Onboarding

Due process and Pandora's Box

For the past couple of months my day job aspect has been in abeyance , very much par for the course in a climate where the young, where not sustained by the bank of Mum and Dad, are faced with swathes of time-honoured entry points vanishing , and some as Alan Milburn has uncovered are crucially without an invitation to the party and are seeking other diversions. I often wonder to what extent notions of employability enter into the curriculum of the Sports Academy next door or the mentality it cultivates. Having worked, 25 years ago now, blimey, in an innovative scheme for serious young offenders where sport (including a purposefully shambolic staff soccer team of a Sunday morning) was used brilliantly to reconfigure teamwork, trust and safe contact I think latent psychosocial resources are potentially being sidelined in favour of the promotion of a NEET template. Were there a purpose to doing so, might it be the Werner Eckhardt one of eviscerating a subject the building them back up again? In that earlier scheme , life had done the deconstruction job , and the reconstruction, nothing less than a person-centred curriculum, took the form of stopping lessons when any student felt distressed and convening spontaneous minuted house meetings until the issue was resolved ( which we in due course stayed up late to type up). In retrospect, and demonstrable results, this was uniquely empowering relative to the general educational climate, in terms of the sheer power of getting a conversation going that perforce went beyond the echo chamber.

Some results of deliberative processes have come under scrutiny here of late - whether Burnham will actually introduce proportional representation, the confidence and supply innovations which No Overall Control requires , and the curious-to-some elevation of Arsenal on aggregate ( nobly accepting pipping to the post of a double hitter by PSG the other night). All in all, there are very good things in the sociological waters , and at a literal level the Wye getting belated legal protections requiring one hopes a cease and desist from its battery chicken farms and the like. The underpinning concepts here seem to be systemic, porous or solid state. Are conventional methods solidified into torpor ? Post-Eckhardt, the socratic, Dylanesque question’ What Colour is Your Parachute ?’ might help here in economic weather where the young and the oldie are stretched beyond the worried well and the Overton window. This has been coming at us since the advent of the gig economy - I randomly recall a Donnish tweedy type gamely cycling through The Lanes in Brighton with a Deliveroo bag late at night, whereas in Londonium you often see itinerant families in the small hours moving between where the work is and the mattresses are. Infinite and apparently robust human resource . I don’t think it would be a stretch to suggest that Orwell in revising might want to add this to his non-ironical list of quiet British values, though there should always be scope to enquire how safe and sustainable burning the candle at both ends is.

That which obligates and necessitates all this is, to state the bleedin’ obvious but oft overlooked, a synthesis of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs ( see above) and various bureaucratic strictures and methodologies related sometimes to a kind of civic orientation of moral obligation and ( a word I heard randomly the other week for the first time in ages ‘conformity’). Said needs are increasingly, as John Oliverexplored the other week, often synthesised by AI at the moment in crampt, time-stressed or prompted silos. The bleary-eyed adjustees in Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ are allotted, amongst other resources, what we might call ‘intimacy coaches’ in the cause of accentuating their none-too-rugged individualism. A recent tomehighlighted by my friend Ian Pace here suggests that retail palaces form the metrics and barometers of the public co-option of relationships, in a way that looks like, but is not actually citizenship , more perhaps its slightly louche cousin.

The bit of this that I think can be explored is the metric and its multifarious accretion. I say this in the context of recent reports of my age group at large needing to resume employment rather than retire and finding it a case of old dog new tricks , where weight of numbers relative to ,say, an influx of abortive undergraduates seems to imply tacit ageism. You have a potential NEETS effect at the unexpected end of the life cycle. To their creit and foresight, I have come across an agency across South London who are addressing this practically, and more about them anon on The Chim and here. I would also swiftly add that my field, fortunately, has very little ageism real or implied, and that a good chunk of recent experience, certainly this past week, has been welcoming and adroit. What is on my mind here is the mechanical inventory by which such positive energy can be eviscerated , and whether this characterises a degree of national cynicism.

A case study from recent experience - a putative hire of A.N. Other of my aquaint by a local authority for a fairly standard residential set-up with, interestingly, revolving door move-on problems for the residents ascribed anecdotally to their jitters more than to the lack of accessible resources when they hit their Brave New World so to speak ( no doubt a more wholesome offer in the main). At the gubbins end A.N. Other was required to complete 12 e-learning courses duplicated mostly by those he had completed immediately prior elsewhere , with the promise of more while secreted and shadowed in a holding cloister, to supply a 10-year tranche of referees , to curate an ID photo to within an inch of its grooming life , on arrival to moderate all facial expressions beyond the neutral and to be subject to a personal inventory before initiating a simple conversation. All of this was orchestrated in an environment moving at the glacial pace of a robotic Japanese tea ceremony while the actual clients bimbled off to do their thing leaving a karaoke machine booming away sacrosanct- unadjustably. In short, what was on offer ticked any amount of boxes but was tone deaf and over-egged. A.N recalls being shown an enthusiastic e-mail from some well-intentioned senior middle person about how enthused they were by their cv and that of a colleague they had recommended for an adjacent part of the forest. What, anecdotally, was not forthcoming was any dialogue or motivation between various dug-in local parties to ameliorate the log jams. The ref was a competent daytime game-show host of a young agency hustler who would call several times a day to chivvy up the sense of belief and light-relief salve the progress-chasing. One wouldn’t want to knock this energy for a moment, though in time it willbe existentially moderated no doubt. The caravan has moved on. But overall this is what my Dad, quoting Culpepper’s Herbal Encyclopedia, the fruit of diagnosing the court of Charles II, would call auto-intoxication- the fervent hope of the sunlit uplands held simultaneously with the constraint and delay of intervention to enable it. There are variants that go way back - long ago in my own progress I recall a gaggle of occupational therapists who spent their days holding meetings in different settings drafting position papers and resolutions to gather further information. They might have a few casual words with a client now and again, but they were optically among the most high and bureaucratically exalted. Ironically the management and consultant psych were founts of resilient and approachable wisdom.

What I am sensing, still crazy after all these years so to speak, is a culture at the fork in the road. I am fortunate in having landed at the resilient and approachable end of things, where, without exception, interview becomes conversation in a moment that is imbued with confidence and supply. I think this is exactly what our national conversation needs, in modest and effective small corners. It’s what you are unlike to find in the chain stores of the mall or in what the memo-aspirant can actually unblinkingly muster in the field. For they are ‘on message’ rather than conversant- we have reached the point where these raw concepts -in the absence of a core civility and sense of proportion, common sense if you will- are at the point of divergence. The lot with whom I am gladly breaking bread again are amongst other things characterised by the readiness of the top brass to synesthaesically , multi-taskingly roll up their sleeves and listen.