Award for Max
Donor campaign work recognised
MAX Johnson is to get a special award from the Prime Minister for his work on our donor crusade.
Theresa May paid tribute to Max, 11, and his heart donor Keira Ball, of Barnstaple, Devon, for the new donor law named in their honour.
Mum Emma, 49, said: “His face lit up when he opened the envelope from No10.” The schoolboy will receive the Points of Light award from Mrs May on her final day as PM tomorrow. It recognises outstanding individual volunteers “making positive changes”. Mrs May wrote: “The powerful story of your heart transplant has inspired thousands to join the
HONOURED
Max Johnson organ donor register and I was honoured to support Max and Keira’s law.”
Max, of Winsford, Cheshire, was on the transplant waiting list for six months before he got his donor heart from nine-year-old Keira, who tragically died in a car accident.
The law means that everyone in England will be presumed to be a donor unless they opt out. IF schools take bullying so seriously, why are so many kids killing themselves?
If our schools are so safe, why are the helpless parents of Sam Connor, Jessica Scatterson and hundreds more rebuilding their shattered lives having lost their teenagers?
Sam, 14, lay down in front of a train last week after writing a note containing the passcode to his phone and handing it to a friend, along with his mobile and bag.
Jessica, 12, from Warrington, hanged herself. She’d named her alleged bullies in a note. Abusive messages were also discovered on her iPad.
And last month Shukri Yahya Abdi, a 12-year-old refugee schoolgirl, drowned in a local river.
Her family say she’d been badly bullied for over a year and claim the school failed to deal with it. A petition calling for an investigation has collected more than 30,000 signatures.
Parents will also be well-versed with the insistence from schools that they “take bullying very seriously”, yada, yada, yada.
The reality, in the wider context, is that it is not enough. Three in five young people have been bullied in school and nearly a third of 1,000 surveyed have been bullied online, according research by charity the Diana Award.
When teachers are not too overworked to deal with it, schools are so concerned about a negative impact on their OFSTED rating that they play down bullying.
Youngsters soon accept the futility of going to a teacher – and suffer in silence.
From September this year there are plans to introduce a new school inspection framework, for precisely this reason.
The number of suicides is too high, the systems too ineffective. For a school to achieve a “good” rating, the current draft says inspectors should consider whether “bullying, aggression, discrimination and derogatory language are rare”.
Unsurprisingly, schools are worried that repeated instances are bad for business.
No wonder home-schooling is on the rise. The latest estimate is that more than 50,000 UK kids are now being educated at home.
Parents are no longer prepared to gamble their children’s mental health, or their lives, by plunging them into a nightmare every day. VICTIM Sam Connor
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No wonder so many parents are educating their children at home...
Sandra Bullock in Bird Box