How do you recognise education when you see it? Can you be educated while wearing pyjamas or dressed as a dog? What about while climbing a tree or building a den in the woods? It is one of many things that bothers me about the new Children, Schools and Families bill currently at the committee stage in parliament, specifically as it relates to home education. The Government proposes, amongst other things that you can read about here, to license parents before they will be “allowed” to educate their child outside the school system. The power to grant this licence would rest with the local authority education departments. Many of these officers have been teachers, a head teacher in the case of the Home Ed liaison person in our LA. How well equipped is someone who has spent her professional career in a classroom, where children sit at tables or desks and often wear uniform to recognise that an education can be found anywhere and wearing anything we damn well please? Our LA’s policy on home education already states they expect to see evidence of 25 hours per week of structured work? So pretty much school then, which is absurd. One or two or three or five children with readily available adults to facilitate their learning do not need the same thing as 30 children in a room with one teacher and one classroom assistant. They just don’t. Does the time she spends learning add up to 25 hours a week? I don’t see how it could fail to when you take into consideration all the time spend poring over books and being creative. Above all the time spent asking questions and getting answers or help to find answers about periscopes and what unit of time is smaller than a second or bigger than a year, or telephones in the 1970s, or what kind of rock is this.
Supposing this person thinks as a friend did in a discussion on the subject, that a child who is often in just pyjamas cannot be getting a suitable education? Can we just stop and think about that logically for a moment? Do our brains switch off when we change daytime clothing for nightwear? I don’t mean when we go to sleep. It is the change in our state of consciousness that matters, not what we wear to do it. My daughter often stays in her pyjamas much of the day. If we’re not going anywhere, why should she not? Her other preferred form of dress is as a dog, often complete with harness and lead. She’s six and inhabits a world of vivid imagination.
Not that much of her education comes from sitting at a table doing worksheets either. Some does; she enjoys doing them. But it might equally be playing chess with Daddy or making a swamp for her dinosaurs out of kitchen ingredients, or emailing her uncle to ask about rocks or my personal favourite, the long and rather philosophical conversations about maths that seem to be triggered by car journeys. How is the person from the LA going to come and inspect something that doesn’t look anything like education as she knows it?
I don’t think you can separate education from life really. There are no “premises where education takes place”, at least there is no one place. Are they going to follow me to the shops where my daughter writes the list and works out how much money we need to give and what change to expect? Or come to our friends’ houses and home ed. groups, to museums and galleries, to parks and forests and swimming pools and stables and sweaty sports halls, to her science lessons and to theatres and to chess club? She gets her education in all these places and more. She does it wearing pyjamas and fancy dress and jeans and jodhpurs and tracksuits and swimming costumes.
One thing I often hear about my daughter is that she is always the one asking questions. And that, to me, is what an education looks like…an enquiring mind and the tools to find answers.
Excellent post. Sums it up nicely – thanks!
‘How well equipped is someone who has spent her professional career in a classroom, where children sit at tables or desks and often wear uniform to recognise that an education can be found anywhere and wearing anything we damn well please?’
I think its wrong, not to mention a little insulting, to assume that all ‘traditional’ teachers have such a narrow view of education. I know many recognise that learning can take place in many situations that dont involve worksheets! The push in primary educatiorn these days is towards experiential learning, motivation and engagement and away from more traditional desk/chair based activities. I know it must be easy to feel defensive when you are to be ‘inspected’, but dont think you should assume that anyone from a traditional teaching background is the enemy!
No, that is true and I apologize, but my personal woman definitely is in that mould. The Badman review had the opportunity to discuss autonomous learning with a respected academic with a body of research behind her and chose instead to ask her “do you think *mothers* (my emphasis) who chose to home educate suffer from Munchausen’s by proxy?” So yes, it is a little hard not to feel under attack when instead of allowing itself to be informed about alternative and valid theories of education, the review chose to question the mental health of women who make this choice.
A couple of years ago there seemed to be a move afoot to look at the LAs who had good policies and practices with their home educating families and develop guidelines for best practice, but instead we get this.
“The push in primary educatiorn these days is towards experiential learning, motivation and engagement and away from more traditional desk/chair based activities. ”
That certainly has been my experience largely with the children not just in Reception where the curriculum is child-led, experiential and increasingly outdoor but further up the school and into KS2. The curriculum is interesting, stimulating, imaginative and practical. DS1 teacehr took the oportunity to teach about negative numbers looking at temperatures during the cold snap even though it wasn’t part of the curriculum at that point and they covered gravity and forces when she took them sledging!School certainly looks more fun than when I was a child.
very true :)
even for children who do attend school (as mine do) I often wonder what percentage of their learning actually takes place at school, compared to what they are learning at home.
We are all learning, all the time. Learning is not something you turn on like a tap because of the location.
The idea of 25 hours a week of ‘structured work’ makes me shudder. Whatever happened to learning through play? I despair sometimes I really do….
x
I fully agree with the learning everywhere through life sentiment and admire your ability to put it all into words much better than I could – but will just add that our LA bod, is an ex headteacher who spent years working as you described – but she still “gets” home education. She fully understands how life and learning can’t be separated, and just last November she was here at my home for 4 hours discussing just that in full agreement with how we do things (child-led, following interests, cross-curricular projects, learning through life, few or no workbooks etc). I know we are lucky and one of the perhaps fortunate few to have such a visitor, I just didn’t want readers thinking all ex-heads would struggle with the HE concept :)
Jules x
That’s good to know Julia. I do know other families who are similarly fortunate, but how do we guarantee that our children’s future is not in the hands of someone who doesn’t “get” what we are doing? This bill will put a lot of pressure on LAs in terms of workload and they have not promised extra resources to deal with it.
We can’t guarantee, there is no guarantee – I fully agree with you. The bill is horrifically flawed and it is a worrying time. We have to fight it and stand up for our rights, I was never disputing that. I was certainly not agreeing with the bill in any way, shape or form :)
On the other side of the coin though the new Home Ed Liaison Officer in my neighbouring LA has openly admitted that she thinks all children should be in school by secondary age at the latest!
This is the person who will be deciding if parents are providing a ‘suitable’ education and can reject their ‘application’ for HE and force their child into school if the Bill goes through in it’s current form.
I supported two families in my region whom the council was trying to prevent home educating. The reasons were that one family was a lesbian couple and the other lived on a council estate. The bod from the council didn’t think either environment was “suitable” for the child to be educated in and tried to prevent the headteacher deregistering in each case by telling the head that he could not deregister the child and must keep the child on the register (i.e. truant) until the head got the go-ahead from the council. Thankfully local home educators were able to inform the council bod that he was over extending himself. However under the CSF bill, the bod from the council will have the power to interfere based precisely on prejudices such as these.
A couple years back me and my two children were taking part in a film making course. We were given the task of making a film about home education. I realised not very far into the task that in order to make the film I was going to have to make decisions about what to film, what bits of life counted as “learning” and should therefore be included. Of course it was impossible, so I ended up actually making the film about that dilemma! Here’s what we ended up with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxkTyV3NaTg
I don’t agree that 25 hours structured work = 25 hours sitting at a table… I can see it is hard to defrentiate “learning hours” when you are doing HE as you don’t have “school time” and “home time” but learning through play and everyday activities is still structured.
I can see that it is harder to show that you are planning as you don’t know whether your child is going to want to learn to tell the time or about the water cycle in advance of it actually happening – and I can see the inspection / registering thing being a bit over the top but I don’t think it is unreasonable for all children to be registered either as HE or in school (then there would be an easy list for truant officers to consult etc), and some sort of agreement about what HE actually means.
Boy2′s teacher (he is in a Nursery / Reception mixed Foundation Stage Class) is EXCELLENT at it – I don’t think they have done a whole week in the classroom they are always out in the community for walks, to visit places, to go to the shops to buy ingredients for cooking. She knows that they don’t switch off at 11.30 when we take them home and actively encourages them to share what they have been doing at home and vice versa. It is structured learning as they aren’t going to the shops for going to the shops sake they are going with specific learning objectives – so to look at the different fruits, buy the specific ingredients they need etc but it certainly isn’t sat at a desk with worksheets.
Ok so further up the school there is more table time but they are still out and about – they use the town facilities, they go into church, they do practical workshops and have science days…
“I don’t think it is unreasonable for all children to be registered either as HE or in school (then their would be an easy list for truant officers to consult etc), and some sort of agreement about what HE actually means.”
If a child is registered at school, but not attending, there *is* an easy list to consult! When a child is taken through the formal process of deregistration, the school and then the LA know that the child is now being home educated.
As for an agreement about what HE actually means, it is the same as it is for school. The Education Act says that the parent has the responsibility to ensure their child receives an education that is “suitable to their age, ability and aptitude and any special educational needs that they may have” and says this must be “at school or otherwise”. That is it in a nutshell.
Schools have further legislation that says what education in school must look like *purely* because of the method of delivery. Offering education to up to 31 children in one go, within the constraints of fixed time periods, delivered according to a set plan, is a “shot gun” approach – they must offer a broad and balance curriculum to ensure that the majority of children will receive a reasonable education (like the pellets of a shotgun where you point and hope that enough hit the target).
Home education is, if you like, the marksman’s shot. Nothing is wasted. It is personalised, totally tailored – not just to the child’s needs but the child’s environment and setting. If what you are doing doesn’t “hit the target” (to stretch the analogy to an extreme!) then you simply recalibrate. That is very easy to do one-on-one at home!
For the state education system, if it is shown to be missing the target, it takes a lot of time, effort, politics, funding and hard work on the part of teachers and all within the system, to “recalibrate”.
Home education is real time, real world.
Don’t get me wrong – I totally agree with the right to home educate and I totally understand autonomous learning BUT surely there must be some parents who are home educating who DON’T do a good job – who don’t foster a learning environment? who don’t stretch their children’s skills etc. I am hopeful that the parents who don’t have any books at all and don’t discuss the world around them they do leave the job of educating their children to the state – but what if they don’t?
Yes it is a parent’s responsibility but what if the parent *is* failing in that responsibility? Isn’t there a societal responsibility to ensure that parents are ensuring that their children are receiving an education“suitable to their age, ability and aptitude and any special educational needs that they may have” .
I think the difficult bit is finding a way of ensuring that the parents are upholding the law whilst acknowledging different learning methods as valid and without threatening the many excellent home educating parents for the sake of a minority.
I hear lots of criticisms about the proposed legislation but not any solutions…
I know 25 hours structured work doesn;t have to be sitting at a table etc, but my LA’s policy requires that I show evidence of it and this new legislation will give them the power to force my daughter back into school if I show insufficient information, or if we’ve decided to go on a 6 week journey around Europe when they want to visit, or if that particular individual just doesn’t like our style.
Home Educators are still, even at the most generous estimate of how many of us there are, a small minority and of that minority the percentage of people who are not doing what is right for their children must be miniscule. The Badman review set out to find evidence that home educated children were more likely to be abused (and I include denial of a fitting education in that) and he couldn’t. His statistics have been widely discredited (although hasn’t stopped the bill being based on them). But some people store stolen goods in their houses, some people grow cannabis in their greenhouses…would we want to live in a state where everybody had to prove that they weren’t doing these things and where the police had the right to enter your home without a warrant or reason for suspicion? I know I wouldn’t.
I personally wouldn;t object to being on a list if it was just a list so List a – children being educated in school and list b being home educated and it was no more than a head count. But what is proposed is the right to “licence” parents to educate outside the school system so giving the power to determine what is best for that child to the state not the parents. This is discriminatory. The law as it stands holds parents, not schools, not the LA, not the government fully responsible for their child’s education, so who questions the parents whose children leave school unable to read and write?
“I hear lots of criticisms about the proposed legislation but not any solutions…”
I’m not sure a solution is what’s needed. A solution is required to solve a problem, and I haven’t seen any evidence that there IS a problem.
If friends, neighbours, family members, etc, etc, are genuinely concerned that parents are failing to provide an education for a child, then they can report them. And they do – anecdotally, I’m forever hearing stories of “unknown” HE families who are “shopped” to the Local Authority, either by people who didn’t understand the education that was on offer, or who were making malicious referrals because of their disapproval of HE in general.
It’s just the same as with a safeguarding/welfare issue – if you are worried about the child next door, you ring social services.
There seems to be this concern that HE children are being kept in the cupboard under the stairs, like Harry Potter, where no-one can see them, and no-one can hear them cry. Except that there is NO EVIDENCE that that has happened – and heaven knows that the Badman Review would have loved to find some evidence. It just wasn’t there.
The current system, then, is working – HE children are out in the community, and when the community is concerned, the LA gets involved. Surely that’s how it’s supposed to work? Surely we don’t want to live in a world where the state takes responsibility for CHECKING on the well-being of all children, all the time?
There may be ‘no evidence’ of the Harry Potter-sleeping in a cupboard neglected children, but that is because they are so hard to find, not because they don’t exist. My own half-brother is one of these children and his suffering and isolation is VERY real.
I am fairly sure he cannot be the only one who has fallen off the radar because of being home-educated and with a parent who doesn’t have his best interests at heart and not allowed to see anyone else (eg a doctor) who might notice his mother’s neglect. Schools aren’t there just to educate but they also keep an eye on kids in other ways. So, it would be good to have at least *something* that keeps a regular check on the welfare of HE kids too, to make sure their needs are also being met.
But the people who want to hide their kids will go on doing so or will know how to say the right things when the “inspectors” come and in the mean time all the good decent loving parents who are doing what is right for their children have to be treated as criminals. When this law passes (as it clearly will when Ed Balls spouts lies and vitriol against us and MPs challenge the findings then vote it through anyway), I will be denied the right that is, at the moment, available to the rest of the population, the right to determine who has right of entry to my home. I may be happy to meet elsewhere with people from the LA but if I refuse them entry to my home I am committing a criminal offence and my daughter will immediately be issued with a school attendance order and I will *NEVER* be allowed to take her out again….even if it gets worse than the threatened self harm at 5 years old.
The system already exists to check on HE children and if it doesn;t work, how is loading the same people with MORE work and fewer resources going to help?
sorry, Edufantastic here didn;t mean to go anon. I will go further and say that while no one wants any individual child to suffer the “if it saves one child” rhetoric being bandied about by the government in justification for the unwarranted assumption of control over the private lives of law-abiding families. I don’t think so actually. The cost of saving this hypothetic “one child” is very high for all of us. For some reason, home education seems to bring down a disproportionately heavy hand from on high (before they’ve even finished this piece of legislation, another review is being planned and there have been a couple of others in the past few years) but while it is our turn to be stigmatised today, once the idea that there is no need to prove wrongdoing to force entry into a private home is in place, that foundation of justice is gone forever. Guilty until proven innocent will be here to stay.
The thing is, why are people so against being visited at home? If my son’s teachers wanted to visit me at home for any reason, I wouldn’t mind. I might momentarily fuss about hoovering and dusting, the way I do when anyone comes over. But I wouldn’t suddenly feel paranoid or hostile to the idea of someone official coming to visit me and seeing where he does his homework, for instance, if that was the norm. Why are you so worried about someone coming to your home if you have nothing to hide?
I feel it’s the same argument when people worry about their civil rights being invaded by cameras on the street that help make the streets safer. If you’ve nothing to hide, then there’s nothing to worry about. So you and all the other good parents who are doing a good job, should be proud to show off your child’s learning environment just like my son is proud when I get to go and visit his school and see his pictures on display and so forth.
And my original argument, if you read it, had nothing to do with any of this. I was just pointing out that those hidden, abused, children DO exist, and you already know my views that yes, the smallest chance of pressurising the ‘bad’ few who DO neglect their children and/or their education into making more of an effort to meet their children’s needs then I do think it’s worth doing.
Not all home educators are doing a good job, just like not all schools do a good job. LEAs currently don’t check up on all cases even though they have the power to. Yes, they need the resources, time and staffing to do it properly. But changes DO need to happen to protect the minority who currently DO slip through the radar – even if these current changes are only a small step towards whatever really needs to be done. I don’t have all the answers, but I know the current system doesn’t work to help everybody that badly needs help. And people like you who do well without help or interference from the state should indeed be continued to allowed to do so. But that doesn’t mean that improvements couldn’t still be made or that changes might not benefit you too in some way that you haven’t yet foreseen.
Personally, I think most people are just nervous of change, but the change isn’t necessarily going to be as bad as they fear.
Two things then I think we will probably have to agree to differ as I know we will never agree on this point.
One, Harry Potter was not hidden at all. He went to school, under-nourished, wearing badly fitting clothes and being actively bullied and still no one did anything. *All* the recent high profile cases of child abuse were cases where the children went to school or were otherwise known to people who should have acted to protect them.
and two. believe me I do feel your pain about your brother and completely understand why you feel the way you do, but the system knows about him, he’s not that hidden and his needs are not being met, but the answer to a system that already exists and doesn;t work very well cannot be to load it down with more work but no more resources. I do wonder how it would be possible to hide a child completely…with no family to raise concerns with the appropriate agencies as you have done, no neighbours at all??? If this license was introduced, his mother seems pretty clever at playing the system and would continue to do so. A license to home educate is basically a license to parent and is that truly where we want our society to go? I don’t distinguish between teaching and life, theres no point at which she stops calling me Mummy and calls me Ms B for certain hours of the day. So if I have to be licensed to be trusted with her between 9 and 3 then I cannot be trusted with her at all and she should be taken away from me (as should undoubtedly be the case with your brother since his mother cannot be trusted with him *AT ALL*. It is an absurd and meaningless distinction to be fine to parent but not fine to home educate.
OK firstly, you are incorrect about my brother being known about and not being hidden even though I did not want my point to be specifically about him, I do feel the need to correct you. He is nearly 13 years old. It took 11 years for him to be visited by anyone at all because he was ‘hidden’ very successfully. The LEA knew nothing about his existence and admitted he had not been on their radar. The only reason he ever got a visit from social services was because my father hammered them on the phone every day for weeks and weeks and weeks when he finally tracked them down. They were, at that time, living in a caravan in the middle of nowhere up a dirt track where people wouldn’t even pass by. So my point is again, that children are and can be hidden under the current system where there aren’t safeguards or enforced home checks for all, and unless there is a system that forces everyone to register with an LEA and checks up on them regularly to make sure their needs are met there is nothing currently to stop abusive parents or negligent parents from doing stuff like this. SINCE being checked up on, my brother’s crap life HAS had significant changes because my stepmother is afraid of being caught out. So yes, she cunningly works the system to get away with what she gets away with. But in order to do so, she is actually HAVING to educate my brother properly for the first time in his whole life so that she can show the authorities he is being educated by producing his workbooks, drawings, notebooks, and so he can describe activities he is doing, and show photos of him interacting with other children at the ice rink and so forth. So he has already benefitted from just the two checks in his entire life. Up until she was being kept an eye on, he was isolated, alone, incredibly lonely, utterly bored and NO ONE was checking up on him. And we know this from the kindly neighbour who recognised my father in a cafe once and thought to tell him ‘I hear your son crying all day, I heard him say “Mummy, I prayed all day for a friend, but no one came”, and his mother just told him to go away’ But yes, the same kindly neighbour (when they lived somewhere WITH neighbours) who heard all that every day but wouldn’t contact social services because people don’t want to get involved.
I feel sad that the current system seems (if what you say is correct) to be run by a bunch of small minded people who are judgemental in the wrong ways. But perhaps then you should be campaigning to reeducate these people or have checks carried out by more broad minded people, rather than campaigning to have no home checks AT ALL.
I do not believe that they can all be as judgemental as you think, as the people who finally did (under pressure) check on my brother found him living in absolute squalor, still sharing a bed with his controlling mother at age 12, with piles and piles of carrier bags full of rubbish filling every square inch of the caravan, with strange idols and incense burning everywhere, to the extent it took the old couple who rented them a caravan 2 whole weeks to clean it after they had gone. My brother’s asthma (unchecked by his GP for years and only monitored when he is bluelighted to hospital) is aggravated by the incense, and his hair hasn’t been cut in over 4 years. In the past he has been described as painfully thin by ex-neighbours (again, concerned enough to report things to my dad after they had moved on but never willing to call the authorities while they are there). Luckily the last time SS education welfare team visited they said he looked ‘healthy’. Even to have that checked on and to hear that small bit of news means the world.
If LEAs and educational welfare officers were all so judgemental and quick to have kids ripped away from their parents and forced back to school I can assure you they would have found every reason to do so with my brother. So clearly some are more broadminded than any normal person would think they should be. I would have hoped there was enough evidence to have things investigated further, but alas, the type of LEA agent you describe wasn’t the kind that visited my poor brother. If they had…he might have been returned to my father by now and have a chance at a normal, happy life. Instead we got a bunch who were only interested in the workbooks and nothing more. So it seems you get one extreme or another, when a middle ground of intelligent assessors is needed. Again, I argue that the solution is not to have NO checks and not to have the checks done by unsympathetic people with a set view of things, but by good, caring home educators to help draw up their own set of guidelines for what would be a fair way to assess a child’s wellbeing and educational welfare at home. To try to get involved and campaign for the right to be consulted who and how the assessments are made. However, I DO think this should include access to the home now and then, since this can reveal a lot just as a visit to a classroom can reveal a lot rather than schools just posting workbooks to the people that come in and assess how schools are doing. You can gauge a lot by atmosphere and I do think hidden, vulnerable children would benefit from having a regular visit from someone to keep their ‘carers’ on their toes (even if it can never make them loved and truly cared for the way every child deserves). Something is better than nothing.
This is obviously a complicated case, and I really don’t want to get drawn into commenting on things I don’t know the details about, but it seems to me, from what you’ve said, that he WAS reported – by your dad. And that SS were extremely slow to respond.
That isn’t a case for tighter legislation, that’s a case for SS conforming to the CURRENT legislation – just as with Baby Peter, Victoria Climbie, Kyra Ishaq, and all the high profile child abuse cases of recent years. Those children were all known about by a wide variety of heath, education and social services professionals, who didn’t do their job properly.
Your brother, it seems, was admitted to hospital more than once with his asthma, and was reported to social services by your father. The problem wasn’t that he was off the radar as a home educator, the problem was that the people and agencies who DID know about him, didn’t respond.
Having to reply to my own message rather than RuthJ’s as it didn’t give me the reply option on her message, but Ruth…although in many ways you are correct, once again the main point of my post has been missed entirely. You fail to see that the ONLY improvement in my brother’s sad life in the last few years has been a direct result of the visits he has had from educational welfare officers checking up on him/his situation which scared his mother into making some much-needed effort with his education. Which shows that these sorts of visits CAN be beneficial if not essential to some children/families who home educate.
Anon have you never heard the saying “hard cases make bad law”? You have to realise that it is inappropriate to make law that affects thousands of families on the basis of one extreme example. Just because there are people out there who traffick stolen goods doesn’t make it right for all of us to have our houses searched does it? Just because genital examinations reveal child abuse doesn’t make it right for all children to have regular genital exams does it? No, because the abuse you create far exceeds the amount of abuse you are trying to stamp out. This is the case with the proposed measures for home education. It is impossible for the state to ensure the welfare of every child and, I’m sorry, but it should not try, because in trying it abuses the rest of us. It was not the state that failed your brother it was the humans who were responsible for him. Please don’t lose sight of that. Blaming the state and demanding ever more stringent measures that destroy people’s liberty is an easy option. Taking personal responsibilty is more courageous but ultimately leads to a better society for all.
“Yes it is a parent’s responsibility but what if the parent *is* failing in that responsibility? Isn’t there a societal responsibility to ensure that parents are ensuring that their children are receiving an education“suitable to their age, ability and aptitude and any special educational needs that they may have” .”
Hopefulmum, the thing is that there is already legislation in place that allows the LA to intervene in these cases. And as Ruth points out, the government have provided no evidence that children are being let down WHEN the current legislation is used properly.
What happens though is that LAs don’t bother to use the powers they already have. Perhaps because they need more training, or more staff, or for some other reason altogether. So the answer is almost certainly not to register and monitor home educating families (any more than all families should be monitored to ensure they feed their children a healthy diet) but to intervene when there is reason to believe a family may not be educating their children (or feeding them). And note that it is MAY not be – they don’t need evidence of failure to enquire about a child’s education. So they enquire, and if the parent’s answers don’t satisfy a reasonable person then they apply for a School Attendance Order; at which point a parent complies or goes to court to prove the education they are offering is suitable.
Anna and Ruth – that is my point though – there clearly is a problem if there is the legislation that isn’t being used properly… if we could find a solution so that the people in local authorities responsible for supporting HE actually did support it then surely that would solve the problem but somewhere along the line the legislation isn’t being used properly so people like edufantastic (and you?) who I am sure is doing a fab job gets a stupid rule that says 25 hours of structured work and leaves you all frustrated.
I don’t think it’s that the legislation isn’t being used properly, it’s more that the government have an isatiable desire to control every aspect of our lives, and Home Educators aren’t easy to control! Existing legislation covers suitable and unsuitable education, and safeguarding children (which are two very different issues). The proposed legislation is a huge sledgehammer trying to crack a single peanut. Home Edders are fine as they are.
The problem lies with the Local Authorities though, and no amount of new legislation will fix it.
Many of the LA officials who demostrate good practice are as against these proposals as the majority of home educators are.
If LAs would stop imagining up extra duties for themselves and follow the non-statuatory (why non-statuatory for the LAs, while home educators get Primary Legislation?) 2007 Elective Home Education Guidelines for Local Authorities we could save a fortune and a whole pile of work/bad feelings.
I don’t have anything especially useful to add to this post, but just to let you know I thought of it earlier this evening when I caught my daughter filling up a sink in the bathroom – I was about to tell her to come out when she said she wanted to see what could float the best: the soap or her toy boat (she’s only three, she obviously didn’t put two and two together) and I thought “Aw, my little girl’s doing SCIENCE!”
So, yes, I agree education happens all the time whatever the setting.
oooh, we love doing this. We fill up the bath and DD throws approved items in to see what happens.
She’s very good about not throwing unapproved items in anymore after destroying one of her books and getting quite upset.
Let that be a lesson to her! lol
Anon asks “why are people so against being visited at home?”
Here’s why anon http://kellygreenandgold.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/nothing-to-hide-it-dont-matter-honey/
Please understand this kind of behaviour by LA officials is the NORM, not the exception.
LA’s have raised questions about the fitness of parents based on the fact that they were re-decorating, burned incense, were gay or had a house that was too tidy or too untidy. Once you let an LA employee into your home you are completely at the mercy of their every single nasty little prejudice.
That’s why.
Oh that reminds me of another point in response to anon above but I’ll put it here. When teachers come to visit from school, their express purpose is to get to know your child so as to be better prepared to help them. When the LA come to “inspect” they are expressly coming to judge you and at the moment this bill is being passed into law, no guidelines for good practice have been given, so the MPs voting it in don;t actually know what it is they are approving, for one thing and we don;t know how much personal biases will come into play (and you can bet they will). In my case it has so far worked in my favour because I have a degree from Cambridge and they were impressed by that, but supposing life circumstances had prevented me from taking that degree but I was still basically the same person, would I be less able to do what I do? I have heard stories of signs of a “hippy” lifestyle (eg incence being burnt!) being taken as evidence against suitability, mental illness in the family, a poor-looking house. I have heard journalists and numerous posters on parenting websites call full-term breastfeeding a form of child abuse…my daughter was still breastfeeding at 5.5 when we took her out of school. I have nothing to hide and I never have hidden any of these things, being poor, having a depressed husband, full-term breastfeeding, being a bit of an old hippy, but do I fear that these things could be used against me, yes, I do! Our LA are openly anti-HE and my sole experience of them so far has involved them trying (not so easy to do) intimidate me, twisting my words and threatening me. I have no reason to trust them and I am not alone.