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IN TOUCH  New principal at New College and Tom Skelton’s comedy TX: 12.09.2017 2040-2100 PRESENTER: PETER WHITE PRODUCER: CHERYL GABRIEL

White

Good evening. Tonight, a new broom at New College. We hear about plans for one of Britain’s remaining schools specifically for visually impaired students. And the tricks and techniques of taking improvised comedy to the stage when you’re not quite sure what’s in front of you.

There’s always that – Oh no am I supposed to laugh at this – and I tell them before the show – no it is fine, please do laugh, I really do want you to laugh, even when you feel you shouldn’t.

We’ll be hearing more from visually-impaired comedian Tom Skelton later in the programme.

But first, New College Worcester, or NCW is not that new. Last year it celebrated its 150th anniversary of teaching, what were then known as ‘the blind sons of gentlemen’. Well the class and the gender bias have now gone – it’s co-ed and open to all, but it still has an academic slant. It’s an independent school run by a trust and I suppose it most resembles a residential grammar school. And it still believes, in the age of mainstream, that special schools have their place. It now has a new principal, she’s Nicki Ross, and I’ve been talking to her about her plans for the school and about her first few months in the job.

When I went in my first week into the gym and saw a Year 8 class trampolining, my first thought was well actually these students should not be doing this, this can’t be safe. But I’ve learnt very quickly that they can do the same as anybody else, things may need to be adapted slightly but they are children and their learning opportunities are exactly the same as they would be in a mainstream school.

How did you prepare yourself for this job?

I was very, very conscious that I had major gaps in my knowledge and understanding of education. One was VI, where I had never even taught a student with any visual impairment. And the other was around residential care. So I learnt the braille alphabet before I started, I talked to people a lot at the school before I actually started on my first day and I need to – I think I need to recognise in myself that they are two areas that I’m going to have to continue to learn in. And it’s actually really exciting for me to have new elements of things that I’ve never had to even contemplate before.

But I do feel bound to ask you, given those gaps, why do you think they gave you the job?

I was very clear in my interview, if I’m truthful, that I had these gaps and they said that actually they were interested in leadership and that leading a school full of VI children probably wasn’t that different from leading a school of sighted children. And I think in that they were pretty much right.

How secure do you think New College is? You know with tightening local authority budgets, some councils have been increasingly unwilling to send visually-impaired people out of their area to be educated – we can do it just as well, they argue, so how do you find the situation that you’re faced with?

Well interestingly somebody handed me a letter on Friday from 1995 that they’d found in college explaining how difficult it was going to be to place able visually-impaired children at New College because local authorities were not going to be able to do that and here we are 22 years later facing exactly the same issue. There is no doubt that we’re in challenging times financially but so are all schools, whether they’re special schools or mainstream schools are facing financial difficulties. And I think it’s very sad for parents that for many of our youngsters who are lucky enough to come to us they’ve had to have a major, major battle in order to be able to prove that we are the best place to educate their children.

Are rolls falling?

I would say they’re stable. The last sort of two, three years the student numbers have been pretty much the same, slightly up one year, slightly down the next year but obviously it’s something that we are going to be very, very mindful of in this current financial climate.

And what can you say to local authorities given the fact that as you say they are very strapped for cash, they’re bound to say that and the cost of New College would rank somewhere near some of our most expensive public schools?

Absolutely and the argument that I want to give to local authorities is one about life time investment. Actually if we can educate these children, which we do, to make sure that they are able to go out into society, take their place, hold down a job, actually in the long term we will save money. Often people don’t want to look that far ahead and I think at the moment we are having some difficult conversations with local authorities and sometimes, at the moment, we are being more successful with students where it’s just not worked in mainstream.

But as you say this has been a perennial problem but the money perhaps has been there, now you have to convince them at a time when the money isn’t there.

Yes you’re absolutely right and it’s a two-way process too, I would imagine that the local authorities find it very difficult having to make difficult decisions based on finance as opposed to what’s best for children and I think that must be hard for anybody involved in education.

There’s always been a problem for visually-impaired youngsters with the transition from school to work, whether the route is through college or some other kind of training, what do you see as New College’s role there?

Yeah I think it’s an interesting one isn’t it, our Year 7s have been with us for a week and to my mind from the moment they enter New College Worcester our job is to prepare them for leaving and whether that’s in terms of having plenty of work experience, making sure that they are able to learn to access everything, so that they don’t expect everything to be provided in a format or a font, for example, that they’re able to easily access but we’ve taught them the skills to find out how to do that. And I think we have a huge role to play in preparing the students for life beyond New College.

I have to say my own impression is that my generation got what you might call a tougher schooling for what turned out to be, in employment terms, a rather more protected world than now, by which I mean there were more jobs that were kind of earmarked for visually-impaired people. Nowadays it’s almost the other way round, in that there is a, if you like, a more pastoral element to New College but preparing them for a rather more unforgiving employment climate. Have we got that right completely?

I think we have got work to do as a college still on identifying careers, making sure we’re putting students on the right curriculum to make sure that they are able to be successful once they leave.

Because the unemployment figures, as you know, are almost – they’re not very different to what they were many years ago, we don’t seem to be making progress.

That’s absolutely right and the statistics, I think, are quite horrific. I think our responsibility as a college is to make sure that for the local authorities, who are paying a lot of money, that the payback for that is that the 30 or 40% of the VI community who do manage to be successful in holding down a full-time or a part-time job come from New College Worcester.

What would your aims be in that area?

Oh they are several fold. The first is about providing the very, very best education for our young people to make sure that they’re able to gain really good qualifications to allow them to pursue the career that they dream of. I think we’ve got to get our careers’ education right, I think importantly we’ve got to get our youngsters out into the community as much as possible. And that might be when they’re young, it might be going to a local guide company, it might be being involved – for example we’ve got a running group that our running group work with the local community, we have volunteer runners who come in. So that lots and lots of contacts beyond NCW, so that the transition from what is a very safe environment is just made a little bit more real.

And on this question – I mean we are a risk adverse society, an increasingly risk adverse society, does that make it difficult for you to do what you need to do? You said right at the beginning that when you went to the school you saw things that looked dangerous to you, is it difficult to actually offer the kind of risks that perhaps visually-impaired children need to learn to take?

I think there is the potential for that. I think the college works incredibly hard to reduce those risks. So the students do take part in all sorts of activities and the risk assessment programme is really strong to make sure that everything that we do do does become safe. I think it would be very easy to fall into the trap of we’re not going to do that because it’s dangerous. And the culture at the school isn’t of that mindset.

I mean we actually had a young man on the programme a few weeks ago saying he hadn’t settled well at Worcester and had gone elsewhere because he had been used to freedom and he didn’t want to have to pass a test to go to the local pillar box.

Yes but we also need the children to be safe, so I think that getting the balance right there is absolutely crucial.

Nicki Ross, the new principal of New College Worcester.

And now to some of your reactions. The row about the RNIB’s sale of a box at the Royal Albert Hall left in a will for the use of blind music lovers rumbles on. Barry Burrell seems to speak for many when he wonders if this is now a trend. He emailed: "I’ve made use of this wonderful facility on several occasions over the years, and following the sale of the Lauriston Hotel in Western Super Mare and the wish to sell two other specialist hotels, I feel even more disgusted with the trustees of this organisation. Do they have the best interests of the sight impaired in mind? Not when they keep taking away long term benefits that we have known and loved over many years." He goes on: "Maybe when they do show their faces on In Touch, you could ask them where the RNIB ‘for sale’ board will next appear."

Geoffrey Johnson is even more succinct: "Please inform the RNIB that I will never leave a legacy, or make any other contribution to them. To sell the Royal Albert Hall box is a betrayal of a legacy."

And on another topic, Jean Murphy is much happier. She found columnist Red Szell’s thoughts on the problem of holidaying when you’re visually impaired reassuring. "We had booked a cruise in November," she says, "visiting major cities and involving sightseeing. Originally I thought ‘you can do this Jean, don’t be a wimp!’ but we’ve now cancelled because I soon began to realise that it won’t be stress free and will literally exhaust me trying to be like everyone else, when I’m not. What a relief! We’re now going to a self-catering, luxury caravan in a familiar and well-loved area, not too far from home. And I can now look forward to my autumn break."

Well thanks for all your comments, that was just a small sample. You can always contact us on anything in the programme. Call our action line on 0800 044 044 for 24 hours after the programme. You can also email intouch@bbc.co.uk or click on the Contact Us link from our website, that’s: www.bbc.co.uk/intouch and there you can also get more information about the programme and sign up for our podcast.

Now 10 years ago, Tom Skelton thought his embryonic stage career was already at an end. Then a student, he was already a budding performer with a penchant for improvised comedy. But he discovered suddenly that there are some situations which you can’t improvise your way out of.

I was on stage doing a sketch in an improv show and then my scene partner did a quite subtle gesture with his hands and I just couldn’t see it. What scared me was that I was looking right at his hands and couldn’t see it and that’s when I knew it was – something was there.

You presumably had had indications had you – were you kind of almost sort of thrusting them back and ignoring them?

I had had a couple of other moments where I’d noticed it. So once in a park I had a fly in my other eye, so tried to get that out and so looked at my friend with only one eye and there was a sort of blurriness in the centre. There was that, there was a couple of other things that I hadn’t quite seen but I sort of – I was ignoring it essentially.

And of course it was a hereditary condition which presumably you knew about?

I did yeah but it’s amazing how easy it is to ignore something even if you know it’s a possibility and if you start to think about it the likelihood was there but I showed a huge capacity for ignoring the likelihood of it being that.

And you didn’t tell anyone?

No it is quite difficult to hide losing a lot of sight for enough time, so eventually it became too obvious, so I had to say something.

And just explain what it is.

Oh yeah so it’s called Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy and it basically means you have no central vision, only peripheral vision and I’m told I have around 5% vision.

And presumably you’ve kind of learnt how to use it for things that are relevant on stage in a way have you?

Yes definitely. My background’s in improvised comedy, so I think it actually turned out to be a bit of an advantage with that because in improv you have to imagine something that’s not there, so you’re miming and – whereas – and if you’ve got perfect sight then you’re staring at this blank space and imagining that there’s a cup or a table or something, whereas I – because there’s a sort of blur – I can imagine more things in the blur possibly because I can’t see what’s not there, I can imagine something that isn’t there more easily. Maybe it has not bearing at all. I do sketch comedy as well and I think with that one of the advantages as well is that I have to learn it a bit more haphazardly maybe but I often learn it on stage through performance through working out what it is. And then line by line I listen to myself speaking it before.

Well we’ll come back to the show that you did over the last month or so but I think until more recently you stayed away from material that related to your blindness.

Yes I think I wanted to be known firstly as a comedian, not that I’m particularly known or anything, but I think rather than do stuff about blindness first and foremost I wanted to be

good at comedy and then once I felt I was good at solo material then explore the blindness later.

And yet it is quite fertile ground, isn’t it?

Definitely. Also the audience is just quite fascinated by it and then there’s always that – oh no am I supposed to laugh at this? And I tell them before the show – no it is fine, please do laugh, I really do want you to laugh, even when you feel you shouldn’t. There was a strange moment actually after one of the shows where a person came up to me, an audience member, and said – are you really visually-impaired? And I said, yeah, yeah that was the whole point of the show. And he said – I feel really bad for laughing now. And I said, no don’t feel bad now, you should have felt bad before when you thought it was a sighted person taking the mickey out of blind people. The message of the show shouldn’t be it’s okay to laugh at the blind just not with them.

No that wouldn’t have been a good message would it.

So because Tom is genuinely severely sight-impaired if you see him struggling to put on costumes or to locate props or just generally knocking things off the stage then he is genuinely struggling but it’s fine to laugh. He wants you to laugh, he needs you to laugh.

Tell me a bit more about the show that you have taken to the Edinburgh Fringe because that very overtly, perhaps for the first time, said I’m going to make jokes about blindness.

Yeah. The premise of the show is me going through my first sight loss and discovering it and then an ophthalmologist – my ophthalmologist tries to reassure me about losing most of my sight by telling me about all the great blind people throughout history. And some of the examples he uses aren’t – for comic effect – aren’t particularly good ones or very effectively told. So that’s the framing of it.

So did you have a favourite blind hero or heroine from the… did you play any heroines come to think about it?

I played – I played Libby Clegg, the…

Ah the sprinter.

Yes. I tried to play her faithfully but she was – obviously her portrayal was often dependent on – I got a guide up – a guide runner up each time to get me over some hurdles, which is her

new event in this show and so it was very dependent on the guide’s speed or if they’d ever experienced sighted guide training.

One thing I must ask you – I was intrigued reading about you that you’d said that you wouldn’t necessarily welcome your sight back and I’m used to people like me, who’ve never seen, saying things like that but not so used to someone like yourself, who’s had sight up to the age of 21, and knows what you’re missing.

I do feel it is such a part of me that I would find it strange to suddenly have sight back. But whether I definitely wouldn’t take it I don’t know but I find it quite interesting how like it marks me out I suppose, it’s all those sort of selfish reasons. It’s like it’s a – it’s part of me that’s interesting without me having to be interesting.

Because I understand that, as someone who’s been – I mean it would be terrible for me, I mean I’m the presenter of In Touch, I’d lose me job for a start. So you think in a way that it does make you stand out from the crowd?

I think so and I think I might well still take my sight back but it’s just becoming increasingly hard to conceive of it. I know feel as if rather than being identified as just the comedian who is blind, I’m like the short blonde blind comedian.

Tom Skelton. And I hope we may be hearing more from Tom in the future.

And that’s it for tonight, from me Peter White, producer Cheryl Gabriel and the team, goodbye.