I’ve talked about my family before, I’m sure, but this week I’ve found myself thinking about extended family as a form of identity, all over again.

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 thing with educating Daisy (which is not really like Educating Rita at all), is that I am holding a tiger by the tail.

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.

So, it’s all gone a bit quiet at theJumps, hasn’t it? I expect you’ll be wondering what’s been going on.

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.

Or at least, setting most of the boring politics aside, last week was brilliant.

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!