I notice that the Twitter feed’s out of date – I do still tweet, so not sure why the website’s three weeks out of date.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!

Of course, it’s not really over. Ed Balls has stated, today, that he has every intention of being re-elected, and entirely recreating the Bill in the new Parliament, and there is a belief abroad that Something Must Be Done about home education, even amongst the politicians who have fought on our behalf against the proposals that have been killed off, tonight. This battle will have to be fought again. But I’m optimistic – even if Labour do get back in, the world will be a very different place on May 7th. Their majority, if they have one, will be tiny, and they won’t have a chance of railroading such controversial legislation through again. In addition, there is NO MONEY. Have you heard? We have no money. All the money’s gone. There is likely to be very little stomach in the other two parties for the spending of millions on a problem which has never been proven to exist. On the theoretical possibility of a problem which could one day arise, maybe.

But tonight, there is reason to celebrate, because, Ding Dong, the Wicked Bill is Dead!

“RE: A fair tax system for all

Thank you for your email regarding a new tax system.

I have made representations on your behalf to the Rt Hon Alistair Darling MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer.

I will contact you when I receive a response”

It’s very good of Louise to do this on our behalf, as we really can’t  say we are in favour of an unfair tax system; that just doesn’t sound right. The fact that we’ve never contacted Louise about an unfair tax system makes her response a little strange, though.

Maybe, based on the meeting we had with her a few months back, where we talked about our strong desire for her to stop the legislation on unfair treatment of home educating families, she has surmised that we are against all forms of unfairness?

It looks very likely that our beloved MP’s filing system has gone a bit potty, which is not something you really want when you are 8 weeks out from an [supposed] election date.

Whilst it might be true that we are against unfairness, tax systems or not, I would much rather she made representations on our behalf about home education, rather than tax, at this time. I’m quite willing for her to make these representations to the Rt Hon Alistair Darling MP instead of Ed Balls, though. You never know, we might get a better response than we have in the past.

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.

When I first considered Not Sending Her To School, I had spent quite a bit of time reading about what other home educators were doing, and had come to realise that there were about as many approaches as there were families – probably more. Some people get up in the morning, check their timetable, spend half an hour on maths, another half hour on English, switch to Latin, French if it’s Tuesday, History if it’s Thursday, and craft all afternoon. Some people like that level of structure, it makes them feel like they know what’s going on. Other people believe that the most efficient way to educate a child is to stand back and let them get on with it. This approach has a number of labels, including “unschooling”, “autonomous education”, “informal education”, “child-led”, and so on, and so on. Some parents come to this position from a belief in a child’s need for autonomy generally – they don’t stipulate bedtimes, they don’t make them eat vegetables, they don’t engage with punishments (preferring to believe that behavioural example, and concentrating on meeting the child’s emotional needs, will combine to lead them naturally to a place of living peacefully with the rest of the household), and therefore would find it utterly alien and inappropriate to try and tell a child what to learn, and when. The evidence would suggest that supporting a child’s interests (answering their questions, helping them source their own information, taking their lead), without taking control of the learning, equips them perfectly to be able to decide for themselves what they want or need to know, and to learn it. They absorb much, they seek out some, they might even ask for formal lessons in certain things. If the child is in control, then the child has a sense of ownership that enables them to learn very efficiently, because they know that the minute they want to stop, they can.

I always felt that I came somewhere between those points. My general parenting style does not have a problem with laying down the law, or confiscating people’s Nintendo DSs for not doing what I said. Equally, I always felt that, enticing as autonomous education sounded, in its belief that children are naturally configured to learn, and will do so with or without your timetable, it was just a bit Too Scary For Me. I’m something of an approval-seeker, and I was sure I would want to Know. If you follow a curriculum, then you have an easy way of knowing what you have covered, and what you have still to cover before you get to the end. What can I say? I’m a box-ticker.

So I anticipated a sort of 3Rs basics that was structured and organised, because surely, if you have to learn that stuff in the right order, at the right time, otherwise you’ll never be able to function in adult life will you?! Followed by a much more woolly, touchy-feely, what-do-you-fancy-learning-today approach to everything else – history and geography and economics and politics and science, etc, etc. As a plan, it had the advantage of controlling the preparation – I needed to find good books about Maths and English, but take the rest as it came.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

I reckoned not with Daisy. Firstly, Daisy is very like me in lots of ways, but we differ in one key aspect. She is not a box-ticker. Not even slightly. She has the attention span of a gnat (gets it from her father…), and WILL NOT spend a single moment doing anything for the sake of getting it finished. She sees no point. If it is fun and interesting, she might do it for a couple of minutes. If it has ceased to be fun and interesting, she will stop, then and there, and refuse to do another thing. Not that she says, “that’s enough, Mummy, let’s finish it tomorrow”. Of course not. She messes. She draws glasses on the characters in the maths book. She circles every answer in the multiple choice, then scribbles out the question. You may think that I am an extraordinarily stupid mother, but whether I spot this for what it really is, varies enormously from day to day. Sometimes, I say, gently, “Please don’t spoil the book, Daisy. If you’re ready to stop, just say so.” Other times, I get crosser and crosser until I want to tie her to the table until she’s told me that ant begins with a. Which she already knows. And which I know she aready knows, so why did I even waste her time and mine in asking? Because it said it in the book, and if I don’t ask her, I can’t tick the box.

Largely as a result, I suspect, of my pushing her a little too hard, in situations very like the one described above, Daisy has been distinctly resistant to reading of late. I would very much like her to be an Early Reader, because once a child can read (it seems to me, admittedly from a position of having no children who can, yet) everyone gets off your case about whether you’re capable of teaching them. Plus, when they ask you questions, you can hand them a book with the answer in, and go finish the washing up. Reading gives her freedom and independence in her learning, and consequently makes my life easier. Which is, of course, why schools work so hard on teaching them to read when they’re five. Once they can read, they can be given worksheets.

What I am learning, though, is that someone who cannot read at five is not suffering from some sort of disability. To be honest, the chief disability connected with being unable to read is social stigma, particularly while you’re still a child. She doesn’t need to read. She gets everything she wants out of life without it. One day, that will stop being true, and then she will probably be a little more focussed on the task. But for now, the only reason, to her, for learning to read, is that learning to read is fun. And I don’t think she thinks it is. Not currently, anyway.

The other thing I am learning, is that my stubborn, flighty, disinterested little girl is not easily manipulated. In short, I have yet to find a way of persuading her to do what I say that doesn’t end in both of us being extremely angry. Getting her into her clothes in the morning is a big enough job. Getting her to look at a page of words, and decode them, when we both know that she is really thinking about chimpanzees, is completely beyond me.

But it doesn’t matter. Because every now and then, when she relents, and concedes to plough through a page of work book with me, I discover that she has learnt things in the in between times. That, without any evidence of practice, she knows more words by sight, she can sound out more quickly, that she is, in fact, getting there. My daughter is rapidly turning me into an autonomous educator against my own better judgement, because it turns out I wasn’t in a position to give her the control. She already had it, and she’s keeping tight hold, thank you very much.

I can’t escape the feeling that she probably knows best.

Well, on the domestic front, we’ve just been pottering about. Seeing friends, learning about World War II (Daisy’s very interested, we talked about evacuees, this morning), visiting museums and galleries and whatnot, grabbing opportunities to get into the soft play cheaply, going to Gymbobs and Rainbows… you know, just stuff. Daisy’s in a very Resistant to Formal Education place, but I figure she’s five, she’d (hopefully) be spending most of her time playing even if she was in school, at this age, and the Formal Ed stuff is only to make me feel better, anyway. All the real learning around here goes on when I’m not looking.

On the political front – well, the government have published their education Bill, on the back of this week’s Queen’s Speech, and it represents an unmitigated catastrophe for home education. To summarize:-

• It demands that local authorities maintain a register of home educated children, then lists a comprehensive selection of ways to refuse to put people’s names on it. The Bill lays no duty on the parents to notify the authority that they are home educating (if, for example, their children have never been to school and they are therefore unknown to them), but if they discover you, they can hold it against you (that bit is here). It specifically says that whether or not the education being provided is suitable, should not be considered. The important thing is that you didn’t tell us.
• Similarly, it demands a detailed twelve month plan of how you plan to educate your child at home, to be submitted to the authority and accepted by them. If you deviate from the plan, then you will be judged, not on what you actually taught the child, but on the fact it was different to what you were permitted to teach them. Never mind if you quickly realised that your particular child needed something different – you will be punished for claiming the slightest degree of autonomy, for not taking your rightful place beneath our boots.
• If you have already been refused a place on the register, or had your registration revoked, then that in itself can be used as a reason to deny a reapplication. Once you’re off, you’re off for good.
• One of the reasons allowed for, for denying a child a place on the home education register, is “if the authority consider that it would be harmful to the child’s welfare for the child to become a home-educated child, or[...] to continue to be a home-educated child”. The subjectivity of this question is vast. Since there are local authority officials who believe that all home education is bad, and all children should be in school, then they could make this declaration about anyone. That single clause, there, has the potential to entirely outlaw all home education in England, irrespective of how good it might be. It’s almost enough to make you throw in the towel, isn’t it? For good measure, there are also officials who will see welfare issues for home educating disabled parents, unemployed parents, parents educated to a lower level than they would like, black parents, asian parents, gay parents, religious parents, etc, etc, etc…
• Ed Balls has stated in the House, this week, that there is no compulsory interview alone with the child, but he neglects to mention that the Bill specifically allows for authorities to deny registration if you object. So, I guess he means there’s no criminal come-back, but you don’t get to home educate.
• They have included the line about the child’s “wishes and feelings” about being home educated, both as an excuse to get them alone and ask, and as a BLATANT removal from parents the right to make unpopular decisions on their children’s behalf. How many children would rather not have to go to school every day?! I don’t see the DCSF enshrining THEIR right to over-ride their parents decision in law, do you?

All in all, it’s a very nasty piece of work. The thing I object to most, is the vindictiveness. It’s the idea that the education the child receives is of no importance, because we will use that child to punish you for not conforming to our absurdly convoluted and pointless bureaucracy. Home educators kicked up a fuss, and the Secretary of State appears to have responded by saying “I’ll teach you to argue with me”. Who was it who called him a bully? That’s exactly what violent partners do. They hit you round the head until you’ll agree with anything to make them stop.

Democracy is collapsing around our ears, people. I’m begging you – get up and do something to stop it.

We started off with a requirement to go to London, to join a Mass Lobby of Parliament. We thought about the logistics, decided we would need to stay overnight in the capital, and really didn’t want to, so we settled on a compromise – a day in London, followed by a night at the Travel Inn in Windsor, some time exploring Windsor the next day, and home.  The two things I totally didn’t want to do, were take my kids on the tube (don’t ask me to rationalise, it just sounded like a horrendous idea), and keep them in a hotel in city centre. The route to Windsor from the city is by overland train, and Windsor is a fairly suburban place, with tourist attractions of its own, so it seemed like a solution.

Then it dawned on me that we hadn’t seen our friends on the south coast for a while, and maybe we could spend the preceding weekend with them, making a much shorter drive on the Tuesday morning for the Lobby. They were reasonably enthusiastic, so then we had a plan that looked a bit like a holiday, so when my mum told us about the nice holiday cottage “with stair gates at the top and the bottom” that was not (very) far from Hastings, we started thinking about booking it for the second half of the week, and making a grand tour of it.

Then it dawned on us that the train to Battle only took 20 minutes longer than the train to Windsor, the cottage was cheaper by the night than the hotel would have been, and it gave us a whole house to play with, rather than the four of us trying to sleep in one room. So we ditched Windsor, and booked Birch Cottage instead.

It was much the best idea. I really dislike London, and the relief of knowing we were spending the day there, but sleeping in a lovely little house, a mile from the nearest village, made the whole thing into an adventure that I could enjoy.

Hidden

As a plan, it felt very gallivanty, and unfettered, and I rather liked it. And I have to say, it worked beautifully.  We spent four days with our friends, chilling out in their house, thoroughly enjoying the mildness of the weather, and the seaside, and the woods, and the farm we visitted. Then we piled into the car, and drove across Sussex to Battle, and checked into the cottage, before driving straight across to the station, to go up to London.

We’d planned to get to London in time for a demonstration/picnic affair at 1pm, but the driving across Sussex part took longer than anticipated (“Mummy, I need the toilet,” and “Henry’s being sick!” rather got in the way of our timescales), so we were two trains behind on the plan. I was impressed with myself though, because I didn’t care. I could have got in a tizzy for not being where I wanted to be at the time I wanted to be there, but I opted for doing the things we had to do in the order we had to do them, and if that made us late, then so be it. As a result, we arrived at the Palace of Westminster at about 2.30pm, which was when the Lobby itself was due to start. We didn’t get to talk to many people, but we queued, we went through security, we went to the Lobby, we filled in a green card, we waited for our MP (who didn’t come, but I wasn’t surprised), we chatted with a few people, then we left – calling in at the subsidised cafe on the way out.

Daisy knew why we were there – “To tell the government to leave home educators alone,” and the basics of where we were and what the government do there, and I think she was rather impressed by the sense of occasion. Then we crossed the bridge, and wandered along the South Bank in the sunshine for a bit, by way of some exercise, and seeking some tea. Henry had a nice sleep in the wrap on Daddy’s back, and Daisy watched the skateboarders under the bridge, and we got the 6.50pm train back to Battle, and the cottage.

It was a big day, but it was great. Daisy learned so much, and actually, so did we.

The next day we spent at Battle Abbey, learning things that none of us knew about the Battle of Hastings (like, it happened a good five or six miles away from Hastings, for a start), and again, Daisy amazed me with her interest and engagement with it all. She was gripped by the video in the visitors’ centre, fascinated by the examples of weapons used, and even mostly interested in the walk around the field, to see where it happened, which we were all borderline Too Tired To Do, really. But we coped, and it was good, and there was learning, and today, when she asked me to tell her the story of the Battle again, I was able to give her detailed strategic descriptions, that I didn’t know about a week ago. We found the altar stone in the abbey, which supposedly marks the spot where Harold fell. I have to say, we found the flowers that had been left there, and the little notes referring “our last English king” a little perplexing. It was a thousand years ago – the Normans invaded, and became part of what England is. Get over it.

Hidden

On Thursday, we went to Hastings, and looked at what’s left of William’s castle there, as well as riding on the funicular railway, and working out some of the physics behind that. And throwing stones in the sea, naturally. Then on Friday we visitted Bodian Castle, which has the combined merits of being in very good nick, for a castle, and having its photo in the Usborne Castles book – that probably means nothing to you, but we got very excited.

On Saturday, we had the trip home, but we added a twist. We didn’t intend to add a twist, but as we passed a road sign on the M25 saying “Services 64 miles” at just the same moment as Daisy said, “I need a wee, Mummy,” we suddenly found a need to find suitable amenities outwith the normal motorway servicing system. Instead, we got the National Trust Handbook out, and used the facilities at Claremont Gardens, near Esher, instead. We used the toilets, had a snack in the cafe, used the playground, and stretched the children’s legs by walking around the lake – essentially, all the things we normally do at the motorway services, but in much nicer surroundings.  We were so pleased with ourselves that we were then on a mission to only stop at National Trust properties on the way home, which we just about managed. We had lunch at Baddesley Clinton, which is a stately home near Solihull (there are lots of NT places around that part of the M40, but not all of them have a cafe, and we really needed to eat). Again, we used the facilities, we ate, we did a whistle stop tour of the house (Henry liked the roaring log fire, Daisy got naughty in the library and had to be taken outside), then got back in the car, and carried on driving. At one point I thought we might also stop at Tatton, but we realised that, unlike motorway services, National Trust cafes shut at 4.30pm, so we ran out of day. Anyway, the kids were coping pretty well, at that point, so we just kept on going for home.

It’d definitely do the NT as Services thing again – it added some interest to the day. Whilst the cafes aren’t cheap, you get more for your money than you do on the motorway, and finding suitable properties to stop at is good, clean, nerdy fun.

So all in all, really good week. Good as a holiday, good experiences of Small Children On Long Journeys, good to be counted by the government on the Lobby, good to see old friends, and fantastic Education, all over the place. The kids couldn’t move for all the Education going on, it was fab!

I’m sorry, I’m bored now. I feel like I have spent forever trying to explain to anyone who will listen, and to a great many people who would rather not listen, that Badman is wrong, that his statistical basis lies somewhere between fabrication and fiction, that his proposals undermine the role of parents and families, that he flies in the face of the basic concept of innocent until proven guilty, and so on, and so on, and so on. I’m bored. It doesn’t seem to matter how many people people respond to the reviews, or submit evidence to the Select Committee, or reply to the consultations. With every opportunity to shout at the government, even more people seem to be motivated to do so, and none of it makes any difference. They don’t listen, and they breeze on in their own sweet way.

Ah well. In case anyone is casually interested, this is my submission to the current DCSF consultation into registration and monitoring of home education. The executive summary would be that I’m against it. All of it.

Question 1: Do you agree that these proposals strike the right balance between the rights of parents to home educate and the rights of children to receive a suitable education?

Disagree.

This consultation, and the Badman Review before it, appear to be under the impression that parents and their children both have opposing sets of rights, which are somehow in tension with one another. This is plainly untrue. Parents do not have rights, they have duties and responsibilities, most of which are specifically to protect the rights of their children. Parents do not home educate in spite of a child’s right to education. In most cases, they do so specifically because they found that the child’s right to education was not being fulfilled through attendance at school. In such circumstances, it is the parent’s legal duty to take steps to rectify the deficiency, and provide an education, since the parent remains ultimately responsible, in law, for ensuring that education is provided. There appears to be a belief in the DCSF that the child’s right is to go to school – this is not the case. How education is provided is a decision for the parent to make, based on his or her knowledge of the child, of the available options, and of the needs of the family as a whole.

The DCSF needs to stop talking about home education as if it represents a form of second class educational provision. It is a valid legal choice, which should not incur discrimination and prejudice from government departments and agencies, any more than the decisions to attend church, or to avoid eating meat, should incur government discrimination. The apparent bias against the parents as educators implies a belief that parents cannot, or can only rarely, educate a child suitably themselves. The most important knowledge for a person to have, in order to educate a child, is knowledge of the child – not theoretical knowledge of education. Parents have this knowledge in the most depth, and have the greatest personal investment in the success of the education. They are, therefore, the best placed to educate their own children. Certainly, the research done in the US and Canada suggests that home educated children achieve consistently superior results, when compared to their schooled counterparts – though the research in question did not appear in Mr Badman’s literature review, giving the impression that he did not wish to find favourable reports of home education.

The only people who are consistently claiming that home educated children are not, generally, receiving a suitable education, are Local Authorities, but recent investigation by Home Education campaigners suggests that, in many cases, LAs are making judgements about suitability based largely on prejudice and presumption, that they frequently find it difficult to conceive of a form of education that does not resemble the school model, and that (crucially) their alleged concerns are rarely backed up by the legal recourse available to them – the number of School Attendance Orders being issued is much, much smaller than the number of concerns that LAs told Mr Badman that they had, and one can only assume that this is because the LA staff know that they would not stand up in court. The children are receiving a suitable education, just one that the school-experienced educationalists do not approve of.

The proposals generally would limit the ability of parents to offer an education that was truly suitable to an individual child’s age, ability and aptitude, and reduce them to providing a version of the state’s one-size-fits-all education model, with the added hazards of excessive bureaucracy (which should never have a place in the family home) and the constant threat of registration being revoked for non-compliance.

The state does not own children. Parents are parents, not state-sanctioned childminders. The state should never attempt to place itself between loving, committed parenting, and the child.

Question 2 Do you agree that a register should be kept?

Disagree.

The apparent desire to allow Local Authorities to keep tabs on the educational setting of all children, not just those for whom it is providing the education, is a significant step. To date, LAs have been responsible for a) the provision of state schools for every child whose parents wish to utilise such a service; and b) pursuing any report that comes to them, that a particular child is not receiving a suitable education at all. Through these two functions, they are able to assist parents in fulfilling their legal duty to provide an education, by offering an educational service, and they are able ensure that parents who are discovered to be breaking this law are brought to justice. They have not been, and should never be, directly responsible for the education of all the children within the boundary of their authority. That role belongs to parents, who are legally responsible for providing an education, “either by regular attendance at school, or otherwise”.

In a democracy, parents, along with any other citizen, must be assumed to be complying with the law, unless there is clear evidence to suggest that they are not. To keep a register of those parents who choose, quite legally, to educate their children themselves, is akin to maintaining a register of vegetarians, in case some of them are criminally neglecting their offspring through the deprivation of protein. Home education is a legal choice, sometimes based on personal beliefs and philosophies, and it is clear discrimination for that choice to incur the intrusion into a family’s life, through the compulsory use of personal information in a database. The insulting implication is that home educators are so likely to be breaking the law, that they need to be watched.

Every database which holds information on a person increases the risk of that information escaping into the wrong hands, resulting in individuals being targetted for identity theft, child grooming, and any of a range of other offences. It is impossible for government, indeed, for anyone, to guarantee the integrity of data held in a database. The only way to guarantee its safety, is not to gather it. As a result, a register of home educators, with no obvious purpose, offers an increase in risk to home educators, with no benefit to them.

A compulsory registration scheme merely adds to the bureaucratic workload of home educating parents, detracting from the time and energy they might otherwise have spent educating their children. Registration offers no advantages to the registered, and registration alone (without arrangements for monitoring, etc) achieves nothing at all, except to add to the number of places from which ones personal details can be stolen.

Most home educators currently consider registration with the Local Authority to be avoided if at all possible. This is not because they have anything to hide, in the vast majority of cases. It is merely because registration offers no benefits at all, and inconvenience, bureaucracy, stress and intrusion into family life, that is entirely unwarranted.

In the unlikely event that the case for registration can be proven, it should be noted that a child’s educational setting is already listed in ContactPoint. There seems to be no merit in an additional, separate register of home educators – if such a list is truly necessary, the pre-existing ContactPoint should be the source.

3. Do you agree with the information to be provided for registration?

Disagree.

I have made clear in my response to Question 2, that I consider registration to be intrusive, unnecessary, insulting, and risk-laden.

In addition to these general concerns, I also object to the requirement to provide “a statement of approach to education, and the location where education is conducted if not the home”. Home education is a family function. Just because education is a function most commonly delegated to institutions, is not a reason to expect families to submit to a level of bureaucracy most commonly found in such institutions. It is not clear how much detail would be required from these two statements, or what their purpose would be. However, it is clear that as a first-stage requirement, or even prerequisite to home education, they would be unreasonably daunting to many parents.

Many home educated children are deregistered from school at a time of crisis. Mr Badman, and many of the Local Authorities, are inclined to imply that during a crisis is the very worst time to make the decision to home educate. However, it is not a decision that families take lightly, and in many cases, it is only taken when the family reaches a level of desperation that leaves them unable to see another option. Expecting parents to produce a document adequately outlining what education they are going to provide, in such circumstances as these, is unreasonable, and unrealistic. Even in a home educating family that is enjoying calm, happy, productive times, it is not necessarily possible to predict with any detail what topics will be covered, or what children will learn. Home education is not like school. The level of structure and advanced planning involved varies enormously between families, and even in the most structured of families, a plan or curriculum can be changed completely at short notice, in order to better meet needs of the child concerned. In families who follow a more thoroughly child-led approach, predicting where the child might lead would be little more than an act of clairvoyance. This does not mean that child is not receiving a suitable education. It merely means that the details of that education cannot be easily predicted in advance.

The requirement to give details of the “location where education is conducted” is bizarre, irrelevant, and a betrayal of the school-focussed perspective of the DCSF. Home education is not like school. It does not involve arriving at a venue, spending six hours there, and then leaving to go home. It happens wherever the child happens to be, at any time of the day or night that suits the family as a whole, and the child in particular. It includes clubs and activities, trips out, car journeys, visits to friends and family, and presence at any number of locations and venues. The question would be entirely without meaning to many home educators. If, as I suspect, it is actually intended to mean, “Let us inspect your house,” then I refer to my answer to Question 2. It is discriminatory to demand to inspect the homes of home educators, just because they are home educators. The desire to do so betrays both an assumption that adequate resources are unlikely to be available, and an assumption a government inspector will be able to make value judgements about the quality of a child’s education, either by looking to see if books or a computer are in evidence, or by evaluating when the carpet was last hoovered. In either case, such an inspection proves nothing about education, but is hugely disruptive and intrusive to the family concerned.

Being daunted by the bureaucratic requirements of the registration regime should in no way be considered to indicate unsuitability of a parent to home educate. The skills required to suitably educate ones own child are vastly different to the skills required to jump through government hoops through form-filling. Staff at schools and in Local Authorities are, in part, employed for their ability to negotiate such hoops (though schools regularly complain about the paperwork overwhelming the educational role). Bureaucracy has no place in family life, and should have no part in a parent’s decision to educate their child.

Question 4 Do you agree that home educating parents should be required to keep the register up to date?

Disagree.

As I have made clear, I do not agree with the proposed register, and therefore cannot possibly agree to a requirement for parents to maintain the data held within it. The comparison between the registration system described here, and the types used for prisoners on probation, for example, is distasteful, and insulting to law-abiding home educators. I have been avoiding making sensationalist comparisons with how Jews were registered and tracked in Nazi Germany, for fear of seeming to belittle the events of that time. However, the comparison increasingly presents itself, and I am having difficulty in ignoring it.

Q5 Do you agree that it should be a criminal offence to fail to register or to provide inadequate or false information?

Disagree.

Since the information which the consultation suggests would be required from home educators is so badly defined, so completely at odds with how home education functions, and so discriminatory and insulting to home educators, to criminalise the failure of parents to contribute that information would cross the line from discrimination into persecution. Parents are not responsible to the state for the lawful decisions they make regarding their family life, and neither should they be so.

If the government were to decide to criminalise home educators who did not comply, they would necessarily have to point out the requirement to all parents, presumably at the point of application for a child’s first school place. This could have the effect of introducing home education as a possibility to a wide range of people who would not have otherwise considered the idea. I suspect that such a thing would represent an unintended consequence, and be the very opposite of the original goal of the legislation.

6 a) Do you agree that home educated children should stay on the roll of their former school for 20 days after parents notify that they intend to home educate?

Disagree.

This question is simply not adequately explained, which makes it very difficult to answer comprehensively. It is not clear, either here, or in the Badman report, whether the child would be expected to attend during this 20 day period. It is not clear whether the school and/or Local Authority would spend the 20 days attempting to pressurise the family into cancelling their deregistration. It is not clear how a 20 day cooling off period, in which a child was not attending, would affect a school’s attendance targets. It is not clear whether parents with no intention to home educate would be able to use this “cooling off period” to take their children on holiday during term-time, and then claim to have changed their minds, and cancel their deregistration. It is not clear whether schools or Local Authorities could use this 20 day period to get “troublesome” pupils out of the way, eg, during an Ofsted inspection.

In some, very popular schools, it is possible for a child’s vacated school place to be filled very quickly, preventing the family from changing their minds shortly after the initial deregistration decision. However, the number of unanswered questions surrounding this proposal suggest that a whole new consultation would be necessary, before such a thing could implemented.

6 b) Do you agree that the school should provide the local authority with achievement and future attainment data?

Disagree.

Absolutely not. A child’s achievement and projected attainment information is sensitive data which is personal to them. It belongs to the child, is covered under the Data Protection Act, and should only be made available to the child and his/her parents. Passing such information to the Local Authority is a breach of trust.

The parents are responsible for providing a suitable education for the child. It is the parents, and the parents alone, for whom the school’s opinion on a child’s achievements and future potential is relevant. It is common for parents who have deregistered a child to do so after a long period of disagreement with the school, possibly regarding the child’s ability. For that parent to then be held to ransom by the school’s statements regarding the child’s capability is to compound the problem that deregistration sought to solve.

Q7 Do you agree that DCSF should take powers to issue statutory guidance in relation to the registration and monitoring of home education?

Disagree.

As I understand it, this is simply a way of asking if the DCSF should arrange to make all the changes I have objected to in questions 1 to 6, by means of statutory instruments which would not require the approval of Parliament. Absolutely not.

I have explained in great depth how the proposed registration of home educated children is discriminatory, unjust and anti-democratic. The registration scheme amounts to an appropriation of parental responsibility by government. It fundamentally changes the legal role and position of parents – all parents, not just home educators – in this country, by giving Local Authorities, not parents, the ultimate power to decide on the best way to educate a child. Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES should such changes as these be nodded through in the form of statutory guidance. The implications are enormous, and warrant a full, public debate, and the benefit of the whole parliamentary process.

Section 7 of the Education Act holds parents responsible for the education of their children, and has done so since 1944. If the government really thinks it wise, appropriate and valid to change this fundamental element of parental responsibility, it should be prepared to do it properly.

For the record, I find the attempt to slip home education monitoring into the Improving Schools & Safeguarding Children Bill, before the current consultation is over, utterly reprehensible. The looming general election is no excuse to bypass due process in this, or any other matter.

On the other hand, I would welcome making the current Home Education Guidelines for Local Authorities (2007) statutory. They are actually very good, and obliging Local Authorities to stick to them would be helpful.

Q8 Do you agree that children about whom there are substantial safeguarding concerns should not be home educated?

Disagree.

I find this proposal to be the least logical idea in the whole Badman report. Education and safeguarding are two entirely separate matters. Mixing them up like this helps no-one.

The implication would appear to be that a family home can be safe for a child during evenings, weekends and school holidays, but not during term-time between the hours of 9am and 3pm. That is clearly nonsense. If a child is at risk of suffering serious harm at home, they should not be there. The form of their education is irrelevant. If there is no evidence of such risk, then there is no reason to prevent a family from caring for their children by whatever means they see fit, including with reference to their education.

The assumptions behind this proposal are fundamentally flawed. There is an assumption that a child who is at risk, but is in school, is therefore being kept safe through daily monitoring. The number of abused children who only disclose their abuse after reaching adulthood would suggest that this is not true. There is an assumption that home educated children are kept out of sight of the world, and are therefore invisible to those who might otherwise intervene in their plight, should intervention be necessary. Mr Badman, however, found no evidence at all that this was the case. The vast majority of home educated children are constantly out and about in the community, joining clubs, making friends, taking learning opportunities from all around them. Indeed, some home educators find that they are reported to Social Services by neighbours, simply because their children were noted as not being in school.

I appreciate that the government is trying to limit the damage caused by a series of high-profile child abuse cases. In none of those cases, however, was the child in question “hidden”. In all cases, the children had been reported to Social Services, and/or seen by health professionals, and in all cases, it was the failure of staff to implement the existing procedures that led to the death of the child. Targetting new groups for new procedures will not solve that problem. The government should invest its limited resources in funding, staffing, training and accountability within their existing Social Services teams, regarding their existing case loads. Home education does not represent an increased risk of child abuse – indeed, the statistics gathered by home educators during the summer of 2009 suggest that home educated children are less than a quarter as likely to be abused or neglected as the general population (0.29%, compared to 1.3%).

For the record, Local Authorities who treat a parent’s right to offer evidence of their educational provision by means other than a home visit, as a “safeguarding concern” should be told in no uncertain terms that such a thing is not acceptable. There are many reasons why a parent might prefer to deal with the LA by other means, including personal preference, and they are perfectly within their rights to make that choice. Again, conflating the suitability of the education with the safety of the child is dangerous and unhelpful.

Q9 Do you agree that the local authority should visit the premises where home education is taking place provided 2 weeks notice is given?

Disagree.

I refer to my answer to Question 3: It is discriminatory to demand to inspect the homes of home educators, just because they are home educators. The desire to do so betrays both an assumption that adequate resources are unlikely to be available, and an assumption a government inspector will be able to make value judgements about the quality of a child’s education, either by looking to see if books or a computer are in evidence, or by evaluating when the carpet was last hoovered. In either case, such an inspection proves nothing about education, but is hugely disruptive and intrusive to the family concerned. In any case, “the premises where home education is taking place” is a phrase devoid of meaning to many home educators, and a betrayal of the school-focussed perspective of the DCSF. Home education is not like school. It does not involve arriving at a venue, spending six hours there, and then leaving to go home. It happens wherever the child happens to be, at any time of the day or night that suits the family as a whole, and the child in particular. It includes clubs and activities, trips out, car journeys, visits to friends and family, and presence at any number of locations and venues.

Giving Local Authorities the right to enter private homes as a matter of course is a violation of the Human Rights Act 1998 and the European Convention on Human Rights Article 8. Home educators, just like everyone else, have a right to their private family lives, and to be left in peace.

The idea of giving “2 weeks notice” is both rude, and potentially unworkable. Home educators are private individuals with lives and responsibilities. They are not sitting around waiting for their LA to turn up, and in some cases, they are much more inclined to go away for periods of several weeks or months. Does the DCSF anticipate criminalising home educators who choose to take their children away for a month, for not keeping an appointment made with two weeks’ notice?

Q10 Do you agree that the local authority should have the power to interview the child, alone if this is judged appropriate, or if not in the presence of a trusted person who is not the parent/carer?

Disagree.

Absolutely not. The only circumstances under which a child should be interviewed without the presence and support of their parents, are when that child is at serious risk of harm, ie, within the context of the existing legislation that Social Services teams use to protect children. In every other case, the right to interview a child at all should be at the discretion of the parents, and the right to interview a child alone should not even be requested by education professionals seeking to engage in good practice. All children are vulnerable, by their very nature as children, and the suggestion in the question that only the most vulnerable should be allowed any adult support at all, is reprehensible. For the majority of children, parents are the key supporter in times of stress, and such an interview has the potential to be very stressful indeed. The children should not be abandoned to a stranger.

Mr Badman’s implication that children should be given the opportunity, not to disclose abuse, but to disclose their secret desire to be educated at school, flies entirely in the face of the legal role of parents. Children are entitled to have their voices heard in matters that affect them, but it is the role of their parents, not the Local Authority, to decide how that voice will affect the decisions to be taken regarding their education, just as it is the parents who are responsible for making all the other decisions surrounding the running of the family. Not all children are happy with all the decisions made by their parents on their behalf. Arguably, most children are distinctly unhappy with some of those decisions. However, the decisions remain with the parents, whose greater knowledge, wisdom and experience can usually be relied upon. It is, of course, particularly farcical, that no-one would dream of offering schooled children the opportunity to demand to be home educated, even though their enrolment at school was just as much a decision of their parents, with which they may or may not agree.

There is no reason to assume that the hypothetical abuse victim would use their annual interview with a stranger from the LA to disclose the abuse. Children who disclose abuse generally do so to trusted adults, with whom they have built relationships over a long period of time. If the child has not disclosed the abuse to their friends, extended family, Brown Owl or swimming tutor, the likelihood of their doing so in this situation is slim in the extreme.

The consultation, and the Badman report before it, gives no indication of how a child who refused to be left alone with an LA official might be regarded. It is not clear whether the parents would be penalised for such a refusal, or whether they would be expected to force the child to comply – in the latter case, it seems like an odd way to listen to a child’s voice, to ignore their refusal to be interviewed.

Q 11 Do you agree that the local authority should visit the premises and interview the child within four weeks of home education starting, after 6 months has elapsed, at the anniversary of home education starting, and thereafter at least on an annual basis? This would not preclude more frequent monitoring if the local authority thought that was necessary.

Disagree.

I consider the current law to be adequate. It allows for Local Authorities to investigate whether a child is in receipt of a suitable education, and if they are presented with evidence that would convince a reasonable person that that he or she is, they should consider their duty fulfilled. The desire to monitor continuously suggests a belief that parents might provide an education at one time, but then cease to do so. This seems very unlikely to be the case – if a parent is prepared to take the time and trouble to provide an education once, they are very likely to continue doing so.

Monitoring, on the other hand, gives the Local Authority a responsibility for the quality of education that they have not previously had. It opens them up all kinds legal challenges, for undertaking a responsibility that previously belonged to parents.

Local Authorities seem very unwilling to utilise the powers that are currently available to them, through existing legislation. This being the case, their constant demands for greater powers through new legislation are inexplicable. There is no need to make regular monitoring compulsory. There is only a need for LAs to follow the rules and guidelines which already exist.

The DCSF has failed entirely to demonstrate that monitoring would improve the quality of home education, would solve any identifiable problem, or would do anything other than cost a great deal of money to implement. This is a white elephant proposal that should be scrapped.

Those points aside, I feel bound to point out that four weeks is a very short period of time after deregistration for a family, potentially in recovery from a major crisis, to deal with an LA inspection. The time scales, if they must exist at all, should allow a period of at least six months, for a family to recover themselves emotionally, organise themselves practically, and bring themselves to a place of having something to discuss. Nothing is likely to subvert a child’s recovery from a stressful school experience, like a compulsory visit from an official with the authority to send them back to school. The whole idea is abhorrent.

And that is why home educators are archiving a copy, and doing our best to get it up the Google rankings, so that when people are looking for the Guidelines, that might have a chance of finding them.

Thanks to renegadeparent, and to Maire for the heads up.

The state however doesn’t like our choices, and while the law of the land explicitly states that these choices are ours to make, that it’s our responsibility to choose. The state seems intent to stamp out that freedom of choice.

Home education – or education by “regular attendance at school or otherwise” as the Education Act puts it – is seriously under attack (nothing really new in that) in the last 3 years there have been 4 ‘consultations’ or ‘reviews’ into elective home education by what is now the Department of Schools, Children and Families (DSCF).

As each review passed, and more and more evidence piled up that Home Education is a good way to educate a child or indeed an “astonishingly effective” way to learn. The DSCF dug in deeper and tried from another angle.

The latest ‘review’ was targeted at safeguarding issues, basically trying to tug on the public’s heart strings by suggesting home educators where abusing their children. No evidence for this at all, but that doesn’t stop the press briefings to raise the ‘concerns’ – with a nod and a wink.

Then conduct a review where you have a good idea what you want, and if the figures don’t quite add up – well there statistics you can prove anything with statistics, when was the last time you used a Modal average?

Only one problem with that, in this modern information age it’s very easy to mobilise and gather information so the Home educators have gone and blown big holes in the report – it turns out the abuse of home educators that was “twice as likely” is actually a lot less likely more than 4 times less likely.

At this point it’s possible to be a bit upbeat, the Department has put a consultation out, briefed and reported their views, and the backlash has found them out; only two problems 1) that’s doesn’t mean it won’t happen, and 2) if you’re really intent on something you can try other ways.

Education Otherwise (the home education support charity) has learnt that the DCSF in intending to have a review into the definition of full-time education in 2010. (via twitter)

They are basically trying from yet another angle, and that is why I am ranting; It’s looking like another review into Home Education has gone the wrong way – so the next one is in the pipeline; it’s relentless. The DCSF is just going to keep going until they get the result they want, and if that doesn’t work, they’ll are still the government so they can always amend the law the next time the act comes up in parliament.

The truth is, we didn’t choose to home educate so we could fight the government for the next 15 years, we did it to give our children the education we feel they deserve.

The options are few; one however is to move, in the first instance to Scotland which hasn’t yet gone anti home school crazy so it would give us a chance to educate our children without a eye on the door, at least for a while.