Schools strike due today

IN THE past two weeks thousands of West London school students have erupted onto the streets demanding an end to canings and victimizations.

And in spite of arrests, threats of expulsion and severe canings, the youth, the majority of them 13-to 15-year-olds, have refused to be browbeaten.

Today the people behind the campaign, the Maoist-dominated Schools Action Union, hope to organize an all-London schools protest to London education headquarters at County Hall, Westminster.

What are the demands behind this campaign that has gained support from a large variety of schools?

They are demands that have béen issues among pupils for any time in the past few yearsno compulsory school uniform, no canings or detentions, schools not prisons, rules to be decided and enforced by the whole school and no victimizations.

Half-way through the campaign a demand for free school milk— taken away by the Tory government-was added to the list.

The pupils themselves have partly explained the reason for their unrest. One 13-year-old boy remarked when questioned by representatives of the Tory press:

'We want the same as the dockers and the railwaymen—if they can come out, why can't we?' And a group of girls told me:

'They don't arrest the ra" waymen and the dockers, yet they are arresting us.' The youth complain of having to sit in stuffy classrooms with all the windows closed in summer and of freezing in winter. They complain of uniforms which are too hot in summer and too cold in winter.

The daily paper that leads the fight again the Torles.

Clapham THURSDAY FRIDAY SATURDAY month AL JE, Behind all the press ballyhoo and witch-hunts and the Maoist adventurist misleadership, these pupils have genuine grievances they want solved.

Pupils in revolt during a recent Hyde Park rally School dinners, they say, are disgustingly poor. First, second and third formers in some schools second turn for to s wait until secone Turn their dinners, which by then are either cold or like left-overs.

It is clearly not just the leadership of the Schools Action Union (SAU) which today has brought these children out of the schools on to the streets in such big numbers.

The SAU leadership, by playing around asking the capitalist press for £10 for an interview, have opened the door to witch-hunts and "red' scares against the youth fighting to defend their This leadership Family life' hospital may lose therapy unit BY OUR OWN A WEST LONDON hospital will lose its experimental group therapy psychiatric clinic if it is taken over by another hospital in the area.

The Paddington Clinic and Day Hospital functions as a therapeutic community in which medical staff, psychologists, social workers and occupational therapists work together with the patients in a group situation.

They make an attempt to explore the basis of an individual's illness in relation to his family and the community in which he exists.

But proposals made by St Mary's hospital, Paddington, which will soon take over the Day Hospital, make no provisions for such treatment.

Instead the treatment favoured by St Mary's-the use of drugs and electro-convulsive therapy treatment—is in direct opposition to the methods employed at the Day Hospital.

In recent months, the staff and patients at the hospital, supported by local Labour Party and trade union organizations and a group of local doctors CiLI .VLO NION ARDON REGION link the legitimate demands of youth in schools to a fight against the Tory government, whose consistent attacks on all aspects of education have helped to build up the tensions that exist in schools today.

Increased dinner charges -leaving over 1 million children in the country unable to afford the meals-stoppage of free milk to the over sevens, cutbacks in teacher training and school building projects, are only some of the measures.

Rising unemployment means that many thousands of youth face years on capitalism's scrapheap the dole queue. Some will low-paid jobs with little or no prospects. have been campaigning for retention of the hospital in its present form.

So far their demands have drawn a blank from the North West Metropolitan Hospital Board, the Department of Health and St Mary's board of governors.

The Day Hospital's catchment area one with an above average incidence of emotional disturbance and is already suffering from a chronic shortage of psychiatric facilities.

At the three main hospitals in the area patients have to wait for up to six weeks for a first consultant appointment. Apart from the Day Hospital, individual and group psychotherapy is almost unobtainable.

On the other hand the Day Hospital orals an 'open-door' policy and there is no waiting list.

Staff at the hospital were involved in making 'Family Life' the film directed by Ken Loach and produced by Tony Garnett, which describes how an individual is driven further into schizophrenia by the attitudes of society. The screenplay was adapted by David Mercer from his play 'In Two Minds'.

At the same time the whole trade union movement has as good as been declared illegal by the National Industrial Relations Court.

All of these questions today facé youth at school. The tensions that are building up underneath the surface of society today as a result of capitalism's crisis take many forms.

Just as the mass movement of youth in schools heralded the advent of the enormous class struggles of the May-June days in France 1968, the movement of school children in Britain also signifies the rising tide of militancy and • hatred of a working class moving into battle against the Tory government.

Sandy Ratcliff as the young girl driven to schizophrenia in film 'Family Life' The film tried to bring out the way in which conventional psychiatry attempts to force the individual to act in a way that conforms to the demands of society and, having failed, designated her as incurable.