Turning the page
IN TWO months, my world will be changing. Given that my daughter attends a specialist school, I had fondly imagined that I had longer, but I had forgotten the existence of study leave. Her school provision will officially cease in May, and her art course at college will not begin until September.
Her move from special education back into the mainstream is a daunting one, but we are thankful that the Education, Health and Care plan (EHCP) that we spent several years fighting for lasts until she is 25, and ensures that the college will be legally obliged to support her additional needs.
These are the legal documents that the Government proposes, in last month’s SEND White Paper (News, 27 February), to offer only to children with “the most complex needs”. Their plan to shoehorn even more children with SEND into the mainstream system under the guise of “inclusion” has been met with alarm by parents like us who know how little the system has to offer — even once you have fought your way into it.
Half-open door
I AM grateful for voices in the Church that offer a better perspective on accessibility. The work of people such as Mark Arnold, with the Additional Needs Alliance, has made training available and created a database of accessible churches. Big festivals such as New Wine and Spring Harvest have always impressed us with their provision. Authors such as Lynn McCann and Sophie Killingley are addressing neurodiversity and faith.
There is still a long way to go, even though the issue is pressing: the youth group at our church is not alone in having an unusually high number of neurodiverse children, including my two.
Perhaps that is simply due to the relief of shared experience: finding a community that understands. The youth room, however, is at the top of the tower, up four flights of stairs, with a broken lift. One kind of inclusion does not mean that the church has solved the problem of accessibility.
Remote control
THE Society of Authors has launched its Human Authored scheme, allowing members to register their books as free from the use of AI.
I am planning to register, although this may cause further battle lines to be drawn in the vicarage. The Vicar — always an early adopter of technology — has embraced generative AI for much of his admin work, asking it to do things such as combine information from his email inbox and calendar to tell him the best night for running baptism prep, or listen to a meeting and provide secretarial notes. He does stop short of having it write his sermons, although he says that he finds its theology “surprisingly orthodox”.
Our son, on the other hand, is so against AI that he won’t consume any content that, he suspects, has been touched by it. In a computer-science lesson, when part of the instruction was to use AI to write a data-sorting program, he refused to follow it, and insisted on writing the code himself from scratch. Fortunately, this act of resistance was impressive enough to gain him extra marks.
His father had better watch out if he wants the youth to stick around at church: apparently, in that generation, “Did you use AI for that?” is a thinly veiled insult for a piece of shoddy work.
Wings of song
ST EDMUNDSBURY Cathedral recently received a gift of an illuminated Psalter that had been created in the town’s medieval abbey in the late 14th century. One of only two books from the abbey’s library to remain in the town, it had been in the possession of the grammar school.
A special evensong was held to receive it, during which the choir sang chants from the Psalter, and 600 years folded up like a telescope as the tunes that a monk’s hand had recorded resounded again within the same abbey grounds.
Created just 40 years before the invention of the printing press, when book-making was still the life’s work of whole teams of artists, scribes, and musicians, the Psalter connected its makers across time. Its creation reaches as far back as the words of King David, and as far forward as the voices in the choir of St Edmundsbury Cathedral in 2026.
Time travel
WE ARE gearing up for our “Easter Encounters” event for local schools. It is a colossal undertaking: four days of school visits, during which a dozen well-trained and rehearsed volunteers from the congregation dress up and act as the first witnesses of the resurrection to hundreds of visiting schoolchildren.
The church is transformed and divided into scenes, each with a backdrop painted by a local artist. Scripts are learned and then adapted on the hoof, according to the responses (during the Christmas equivalent of this event, we quickly discovered that most five-year-olds thought that “manger” was synonymous with “cradle”, leading to their loud derision when the sheep ate out of it, and the need for further clarification).
For the finale of each visit, I have been designing a timeline to go down the centre of the nave: one century per pew-end, so that the children can walk forward in time from Jesus’s resurrection, bringing the good news into the present day.
All 21 centuries need a relevant picture: a Roman soldier on pew number three; the invention of the printing press on number 15; Queen Victoria overseeing the Industrial Revolution on number 19. The temptation to make a quick job of it using AI is immense, but, luckily, I have a daughter who is heading for an art and design course at college, and could do with adding to her CV. Why give way to new technology when good old-fashioned child labour will do?
Seeds of hope
THE work of St Mary’s with schools has been growing, and has included workshops for individual classes between these larger events. A recent one was on the Tudors, as Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, is buried in the chancel.
Her story reads like a fairy tale: betrothed by Henry to the ageing king of France, she had the cunning and foresight to submit to the marriage on condition that she would be allowed to choose her next husband. This meant that she managed to avoid being beheaded for treason when, against Henry’s will, she married her childhood sweetheart, the Duke of Suffolk.
Besides telling her story, we wanted to include some church history, and to offer a perspective on the Reformation which was not just about Henry and his wives. With that in mind, we included a station at the tomb of the last abbot, poor old John Reeve, who had to watch his abbey being destroyed, and died of a broken heart; then, for balance, we told the tale of our pre-Reformation dissidents, John Baret and Jankyn Smyth, who stood against the greed of the abbey when it taxed the town.
It was a lot of information to put across, and I don’t know how much history the children will have remembered. But I hope that they went away with a flavour of the little acts of resistance which can take place when the will of the people in power seems like a tidal wave.
Amy Scott Robinson is an author, editor, performance storyteller, and ventriloquist.
