Still very upset by this, and to be honest the blind reporting of most of the press – it strikes me as quite scary how anything an ‘expert’ can say is taken verbatim even when it’s questionable.
Without going in the specific things i disagree with in the report, I can say the following things have come to light over the last week or so.
For an official review, its very personal full of I believes and I thinks – now I suppose reading this blog you may say ‘you can’t talk’ and you would be right, except I’m not claiming to be authoritative and I haven’t been asked to review anything for government departments – If i did I would be submitting something with a bit of academic rigour, the Badman report contains quite a few claims but has no references to back them up.
Some of the unsubstanciated claims are really scary – “Home Educated children are twice a likely to be on social services registers for being at risk of abuse” – no evidence and others have taken the evidence from local authorites compiled it and found this to be untrue.
The Report miss represents the people he consulted, there is a place in the report where the response from the education division church of England selectively quotes there response and misrepresents there views quite significantly.
there are loads of other things which to be honest which I’ve written and then deleted because I am trying not to turn this into a big long rant. let’s just say It’s a shockingly poor report which would get thrown back at an undergraduate if they handed it in as work.
I’m not going to go in to specifics (yet) other people can do that way better than me.
