Cliff let go of the constraints that hold many psychologists and therapists back right at the beginning of his career when he plunged himself into developing a school in Ukraine. Find out how he did it, what it took and how that experience shaped his career from learning disabilities to management consultancy in this episode.

Cliff is a great example of a psychologist who was willing to step outside of the "normal" roles in order to make a change he saw was needed in the world.

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Setting up a school in the Ukraine

Rosie:

Today I'm speaking to Cliff Hawkins, a clinical psychologist, who over the past 35 years, has had an awe inspiring, diverse career. Just going through his CV it's clear that doing more than therapy has been central to his career from the beginning, and is so much that I think we could all learn from. So I'm just going to jump in and welcome Cliff Hawkins to the podcast. Hi Cliff.

Cliff:

Thank you very much. Thank you Rosie.

Rosie:

So thank you so much for coming on today Cliff. Over the last 35 years you've done some really cool stuff. So if you had to pick just one thing that you've done, what would you say has been the most professionally fulfilling part of your career?

Cliff:

To me, undoubtedly it was having the opportunity to be involved in opening Ukraine's first school for children with severe learning disabilities, shortly after Ukraine separated from the Soviet Union.

Rosie:

Wow, that's an amazing thing to be part of. How on earth did you get into that?

Cliff:

Well, I was very lucky. I was working at the Institute of Psychiatry at the time, with Professor Bill [Euele 00:01:00 ] and a couple of Ukrainian parents had come to England, to the Institute of Psychiatry, to seek a diagnosis for their young daughter. And I was asked to work with them clinically, and it became clear that when they went back to Ukraine, their child wouldn't be entitled to any support whatsoever, would be excluded from school.

Cliff:

And so Bill [Euele 00:01:26 ] and I thought, "Well, we need to do something to help here." So we started off by raising money, and quickly we realized that money wasn't sufficient, that what they needed was some help in setting up a school, which would effectively be a private school. And so what I did was, went to Ukraine and started giving lectures at the Institute of Psychology there, about special education in the UK.

Cliff:

And what I learned very quickly was that our task wasn't to replicate a British system of special education in Ukraine. That would be akin to cultural fascism. Rather, what we needed to do, was to help Ukrainian parents develop a Ukrainian system, that could draw on the rich heritage of Russian psychology, as well as the ideas that we'd learned in British psychology.

Rosie:

I mean, that's just amazing on so many levels. To start with, obviously I can imagine thinking "We need to raise some money for this issue." But then how did you take the next steps, when you realized that wasn't going to be adequate, how did you make the links that you needed even?

Cliff:

By firstly raising money to fly me out to Ukraine. This was in the context of the Soviet Union had just ended. Ukraine was in turmoil. Everyone was very optimistic about the future. However, at that particular point, the Ukrainian economy had gone into meltdown, and government systems had gone into meltdown as well.

Cliff:

Luckily, universities hadn't. They were starting to be very keen on inviting westerners to come over and talk about western science, and particularly psychology. And what I found was that there were many Ukrainian psychologists who were very keen on a non-medical approach to special education, and to special needs in general, because previously psychiatry had been the dominant model. And thankfully from our point of view, psychiatry had been completely discredited, because of psychiatrist's collusion with state sponsored detention with people in psychiatric hospitals.

Cliff:

So many of the parents of children I was working with, I was told those parents were simply not prepared to have their child see a psychiatrist, but because clinical psychology was virtually unknown, they didn't mind seeing a clinical psychologist, and so we were able to fill that vacuum.

Rosie:

Wow. What a context. At that time, how did that compare to the context you were working under in this country?

Cliff:

Well, it was surreal. I was working at that point in the NHS actually, with adults with learning disabilities, in a regular NHS job. Following normal NHS rules, and all the benefits and costs that that implied. And then I was working in, effectively a wild west scenario in Ukraine, where normal rule of law didn't apply. Bribery was the way to get things done. At that point, I didn't speak a word of Russian, so I was reliant on interpreters, and not always sure how far I could trust either the interpreter's ability, or their motives. And so it was a real contrast.

Cliff:

But what I found was that the confidence I learned from making things happen in Ukraine, then transferred to other areas of my professional, and indeed my personal life, that I thought "Well if I can achieve this, I can achieve anything."

Rosie:

Yeah, I bet. Because often when I speak to other psychologists in this country, and we're trying to set things up, we're trying to get things moving. The red tape is really intimidating, and sometimes you just feel like, "I just don't even understand commissioning enough to actually put forward an idea." Right? But actually you did that in a system where you didn't speak the language, you didn't have the cultural references. So I suppose we should probably stop moaning.

Cliff:

We found whiskey was the way to cut through the red tape. Scotch whiskey was very, very expensive on the black market, and we found that bottles of scotch whiskey miraculously enabled things to happen. So I don't know if that would work in the NHS.

Rosie:

I don't know. I mean, I haven't tried it. Yeah, so that sounds like an amazing experience, but certainly must've been an intimidating one. How did you feel flying out with that mission in your mind?

Cliff:

My first thought, the first time I flew out was, "I can't speak the language." Like most people of my generation, I knew nothing about Russia or the Soviet Union, other than cossack hats and bears. I bought myself a tape, Teach Yourself Russian, a couple of weeks before I went, and it didn't work at all. I still couldn't speak a word of Russian. So on the flight I was desperately reading Teach Yourself Russian books, and thinking, "Well, this isn't going to work."

Cliff:

And what I learned was that didn't matter, that my training as a clinical psychologist meant that body language was key. So often, if I was interviewing a parent of a child with a learning disability, I would often have an interpreter of sorts there. However, what I found was that by focusing on the parent, I'd pick up the odd word, and there were more similarities than differences in how that parent was talking. So over time, I found that I could learn the keywords, and that my clinical psychology training was sufficient. That I could get the message from what the parent was saying, or the grandparents. In that society, often the grandparent, or the grandmother, is the key carer, rather than the mother.

Rosie:

Gosh, I mean, that's really inspiring to me, particularly, because of my husband's job, we're moving to Turkey for a couple of years.

Cliff:

Oh right.

Rosie:

Yeah. And I'm not going to work clinically in Turkey. I'll still be carrying on my online practice, but I've been trying to learn the language, using the Rosetta Stone, and there's just something missing isn't there? There's no human. And I have been saying to my husband optimistically, that I feel like I'll pick it up more when I can see somebody speaking it to me. I'm very comforted by your story, because you went out there and did something amazing and ambitious. My only hope is to survive. And so if you can do that, maybe I can survive it.

Rosie:

So you must've had no idea really how this was going to end up when you were first going out there. How did things take shape? What was the timeline?

Cliff:

Things took a lot longer than we expected, because of the collapse of Ukrainian economy. So we raised quite a lot of money in the UK. People running the London Marathon, and so on. And what we did was we enabled a group of teachers and parents to open a school in a disused school building. So it was effectively a private school.

Cliff:

We raised the money to pay the teacher's salaries, and we paid them in US dollars, which gave us a massive advantage. So we were able to poach teachers from the state sector, who were being paid in the local money, which was becoming worthless because of hyperinflation. So a comparatively small amount of US dollars went a long, long way.

Cliff:

At the Institute of Psychiatry, we set up a charity specific to this project, and initially we thought we would support it for five years financially, and in terms of expertise. We didn't want this to be a British school. We wanted it to be supporting a Ukrainian school. What we found though, was that as the five years were coming to an end, the school still wasn't able to be self sufficient financially. So we carried on supporting it,