Cuts close mother-baby rehab clinic

One of just two mother-and-baby drug treatment centres in the country is being closed due to cuts to public services.

Noami House in Bristol was set up in 2009 by the charity One25, which has been providing support for women exiting sex work and drug addiction in Bristol for 16 years. The house provides women somewhere safe to stay while receiving help for drug addiction and allowing them a proper chance at motherhood.

One mother only found out she was pregnant two days before starting a five-month prison sentence for assault, she had also been addicted to heroin and crack for two years and sleeping rough before her sentence. Now, having spent 10 months at the centre she is drug and alcohol free and will move into a flat with her daughter next month.

Since being opened it has produced promising results, of the 18 women who have passed through its doors, 10 left drugs free and with their babies. Those who have their babies taken into care can still receive treatment and are given advice about keeping in touch with their children.

The charity began to struggle with costs when it lost two government grants, notably since the Tories came into power in May 2010.

In an effort to change its funding model, Naomi House re-launched as primary treatment for 12-18 weeks rather than up to 23 months, which is drastically cutting the time it can rehab the women. However this caused it to lose its entitlement to housing benefit from the local authority as a result.

It isn’t that the need for this service wasn’t there, in fact quite the opposite. Women in these situations need as much support as possible through their pregnancy and as they start into motherhood. With pressure to change after high-profile tragedies like Baby P, social services are under pressure to remove children and put them in homes without trying to offer these women the help and treatment they need to be able to take care of their children properly.

Now women in the area who give birth while working as a sex worker or addicted to drugs will stand much less chance of being able to keep their children or indeed receive any help or support.

This is Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ in action. The charities which his party praises so much are equally the victims of the Tories’ slash and burn. It is appalling that we have to rely on charities to carry out this vital work in the first place – losing them means many people have nowhere else to go.

Instead of cutting to refloat a broken system, we should demand that services which are forced to close should be nationalised under the control of the workers and users. Companies which threaten to sack staff should be nationalised without compensation to the bosses – Halifax has sacked tens of thousands of employees since it was bought by the taxpayer.

The government should be putting money in to support these women who are in incredibly vulnerable situations and helping them into parenthood rather than abandoning them and their communities to povertyr and crime.

 

 

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Archive: 150 march against ASBOs in Leeds

This is an article from the archives, originally published on 21 January 2006. 

On Saturday January 21st around 150 youth held a demonstration against the proposed dispersal order that the council are planning to place on Leeds City Centre. The demonstration has come out of anger from young people who

The decision was voted on, and the meeting came to the agreement that at this stage a march on Saturday was the best way of raising the issue publicly. Whilst people at the meeting were in favour of taking direct action in opposition to the council, it was decided that at this stage, such an action would be easy for the police to target, and would crush our campaign before it had started.use the city centre at weekends, and would be the target of such a dispersal order.

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New GCSE’s will penalise dyslexic students

Dyslexia groups have condemned a government proposal to improve ‘communication skills’ by awarding 5% of marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Charities and campaigners say the move will make it harder for hundreds of thousands of young people with a genuine learning disability to get the grades they need.

The government said the new marking scheme – due to come into effect from September – will make no allowances for students with dyslexia.

Furthermore, many teachers and parent are becoming concerned at the exodus of specially-trained teachers and assistants from our schools. While students with recongnised learning disabilities can get up to 25% extra time in exams, the application process is complicated and without specialist staff in schools, many students do not benefit.

A £10m scheme launched by Labour in 2009 to train 4000 specialist dyslexia teachers has been shredded by the coalition. Many of the teachers are being made redundant from new ‘academies’ and ‘free schools’ who don’t want the cost of shelling out for specialist teaching.

Government policy is fusing perfectly with the interests of big business who want to exploit the profit potential within the education system.

Paying for the intensive, specialist services that a proper education requires is not a priority for these businesses. Instead they want to cream off the top students, packing them into grade-factories, whose schools hover at the top of the league tables, ensuring plenty of cash-flow and credibility for the ‘sponsor’.

We oppose the government’s attempts to dump its responsibility for education. We have a social responsibility to provide the best education possible. To do that we need to put our schools, curriculum and exam boards under the democratic control of teachers and students – not subjecting education to the profit-logic of the market.

 

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