UKH

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43519296

I do feel sorry for the boy concerned, I am sure that things could have been handled better but this type of settlement troubles me.

This a volunteer organisation entirely reliant on people donating their time, not only in meetings, but training weekend, preparation and fund raising.

I have seen from my own experiences volunteering with Scouts that many parents merely see this the group as a cheap childcare. We have had a policy that we will not allow the behaviours of one single member diminish the overall experience for group. We seek to mitigate this through parental engagement including encouraging the parents impacted to join in and support the group which will allow them some supervisory role with their own child.

It's difficult to manage and this case sets a worrying precedent. I wonder how many local leaders have left as a result of this and what the impact is on wider group?

Exactly. The parents were asked to come along and help out the volunteer leaders, but opted instead to sue.  I bet that as lawyers they earn far more than any of the leaders at that scout group.

The scout assoctaion are considering yet more training for the volunteer leaders. Why not a mandatory training session for parents??  I bet that would cut the waiting lists down.................

I’m hoping the parents will be donating the £42,000 to an autism charity.

Failing that, The Scout Association might be a good choice. 

“They said his autism manifested as anxiety to change and that he needed to know plans in advance.”

Scouting is all about self reliance and the motto ‘Be Prepared’ says it all.

My sympathies with the parents as my son has lots of borderline tendencies and can be very difficult, but mainline scouting is really not the place for him. 

"The Gleesons have donated some of the money to a local autism charity, while Ben's portion is being held in a trust."

Pursuing a case such as this in order to institute change is one thing. Profiting from it is entirely another. Compensation for 'damages'...? Hmmm

The BBC headline is a bit tame.  How about, "Leech lawyers use son to suck money out of kids organisation"?

I saw this and my first reaction was to be thankful I'm not involved any more.  

As an unpaid volunteer the issue is that the child in question has a history of running away and not following instructions.  

I have autism myself.  I think it was entirely reasonable for the Scout leaders to request 1:1 with him for his own safety. The comparison with school is irrelevant, at school I don't have to supervise children with knives axes fire and over night.  

For the parents to say he was being treated unfairly is awful.  Scouts is run by unpaid volunteers ffs. 

No amount of training could change the fact that in this case his autism was causing him to behave dangerously.  

I think the parents did well to settle out of court as I don't think there is any guarantee it would have gone their way in court.  

Adjustments for autism or anything else have to be reasonable.  Safety comes above disability.  

There is already a significant amount of mandatory training for volunteers, often only available on limited dates and sometimes in locations awkward to access by public transport, I certainly wouldn't have encouraged them to stick another module of training in when I was volunteering 5 years ago...

Ah. I missed that they settled out of court. 

The Scout Ascociation will do a lot to ensure that they don’t get dragged into court. It’s very bad PR and I suspect,  as it’s staffed entirely by volunteers, it really doesn’t need any test cases going against it. 

Imagine the ramifications if they’d been found guilty. 

We had an autistic person in our troop and he had one to one supervision from his parents, until  we pulled the plug on it after they stopped coming along and supervising him. Nightmare for volunteers

At he same time we have a severly disabled lad in a wheelchair- 1;1 supervision. he took to scouts like a duck to water. We even wheelchaired  him round a 2 day expedition called cheshire hike. First time it had been done.Hoisted him up various low lying hills in the Lakes.

I have every sympathy with the Scouts on this.

I've got plenty of sympathy for both sides but the tone of some of the replies here is a bit alarming!  I work with kids in the outdoors. Kids can have all sorts of behavioural issues. All kids can act dangerously at times. All kids need supervision around knives and fire.

   None of us know the details of what occurred in this case but I have often witnessed young people with autism being sidelined and excluded due to lack of training on the part of the people who are supposed to be caring for them. It seems odd to me that he is in mainstream school but he can't travel on a bus with the scouts.  And why should he participate in an egg and spoon race if he doesn't want to? And kids run off for all sorts of reasons.   It doesn't matter whether they are volunteers or not, the staff caring for children should receive adequate training. Kids with autism require supervising adults that understand their condition, not necessarily 1:1 supervision.  

This has been a long learning curve for me in my professional life and I'm still on it, but my default position when I am supervising a child with Autism now is inclusion. And yes, I work with kids that have occasional meltdowns, and yes its alarming at first.  However, they are no more troublesome than the kids that get distracted and do things they shouldn't or who argue with each other and cry, or who are sick in the night because they ate too much chocolate. 

Don’t disagree with the gist of your post.

However, I think the issue many have, myself included, is that a voluntary organisation has just been f&&&cked up the arse to the tune of £42,000. 

There are far better ways to resolve an unfortunate situation like this without having to resort to compensation. 

And I use to volunteer for a couple of hours a week( not a paid professional like yourself), there is only so much time you can give on these issues. Otherwise the whole voluntary section just collapses in on itself.

The key words in your post are "professional life". Volunteers don't have to put up with the same shit as payed people. When i was a scout leader we had a kid dropped on us by the County level SA. We never found out what was wrong with the kid as no one would tell us. He was a complete nightmare to handle and in the end County was told "lose the kid or lose all the leaders and helpers". At least back then the SA had the balls to tell parents where to get off.

I too am glad i am no longer in the SA.

Your comments on the child and the opportunity that can and should be catered for are spot on.

The problem is rarely, if ever, the child. It's the parents who are occasionally the real challenge.

But parents suing a volunteer lead registered charity to line their own pockets is a whole new level of challenging behaviour.

Indeed, but I think that this could have been avoided pretty early on by some flexibility and willingness to learn and accommodate on the behalf of the Scouting Association. 

I am a paid professional, but I have done and will continue to volunteer on occasion, and have done so for the Scouts in the past. 

People who volunteer for the Scouts are awesome but being a voluntary organisation does not mean that the organisation can absolve itself of it's responsibilities, even if not subject to the same level of scrutiny as schools and outdoor centres.  The Scouting Association has issued an apology so I am guessing that they also recognise that they have not done the best they could for this boy. 

No.  The voulantry orgsnisation chose to pay the parents to drop their court case, instead of taking it to court.  This was their choice.  Perhaps it was done to save money, perhaps to save face.  

I wonder from reading the article if the scout lawyers advised this because of the data protection case and not the equalities act case.  The ICO would be more likely to levy a putative fine (and have significant powers to do so), and the data protection aspect is significantly more serious especially for a youth organisation.  

Deciding what is a reasonable adjustment for autism is a grey area, emailing other people to say that someone else - let alone a minor - is autistic is not a grey area.

It would have been very interesting to see the equalities act component of this go to court.

I consider the parent’s actions a total dick move that makes me suspect that their goal was cash all along.  They appear to have gone straight for the nuclear button on both EA and DPA fronts without going through the typical pre-legal formal channels first.

Edit: I’m aware I’m jumping to conclusions without full information, but I wanted to offer a different perspective.

The Money will come from public liability insurance unless specific systematic problems are proven (e.g. Gross Negligence).

Whilst it will likely put up premiums a bit it won't hit the bottom line to the extent you fear.

The awards and fines that do hit the bottom line are those against public self insuring institutions (like the nhs, police etc)

I recently went to a fantastic training session on Autism run by the Scouts, an inspirational trainer gave us a fascinating glimpse into autism which lasted an hour and a half and we would happily have sat in for another hour!

However, on dealing with a meltdown from an autistic child his advice was "Clear the room, just get everyone out".  Now that's fine but what we are then left with is 24 6 - 8 year olds standing in the cold with no planned activity.  I'm sure we'd think of something but the point it illustrates it is how far are reasonable adjustments allowed to impact on the other members of the group in an organisation with limited resources (both human and financial). 

It's a bloody tough one and I feel that for the most part it is handled with common sense, but unfortunately lawyers make hay with common sense.

I've been giving some thought to the parents too as a lot of folk have given them short shrift.  I have a couple of friends with kids with disabilities and I know that they have to fight a constant battle with schools, local authorities,  benefit agencies, other parents, to keep their kids included and getting the things that other kids take for granted. They fight this battle with whatever weapons they have to hand- usually determination and resilience and a refusal to back down.    I suspect that in this case, faced with total exclusion of their son, in a way that they felt was unnecessary, and emails flying around the other parents behind their back, they resorted to the weapon that was closest and easiest to them- they are lawyers.  I don't think it was about the money- they gave most of it to charity. 

Unfortunately parents aren't always right. They said they didn't want their child singled out by having a 1 to 1 support.  They were cross about his privacy.  So they put his picture all over the national news.  It doesn't make sense. 

Sometimes parents in that situation become conflict focused and their first response to anything around their child is to fight it and kick up a stink rather than a more reasoned response. I understand why this happens and I'm not saying it's the case here but it does happen and sometimes to the detriment of the child.

Re giving most of it to charity- did they? How do you know- do you have another link to that? 

We had a couple of kids with Autism or similar in my cub leader days. My experience was that the parents were incredibly understanding about how difficult their child could be to manage sometimes and never more than a phone call away if we had any major problems (not that we had many). Something just doesn't quite add up here.

As you say yourself you are professional and presumably work full time in your role. Anybody would expect you to have a far greater understanding and operate under higher standards than a volunteer doing a couple of hours a week .

Surely you recognise this ?

it is a huge difference .

Yes and no, it's not that simple.  And also what you say doesn't give volunteers credit where it is due.  Where young people are concerned there is a minimum standard that needs to be applied. The Scouting Association more than exceeds this on the whole. The SAs own statement acknowledges that it didn't meet that standard in this case, and that it is looking at plans for mandatory further training.  

Training in areas like autism awareness doesn't just help young people, it supports volunteers as they have the understanding and the tools to deal with tricky situations that arise. 

All great and nobody disagrees with your sentiment. 

Putting it into practise with volunteers is a different ball game.

it is always something of a gap between professionals and volunteers in areas like this( autism is not the only area) . Always has been. 

Just remember volunteers are no more than that. 

They took the money, forced a youth organisation to hand it over, being lawyers they would have wielded an unreasonably big stick.  Utterly despicable.

lawyers are ready conditioned to make profit out of conflict, often the only ones who do well out of it

We don't know the full story but one aspect of the problem that was mentioned in the news article was that the child would get anxious if he isn't made aware of things in advance. Fair enough, but this things happen which cannot seen in advance. At the Scout Camp there might have been helpers that were not aware of this issue. It could be argued that everyone should have been aware, but the helpers are human - sometimes they forget.

I also agree that a large compensation is not appropriate. The child was upset and I can't understand how that might have affected him but it was an upset - he wasn't physically injured. I am only a lay person as far as autism is concerned but isn't part of the management of autism is learning how to react to difficult situations.

Pity the result of the court case could not have been an instruction to the Scout Association to make the changes that they have now decided to undertake, rather than hitting them with a large bill, even if it is going to be paid by the insurers.

Dave

I tend to agree.  There appears to have been a data breach relating to a minor, and relating to their health.  Those two aspects would definitely be compounded if the ICO was assessing a fine.

However, as the whole thing was settled out of court, we'll never know.  Just as we'll never know what "Ben's portion" of the settlement amount was, how much went to charity, or how the split was calculated.

There was no court case. It was settled out of court. 

I’m not sure why the insurers would pay for this. 

It's down to how TSA's liability policy is structured.  The insurers are owned by TSA, in any case, they just reinsure some risks.  So whether it came from the insurers or not it has still cost the Association money that could have been spent on young people.

I believe it was not at all the right course of action for them to take, however justified their grievance.  Seek regulatory involvement by all means if there is a belief something is genuinely wrong, but taking money off a charity does not sit at all right to me unless for out of pocket expenses e.g. adapting a house for a wheelchair if an accident led to disability.

Volunteers play an enormous role in everyday life, helping children, conservation, caring for elderly, charities, the list is endless. All giving up time and energy for the benefit of others without any monetary reward.

The actions of these parents are just a kick in the arse for all volunteer workers, it does nothing to encouge others to follow on good works.

Oops. You are correct. I wonder what the response would have been if the Scouting Association, after agreeing an amount, had proposed either they give it to an autism charity or guaranteed to add it to any amount they were going to use to provide better training for their volunteers.

Dave

By settling out of court it shows the lawyers were after the money, not a change in the law. 

Isn't that what 99.9% of lawyers are always after ?

There are two types of damages awarded in court, punitive and compensatory. It’s not down to the ‘victim’ to decide what the level of punishment is. 

As others have said, while I agree with you in principle, it's a big ask for volunteers to do yet another training course.

Cubs/Scouts/Guides/etc is not just a couple of hours 1 evening a week - it's also the time spent planning activities, sourcing equipment, writing risk assessments, doing basic leader training, first aid courses and a myriad other things, usually around a full time job and a family, several other days a year for district activities and even some of your own holiday time for summer camp.

It's a wonder ANYONE is prepared to do it and we're very lucky that we have those that are. I was one of them for many years. The last thing we need is more discouragement/demoralization of existing/potential leaders.

Very true.

Dave

Very good point. Our daughter is a volunteer with the a local Brownie and Scout group and apart from planning meetings for what the groups will do during the year, there are weekends and sometimes a week away where she, and the other leaders are really essentially on duty 24/7.

Dave

I am a qualified teacher and autistic. Send me in as many training courses as you like, a kid that can't be trusted to put and keep his seatbelt on, who can't put his shoes on without drama and who is unpredictable and likely to run off is going to need extra supervision at Scouts.   

I fully understand from my own feelings and experience the need for predictability.  However life isn't always predictable.  Learning to deal with this is important.  

You've hit the nail on the head!

Strange how you can understand how difficult it was for the scouts yet the child's parents seem to have failed to grasp the point.

If they sue someone every time their child is upset or treated differently they'll be worth a fortune.

Never mind that their actions have probably set back the cause of autism by gosh knows how long.

We had a kid in our Scout troop who was quite severe Downs. He'd had a shit life before being long term fostered, and despite being the same age as us, was fookin massive, with arms like pit props. 

You didn't want to be there when Kevin went postal. 

However, over time, Kevin's behaviour moderated and we learned how to interact with him. He needed 1:1 at first, but in the end, was able to get along with minimal supervision - we all just kept an eye on him and were protective of him at events, camps etc. 

It took time, and we were all on a learning curve, including the big fella. I'm sure there were times he could have been accommodated better, but ultimately the leaders and lads tried as best they could. 

Perhaps the couple here should have allowed the leaders, all volunteers, a little latitude and worked with them, like Kev's foster parents did with us, rather than go for the jugular. 

That strikes me as a disproportionately large amount of cash for an issue that really doesn't merit this from parents who are obviously unsympathetic to the ideals of the scouting movement, the practicalities of scouting events and the best way for their son, who as someone with autism unarguably has some special needs, to be different from but equal to every other member of the scouting troop.

As a child of eleven or twelve I went along to a few meetings of the local scout troop but was then asked not to come any more as my parents couldn't afford the uniform.  Can I retrospectively sue for emotional damages and restriction on social and educational opportunities by what amounted to an effective ban on my participation?  Of course I can't; and it's as travesty that these parents have been awarded an out-of-court settlement rather than being told to work with and for their son in recognising that yes, he's different but so are we all, and that if his differences are accommodated reasonably and provided for appropriately then he could remain in scouting.

T.

I’ve had a number of Scouts with autism and/or adhd in troops and units I’ve helped at over the years.  I’ve thankfully never had parents who thought that suing would help.  Most of them have had an amazing time, and made friends much easier than at school.  They have discovered what they can do, not what they can’t.  

I’m concerned that volunteers will leave if they feel that this could be the outcome of saying they can’t cope with a disabled child without help.  

I’m sorry that happened to you, we always managed to find a way to get a uniform for everyone one way or another.  

Usually in these cases we are a long way from getting the full story. 

Having individual support seems to be a reasonable adjustment to allow an ASD youngster on a trip if this is what the risk assessment identifies. You can be sure that if the young person had run off and been run over this would also be found to be unacceptable.

Usually in these cases we are a long way from getting the full story. 

Having individual support seems to be a reasonable adjustment to allow an ASD youngster on a trip if this is what the risk assessment identifies. You can be sure that if the young person had run off and been run over this would also be found to be unacceptable.

Good of you to say, but I wasn't left emotionally scarred by not having a woggle to call my own.  Well, not visibly at least...

T.

I find that very disappointing. Every troop I know runs a second hand scheme and the troop I ran had a hardship fund for kids.

Careful about using the term 'disabled ' in association with the child in question - you might be sued!

Autism is generally considered to be covered by the equalities act.  The legal definition is something about a long term condition which cases problems with daily life.  

I don't see how they could complain as it was the equalities act they tried to use.  

I used disabled as a more general term as there are other disabilities that can be challenging for leaders too. 

And I can't see how they managed to get the scouts to pay them over £40,000. But somehow they managed it.

Do we know if the child is still a member of the scouts or have his parents moved him on to a more predictable organisation, the army cadets maybe?

Edited to add that my post at 21.52 was an attempt at humour, failed again

It's a while since PBaB was briefly a Scout. I suspect things may have changed a bit since then.

However, having said that, the early seventies saw poverty pretty much like today. And hand-me-downs were very much part of my childhood, both within my family, and between neighbours. And we were firmly middle class, with my father being a university lecturer.

I was a Scout Leader in the early 90s and the group I was at we had similar issues. 

As someone already said I suspect the data protection issue was the expensive one.  

As for humour, I sometimes take things a little over literally and miss it.  Autism.  

Like Sheldon and his sarcasm sign, I find the useful.  

Yes, my fault for not including the ????

Colon dash bracket.

I'm that sad that I had to look at my keyboard to see what that meant, hangs head in shame.

(Is there a keyboard symbol(s) for shame?)

Like the baron, my post was intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek (well, the first paragraph, anyway; the second was musing on the difference between the 70's and now). But I forgot my usual ellipsis...

Scumbags.

I wish Bear Grylls on them.