Step one: start with Why:

I notice that the Twitter feed’s out of date – I do still tweet, so not sure why the website’s three weeks out of date. And comments are off. Odd. I shall have to poke Kevin for some kind of tech support.

What was the last thing I blogged? Ah, yes, I remember. It was political, wasn’t it? I was very political, then. That was all Before the Election, though. Everything has changed since then. The world feels different. I did sort of predict that it would, but the starkness of the difference has still taken my breath away.

The new government simply does not care about home educators. It’s not interested in us. And nothing could make me happier. They do not mind that they don’t know what my children are learning – they’re reasonably content that the evidence suggests they’re probably learning quite a lot. They do not need to control the minutiae of what we do on a day-to-day basis. They do not feel the need to protect my children from me, just in case I secretly hate them. They know that that’s very unlikely, and in any case, that all the existing mechanisms for protecting children from nasty parents are pretty much good enough as they are. They are not obsessed with power and control. They are, largely, obsessed with trying to make the books balance, and it’s a sufficiently challenging task that they are unlikely to give me and mine more than a second glance for some years to come.

After 18 months of anger and fear and outright paranoia, the change was quite a shock. It took me a while to settle into it. But settle into it I did. A couple of weeks ago, Ofsted produced a report that they were researching before Christmas, into home education. It was all the same yada-yada-yada as we’ve heard before – no-one is monitoring these people, anything could be happening, blah, blah, blah. It was precisely what we were all dreading, last year, when we first got wind of it. Except the wind has changed, and when I read the summary (didn’t bother to read the whole thing, it wasn’t important enough), I didn’t get angry. I laughed. I smirked as I marvelled at how far out of touch Ofsted had suddenly become. It was precisely the report that the last government wanted them to write – the government which couldn’t bear to leave us alone to get on with it, that wanted to pin down every possible deviation from the state-sanctioned norm, and legislate it out of existence. But this government didn’t want it.

I suspect that they weren’t supposed to publish it at all. A few weeks before, the Department for Education had told all the quangos and gravy trains to stop producing this stuff, until they worked out what the priorities were. But Ofsted had put a lot of time and effort into producing a report which helped to justify their existence, at a time when they’re quite afraid for that existence. And besides, these people could be doing anything – someone should be checking up on them! In any case, the response from the government has resembled the sound of tumble-weed blowing through the deserted town. So much so, this week, Diana Johnson felt the need to poke them, from her new spot on the opposition benches, to try and goad them into continuing the witch-hunt that she was so very keen on. She didn’t get very far. The response amounts to “Yeah, yeah, home educators, we’ll look at it later. Much later.”

It won’t be forever. Sooner or later, someone with the power to do something about it will say, “What do you mean, we don’t know how many there are?” and the whole silly roller-coaster will start again. But that day isn’t likely to come for a very long time – until they’ve got the books to balance, at the very least!

But if I don’t, then I’m standing by and letting liars and bullies have the last word about what happened to the poor child, and I’m letting them tar me with their slanderous, defamatory brush, and I’m letting them abuse her memory almost as badly as her body was abused in life. Insult added to injury, when injury was horriffic enough.

You need to know that Khyra Ishaq was not home educated. Many news articles have implied that she was, over the last nine months or so, though I am relieved to note that most of them have dropped that angle, when it became apparent that she wasn’t. The BBC, however, are still touting the line of the Labour machine, that she was home educated, that there was nothing the authorities could do, that the only thing that could have saved her was the introduction of the faltering legislation that has this week been signed off by the Commons, and moved on to the Lords.

Guess what, folks? It isn’t true. So much of it isn’t true, it’s difficult to know where to start, but let’s start with “Was Khyra home educated?”

When a child is registered to a school, and the parents wish to end that arrangement, there is a set procedure. It is laid down in law, it is neither difficult nor complicated, but it is necessary. The parents must write to the school, stating clearly that the child is to be taken off the roll, since s/he will, from that point forward, be recieving their education at home.

It has to be a letter. It doesn’t have to be recorded delivery, though some would recommend that it should be, as protection from accusations of truancy amid claims that letter did not arrive. It just has to be a letter, and it has to be sent to the school.

On receipt of the letter, the head has a legal responsibility to notify the local authority. What the LA choose to do with the information does vary from area to area, but generally speaking, parents are likely to hear from them within a few weeks, with a request for some reassurance that education is taking place.

As far as I can gather, from the various things I have read, including this FOI request, that letter was not sent. But guess what? The local authority didn’t know their own legal procedures, and deregistered her anyway. The school, at one point, had a telephone conversation in which the parents told them of their intention to home educate, but that does not make for a deregistration. The local authority, later, recieved a letter of deregistration, but the local authority CAN’T deregister a child – only the school can. They all muddled their own procedures, and behaved as if she were home educated, but she was not.

For months and months, Khyra was, or should have been, on the roll of her school, but was not attending. She hadn’t gone anywhere, they knew where she was. Teaching staff went to her house to try and see her, but failed. The school, who were actually very worried about her, reported her to social services, who by all accounts, went to the house once, got no answer, and never tried again. The neighbours knew that odd things were going on, including leaving Khyra outside in winter in her underwear, but did not see fit to play the merry hell with social services that really should have been played.

That child was let down – not so much by the school, though some training issues appear to have arisen there, too, but certainly by social services, by her community, and most importantly, BY HER PARENTS.

Guess what, folks? It was her mother, and her mother’s boyfriend, who killed her. Nobody else. It was them. They did it. Nobody stopped them, and plenty of people could have at least tried, but ultimately, their contribution would not have been required if those two people had fulfilled their legal and moral obligation to feed her. To FEED HER, for crying out loud! The blame lies with them.

Where the blame does not lie, is with me. Khyra had a whole community around her, and that community failed to save her. Her father failed to save her. I, however, am not a part of that community. I did not know Khyra. I wasn’t there. There was nothing I could do. It is not my fault.

The thing is, even if Khyra HAD been home educated, and it’s perfectly possible, given a slightly more robust investigation of the procedure by her parents, and even if Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill had been enacted into law, SHE WOULD STILL HAVE DIED. Schedule 1 allows for two days a year spent with the family – less, by the time travelling time, report writing, and so on, are factored in – and Khyra was starved in five months. Schedule 1 of the CSF Bill is about giving local authorities carte blanche to arbitrarily reject the provision that home educators are making for their children’s learning, on the basis of a wide range of equally spurious reasons. It is about taking responsibility for the education of children away from parents, and handing it to bureaucracies. It is about, incidentally, setting the legal precedent for YOU, oh school-using friends who think this doesn’t affect you, to be unable to choose the school that is right for your child, that fits your belief system, or even that accepts your cheques.

Being enrolled at school did not save Khyra. Being a long-term truant certainly didn’t save her, since no-one quite noticed. Serving up the education of my children on a platter, in the wake of an unjustified, unsubstantiated, just plain incorrect moral panic over children being “seen” certainly wouldn’t have saved her. It won’t save anyone.

My granddad, with two of his younger brothers, outside their house.

My granddad was the eldest of six children, which meant that my dad grew up in something of a clan – he had two siblings, and ten cousins on his dad’s side of the family, to say nothing of a stack of cousins and second cousins who were from his mum’s side. Families in those days had a lot of proximity about them. They all lived within a few miles of one another, in North Liverpool, and the ones who didn’t, didn’t go too far – Aunty Gwen lived in Parbold, Uncle Alf moved to Rainford, but mostly, they were less than ten minutes apart by car. Also, those of them that held on to the faith of their childhoods, tended to stay in the one church.

My dad’s generation, of course, were the baby-boomers (he only discovered this about himself recently, I can’t imagine where he’s been). They were the ones who did the 11+, and saw driving their own car as less of a privilege than a right, and would move towns for a job, and be the first in their family to own a house. My dad’s cousins were much more geographically disparate. We lived in various bits of East Lancashire when I was growing up, and Tim moved from Southport to Altrincham, and Phil spent about fifteen years in London, which was as close to the edge of the earth as made no practical difference to the rest of us.

Some of the cousins lost touch, at that point. There are at least four or five whom I know I would not recognise if I met them in the street – although one of that group is my “friend” on Facebook, and lives ten minutes walk from my house. I’ve not been round, though. A core, who stayed in Liverpool, also stayed in the church, and helped to create a kind of home base there, that the rest of us came back to, periodically. My grandparents and two of their children went for a communal living approach, pooling their resources to put three generations into a lovely big Victorian house in the suburbs. The house became another sort of base – there was always someone in, there, and when you arrived, you instantly felt part of the big family, probably just because a good proportion of the family were there already.

That house is where the Christmas parties were held (Boxing night, every year), with all the little traditions, including the one where Father Christmas arrived, and handed out presents to everyone (for hours…) in return for a rendition of Away in a Manger. One year, my granddad stood in for Santa by appearing in drag as a Christmas Fairy – drag isn’t something I would ever have associated with him, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, and as far as I know, it has never happened before or since. Increasingly, for me, part of generation number three of the ever more separated, and ever more numerous family group, the Christmas party was the only time I ever saw most of those people. We have less and less in common, and less and less to tie us together.

And yet, we are still tied together.

I heard a story, today, of one of my dad’s cousins, who’s immediate family had drifted away from the group, and who, now in her fifties, is missing her family, to the point of feeling quite resentful about it. It touched me. I don’t know this woman from Eve, but if she has discovered a need in herself to reconnect with the Family (that makes us sound like the Sopranos, and nothing could be further from the truth), then I’m pretty sure we have space for her. Why not? She belongs with us. She should have been here all along.

My great-grandma, with her grandchildren at Christmas - the generation before mine!

For various reasons, the Christmas party did not happen last year, and isn’t going to happen this year. It remains to be seen whether two years out will mean the end of it, forever. I’m really not sure how much effort is reasonable to expend, in an attempt to bring together a group of people who otherwise get along fine without each other. To bring any real substance to those relationships, I’m pretty sure we’d have to meet more frequently than that, and I’m equally sure that if someone were to do something off-the-wall, like host a family open house once a month, nobody would show up.

The fact is that our family is too big, now. Including spouses, there are knocking on for fifty living descendants of my great-grandma. So, it’s hardly surprising – the family is losing it’s structural integrity, because in modern life, when we live so far apart, and have such busyness to contend with, it takes all our energy to maintain our closest family links. The second cousins once removed are just once removed too far.

That kind of makes me sad. I’d like to find a way to fix it, to make it possible for the group identity to continue, because it’s a key part of my own sense of identity, and I suspect, I’m not the only one. I’m just not sure that it’s possible.

The Philadelphia Story

As ever, this post started life as a Facebook status, and if someone hadn’t gone “Huh? What you blethering about?” it would probably have remained as one. Facebook is bad for my writing, it really is. Anyway.

Today, I watched High Society for the umpteenth time. The film is essentially a remake of the pre-war classic The Philadelphia Story, which is a better film, but doesn’t have the songs. Much of the script is lifted, word for word, but it loses some of the depth, in order to fit in Frank, Bing and Louis Armstrong displaying their jazz wares.

In both movies, we have the rich, beautiful, uncompromising Tracy; the ex-husband and neighbour from her brief first marriage, Dexter; George, the fiancé whom she plans to marry the following day; Seth Lord, Tracy’s father, who has lately separated from his wife to pursue a liaison with a dancer in the city; and the two society reporters, Mike Connor, a cynical Angry Young Man with a chip on his shoulder, relating largely to being too poor write serious literature, and his long-time girlfriend, Liz, who has not yet married him because he “still has a lot to learn. I don’t want to get in his way for a while.”

At the beginning Tracy is angry – angry at Dexter for the failure of her marriage to him, angry at her father for running away with the dancer. She is criticised by both for her unfeeling, uncompromising expectations, both of herself, and of those around her. Indeed, her father subjects her to a speech in which he blames her lack of affectionate understanding of him for his affair. George, on the other hand, is enthusiastic about how “untouched” she is by her previous experiences, and sees her as unblemished and worthy of his adoration.

During the course of the film, and on the eve of her wedding, Tracy gets extremely drunk, and pretty much throws herself at Mike, the reporter, who has, in turn, become somewhat infatuated with her. She resents George’s attempts to cover for her inebriation as intrusive and fun-less, so sneaks out of the party with Mike, back to the house, where they talk passionately, kiss, and go swimming, before she passes out, and he brings her back to the house.

Waiting at the house are Dexter and George. Dexter has guessed enough of the developments to seek to shield Tracy from being discovered by her fiancé, knowing that she would be unlikely to remember events in the morning, in any case. George is mystified, and a little worried, by Tracy’s disappearance from the party, and is looking to reassure himself of her safety. Discovering her in a dressing gown, being carried back to the house by Mike, scandalises him, and he is unable to reconcile himself to her apparent indiscretion.

High Society

George, at this point, sees Tracy’s honour as restored, but she points out that her sustained chastity is due to Mike’s honour, not hers, and as such offers her no credit. That George accepts her because he sees her as still unspoilt, she says, is worth much less than his willingness to accept her as spoilt would have been. She assures him that she is not good enough for him, since she now realises that she cannot live up to his standards for her, any more than she could live up to her own. George leaves, and Dexter steps into the breach, again demonstrating his willingness to both accept her in her fallen state, and to work to help her in that state. She remarries Dexter, promising to be more understanding and accepting of the human weaknesses of both of them.

So, that’s the story. It took longer to summarise than I anticipated, but never mind. The thought that struck me, as I watched it, was that the ultimate lesson of the film appears to be that people are fallible, and should be held to low standards. The scene between Tracy and her father particularly irritates me – how dare he suggest that SHE is to blame for HIS infidelity? It’s not even that he blames his wife, in the classic “My wife doesn’t understand me” mold – he blames his adult daughter for failing to pander to his vanity, his inner need to be thought wonderful by a pretty young girl. It’s all a bit icky, when you think about it, to say nothing of entirely unfair. But ultimately, Tracy comes around to this point of view, and marries the man whom she considers fallible, but who loves her in her own fallibility.

Then I started thinking about the Church. Historically, the Church has fallen into two main theological camps – the “evangelicals” and the “liberals”. Traditional evangelicalism has tended (gross generalisation coming up, bear with me) to value “righteousness”, or sinlessness, very highly, and to tend towards an intolerance of sin, and consequently of the sinner. It’s a stereotypical image, isn’t it, of the stern Free Churchman, preaching against the evils of cinemas, and alcohol, and of playing football on a Sunday? The liberal end of the church, upon which the evangelical wing has been inclined to look with disdain, have more of a history of acceptance of such things (catholic churches are likely to own bars, rather than condemn them), and therefore of people who indulge in them. It comes down to balance. The bible advocates a need for righteousness, for the renunciation of sin, but it also advocates a need for love, for compassion, for forgiveness. Every Christian has, at some point, to work out how to manage the tension between those two essentially contradictory positions. It’s fairly safe to say that in 2000 years of Christianity, no-one has quite got the balance completely right – everyone leans slightly too far in one direction or the other.

So how is that the 1956 musical romantic comedy is playing out these eternal tensions? And, ultimately, the film comes down on the side of 1 Corinthians 13 – “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” Love is a word of complex connotation, in Hollywood, but they use words like “compassion” and “understanding” instead, and they mean the same things. They mean the acceptance of people for who they are, not for who you think they ought to be.

Which makes the film a good deal deeper than I’ve previously given it credit for.

The article is full of excitement over the amount of time that is wasted in schools, and how much more efficient this system seems to be, and thereby stands the problem.  The education system that we’ve evolved is, as we’ve discussed, in large part about childcare.  It’s concerned with keeping children out of the way of their economically productive adults, so they don’t prevent the economic productivity from going on.  Within that structure, there is no advantage in making education efficient.  Which is odd, because the text of the education act makes parents responsible for ensuring that their children receive an education that is both efficient and full-time (either by attendance at school or otherwise).  And I’m starting to wonder if an efficent education, is, by definition, not full-time at all.

It’s all reminscent of the days when we (well, not me, I wasn’t born) were told that technology would give us all free time.  We’d all be working three day weeks, or less, because the technology would get the necessary work done in a fraction the time, and we’d all be wondering how to fill our new leisure time.  Except it didn’t happen, did it?  For a while we had some people working as hard as ever, whilst the others couldn’t find jobs at all, and lived in poverty.  Then we had economic boom, in which we successfully invented work for everyone to do, most of which is completely unnecessary. We created call centres, and all forms of bureaucracy, essentially to keep us all busy.  And of course, the childcare industry, which is built on the need to cover all the time we spend doing non-work.  Heaven forfend that we could earn a living wage in three days, and take the rest of the time off.

If I’m ever in a position to do so, I shall run a three-days-a-week business.  One where part time work is the norm, and where people can go home when they’ve finished what they were asked to do.  In the war, when people were asked to contribute to the war effort by working seven days a week, productivity actually went down.  And in the seventies, when the power went out, and businesses went to three day weeks, it didn’t. We’re all working far too hard.  It’s not necessary.  But for as long as you’re all doing it, it is necessary, because the the amount of time you work, and the amount of money you earn doing it, is what sets the cost of all the things I need to live – house prices, and food, and petrol, and clothes, and all the rest of it, are set based on how much money you have to spend on them.  The harder we work, collectively, the more expensive things get.  We don’t get any advantage from it.  So, I’m saying, let’s stop.  It’s not necessary, and if we all stop together, we don’t have to starve to bring about the change.

So, yes, let kids study GCSEs in three days.  If that’s how long it actually takes, then let them do that, and then stop.  Have fun. Spend time with their families. Learn things that they want to learn, from a position of having the time and energy to do it. But the idea of a generation of children with time on their hands is a terrifying prospect to the powers that be, and I’m guessing they will strain every nerve to avoid it happening.  Look out, Monkseaton High School.  This isn’t a revolution that you’re going to be allowed to start.

What is the purpose of school? Erm – I don’t think anyone really knows, which makes it awfully difficult to make a judgement over whether it’s working or not. The possible purposes are wide and varied, and the reality is likely to involve a combination of these factors, or, even more likely, to be different things to different people, resulting in conflicts of opinion about just how the school system is doing.

What is education?

The most obvious answer to the original question is “Why, to educate children, of course!” accompanied by a look of mystification at the idea that such a question was ever asked. But what is education, how do you know if you’re achieving it, what are we educating our children towards (or, I suppose, away from), and is school the best way to go about it anyway?

Most children don’t really know what they want from their education – not because they’re incapable of forming opinions on the subject, but because no-one ever gives their opinion much weight or credence, so it’s not really worth their trouble in thrashing an opinion out for themselves. The closest they get is to come up with an answer to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I suspect that in lots of cases, that answer stems more from a desire to give an answer – any answer – and gain adult approval, than a real opinion on the subject.

Most parents, from what I can gather, want school to equip their children to make money. Some parents want their children equipped to make as much money as is humanly possible – others are content with enough money to maintain a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle. But really, that’s the point. It’s about the treadmill of SATs, and GCSEs, and A Levels, and University, and a job at the end of it all. I find that terribly depressing (hence my use of the not-loaded-at-all term, “treadmill”). It makes me feel like an inanimate object, being churned out of a machine in a factory. Not a new metaphor, I know, but there it is. The older I get, the more I find myself rebelling against the idea that adult life is about work – that work is boring and tedious, takes up most of your waking life, has to be paid for to count as work at all, and is relentlessly, mind-numbingly, non-negotiably present until the day you die – unless you’re lucky enough to live to 106, and be allowed to actually retire. Surely, there is more to life than that? Surely, there’s something more fulfilling, more purposeful than generating income, to pay for the food, clothes and rent that it takes to enable you to go to work?

Of course, the people whose opinions really count, on the subject of school, are those who pay for it. Ultimately, that’s me and you, the tax-payers, but we are severely separated from state-sponsored education by the fact that our money goes through a middle-man. And what Government thinks is the purpose of school, is really not at all clear.

School as childcare

From what I can tell, the first and primary role of school, to the government, is to provide universal childcare. Now, it seems to me, that that isn’t an educational purpose at all. It’s an economic exigency. School professionalises childcare to the point that one or two adults can take care of a group of thirty children at a time, thereby freeing the parents of those children to get into the workforce and start being economically productive. And economic productivity is the number one concern of governments. They are only casually interested in education, health care, defense, social services, law and order, speed limits, and the host of other things that they witter about on a daily basis. What they actually care about is money. They care that the economy continues to grow, that people feel rich, that taxes get paid, that consumers consume, creating more jobs, and more taxes, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum.

There are one or two problems with this.

Firstly, nothing can grow indefinitely. The constant growth is fuelled, ultimately, by the ransacking of the planet’s resources. The oil is running out. The rainforests are shrinking. We can’t carry on treating the planet as in indefatigable resource. And with that reality comes the further truth that constantly buying New Stuff is not sustainable, either ecologically, or economically. The system saturates. The bottom drops out of the market, we get recession, and poverty. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It’s inescapable. Anyone who tells you it’s not is selling something. “Gone are the days of boom and bust economics”? I think not.

Secondly, modern industrial and post-industrial economics are anti-family. Whether they are consciously, or unconsciously so rather depends on how prone you are to conspiracy theories. My own opinion fluctuates according to how I feel, so I’m not able to make a clear statement on the subject. However, intentionally or otherwise, the effect of modern economics is the split up family units. 300 years ago we were all living and working together as families, in farms and cottage industries, passing the skills and resources down through the family group, and spending stacks of time together, building close bonds, trust, and proper relationships (and dying of plague, admittedly, but that’s a different discussion). Now, we are expected to run our family life between 6pm and 8.30pm at night, between collecting the children from the childcare, and putting them to bed in time to get up for school the next day, whilst simultaneously making sure they get some food and do their homework. Is it any wonder that people worry about children and teens being uncontrollable? I mean, I’m sure there’s a massive amount of paranoia going on there, too, but in amongst it is a generation of children who aren’t being brought up by their parents, but by a series of childcare solutions. Children need love, not “quality, affordable childcare”. All the economic growth in the world won’t replace that, and actually, without it, achieving economic growth itself gets tricky – mental health issues, a lack of social stability and belonging – these things make it very difficult to hold down a job anyway.

Training the workers of the future

The other governmental purpose for school, and this is quite a long way down the priority list, is the creation of the next generation’s economic growth.  When they start talking about what children should actually do in school all day, they get terribly tied up with phrases like “preparing for the world of work” and “keyskills” and “a suitable workforce for employers”, and it makes me want to scream.  That isn’t education.  If the role of school is to churn out young adults perfectly primed to do some job or other, to enable them to continue the never-ending push for economic growth, then that’s not education – it’s training, at best, and training is something you can do to a monkey.

Education is about thought, about analysis, about taking other people’s ideas and turning them into something new, something that’s uniquely yours.  It’s about advancing the extent of human understanding, about stretching your intelligence, about intellectual challenge for it’s own sake.  If, during that process, you stumble across something that turns out to be useful, then hurrah and huzzah, congratulations!  If not, then it doesn’t matter, because that was never the point. Only funding “useful” research is to destroy our capacity to think, and without that, we’ll never achieve anything, economically or in any other sense.

Most people have a requirement for money.  Food and rent need to be paid for, regardless. But the economic model currently being pushed by the powers that be is fundamentally flawed.  It involves far too much working for someone else, being paid for your time rather than your productivity, and being pushed into the belief that you can never actually have enough money.  It involves being party to a system of constantly pushing up the price of the things you need, so that it takes more and more work to pay for it.  And surely, surely there’s a point where you can rest.  Surely there’s a time when you are fed and clothed, and can stop the grind.

Trug

Trug, for the uninitiated, is a renegade toy who escaped from his factory assembly line to enter into a life of wandering about finding Stuff, then taking the Stuff to a place where it can be used. He is joined on this endeavour by two balls of fluff, Bits and Bobs, who live inside him, and who make wildly inaccurate guesses as to the identity of the Stuff, and it’s possible purpose. That’s pretty much the whole show.

I considered for a moment, and said, “Because Trug has free will.”

“What’s free will?”

“It’s the thing that means you are in charge of what you do.  Whether you push Henry over, or don’t push Henry over is your choice, because you have free will.  I can try to influence your decision, by saying “If you push Henry over I will put you in time out,”  but you still decide for yourself whether you will do it or not.”

She seemed satisfied with that.  Thankfully, we didn’t get from there to predestination – not this time, anyway.  Still, it was all a bit deep for so early in the morning, if you ask me!

The other home ed blogs that I read tend to indulge in a set of fairly similar practices: this week, many of them have told me their educational plans for the New Year – what websites they’ve decided to subscribe to, what resources they’ve bought, how they plan to address various subjects, concepts and ideas. It’s January – most people get a little absorbed in planning for the future at this time of year.

Another common occurrence is a list of the educational activities that the blogger’s children have indulged in during the course of the day. I can see the value of that, to a parent – it’s rather reassuring to be able to tick off a list of things that have some form of educational merit. Since you’ve got no-one to blame for the quality of your child’s education but yourself, mechanisms for constantly checking that education is, in fact, going on, are highly useful.

I’ve never made such a list before. I’m not used to thinking about Daisy’s activity in those terms, and I therefore don’t give things the educational credit that they deserve. However, today, I think we have excelled ourselves in sneaking education into our day. So here goes:

• This morning, we walked up to the main road, put my boots in to be soled and heeled, and called in to see some friends who live up that way – physical exercise, including balance (it was very icy, and Daisy landed on her backside pretty hard at one point), followed by socialisation – talking to grown ups is a valuable skill, and socialisation doesn’t always mean other children.
• When Henry was in bed, this afternoon, we decided to play some games. Daisy got the Jitterbugs game out (fine motor skills, when she wasn’t cheating),
• then we played snakes and ladders (numeracy, and the subtle art of holding your attention span all the way to the end of a game – Mummy had to be firm, though, and it’s just as well that she got the sudden-win ladder at the end…),
• then we played pairs using the Roly Mo cards, which are sneakily hard; they have the picture of the item and the word written on one card, but the pair doesn’t have the picture, so you have to read them (literacy, observation)
• then we did jigsaws (logic, pattern matching, visual attention to detail, and a bit more finishing-what-we-started).
• After which, it was time for Gymbobs, which is the bigger-kids class of Tumble Tots, to which Daisy was just promoted (more PE, more socialisation – with kids, this time).
• After tea, she shrewdly picked on the most educational computer game we own, in a calculated bid to get me off my computer so she could play. So then we did more reading, phonics work, and IT skills with a literacy game my mum gave me ages ago.

All in all, it’s been a successful day, a fun day, and a day when I felt like home education was something I could pull off, and was, in fact, already doing. The thing with home ed, is that it all counts. Do remember being young, and occasionally stumbling across something that counted for school, or Duke of Edinburgh Awards, or something, and being delighted because you were already doing it – you were getting free credits, in effect, because something you were doing anyway could be made to count? That’s what home education is like, except you don’t get the thrill of cheating the system, because that is the system. Everything that teaches you something counts.

I don’t have a proper plan, like some of the bloggers I mentioned up at the top. That’s partly because she’s still at the pre-reception level, and all the of the really cool educational stuff that I stumble across is still beyond her (like this, for example). My plan, for now, is to keep pushing the reading, and the counting, and give her lots of opportunities – answer her questions, listen to her theories, take her to places, show her things, and just see what sinks in. If I try to plan for the next year, it all gets a bit daunting. Planning for the next step, though, and identifying where to go from here, a step at a time – that’s attainable. That we can do. Indefinitely, I think.

my head yesterday, today...

I’ve been looking over the last few (hundred) posts from me, and well most of them are naff, don’t come close to being coherent, or make any point that i may have been trying to make in my head.. sorry if you’ve read through all that trash.

The blog has been going for six and a half years now, and it’s fair to say the content has varied in quality quite a lot in that time. Not that it’s been about the quality – the rules of blog are almost 5 years old, and have always been true; if you can be bothered you can blog it.

One thing you might not know is that when you blog, there are many more unwritten rules in your head, don’t upset relatives, make sure you don’t say something that might get sacked, don’t offend friends, and depending on your mood – only blog if you think it makes sense.

I’ve probably bent all of those rules during the last 6 years. It’s just good fortune combined with the fact that no-one reads the blog, that everyone is still speaking to me and I didn’t get sacked. 

Anyway the reason i think the blogging has been so poor recently is down to two things time and spaghetti – I so often don’t have the time to write, and because my head is full of spaghetti it should take longer for me to untangle, except i don’t have the time. 

so maybe i will have another unwritten rule for a while, take time to think about what you want to say, and take time to write it. If only to save people from the randomness in my head. 

*just because I’ve said all this doesn’t mean i consider this post to be well written, or for me to have taken enough time over it.