work by alternative means. Yet CB has made claims of pretty much being absolved from reading tasks and written work. Very strange indeed, considering she will have done this before the Equality Act when there was considerably less scope in assessment regulations at university for variations, And if it is true, who was the external examiner and what did he/she have to say about this? Big gaps in this account to my mind.

1. So they open a facility to give kids their tea and safe space to do homework. Children self-refer. The argument is that children come from dysfunctional homes and therefore parental consent is not required and the normal legal obligations in this regard don't apply. How can an organisation be allowed to disregard the law surrounding consent, data privacy and so on? And does this not effectively undermine the family?

1. So the argument is that there are literally thousands of parents incapable of doing a good job and therefore this organisation needs to step in and.parent. Is this even true? I used to work in inner city comprehensive schools and I saw parenting that was not what I would have wanted for my own children but it was still parenting after a fashion. Anyway, a lot of the problems my pupils had were rooted in poverty, poor housing, low levels of parental education, and poor diet or parental substance abuse. The occasional hot tea and s bit of counselling isn't going to make much headway with that compared to what schools do routinely via extended professionalism referrals, frankly.

1. Does this not vilify inner cities as being places with feral children needing corralling, like the need for barefoot schools in the 19th centuries? After the five estates regeneration in the 1990s etc is the situation even that bad any more? I ask because I don't live locally to it now but I saw so much improvement in the late 1990s I am starting to doubt the rhetoric of dysfunction and despair that has been portrayed by CB. I only see improved schooling, better exam outcomes, and better social housing stock (what there is of it). Still not as good as I would like to see things, but certainly not the bleakly universal dystopia we are shown.

I suppose what I am asking is whether the existence of KC may in some way done more harm than good.

What I don't understand is - where was the Charities Commission? Why weren't they investigating KC, there were enough red flags surely and I know how robustly Charities have to adhere to legal and other obligations.

TV crews at the Bristol Kids Co on Thursday offered a young adult £200 to read their script off the teleprompter.

The script mentioned child abuse. This had been written by the media company (rumoured to be the BBC).

The young adult refused. Fucking shameful behaviour by the media.

Hmm I will save my judgement until we know more about the sexual abuse allegations on charity premises.

What I don't understand is why accounts were approved - what were the CC doing?

It does ridicule the Big Society plan. What you get is no accountablility and a massive waste of public money in small pockets of the country. David Cameron's really not a very good judge of character.

I have a friend who teaches in a secondary school in Camberwell. I remember her once telling me how difficult it was to teach the teenage boys in her school that hard work and exam achievement were the key to success when charities like Kids Company were handing them out cash for nothing..... Equally, she did say that they did some excellent work but the fact that children could self refer was a problem.
The sad thing is that there are some excellent, smaller, charities in South London doing great work with the underprivileged and their funding may be damaged by this if the public lose confidence in donating to charity.

I think a lot of people were taken in by CB tbh but yes DC does have form for bad judgements, Andy Coulson as Media advisor? It is because he is a PR man taken in by gloss and shiny sayings but unable to examine the detail whether it is financial detail or therapeutic detail in improving outcomes for young people beyond the envelopes of cash. But then it fitted his slash the state let the charity sector take over agenda...

In some ways they did most good because they were not bound by rules.
Self referring is absolutely vital. Many of these children do not even have a bed or a coat. The ones the social workers have time for which is presumably about 1 in 1000 of those in need leaves an awful lot of others that KC could help.

However I would certainly support removal of tax relief from all charitable contributions. Osborne tried to do this a few years back and rich people objected to strongly he had to back down but it would have been a very wise move. Give money because you want to help people not for a tax break.

What I don't understand is why accounts were approved - what were the CC doing?

As I understand it their accounts were technically competent, money on, money out etc. It is their financial management that is in question eg choosing not to build up a surplus.

BoffinMum: " And also the appropriation of dress as a semiotic marker here - I have said more than once that if she wore a navy suit from M and S, would she have made such headway? "

I love that on MN we have people who use phrases like "semiotic marker". BoffinMum, you are truly living up to your name.

I agree, though - I've been thinking a lot about her style of dress over the past couple of days, and it's clearly a good way of a) drawing attention to herself b) making sure she's not subjected to the usual kind of scrutiny middle-aged overweight women tend to get about their dress sense.

£3 million has disappeared and it going out through payroll is corrupt when it was agreed the money would not be spent that way. It's misappropriation of funds which is fraud. If CB had returned the money to the government I'd have some respect for her.

Quite frankly I think she should be looking at a court case to examine exactly what happened and if found guilty a lengthy jail sentence should be applied.

^Of course, I couldn't say anything like this at the time. You really couldn't criticise a charitable endeavour back then, and a charity personality was totally off limits, so I swallowed my disquiet. Yet every time I saw her on TV, I still got the feeling that something wasn't right.

Having said all that, I am still shocked by these recent revelations about KC. It goes way beyond what I thought possible.^

I'm glad you posted, werks. All I knew about KC was what I saw on TV over the years, but I also felt there was something wasn't quite right though couldn't put my finger on it. The only specific thing I remembered from a few years back was one broadcast where quite young girls were talking, seemingly quite lightly, about serious sexual abuse (surely, if that was right, they would be in care) but I thought the worst that KC might be doing was taking extreme cases and making out that that was entirely typical of their client base.

But if you Googled CB, it was all praise and no-one had a bad word to say about her or KC. So I just thought, 'cynical old Cecily.' Things seem to have gone from one extreme to the other in the last week.

What are the Warwick claims? It's been reported that she claimed to have done her qualification at whatever Regent's University was called in the 1980s at a time when Warwick says she was still doing her BA, but I hadn't heard she claimed not to have done any reading or writing though thinking about a couple of people teaching at Warwick at the time I wouldn't be surprised.

I read her saying she was the youngest person ever to do a Masters at Warwick when she was 21 - but if you go straight from a degree to a Masters, 21 is just the right age

Then you get all the 'can't use a computer' as she is severely dyslexic which makes me wonder how she got through it and how arduous it actually was.

Some of the timelines don't add up.

And then she seems to have launched into running her own therapy based charity on the basis of very little supervised experience of therapy which is presumably where it started to go wrong - no-one around to tell her she was wandering into woo, and if you did you just 'didn't understand the complexity' and 'the mainstream isn't helping'. Sadly the current political climate loves that message so she got far further than she should have.

Wolpertinger: " if you go straight from a degree to a Masters, 21 is just the right age."

I suppose it depends whether 21 was the age she started or finished the Masters.

Hackmum, one aims to please

In this article she states
I started my masters in psychotherapy at Regent's University in London as their youngest ever masters intake, aged 21. I'd read so much, had obtained a first class degree from Warwick and had done a lot of experience in the field so they let me in.

However

According to Companies House records she was born in Iran in January 1963, suggesting she began the MA in 1984. Yet at that time, according to a Warwick University spokesman, she was a drama undergraduate there, and that she left in 1985. A spokesman said she in fact began the MA in autumn 1986 - aged 23
www.sott.net/article/299700-UK-childrens-charity-investigated-by-Scotland-Yard-for-sexual-abuse

Fair point but a full time Masters then would prob only have been a year

Which come to think of it, leaves her as a very junior counsellor compared to say a child psychologist.

I thought her 'Masters' was at Regent's (though since it wasn't a university at the time I don't see how it could have been awarding Masters degrees) - she said she was the youngest person they ever admitted at 21, and Warwick pointed out she was still an undergrad with them at the time. She only did her BA at Warwick.

Wolpertinger: I also wonder what she actually did in her Theatre BA and whether she picked up her questionable approach to cash from one of her lecturers

I don't think it was likely to be the case that there was no-one around to warn her off the woo, since she's a second generation woo-merchant (I wonder if she thinks that her exposure to woo at home affected her on a cellular level?). Her father tried to promote the idea that you can solve most medical problems with water. Wikipedia claims: "Many believe he conducted research in the field of gastroenterology, and subsequent books garnered media coverage in the nineties. A search of scientific literature on Medline is only able to locate two papers ever published by him in scientific journals, a three-page editorial and a lecture; neither of them can be considered research." So, lots of people thought he was an expert in his field but actualy it turns out to have mostly been clever self-promotion. Now who does that remind me of...?

YY re second-generation woo merchant.

I posted this on another thread.

According to that august repository Wikipedia she has a first class degree in Theatre and Dramatic Arts. The she trained as a psychotherapist at Regents College London, a private university that wasn't allowed to give degrees until 2012 but which did run various (apparently non-accredited) courses.

Looking through various interviews and articles, at 19 she also claims to have had a full counselling practice of children, and was also working as a nanny.

Interestingly Warwick has not given her an honorary degree, as far as I can tell. Normally she would be a prime candidate, being female, colourful, and running a charidee.

Is she a fantasist? It all reads a bit 'Dr' Gillian McKeith, frankly.

That's the impression I've formed Boffinmum. I think the empress has no clothes.

I do wish someone would challenge her on these fantasies inconsistencies.

Actually, the more you look at her father, the more sense CB makes. Growing up with a father who makes claims for himself as a revolutionary thinker and special person, healing the world in the face of the hidebound medical establishment through his pioneering research into woo, even though the research doesn't actually appear to exist (Quackwatch) probably normalises messiah complexes and ludicrous claims based on dubious or non-existent research.

Cross-post Bore

Sounds like bloody Michael Gove.