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Can you have ‘half believe’ in dementia friendliness?



handshake

There have been numerous examples of refusal of handshakes over the years. In 2012, Luis Suarez refused a Patrice Evra handshake. On the other hand, a handshake can be extremely symbolic. In 2013, it was reported that there had been a brief, but important handshake, between Obama and Castro.

Indeed, using the “Handshake” app, sales reps can take orders on the company’s tablet application while in a store or at trade shows, with the latest data on inventory and previous sales histories at their fingertips. It is now reported that app developer Handshake has raised $8 million in new funding to grow its business selling a mobile wholesale sales ordering and fulfillment application.

There has been much media coverage about a leaked memorandum from the UK Labour Party about ‘changing the subject’ when immigration comes up on the doorstep in campaigning. But, it turns out on closer inspection, such a tactic is advised if a potential voter shows unwillingness to discuss the topic of immigration in a constructive way.

The handshake is the symbol of bilateral goodwill. In other words, for a handshake to work, it cannot be refused by one party. The concept of ‘dementia friendly communities’ critically depends on rational members of the public wanting to show goodwill to people living with dementia. There may be all sorts of reasons why a member of the public might be unwilling to have that conversation. Possibly, a person might demonstrate prejudice towards, and discrimination, against a person living with dementia out of sheer ignorance; or because of powerful preconceptions from media imagery.

It is inevitable that combating such imagery is only possible if the media play out their side of their bargain. In other words, they avoid words such as ‘battle’, ‘fight’, ‘war’, or ‘robbed of his mind’. But this is not always the case. It is possible that if you know absolutely nothing about what dementia is you might have formed very crystallised opinions. Such views are ‘bigoted’ in the sense that it will be difficult for any amount of campaigning to change one’s perception of dementia.

It is now possible that creativity could be one of the best tools in shifting cultural prejudices. The latest ‘illridewithyou’ trend is a testament to that. Many Australians are still showing their support for Muslims using the hashtag #illridewithyou.

The trend started even as the siege in Sydney was ongoing on Monday. But, perhaps inevitably, a backlash has hit Twitter: #iwontridewithyou has been tweeted more than 3,000 times. On a train, one passenger reportedly spotted a Muslim woman removing her hijab, ostensibly out of fear of being targeted. The passenger told her to put it back on and offered to walk with her in solidarity. And so began #IllRideWithYou. The hashtag went viral and is currently still trending worldwide, days after the end of the hostage crisis.

It is very hard to think you can half believe in ‘dementia friendliness’, however defined, in that you can’t be ‘half pregnant’. One would think you might either sign up to the notion of wanting to learn more about the dementias, inclusivity, or accessibility, in other words making a community welcoming to a person living with dementia – or not. But the unpalatable truth is, possibly, that we all have different degrees to which we should want to prioritise this. I have often heard at meetings ‘what makes people living with dementia so special?, albeit asked politely; a person who asks this might be a commissioner in mental health services who is genuinely asking what makes a person living with dementia a higher commissioning priority than, say, a person with first episode psychosis?

These are difficult questions. The current ‘Dementia Friends’ initiative, implemented by the Alzheimer’s Society, with Public Health England in support, officially runs next year too in 2015. But at the end of this time, whatever the exact number of new ‘Dementia Friends’, serious questions will need to be asked about the wellbeing for a person newly diagnosed with dementia is any better. The annual funding of social care is reported to have dropped in recent years, from official figures, with social care not having been ring fenced since 2010.

There has never been a campaign for dementia friendliness to match the vigour of ‘illridewithyou’. Admittedly, there are key differences between stigma and prejudice against a person living with dementia, and, say, that towards a Muslim lady wearing a burkha. But this relates to another aspect of the ‘dementia friendly communities’ policy strand I have been concerned about for a very long time. Proponents of ‘dementia friendly communities’ have often argued that you might be able to spot someone with dementia in a shopping queue by virtue of the fact he or she is having trouble with monetary change. But this is a difficult path to tread down.

Somebody having difficulty with change could be exhibiting such behaviour as he or she is thinking about his partner having just died. The screening test is not particularly sensitive or selective. More basically, many dementias are ‘invisible’ to the outward observer. It might not be obvious to a stranger that someone is living with a dementia, or he or she never talks about the night terrors, the changes in semantic language, or the change in complex visual perception.

More fundamentally, we might get to the end of 2015, and we find that nothing has particularly changed in public attitudes. People living well with dementia might not find that members of society want to ‘ride with them’, but I feel the ‘Dementia Friends’ initiative has been influential in changing around a culture of indifference. Lazy commissioners will have to find another initiative to hand their anti-stigma credentials upon. My gut instinct that we will get to know whether as a society we know whether it’s possible to ‘half believe’ in dementia friendliness by the actual behaviour of us as a society. This will be very difficult to ascertain, but we will need to look into this. One thing’s for sure, it won’t be easily determined by the abundance of stickers in shop windows promoting ‘awareness’.

It’s time we talked about ‘dementia friendly communities’



This could be the video from any corporate. The point is that the video contains very familiar concepts and memes which can be marketed very easily.

I have reviewed the development of the policy of ‘dementia friendly communities’ in the penultimate chapter of my book ‘Living well with dementia’.

The description of “dementia friendly communities” given by the Alzheimer’s Society is provided as follows:

“The dementia friendly communities programme focuses on improving the inclusion and quality of life of people with dementia… In these communities: people will be aware of and understand more about dementia; people with dementia and their carers will be encouraged to seek help and support; and people with dementia will feel included in their community, be more independent and have more choice and control over their lives.”

This definition doesn’t make sense to me as it ignores networks – networks (including social networks such as Facebook and Twitter) are particularly important to those whose physical or mental health might pose formidable barriers to being physically in any one place in a community.

But when you ask “what is a dementia friendly community?” inevitably the question becomes re-articulated “what constitutes a community, and what counts as it being ‘friendly’ to ‘dementia’?”

And immediately you see the problems. How large is a community? Or put another way what constitutes the boundaries of the community? In theory, a community could be members of a part of the Lake District, or the Square Mile. Being ‘friendly’ demands the question ‘how long is a piece of string’? Without some clarity, this construct is ‘motherhood and apple pie’ and a perfect tick-box vehicle for commissioners to demonstrate that they’ve done something about “dementia friendliness”.

But simultaneously shutting down a day centre will immediately take out any feel good factor of commissioning decisions, leaving people with dementia sold down the river.

And headlines such as this from today’s Guardian continue to make a complete farce of ‘dementia friendly communities‘:

social care cuts

And which dementia? There are about a hundred different causes of dementia, the most common one being globally Alzheimer’s disease, characterised typically in the early stages with real problems with learning and encoding new memories (and subsequent retrieval).

So it’s conceptually possible to talk about dementia-friendly communities where you put up signage everywhere so people with Alzheimer’s Disease, who have spatial navigation difficulties, can get a bit of help.

But not all memory problems are dementia, and not all dementias present with memory problems.

But what those people with frontal dementia who have perfect memory, but who present with a slow change in behaviour and personality according to their closest ones?

How should we make communities ‘friendly’ to them?

The policy construct immediately experiences an obstacle in that it talks about ‘dementia’ as one great mass, an error previously made for ‘the disabled’. But this criticism is of course by no means fatal – as conventional communities also contain a huge range of people of all different characteristics, anyway. But is then the concept too broad as to be meaningful, such as “male friendly communities”?

Something which Kate Swaffer, an Australian who has significant experience in campaigning for advocacy for people with dementia, and who herself lives with dementia, recently shared on Twitter was this eye-catching caption.

persimage

And you see the difficulty? How do we design a ‘community’ which is ‘friendly’ to ‘dementia’, if you believe like me that once you’ve met one person with dementia, you’ve met one person with dementia?

It’s clearly impossible to legislate for someone to be ‘friendly’ to another person in a society, however loosely defined, but it is worth at least acknowledging the existant law.

You can’t have a policy that discriminates against a group of people to their detriment, with that group of people defined by a ‘protected characteristic’ under equality law in this jurisdiction. Dementia can fall under this protected characteristic definition, as legally it can come under the definition of disability; any discrimination of disabled people is unlawful.

But you can easily argue that the policy fosters a spirit of solidarity far beyond rigid compliance with the law. Such solidarity of course seems somewhat at odds with the backlash against any form of state planning from this government and previous governments.

I’ve thought long and hard about the need to try not to dismiss worthy initiatives in dementia policy. For example, whilst I am concerned about the error rates of ‘false diagnosis’ of people with dementia, I would be equally concerned if NHS England did nothing to try to identify who the undiagnosed with dementia currently are.

Likewise, my natural instinct is to think about whether the charity sector is distorted with initiatives such as ‘Dementia Friends’.  According to the Government’s website, by 2015, 1 million people will become Dementia Friends. The £2.4 million programme is funded by the Social Fund and the Department of Health. The scheme has been launched in England, and the Alzheimer’s Society is hoping to extend it to the rest of the UK soon. Linking the global policy of dementia friendliness to one charity, when other similar initiatives currently exist (such as the Purple AngelsJoseph Rowntree Foundation, University of Stirling, WHO, and RSA), means that many dementia charities may get unfairly ‘squeezed’.

I do, however, intuitively and desperately wish this policy to succeed. For example, at my stall yesterday at the SDCRN 4th Annual Conference (the Scottish Dementia Clinical Research Network), a person called Hugh actually bothered coming up to me to tell me how much being a ‘Dementia Friend’ meant to him. He talked about friends of his who were ‘Dementia Champions’. He spoke with tremendous affection about his late wife had lived with dementia for eight years, and the importance of community work to him.

my stall

And it is very difficult to deny that initiatives such are this are truly wonderful.

Pharmacy

A real concern, though, is that by conceding one is building a ‘dementia friendly community’, even with all the best will in the world, the term itself doesn’t for me suggest or promote real inclusivity. It still sadly implies a ‘them against us’. I think I have this attitude because I’m physically disabled, and I would balk at the term ‘disabled friendly community’. It’s incredibly important that this policy is not London-driven friendly communities with more than a twang of tokenism.

I am therefore leaning towards a viewpoint expressed by Simon Denegri, Chair of INVOLVE, and NIHR National Director for Public Participation and Engagement in Research:

And surely you’d want businesses and corporates to be ‘dementia friendly’? But which corporates, and why dementia? Surely you’d want them to be friendly with rare muscle wasting diseases, or cancer, for example? Shouldn’t carers get their own “carers friendly communities”?

This poses big problems for our perception of inclusive communities.

Alastair shared a lovely picture which sums up the problem for me.

You can easily see why certain corporates such as banks might wish to help out with this policy, because people with dementia can be at risk of financial abuse, but is this a genuine drive to help people with dementia or is it a pitch to secure competitive advantage like ‘ethical banking’.

Apart from isolated stories such as of dedicated no-hurry lanes in supermarkets, for example, surely one would have expected supermarkets to have pulled out all the stops with adequate signage everywhere? Many large supermarkets have about thirty lanes where it’s easy for the best of us to get lost. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a dementia-friendly supermarket where the signage would be of a good enough quality to prevent a person with mild Alzheimer’s Disease becoming spatially disoriented.

“Dementia friendly communities” lend themselves easily to ‘diversity marketing’, however. Diversity marketing is a marketing paradigm which sees marketing (and especially marketing communications) as essentially an effort in communication with diverse publics. As an acknowledgement of the importance of diversity marketing is that AT&T Inc. has a post for this discipline at vice president level. It is reported that, starting in the 1980s, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, universities and non-profits organisations began to increase marketing efforts around diversity, according to Penn State University.

I asked my friends on Facebook whether there was anything particular ‘immoral’ about this diversity marketing in relation to dementia friendly communities, and their responses were as follows.

Comments 1

Comments 2

In other words, there is no ‘right answer’.

It’s clear to me that this policy, as it is currently being delivered, needs much greater scrutiny in terms of where the benefits have been, and for whom.

 

“What’s in it for me?” The importance of the ‘built environment’ for living well with dementia



built environments

Strangely enough, with the focus of drugs, drugs, and yet more drugs, there’s been relatively scant attention for the environment in which a person living with dementia finds himself or herself in.

Improving wellbeing for a person is essentially about understanding the past and present of that person, and building on that person’s beliefs, concerns and expectations about the future. But the idea that you can ignore the environment is simply science-fiction.

The design of care homes maters. The design of hospital wards matter. The design of towns including pavings and signs matters.

Such an approach sounds ambitious and joined up, but not impossible. There’s been a long and proud history in England of understanding the social determinants of health, including housing.

The Attlee Government also extended the powers of local authorities to requisition houses and parts of houses, and made the acquisition of land less difficult than before. In 1949, local authorities were empowered to provide people suffering from poor health with public housing at subsidised rents. That very same year, unemployment, sickness and maternity benefits were exempted from tax.

Recent research suggests that wellbeing in later life is closely related to the physical environment, which is an important mediator of ageing experiences and opportunities. The physical character of the built environments or neighbourhood in particular seems to have a significant impact on the mobility, independence and quality of life of older people living in the local community.

According to a “Greenspace Scotland” report from 2008, “Trust for Nature” is a community-based conservation organisation that focuses on the protection of private land of high conservation value in the state of Victoria, Australia.

In recent research by Inclusive Design for Getting Outdoors (ID’GO), 15% of questionnaire respondents (a large sample, nearing 1000 in sample size) had stumbled or fallen outside within the last 12 months. The real figure is likely to be higher, since past-year falls are often under-reported. Many of the environmental risk factors associated with outdoor falls appear to be preventable through better design and maintenance; factors including pavement quality, dilapidation and kerb height.

Abstract experiential qualities such as perceptions of ‘safety’ and ‘attractiveness’ have been identified as important factors in stated preferences for parks and green spaces and there has been much written over many years on landscape aesthetics  and how this might influence preference and use.

By contrast with research on environment and health, arguably this is a domain rich in theoretical concepts for the mechanisms behind engagement with the environment but poor in terms of tools to measure the detailed spatial and structural qualities of different landscapes in relation to how people actually use and experience them. For landscape designers, this is of crucial interest. There have been, historically, attempts to develop guidance based on general principles, but few tools actually to measure the dynamic spatial experience in practice.

A built environment for all ages is conceptualised as one that has been designed so that people can access and enjoy it over the course of their lifetime, regardless of ability or circumstance. Such environments are said to be designed “inclusively”. The I’DGO (Inclusive Design for Getting Outdoors) consortium was launched in 2004 to investigate how outdoor environments affect older people’s wellbeing and to identify what aspects of design help or hinder older people in using the outdoors. Their focus is on identifying the most effective ways of shaping outdoor environments inclusively. They support the needs and preferences of older people and disabled people, always seeking to improve their independence and overall quality of life.

I’DGO was set up to explore the ways in which being able to get out into one’s local neighbourhood impacts on older people’s wellbeing and what barriers there are to achieving this, day-to-day. The project asked the crucial question: why do we need a built environment for all ages? The first phase of research, which finished in 2006, involved over 770 people aged 65 or above. Participants were asked about their wellbeing and quality of life, how often and why they went outdoors and what features of their local neighbourhood helped or hindered their activity. Researchers also physically audited 200 residential neighbourhoods to look for barriers and benefits to getting around as a pedestrian.

The I’DGO research found quickly that older people went outdoors very frequently to socialise, exercise, get fresh air and experience nature. If they lived in a supportive environment – one that made it easy and enjoyable for them to get outdoors – they were more likely to be physically active, healthy and satisfied with life. Walking was by far the most common way that people spent their time outdoors, whether for recreation or transport (‘getting from A to B’). Participants in the I’DGO study who lived within 10 minutes’walk of an open space were twice as likely to achieve the recommended levels of healthy walking (2.5 hours/week) as those whose nearest open space was not local.

A major research goal has been to examine the specific attribute of neighbourhood streets – tactile paving at steps and crossings – and asks how this affects the biomechanics of walking and risk of falling in older people (the project run by the SURFACE Inclusive Design Research Centre and their colleagues in Health, Sport and Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Salford). The benefits of tactile paving for blind and visually impaired people have been well established yet the system is not without its issues.

Tactile paving is not a policy area without its concerns, and a few in particular emerge from a report by the UK Health and Safety Executive. This report suggested that there is a need better to understand the extent and implications of incorrectly designed and laid tactile paving, and the toe clearance of an individual in negotiating paving ‘blisters’ and potential slip hazards. These factors appear to be crucial to older people, since many of the first phase ID’GO interviewees expressed concerns about falling?or feeling unstable on tactile surfaces and fall-related injuries are associated with loss of independence, morbidity and death in older people.

If we are to understand what qualities of the environment are important to an ability of individuals to ‘live well’, we need perhaps to acknowledge the diversity that exists in people’s capabilities, experience, desires and needs. This overall is a huge challenge for designers; the response conventionally has been to look for factors in the environment that matter to most people, or to a defined group of people, and to address those factors as if they were equally important. Yet for any individual, different qualities and elements in the environment may be a matter of indifference (e.g. certain colours if you are visually impaired) or vitally important (e.g. proximity of an accessible toilet if you have a weak bladder).

Such an approach builds on the concept of “affordance” and the reciprocal relationship between perceiver and environment. The concept of affordance links environment and human behaviour, or opportunities for action, and is therefore of particular interest in understanding how the environment might encourage or support people to be more active—a primary goal of public health policy. This is an insight of key relevance to investigating human behaviour in the landscape. As Appleton has put it, more succinctly, for any individual considering their landscape context, it helps us understand “what’s in it for me?” (Appleton, 1975).

Key text

Appleton, J. (1975) The experience of landscape, New York, NY: John Wiley.

Complete review of 2011 for the BPP Legal Awareness Society



It’s been a great first year for Legal Aware, the official blog of the BPP Legal Awareness Society (here it is on the official BPP Students website developed by Madelaine Power and Laila Heinonen).

February

On February 26 2011, I introduced my blog for the first time. I announced that blog would be centred around ten topics, and indeed I have largely stuck to this list throughout the year. Actually, I have expanded the list as my interests in the corporate legal news grew, and I started blogging on non-corporate topics, as my interest in pro bono welfare benefits developed. I have worked for five months in a law centre in London, in a post which was first advertised through the BPP Careers Newsletter.

March

Shortly, after announcing some meetings, I reviewed the plagued Rio Tinto and Riversdale transaction, one which had been plaguing Linklaters for months and which had an unfortunate conclusion. I invited people to join the brand new BPP Legal Awareness Society, which they did.  Maxinutrition was sold to GSK through Marcfarlanes in an interesting transaction, and I reported on the forthcoming implementation of the Bribery Act. Onto the legal landscape, it was becoming  increasingly recognised that professional legal services had to be run as businesses, and the nature of commercial law continued to interest me.

April

U.S. firms were fast adapting to the commercial opportunities of social media, and this was a theme to recur in the whole of 2011. For example, in May 2011, I reported on lessons in the UK industry for my social media strategy which had been very much made up on-the-hoof. In June 2011, Victoria Moffatt would later consider whether junior lawyers should participate in LinkedIn. By that stage, I was gaining a much clearer idea of what the BPP Legal Awareness Society was about, and that was to explain the relevance and critical importannce of law and regulation to shaping the competitive advantage of businesses. The regulation of the banking industry was beginning to bcome important as a theme, and I first brought up firewallsThe SRA spelt out 10 new principles in its Code of Conduct, and members of my Society discussed the use of ‘Second Life’ in law and legal education.

May

Slaughter & May LLP removed what they called a ‘clearly offensive advert’ widely reported in the blogosphere, including “Roll on Friday”. I was becoming very interested  in my MBA on how corporate social responsibility should pervade the business strategy in corporates, and I reported on a recent experience from India. Back in the real world, I was doing pro bono, and I wrote about a test in welfare benefits law which interested me – the cooking testMotor insurance was hitting the headlines, whilst international arbitration saw two bits of ‘big news': arbitration over nuclear power in Russia was becoming important and a new ‘Arbitration Ordinance’ was introduced. The effects of  the global financial crisis were becoming clearer, as law firms sought to find solace in Islamic Finance in diversification of their range of legal services. The effect of other issues, climate change, continued to be a source of legal work for the City,  RBS considered a international expansion strategy into China through the joint venture mechanismAmazon Inc continued to explore the intellectual property issues surrounding their “1-click patent”, and Google Inc meanwhile had their hands full with problems over AdWordsThe High Court also saw another interesting IP dispute over the name of Lotus in motor racing.

The impact of media law was beginning to become known as England discussed the need for a privacy law whilst free speech on the internet became under scrutiny and Charlotte Harris, a partner in Mischon de Reya LLP, tried to discuss superinjunctions and anonymised injunctions on BBC’s Question TimeLord Prescott indeed managed to achieve a win in the High Court over phone hacking. Finally, the impact of technology and the breaking of superinjunctions hit the limelight as ‘the Streisand Effect and that footballer’, and I dutifully did not break the superinjunction as I have student enrolment from the SRA.

June

“Roll on Friday” mooted the notion that I and various others at BPP were in fact suffering from “Stockholm Syndrome”, whilst I considered how my Society could help to overcome “the silo effect” in business and legal education. I moved the CSR debate onto a discussion of Bhopal in our Society’s meeting on CSR and international corporate strategy, and the general importance of marketing and CSR in corporate law’s “competitive advantage”.  The changing landscape of the world generally was further manifest in the ongoing discussion of the impact of the Digital Economy Act, now in the arena of whether it offended human rights.

Meanwhile, Ken Clarke presented his new legal aid and sentencing bill to parliament, and BAILLI realised it was having trouble securing fundingMicrosoft took a critical look at the role of entrepreneurshipCompass looked at ‘ethical banking’ in the banking regulatory reforms, and Steve Hynes wrote a brilliant letter to the Guardian on the impact of the legal aid cuts, whilst the Government produced its official response to its consultation on legal aid. Meanwhile, discrimination reared its ugly head, some would say quite literally, in a ‘battte of the cornrows‘ at the High Court. My passion for social law was intensifying at this point in this year, as I went to a brilliant meeting organised by the Islington Law Centre about what the legal aid cuts would mean. Again, I only found out about this meeting through the BPP Pro Bono Unit.

I revisited the subject of my LLM at the College of Law – cloud computing – in attending an interesting one-day conference on it at the HQ of Microsoft in which we discussed possible regulatory avenues for cloud computingFrank Jennings argued at this meeting that cloud computing offered a myriad of opportunities, particularly for cloud computing providers to “stand out”. The highlight of the month, and possibly the year, was our #tweetup organised by @ShireenSmith of @Azrights at “The Yorkshire Tea”, just a stone’s throw from the BPP Law School in Holborn. I was highly amused at the various antics of Magic Circle Minx, and this interview description made me laugh a lot.

July

As the training contract deadline was drawing to a close, I blogged about the online application form based on a meeting done by the BPP Careers Unit at Holborn. I was in the middle of studying leadership for my #MBA, so I wrote about Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” iconic speech.

I got easily bored, and discussed how Yogi Bear should be ‘legally aware’, and I even likened the training contract interview to the driving test the following month. I gave a well received presentation on the employment support allowance for my student society, whilst the full impact of the phone hacking at the ‘News of the World’ was becoming more widely known and what effect our statute law might have. This was the birth of the #Leveson inquiry which would be a dominant feature of recent months. Phone hacking was now a very active area of debate in the Houses of Commons, which was to be the case for the months which followed.

August

I became increasingly interested in the methods that legal recruiters use to select people for interview for corporate law firms. I had in my sights the ‘situational judgement test’ where applicants have to make a decision ‘what they would do’ in that particular corporate situation; I made my own version up, and so far over 100 people have taken it providing me with clear answers, surprisingly.

September

On 1 September 2011, Alex Aldridge published a thought-provoking article, “Disabled lawyers still face discrimination” in the Guardian.

I commented as follows:

I’d very much like to thank @AlexAldridgeUK for writing such a constructive and positive article on a topic, in my personal opinion, which has become somewhat of a ‘white elephant’ for law firms and legal education.

I agree that all of the firms mentioned in the article have really ‘meant it’, when it comes to widening access to disabled students in the legal profession. I am mentioned in Alex’s article above, and I tweet at @legalaware. The article generated much-needed debate, and I hope that it begins to forge a path for the future, where all stakeholders can bring their views to the table equally validly. For example, I have always found @SundeepBhatia2 very encouraging in supporting me. Sundeep is a Law Society Council member, and is extremely committed to the values of equality and diversity, in letter as well as in spirit.

Although I have now passed my LLM in international commercial law and I am about to commence my LPC in January 2011 here in London, I now run the BPP Legal Awareness Society during my MBA, a student-run society to promote the importance of law to business, and business to commercial lawyers (our news and educational videos are located at http://www.legal-aware.org). This time last year, however, I went to the http://www.open-to-you.com/ (OPEN 2011) event which was immaculately organised.

It was a great opportunity to meet face-to-face legal recruitment experts, other law students, and, most importantly, lawyers generally at Managing Associate or Partner level. I’ ll be strongly encouraging my friends at @BPPLawSchool and@BPPBusiness, where I hope to be increasingly involved in our disability strategy at a personal level. As I am physically disabled myself, I think such an event is wonderful for introducing law students to issues such as reasonable adjustments in legal recruitment, and ongoing training. There was a brilliant session on interview techniques which I loved.

I happen to believe that a much more ambitious debate needs to be had, however. Disability is not simply about law firms meeting future employees face-to-face once-a-year, which I dare suits meets requirements of all those concerned. We need a decent acknowledgement that disabled people aren’t there simply for marketing purposes; disabled citizens are potent members of society. and can indeed secure “competitive advantage” for law firms in a directly relevant area of law such as real-life application of the Equality Act 2010 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents).

Crucially, all disabled lawyers can exhibit remarkable skills in completely different areas of the entire range of corporate law specialities, such as share acquisitions or joint ventures, as indeed you’d find out if you were to attend the ‘OPEN 2012′ event. I believe that many disabled lawyers are also happy in high-street ‘social law’ in professional legal services firms offering specialist advice.

and

I couldn’t agree more with Tim’ s comment above: especially the need to ‘walk the walk’ as well as ‘talking the talk’ when it comes to inclusivity and diversity. This extends to all forms of legal recruitment, including careers fairs.

Tim is deaf as stated in his comment, and I have mildly impaired walking ability, as indeed also stated correctly in Alex’s article.

I feel intuitively that partners promoting disability in ‘top law firms’ (a term used in helenfcooke’s comment above), especially if they are not disabled themselves, could ‘do no harm’ ln listening extremely carefully to the views of people who live with disabilities.

This is, I suppose, what the people like me might call ‘face validity’ (cognitive neuropsychology was the subject of my own Ph.D., hence my somewhat late interest in psychometric tests for legal recruitment).

Ideally, I don’t feel it would be a bad thing if there were more disabled lawyers at Managing Associate or Partner level in these ‘top law firms’, anyway as I feel that there are few role models for disabled law students like me.

Furthermore, the proportion of disabled people in the general population is not altogether insignificant, so there is arguably no legitimate reason why disabled citizens should be underrepresented at senior level in such ‘top law firms’, or any law firm for that matter.

A new intake of students arrived at BPP University College. I hotfooted back from the party conference season to display my stall at Freshers Fair with Majid. During my conference, there were many interesting topics which I blogged on. Having already done pro bono work as a law student for several months by that stage, I attended a major event at the Labour Party Conference on the perils of the legal aid reforms. I concluded that the proposals did not constitute ‘justice for all‘. At some point during the year, probably inspired by two academic economists Prof Paul Krugman and Prof Joe Stiglitz, who both won the Nobel Prize in economics, that the Coalition policy was wrong and profoundly anti-Keynesian; I disagreed with Vince Cable’s interpretation of it in a blogpost I wrote on the “paradox of thrift“. I felt I had to tie in the notion of ‘economic rent’ and Ricardian economics in discussing bankers bonuses, however.

Later that month, I decided to make my own platform to help law students, particularly those with dyslexia and visual impairments, become good at the online verbal reasoning test; this is an obstacle for many law students getting even an interview for a training contract now. I wrote an introductory post on this here.

October

I became increasingly interest in how psychometric tests had managed to gain such an elevated status in legal recruitment; in fact, at one point, I reviewed the history of the situational judgement test, with a view to considering what the future holds.

On 14 October 2011, Alex Aldridge published an article in the Guardian entitled “Is the law degree an ass?”.

I commented as follows:

I really enjoyed attending this debate at UCL on Tuesday for two main reasons. Firstly, as a law student (about to study the BPP LPC in Holborn in January 2012, having successfully completed my GDL, LL.B.(Hons) and LL.M. as a mature student), I was interested to hear how academics answered the question “Do lawyers need to be scholars?’. This is particularly since I have received academic scholarships from three well-known institutions including Cambridge. Secondly, UCL is in fact where I did my own post-doc, and I have fond very memories of the place. I

I would like to thank the organisers @LexisNexis and UCL who took great care over the many delegates. I was able to sit near the front, due to my poor eyesight. I hope very much that @LexisNexis hold an event in the near future, with panel representatives including ‘real’ law students. I hope particularly @kevinpoulter will be involved as he is an experienced legal commentator who communicates well. I sat with fellow ‘legal tweeps’, @colmmu from the College of Law, and@legalacademia, a legal academic originally from Cardiff. It has been interesting for me (as @legalaware) to read the general feedback following the event, which converges on the notion that the scope for discussion about the issues was too limited, and drawn from people who were perhaps too senior. Notwithstanding these issues, I am very much looking forward to the outcome of the review to be conducted by the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR).

I have written a blogpost based on my own personal experience of this panel discussion on our ‘LegalAware’ website, the official website of the BPP Legal Awareness Society. On a positive note, Mr Bickerton explained his personal belief that the purpose of the degree is fundamentally not supposed to teach people how to be good at the law – his firm are rather looking for aptitude, interest, and a need to pursue law as a vocation. However, I found a bit alarming his relative disinterest as to what should be in the legal curriculum compared to the well-reasoned thoughts of the academics in the panel, in that the trainee recruitment of the Clifford Chance was of acceptable standards anyway. Ironically, it is perfectly possible for the Graduate Recruitment Team at Clifford Chance never to discover that you are a “scholar” if you do not meet their benchmark in their situational judgement test or verbal reasoning test. However you choose to define what a “scholar” is, most reasonable people would not define it as simply producing an arbitary mark in a psychometric test.

Personally, I found the views of Prof Richard Moorhead the most compelling. Prof Moorhead is at the University of Cardiff Law School (profile here). According to Prof Moorhead, lawyers ‘needed’ scholars, otherwise it would not be clear where the knowledge was coming from; scholars researched the key issues, and there is a key interdependence of lawyers and scholars – without scholarship, the advancement of knowledge would slow. The curriculum therefore needed to be exciting and innovating.

and

Interesting. I’ve had entirely positive experiences as a postgraduate student at BPP Law School, BPP Business School and College of Law doing my LLM, LLB(Hons) and MBA – but please bear in mind I’m bound to be happy at anything surviving a 2 month coma due in meningitis in 2007. i am also mindful of ‘advertising’ legal providers in this new ‘age’ of ‘expansion’ of legal services and legal education providers.

I did spend a lot of time at Cambridge, close to ten years in fact, as both an undergraduate and postgraduate student at Cambridge. I think @BaronessDeech is possibly being a bit tongue-in-cheek in her views about Cambridge, but I have always had a huge amount of respect for the jurisprudence FHS at Oxford.

I am now myself disabled, and I have passionate views about improving access for people like me who are visually impaired. Indeed, I have a chance to air them in the Comments section in a different article by @AlexAldridgeUK recently. I once had the enormous pleasure of meeting Prof Jim Harris. If you read his obituary, you’ll understand why,

Obituary in the Times

I didn’t study the Law Tripos at Cambridge – but I think i can understand where your impression of it as ‘stifling’ came from from my limited understanding of the organisational behaviour of faculties at Cambridge, @alienat. I think Cambridge suffers from a lot of very clever academics who don’t talk to each other when designing the Tripos, meaning that the Tripos is totally overloaded. As is usual in academic interests, they tend to be protective about representation of their own research interests in the undergraduate courses (and their examinations),
This was certainly my experience in an altogether different Tripos.

I would, however, be a bit disappointed if the Law Faculty (which does have an amazing research record, for example in criminology), were not able to input constructively into design of the law curriculum. They must however be extremely careful not to overload the curriculum (different from syllabus, by defintiion) with their suggestions, however.

Interestingly, since my comment was published, Clifford Chance have decided to discontinue their use of the Situational Judgement Test (they set exactly the same test in 2010 and 2011). I assume that this is not related to my comments above.

 

In the final three months of this year, I wrote more about psychometric testing (for example in the proposed BCAT and psychometric tests for training contract applications), human rights (for example the future of the Human Rights Act as discussed in a meeting of ALBA at the Inner Temple), and book reviews (for example on affect and legal education and happiness).

However, in these three months, I did become very interested in disability issues, accessibility and inclusivity.

 

October

The BPP Legal Awareness Society published its timetable for meetings to be held at the BPP Business School, St Mary Axe. We held all these meetings successfully in October – December 2011, including flotations, debt finance, international arbitration and joint ventures.

In October, I started blogging, in addition, for ‘Legal Cheek‘, an alternative blog look at the legal education and legal life in general. I wrote an article outlining my feeling that disability is the legal profession’s white elephant.

In this article, I argued that embracing disability was a good way of improving the quality of law schools.

All law schools deserve to be scrutinised very carefully in their response to the government white paper entitled, ‘Students at the heart of the system’, over the issue of whether disabled students are seriously disenfranchised. The formidable white paper, which was published in June, sets out proposals for a higher education sector which is sustainably funded, delivers a “better student experience”, and contributes fully to the efforts to increase social mobility. The ability of a disabled student to get a job is a massively significant factor in that individual’s social mobility; virtually all individuals do not aspire to sustain themselves through the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) itself. An adverse effect of the legal aid cuts may be to put off disabled applicants from applying for the DLA. Good law schools will wish to embrace theNational Student Survey, and participate in it to the full.

 

November

In November, I argued in an article for ‘Legal Cheek’ that the term ‘diversity’ is an unhelpful one, not least because it means different things to different people.  My conclusion was follows:

I believe that an useful first-step in advancing the diversity debate would be to phase out the word ‘diversity’ from the terminology, because, far from encouraging individual differences, clumping people together – inappropriately – inadvertently abolishes key individual differences.

Continuing the theme of disability, I developed the argument that law schools could take practical steps to make the wellbeing of disabled students much better:

The agenda for disabled law students under the government’s new framework is very much set by the law students. One way of getting involved is through the National Union of Students’ recently-launched petition calling for the establishment of a national advocacy service for disabled students (disabilities usually include long-term illnesses, mental-health conditions and specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia). In fact, if you’d like to set up your own disabled students’ group, you can email them for advice:disabled@nus.org.uk.

Still, I also feel it is up to the individual learning provider to be pro-active in responding to what disabled law students aspire to. At the bare minimum, they can simply comply with the white paper. But learning providers which wish to add social value may wish to do more to understand what disabled students aspire to and are legally entitled to. Certainly, it would reflect well on them to do so.

Meanwhie, back on the LegalAware blog, I was becoming acutely aware that the overlap between law and politics was becoming much closer. The legal aid cuts agenda remained at the front of my mind:

‘Sound off for justice’ and ‘Justice for all’ maintain that their campaigns are not political. However, senior people I talk to in law centres in London come to a conclusion that it is not possible to divorce politics from legal aid funding. Poverty unfortunately is political, as the Shadow Attorney-General, Emily Thornberry MP, suggested yesterday on BBC’s ‘Any Questions’. It happens that access-to-justice could disproportionately affect people on the basis of their income, in that cases of access-to-justice could become much harder to obtain for poorer people for certain problems. With many law centres set to shut down altogether, the legal services for immigration, housing and asylum, and welfare benefits, look set to be affected. The question is whether the poor will suffer disproportionately. Rich people will possibly be able to afford superinjunctions as before, as the evidence that the top 1% of the population have been affected substantially by the recession is lacking. This top 1% includes some (at least) well-paid lawyers in London.

However, colleagues of mine found it hard to discuss the political issues in an open way, but the funding of legal aid had unfortunately become a political isssue.

Whatever – I personally think all legal practitioners should be given support, acknowledging that funds are limited. but funding bodies will have to prioritise unfortunately. In fact, a focus on funding may have the beneficial effect of providing better precision to all stakeholders in their strategy and core competences of their legal services, whatever sector they are in. However, fundamentally, I most agree with the observation that, at this late stage, arguing over a sense of entitlement is totally unhelpful. It is desperately important that we fight until the end for our common purpose in protecting legal aid. I would find it very hard to support law centres if they wished to campaign at the expense of CABx or other stakeholders, but they should think about how they differ from other stakeholders when applying for London Borough grants for community investment or structural upkeep, I feel.

 

December

By December, I had come to the conclusion that a more radical solution had to be developed to improve access to the legal profession

It’s my fundamental belief that people are written off far too early in England and Wales at present. We have an education system that seems to punish certain bright people who fail to get perfect grades at GCSE and A-level. It doesn’t help that students are forced to make very specialised educational choices for their 16-18 studies at an age where they may not be totally convinced about their career choices.

I feel that the education and assessment environment needs an overhaul to prevent recruiters from using arbitrary academic achievement to ‘sift’ candidates out of sheer laziness. Talented people are being deprived access to jobs in the legal profession. Instead, we should be encouraging people to learn how to learn for themselves, and know where to find relevant information.

To this end, I feel law firms should be able to hire people straight out of school, if they wish, but also to take advantage to a greater extent of the enormous breadth of experience from other spheres of life mature candidates might offer. Unfortunately, we’re not in a place where that sort of flexibility can happen.

What will the future hold? 2012 has now begun.

LegalAware Review of the Year 2011 – Part 3 (Oct – Dec), disability and inclusivity



In the final three months of this year, I wrote more about psychometric testing (for example in the proposed BCAT and psychometric tests for training contract applications), human rights (for example the future of the Human Rights Act as discussed in a meeting of ALBA at the Inner Temple), and book reviews (for example on affect and legal education and happiness).

However, in these three months, I did become very interested in disability issues, accessibility and inclusivity.

 

October

The BPP Legal Awareness Society published its timetable for meetings to be held at the BPP Business School, St Mary Axe. We held all these meetings successfully in October – December 2011, including flotations, debt finance, international arbitration and joint ventures.

In October, I started blogging, in addition, for ‘Legal Cheek‘, an alternative blog look at the legal education and legal life in general. I wrote an article outlining my feeling that disability is the legal profession’s white elephant.

In this article, I argued that embracing disability was a good way of improving the quality of law schools.

All law schools deserve to be scrutinised very carefully in their response to the government white paper entitled, ‘Students at the heart of the system’, over the issue of whether disabled students are seriously disenfranchised. The formidable white paper, which was published in June, sets out proposals for a higher education sector which is sustainably funded, delivers a “better student experience”, and contributes fully to the efforts to increase social mobility. The ability of a disabled student to get a job is a massively significant factor in that individual’s social mobility; virtually all individuals do not aspire to sustain themselves through the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) itself. An adverse effect of the legal aid cuts may be to put off disabled applicants from applying for the DLA. Good law schools will wish to embrace theNational Student Survey, and participate in it to the full.

 

November

In November, I argued in an article for ‘Legal Cheek’ that the term ‘diversity’ is an unhelpful one, not least because it means different things to different people.  My conclusion was follows:

I believe that an useful first-step in advancing the diversity debate would be to phase out the word ‘diversity’ from the terminology, because, far from encouraging individual differences, clumping people together – inappropriately – inadvertently abolishes key individual differences.

Continuing the theme of disability, I developed the argument that law schools could take practical steps to make the wellbeing of disabled students much better:

The agenda for disabled law students under the government’s new framework is very much set by the law students. One way of getting involved is through the National Union of Students’ recently-launched petition calling for the establishment of a national advocacy service for disabled students (disabilities usually include long-term illnesses, mental-health conditions and specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia). In fact, if you’d like to set up your own disabled students’ group, you can email them for advice:disabled@nus.org.uk.

Still, I also feel it is up to the individual learning provider to be pro-active in responding to what disabled law students aspire to. At the bare minimum, they can simply comply with the white paper. But learning providers which wish to add social value may wish to do more to understand what disabled students aspire to and are legally entitled to. Certainly, it would reflect well on them to do so.

Meanwhie, back on the LegalAware blog, I was becoming acutely aware that the overlap between law and politics was becoming much closer. The legal aid cuts agenda remained at the front of my mind:

‘Sound off for justice’ and ‘Justice for all’ maintain that their campaigns are not political. However, senior people I talk to in law centres in London come to a conclusion that it is not possible to divorce politics from legal aid funding. Poverty unfortunately is political, as the Shadow Attorney-General, Emily Thornberry MP, suggested yesterday on BBC’s ‘Any Questions’. It happens that access-to-justice could disproportionately affect people on the basis of their income, in that cases of access-to-justice could become much harder to obtain for poorer people for certain problems. With many law centres set to shut down altogether, the legal services for immigration, housing and asylum, and welfare benefits, look set to be affected. The question is whether the poor will suffer disproportionately. Rich people will possibly be able to afford superinjunctions as before, as the evidence that the top 1% of the population have been affected substantially by the recession is lacking. This top 1% includes some (at least) well-paid lawyers in London.

However, colleagues of mine found it hard to discuss the political issues in an open way, but the funding of legal aid had unfortunately become a political isssue.

Whatever – I personally think all legal practitioners should be given support, acknowledging that funds are limited. but funding bodies will have to prioritise unfortunately. In fact, a focus on funding may have the beneficial effect of providing better precision to all stakeholders in their strategy and core competences of their legal services, whatever sector they are in. However, fundamentally, I most agree with the observation that, at this late stage, arguing over a sense of entitlement is totally unhelpful. It is desperately important that we fight until the end for our common purpose in protecting legal aid. I would find it very hard to support law centres if they wished to campaign at the expense of CABx or other stakeholders, but they should think about how they differ from other stakeholders when applying for London Borough grants for community investment or structural upkeep, I feel.

 

December

By December, I had come to the conclusion that a more radical solution had to be developed to improve access to the legal profession

It’s my fundamental belief that people are written off far too early in England and Wales at present. We have an education system that seems to punish certain bright people who fail to get perfect grades at GCSE and A-level. It doesn’t help that students are forced to make very specialised educational choices for their 16-18 studies at an age where they may not be totally convinced about their career choices.

I feel that the education and assessment environment needs an overhaul to prevent recruiters from using arbitrary academic achievement to ‘sift’ candidates out of sheer laziness. Talented people are being deprived access to jobs in the legal profession. Instead, we should be encouraging people to learn how to learn for themselves, and know where to find relevant information.

To this end, I feel law firms should be able to hire people straight out of school, if they wish, but also to take advantage to a greater extent of the enormous breadth of experience from other spheres of life mature candidates might offer. Unfortunately, we’re not in a place where that sort of flexibility can happen.

What will the future hold? 2012 begins soon.

 

BPP Legal Awareness Society – arrangements from January 2012



Our meetings will be held at the BPP Law School in Holborn from January 2012.

The purpose of this Society will continue to promote the importance of law and regulation in the function of all businesses including corporates.

I hope you may continue to support our Society. Details of forthcoming meetings will be posted soon both here on this blog and the official site for BPP students here. They will cover, as usual, the range of traditional practice areas in international corporate law. The Society, run by BPP students, will continue to emphasise the critical importance of diversity, equality and inclusivity for disabled law students. We are proud to do so.

 

About the BPP Legal Awareness Society



 

 

 

 

 

 

I am still one of the most active current full-time students of BPP enrolled on a postgraduate course, but I just wanted to clear the air over this issue.  To prove it, I am expecting my MBA summative results in organisations and leadership and strategy, systems and operations, on Monday, so wish me luck!

‘Legal Recruit’ is an initiative resulting after discussions of students of the Legal Awareness Society. The Legal Awareness Society is a registered popular Society of BPP. The Twitter thread to be the official mouthpiece of this BPP Society. Its aim always has been through the social media to explain the links between business and law, and we indeed have a popular website which transcends any usual boundaries.

The Society has regular meetings in the City, at the BPP Business School, although any BPP student may attend. Bear in mind that we have students in accountancy, finance, business, law, tax and marketing – so it’s a fertile area for interdisciplinary analysis.

This Society has never received any funding from BPP. Carl Lygo, CEO of BPP, and Clare Tunstall, Student Support Officer, have between them offered funding at various stages; I feel the money would be better spent in other parts of BPP. We like our independence as students in the Society rather, in that all our views are independent of BPP. Save for being a Student Society entity within BPP, we are nothing to do with BPP or its part.

I am meticulous about not using any branding of BPP. I have no BPP branding on any of my videos, books or posts. It is at this point I would like to acknowledge that I have attempted to liaise with the social media unit at BPP who were very helpful in arriving at this draft of the terms and conditions of my LegalAware website albeit it is a student one only, please press here. I signpost these T+Cs in the huge box on my homepage, and indeed anybody who becomes a ‘member’ of my LegalAware website is deeemed to have read them.

Back to ‘Legal Recruit’. It became apparent to me, and Careers staff at BPP Business School, that it’s an enormous pity if law students, despite a II.1 and relevant work experience, perform suboptimally in the psychometric tests. There is in fact a disclaimer on the Legal Recruit website, which reads as follows. This has been the exact wording of the disclaimer since the website went live.

Commercial awareness is a hugely important competence for a trainee in any corporate law firm. You may like to follow legal news on the blog of the BPP Legal Awareness Society, and its Twitter thread. With over 2000 followers including barristers, solicitors, technology and business professionals, journalists and students, it’s a great way to meet legal #tweeps. Please note that LegalRecruit is not endorsed by BPP, and is entirely unaffiliated with any BPP learning.

I am passionate about disability rights and inclusivity. I want disabled law students to be at the heart of the system, which is why I have tried very hard to ensure that individuals with dyslexia or visual impairments are able to benefit from practice on these tests.

LegalAware podcast 1: Ataxia and welfare benefit cuts



Welcome to the first ever LegalAware podcast. I am sorry for the sound quality. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it’s recorded on a very busy Regents Park Road, which can be busier than the #m6. Secondly, I am still getting used to the #yeti microphone and Audacity. Notwithstanding these problem, Alan (@AlanROYGBIV) joins me for a explanation of the neurological condition of ataxia, which we both have, what Ataxia UK is, and how the welfare benefit cuts are a tragedy for society, including disabled citizens like us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Final podcast 1

 

 

 

 

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