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.

After the latest bout of Monitor stroppyness on Friday, I trekked over to John Lewis and picked up an 21.4″ wide-screen monitor, For what was quite a reasonable price. The net effect on the study is a lot more desk space now we have got rid of the monster and massive screen real estate - we’ve gone from a fairly respectible 1280*1024 to a quite massive 1920*1080, which is a lot of desktop to fill.

While at work (and for a while at home) I have multi-monitors – having a single wide screen monitor is a different experience. for one you need a nice single picture to fill the screen. Since Saturday both Ruth and I have been looking for excuses not to use our laptops for a while and now we have both dug around and come up with our own 1920×1080 wallpapers for the superwide screen PC we hardly ever use.

Liverpool Skyline

Blossom (Ruth's Desktop)

Compton Bay

They are not quite all 1920*1080 because, well, we’re a bit lazy – but still they are very pretty on a very big screen – which means you will need a big screen to see them properly

All we do now is occasionally disappear upstairs turn the computer on and stare at the desktop. We haven’t worked out how to fill the space on the screen, websites full screen just look a bit lost, and well you need to be able to see the pretty pictures don’t you?

My Friendly Broadband Provider Virgin Media have told me that it’s something more complicated than they are willing to explain and it will take 6-8 weeks to fix – which is a long time to have a swollen thumb.

I’ve thought about moving to some other way of getting the internet into the house but the lack of physical BT wire means it would need reconnecting and surprise surprise that takes 6-8 weeks.

My Insecent moaning on twitter and in emails has gotten me £15 of my bill – but i still don’t have broadband I would call in any sense of the word broad.

Sorry for the rant I just need write that down.

I’m thinking of declaring January null and void and having a new new years day on 1st February - maybe without snow, and a bit of rest (I can’t dare to think my internet will still be slow) it might all start out better. It also gives me another month to actually think of some things to be all eager about.

BBC News – Public sector ’still expects raises despite recession’

Most public sector workers are still expecting a pay rise in 2010, despite the impending clampdown on earnings in the sector, a survey has found.

I am truely confused by this article. If you read it; it says public sector workers expect 2% pay rise – and private sector expect 3%. Then it goes on to suggest public sector workers are out of touch with reality?

“according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development survey, most public sector workers still expect a pay rise of 2% in 2010.

Workers in private firms predicted that their pay will rise by 3% next year.”

and

“Public sector workers are clearly not sensing that the pay storm clouds are gathering. It looks like 2010 will prove to be the last hurrah of this gilded age.”

Now I’m not suggesting anything about pay rises here – but just reading the article I can’t see it has this bias?

The only other stat in the article – is 20% of Public Sector workers don’t expect a pay rise while 25% of private don’t – so are they using that as the stat to beat up the public sector with? because the other stat suggests it’s the other way?

In reality does this research conclude that their is very little difference between people in these sectors but we need to publicise our story?

like with most news stories of this type I can’t get to the real numbers yet because the Beeb obviously have the report before the company that did it have bothered to put anything on their own website – at this point I could go on a rant about marketing and news releases – but I’ll save that.

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.

At the moment it appears you can make a lot of money from writing flash based facebook games that basically turn people into clicky automatons.  So we’ve been thinking, there must be a way for us to enslave people in our own version of a flash based sweatshop – but first we needed to work out just what makes them so successfull.

Drudgery: people apparently enjoy virtual versions of labour intensive jobs that advances in modern machinery and technology has all but eliminated.

So how about Dishville? Where you have to wash the dishes?

Reward: Ruth thinks this won’t work because you need a ‘reward’. Apparently in a certain farming game “oh look i have a picture of some grapes” constitutes a reward, so we need to find a game that gives people a reward.

Sweepville? where you clean the street and at the end you get a reward from a local councillor? … humm maybe not

So what else do we need? Oh yes, the game has to enslave your friends too. Again drawing inspiration from a certain agricultural game, you can apparently guilt people into playing by doing their farming for them. Personally I don’t see why this works but hey ho.

Anyway, we’ve had a bit of a scuba in our thinktank, and ran a couple of things up the ideas runway; and now I can announce the next big thing in the world of doing a boring job on the internet:

PostVillie!

You are a postmaster – so you have to deliver letters, occasionally sell stamps and maybe every once in a while deal with an aggressive pensioner whose pension book has gone missing.

The main bit of the game however will be the enslaving delivery system;

• using the names of everyone playing the game (i reckon we’ll get around 70million) you will get a letter to deliver to someone who might or might not be a friend
• but you can only send it to one of your friends who will then send it on
• when it gets to the right person – the postage cost will be divided between everyone who handled the letter
• so if the letter goes through 5 people you get a fifth of the money

This, I think, is a winner. It has the drudgery of running a post office, combined with the reward of someone saying ‘I got a letter’ and the enslaving of your friends to send the mail.

Now I just have to learn some flash….. but I can’t be bothered, oh well I need another money making scheme.

more piccies over here.

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.

Simple i think it’s the broadband provider getting all slow – except it’s not because when you plug a wire directly in it’s OK

Simple I think wireless in our house is broken/slow/getting interfered with. – except i don’t think it is – because copying between the pc’s on the wireless isn’t (that) slow.

At this point I am really annoyed – not at the lack of good broadband, although that does wind me up, but at the fact I don’t know why it’s not working I don’t even have a plausible theory.

So I harumph downstairs, and moan a bit, about it all to Ruth, who if she’s honest isn’t really that bothered – by not knowing what it is.

Despite this Ruth comes up with something I don’t have – a theory, it’s the bit of the wireless between the wireless and the wires, I’m not 100% convinced by the logic but given I don’t have a theory and if I’m honest because I would be really upset if it was right, I troupe back upstairs to try.

(un?)luckily for me that isn’t it – slightly but not much faster copying files from a wired PC to a wireless one.

So now here I am stuck, grasping at any straw that passes, but mostly really annoyed ! I hate it when i don’t know why something doesn’t work. For me getting something working or not isn’t the point of the exercise it’s understanding why and how it does or doesn’t work.

It’s really annoying (did I mention that) and all the time while i write this – I’m reminded I don’t know what’s wrong by the stupidly SLOW INTERNET…. Arggggh