See the QS BRICS University Rankings 2018 at https://www.topuniversities.com/.
6. The university has featured among the top hundred worldwide in various league tables, University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP), and the Times Higher Education and QS World Ranking tables.
7. John Bowlby (1907–90) was a British psychologist best known for his pioneering research into child development and issues of attachment and loss. He was born into an upper-middle-class family and, like many from that background at that time, was largely raised by a nanny and sent away to boarding school. He had little interaction with his mother when growing up. During the Second World War he carried out significant studies on children separated from their parents which led to his later groundbreaking development of attachment theory. Bowlby’s research explored how children become attached to significant carers or “parental figures” when separated from their birth parents. His findings laid the foundations for later research and childcare practice. His best-known works are Child Care and the Growth of Love (1965) and Attachment and Loss, vols. 1 (1969), 2 (1973), and 3 (1980).
2. Home
Then if she dies, at least she’ll die at home.
Matches, fire, smoke. By the time Mrs. Gardner reached her kitchen, the whole thing was alight. They knew something was wrong when I dashed into the lounge and dived under the table where the television had pride of place. The table was covered by a cloth so I cowered beneath it.
“Hey up,”8 they must have thought. “What’s he done now?”
Only set fire to the kitchen, that’s what. Mam had taken me around to Billy Gardner’s house. I must have been about six or seven. While she was talking to his mother, I went into the kitchen with one or other of his brothers and sisters. There I found something I loved to play with, a box of matches. What’s more, something to ignite, dishcloths hanging up to dry on a rack that stretched across the kitchen. Within seconds the room was full of choking smoke.
Mrs. Gardner soon put the fire out, but it could have been a lot worse. As a boy, I was forever getting into scrapes. I loved playing outside, soccer, cricket, throwing stones—particularly throwing stones. My father was a bricklayer. He always kept a stock of window panes handy to replace those I had broken or been suspected of breaking. “Who’s broken that window? It must have been that Mick Pease . . .” Rather than pay for the damage, my father kept panes he had picked up from work. I hadn’t always broken them, but I got the blame.
My mother caught me once throwing stones against the wall of our house.
“What are you doing?”
“Throwing stones up again’ a-wall . . .”
“But there’s a window up there, you’re going to hit it.”
“No, I won’t, I’m just trying to see how close I can get without hitting it.”
My mother was furious, “You dare do that again!”
“Alright, I will,” so I threw another.
“Right, you get yourself in here!”
“Why? I only did what you said, ‘Dare do that again . . .’”
Of course, I knew very well what she meant. I chose to interpret it differently. In training and advocacy, I use this incident to reinforce a serious point. When we deal with issues affecting children’s lives we must choose our words carefully and be absolutely clear in what we say and how we say it.
I was an energetic lad. I was always playing in the street, in neighbors’ houses, and I liked to talk. Boy, could I talk! Nobody would tell me anything in case I spread it around. We were the last family in our street to get a TV set. I was cock-a-hoop to find out we were getting one at last only to learn that the whole neighborhood knew about it already.
I asked Mam and Dad, “How come everyone else knew we were getting a telly and I didn’t?”
“If we’d told you, it would be all around t’town by now.”
“But you didn’t tell me and it’s still all around t’town!”9
Many of my childhood experiences informed my later work. I grew up on a council estate in the north of England, what would be termed a public housing project in the United States. The houses were all built between the wars. They represented an improvement on the Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses and back-to-backs where most industrial workers lived.
It was a rough, tough place but with a strong sense of community. People looked out for each other, cared for one another. Whenever money was tight, as it often was, they would borrow a cup of rice or sugar, or a few shillings from neighbors and friends to buy food until the next payday. It was a close-knit, white working-class, blue-collar community. There was high unemployment. Those in work earned low wages through manual labor. There were problems with drink and domestic violence. Gangs of lads would intimidate youth from other areas who dared to come onto our estate. It was largely low-level violence, pushing someone off their bike, a quick scuffle with fists. Sometimes it got more serious, as my teenage sister was to find out.
Despite all this, it was a great place to grow up in many ways. In those days, even in cold, wet northern England, people would spend more time outdoors, chatting to their neighbors. As I go around the world, I encounter both rural and large urban communities which are still like that, very much like British society in the 1950s. People chat with one another across a yard or over a garden fence just as we did in my mining community back then. There are kinship structures and community links that play a very positive role in the work we now do with vulnerable and abandoned children.
Although we had a strong sense of community, it was also a very deferential society. People knew their place. It was drummed into us in school, in the factories, mills, and mines. We had low expectations and adhered to unwritten rules and codes. Certain things went unmentioned or were whispered behind closed doors. A teenage girl might disappear for a while only to turn up several months later. They had been “staying with an aunt.” They had been ill, had problems of some kind, had to go away. We were never told why. Only later did we realize that they were pregnant. They were sent away to avoid shame on the family. British society has become far more liberal since then, of course, but we encounter these attitudes today too in our work around the world. People are marginalized or outcast because they are thought to have brought shame or dishonor on their families and communities. People are isolated because they are different or because they don’t conform.
Where I grew up, outsiders were rare. Someone from a neighboring town or village would attract attention. It was even more uncommon to see someone of a different race or ethnicity. I can remember the first time I saw a black person. A woman near us was rumored to be dating a black man. I must have been about seven or eight years old and remember waiting near her house with my friends. We had to see for ourselves. Now I know what it is like to go into regions where I might be the first white person people have seen. They want to hold my hand and touch my skin to see if it is different to theirs. Every stranger can become a neighbor. What is familiar to us is unfamiliar to someone else. Our work is all about context, contact, communication, community.
Knottingley was a grim industrial town on the River Aire in Yorkshire, England’s
