Jason Arday, Cambridge Plagiarist, thread two

[Angeruish]

We are nearing our 1000-post limit on the original thread:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/education/5561878-jason-arday-cambridge-plagiarist?reply=153910946

I have now removed the question mark after "plagiarist".

I can't believe the sequel will be as good as the original, but you never know...

Courtesy of JA'S book we have yet another change in story.

His 6/7 days of speech therapy has now reduced to 3:
"...Local council granted me multiple hours of speech therapy three days a week, every week for the best part of ten years."

Sample of book available at link below.

https://a.co/d/06zvjx56

This is similar to the case of the jazz musician Martin Speake, hounded out of his teaching post at Trinity for stating the bleeding obvious that black jazz musicians are not under represented or discriminated against in the field of jazz.

Trinity Laban settles with Martin Speake over his remarks on jazz and skin colour - Jazz Journal https://share.google/T2hmskgocy2ascueg

I said had.

Trying to work out if this coud possibly be correct? It would mean he would have had to have had an EHCP in place by the age of 3? I know I am cynical but we have one of the country’s leading providers of SEN education near me, admittedly taking boys from 7-18, and so I know A LOT of families and individuals who have been down this process. Whilst its a large specialist boys school, many of those families have girls and less impacted boys who are ND that go to the progressive private co ed school that is literally 2miles up the road and which mine went to. The families drop at one and then the other and we talk a lot. [As I write I am aware this is at the very least a bit outing, in terms of identifying where I live/schools my kids went to. Eek.]

Getting an EHCP for most of those families was utterly unobtainable by the age of three. For may - most even - it took 2-3 years of extensive, multiagency clinical specialist input (which, due to waiting lists, also involved years’ long waiting lists), for more than half, it involved taking the LEA/LA to court, costing them £20-40K over several years because the school is technically a private one, even though 70% of the students (now) are funded by LAs all over the region.

The private speech therapist we used was recommended by contacts at this school because the waitlist under the NHS referral scheme, even with GP/HV and other supporting referrers involved, was months long and led to an mere 8 session course of 1 hour a fortnight and a load of ‘worksheets’ for things to do at home with mummy. I was eventually able to feed it into an IEP (Individual Education Plan) arranged in their states schools (they started in the state system), but even then they did not suggest or promote referral for an EHCP, or autism assessment, or any kind of ed psych review at all. Hence my kids not being diagnosed until their teens and only then because I coincidentally did an Open Uni degree in psychology and did a module and dissertation on autism to better understand a much younger half brother who had been diagnosed. Ie there was no help, no proactive support, no awareness that speech therapy could help, that intensive ed psych assessment was warranted, that all of this could be provided by the state - let alone expedited by the age of three. And I am in a wealthy, well funded (at the time) LA, and my kids started at the no 1 state primary school acc to the Times where the HT was best buddies with Gove and advising on national policy.

So I am unsure that I really believe this fairy tale. It bears no similarity with mine or, and no exaggeration, the dozens upon dozens of other families and parents I have known over the last 20 years, many of them quite intimately as we have held each other and cried together with frustration and heartbreak over the years. One of the issues I have with his story is the way it misrepresents the support that is available [SHOULD be available], sets an expectation of a prompt, responsive and extensive care and intervention package that I have never seen offered or had access to myself. For families at the start of the journey, who find that they do not get that support, it spins the narrative that their children too might have gone on to become Cambridge Dons, but for some extra speech therapy.

NB typos and SPAG errors all my own, but enhanced by early morning caffein deficit.

Borrowed from facebook:

He's working on a memoir called 'Arday's night' where he details the trials and pressures of being the fifth Beatle

There seems to be a consistent pattern of making a statement ('I was non-verbal and had intensive speech-therapy') and then varying the actual detail around it ('it was 6 days a week/5 days a week/3 days a week'). And so on and so on.

Yesterday someone found a mention that his mentor had spent 'seven hours a day' giving him intensive coaching. But elsewhere he's quoted as saying he’d been good enough to be a professional snooker-player and spent 'seven hours a day practising'. How many hours in a day are there?

Was all this after he was non-verbal? While he was still unable to read and write? before or after the car accident that put him into a coma and then a locked-in state? And we haven’t factored in the testicular cancer. Or the two brain tumours. Or the stroke. Or somehow getting to university in the first place (where was his undergrad degree from?), graduating, beginning to teach PE, deciding (with his mentor's help) to go for a PhD and gaining it in record time despite working two jobs - oh, and getting married and having two children somewhere in amongst all this.

I mean, he may be some kind of superman. Or it may all just be too incredible. Maybe the answers are in his book…

(btw, I love the fact that he feels the need to inform us that 'all children are born non-verbal')

@AnonyMumAuDHDthere is no way that anyone in the UK gets speech therapy from the NHS for 10 years, 3 days a week. Once a term is more likely for an hour. Particularly with ASD. Think he is absolutely telling lies about this

😆 🤣 😂

Well well well.
This link (posted by someone upthread, many thanks but I can't recall who) https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/who-hired-the-ridiculous-jason-arday gives the panel who appointed Arday.

I am very familiar with the work of one of them, one of whose books had a large overlap with the field of my own PhD. It was so inaccurate that it actively confused me. Names are misspelt, quotes are cherry picked (and in at least one case, edited to fit the narrative), timelines are sometimes confused, the referencing is poor (incorrect page numbers and dates, for example), and some of the information is just wrong (including some that is very significant). All the significant errors of fact - rather than those produced by patchy general knowledge - tend in the same direction.

The incident that particularly got me was the reliance by this person on a biased source written some months after events in preference to the contemporary diary (which he cites) of the man at the core of the incident. This allows the author to press on with a persistent lambasting of the British Empire as uniquely dreadful.

I'm no fan of imperialism, but there is plenty to criticise about the BE without, as this person does, making stuff up. I concluded long ago that the book I'd read was likely to have a pernicious impact on both faith in democracy and our view of British history.

I have a whopping great document detailing it all on my laptop...

If Cambridge does get someone independent to review the hiring process, it’s certainly going to be interesting

Not a chance, @Escapefrom1984
As said ages ago, an "outsider" might easily identify issues they'd prefer to remain unaddressed, and frankly I'll be very surproised if any real investigation's done even within Cambridge

I agree with this institutional culpability point.
This is an age old story of lack of safeguards because of creating people with great power. It’s horribly ironic that we can’t societally seem to stop creating people with great power even (particularly given the academic topics involved here) we think we are trying to break down power structures. Why haven’t we worked that out yet? Nobody should be held beyond reproach and investigation.

If someone in an organisation is appointed and retained in post (and as more detail emerges it seems if must have been) primarily on their amazing back story rather than on their stellar academic performance, and if they’ve been appointed by a senior person who (let’s take her at her word) thinks they’re ‘the best in the world’, but then allows a system where their students can’t safely challenge poor teaching, then the immediate senior colleagues and the university appear to want to be associated strongly with that amazing back story above anything else they know about the post holder.

So of course Cambridge have a case to answer here. They should be able to resist fabulists. They must have been using their press office to find interviews for a big strategic appointment like Arday, and would be wanting to milk the media opps for all they’re worth. And unless a strong institution had compelled them to do otherwise, because of all the great messages and visuals personally and organisationally that arise from the appointment; the appointing senior colleagues (it would seem) were inclined to be slow or even not give basic redress for students when the lauded academic falls very short of expectations.

This institutional behaviour is unlikely to be limited to just Jason Arday’s situation of course. JA won’t be the only example of this kind of power imbalance. It’s a horrible irony though that untouchable status has been very much enabled by the professional people around JA- nobody can make that status happen on their own.

A huge power imbalance was tolerated by senior people who make a career of writing about serious power imbalances. So those institutional blind spots and ensuing damage to those people affected by power imbalances are pretty worrying if we are to take the social justice themes in the academic work at face value. This was all avoidable had there been some better genuine commitment to a critical culture around power and better regulation to back it up within the institution, surely.

you were perfectly clear 🤷🏼‍♀️

Fantastic analysis.

I know, I'm a little shocked that people are being so bitchy and obtuse about an autistic little boy doing brilliantly for himself. Only a little shocked, though.

With Cambridge is this a case of being too big to fail?

I couldn’t agree more as a parent still in that EHCP process for years myself. It has really done a number on all of us in all aspects of our lives especially financially and health wise and educationally most critically on our DC. Sorry to hear your experience of this.

JA would presumably have been a child in the 80s or 90s before the current SEND system we have now which dates back to 2010s. Since the early 80s a child would have had a ‘statement’ not an EHCP, but even so this amount of therapy seems unbelievably generous. Especially because it would be more expensive to provide that level of support outside of a residential school placement.

This Arday case is upsetting as a parent of ND DC to think of the impact it could have on them. I don’t think genuine research on educational exclusion or educational disadvantage is ‘woke’ or unnecessary, far from it. As the 100000s of kids like ours who have immense struggles at school or in specialist education or are at home unable to get an education, would illustrate.

Oh dear god it gets worse wrt Cambridge
link plus screenshot (which might take longer) https://spectator.com/article/the-problems-with-the-faculty-of-education-go-beyond-jason-arday/?

They are fucking joking, surely?

I think that your well intentioned sympathy/empathy should be directed at a more deserving person. Clearly there are huge doubts as to whether any of his claims to ‘non- verbal/austism/adhd et etc’ are true at all. Putting absolutely everything to one side - it’s unarguable that he is simply a fantasist/fraudster. There are plenty of historical examples.

Unfortunately not.

Think she was referring to the little boy she knew who went on to become Head Boy, not Jason and his technicolour dreamscape.

Oh. Thanks :)

@tramtracks Those posts are about a boy ThatLilacTiger wrote about, not Arday.

And Farah Ahmed is opposed to British education upholding British values in Britain, including teaching that child marriage is wrong, is she? And she's an assistant research professor in the same faculty as Arday? What the fuck are that faculty playing at?

If you don't like British education in Britain you are free to move somewhere that is more to your taste.

eta: Sorry @tramtracks I see you've already had it explained.

Jesus what is so hard to understand about this? I was offering a comforting anecdote to a mother with an autistic child who said she was upset that Arday lied to make it seem like a non-verbal autistic child could be successful. I don't care if Arday was non-verbal.