Once again I am fully in support of Lord Soley’s comments. I am impressed by the vigorous way in which the lobby for unregulated home education responded to this blog, but I remain concerned. If home education is as good as is claimed, then there is nothing to fear from some inspection. If a child is frightened when a stranger comes into the home, the child needs help, not continued protection from seeing any strangers. Other European countries seem to be running a lightly regulated system of home education and the UK is somewhat out of step. There should be information on (a) the numbers and results of home schooled children taking science A-levels, and (b) their entry to the top universities. There should be some safeguard against home educated Muslim girls, or any others, not receiving the equality of opportunity that would be offered at school, or should be; and reassurance that children who are not English speakers are learning the language. The whole of society has an interest in how each child is educated.
You’ve touched on one of the important points: inspection. Just what is to be inspected and against what standard.
If a family is doing ‘school at home’ with a curriculum, workbooks and some concept of a timetable then it is relatively easy for an inspector with a school background to come in and assess what is happening. However, if a family is using an autonomous, or child-led, approach then it is much harder to inspect. the fear is that untrained (in home education, they may be excellent at school inspection) inspectors will come in and insist that a perfectly adequate education method is changed, to the detriment of the child. With the powers being given to local authorities in the CSF Bill, this is bad news for home educators, especially as a large number of inexperienced inspectors will suddenly be needed to cope with the extra workload.
There are examples of good and bad inspectors around the country, I made reference to the NW county that is a bad example in a response to Lord Soley. In contrast, the inspector at my local authority is very good and is happy with a wide range of educational philosophies. However, it is notable that he admits that some families that he sees now and is happy with, he would have had concerns about when he first started the job, purely because of his own background in the school environment. See also my submission to the Commons Scrutiny Committee on inspection and Graham Stuart’s comments in committee.
As for top universities, Cambridge has more than one home educated student in its ranks. You may find that universities come to prefer home educated students because they have been taught how to learn, rather than taught how to pass a test, and are therefore much more likely to thrive in the sort of self-motivated learning environment at university. They will probably have superior social skills as well.
As for other European countries, don’t forget the light-touch in Germany, where home education has been banned since Hitler made it illegal in the 1930s, and where a German home-educating family has recently been granted asylum in the US. The proposed system for England is not light touch, however much the DCSF ministers would like us to think so.
As for visits, you’ll attract the wrath of parents who home educate children with special needs, some of whom actually will react badly to strangers in the house. Most of these children will have been withdrawn from school because of a failure of the school to provide adequate support, and so the children are likely to be damaged by that experience and will need much careful nurturing to recover from it.
Under the proposed legislation, Local Authorities will have a much larger workload hoisted upon them in having to inspect the entire home education community. This is a community they have dealt with poorly in the past. The vast population of home educators that will need to be inspected will want specific assurances and a long process of interviewing the LA in order to assess whether they would even consider them competent or able to assess their child before any meeting with the child could possibly take place. The atmosphere of distrust generated by the Badman Report and past experience will not have helped foster confidence. Many home educators will have made their decision to home educate precisely because of the need to protect their children from the local and school authorities.
The promise of funding for extra training and additional manpower comes from a bankrupt government. Given provisions in the legislation that allow LAs to ultimately decide cases on the basis of expediency, why would any LA in their right mind NOT exercise their new powers to just get on with the inspection. Despite the best intentions of the inspection authorities, a light touch approach, under present circumstances, has no practical possibility of being implemented.
Dave H, i think that if they are persistently doing school at home and don’t deviate from it, they’re practicing an inefficient method of education for a small number of children, and possibly failing to address their children’s needs. I say possibly because i know every family is unique. The point is, though, that an inspector used to schooling might think the child’s needs were being addressed if they onserved that when they weren’t.
Thanks, Mark. That’s a good way of looking at it, I can see myself using the idea in various arguments. Expecting us to use a method that may be efficient for a class of 30 but highly inefficient for a class of one or two. Inspectors breaking the law, whatever next?
I am shocked that a peer would express such openly racist views in a public forum. Have you any evidence to back up your claim that home educated girls, who happen to be from Muslim families, are disadvantage by the choice in any way? And do you have any evidence at all that home educated girls, who happen to be from Muslim families, are disadvantaged in comparison to school educated girls, who happen to be from Muslim families? Because if not I truely do not think you have a right to make such sweeping statements which imply that Muslim parents care less about the education of their daughters than any other parents.
I’d like to ask you the same questions as I’ve asked Lord Soley. Have you read the full transcript of the debate in the Public Bill Committee? Have you read the submissions to the Bill Committee? If so, can you share with us your opinion on the criticism of the Bill you are defending? If not, do you feel you have enough information to be defending the Bill at all?
Home education is something which almost all parents practice through their parenting and the likes of homework help, and before school age, unless their children go to nursery or they are absentee parents and so forth, all parents, more or less are home educators, and unregulated home educators at that. The majority of them then opt into the state system for under 20% of their children’s time, but not all. The rest of the time, they are unregulated home educators.
Local authorities often demonstrate through their behaviour that they lack the expertise needed to understand how home education works. They judge children by the standards of schools, which is inappropriate because schools are oriented towards teaching groups of children rather than the flexibility which allows children to pursue learning in a motivated way and follow their interests. Were we to be inspected, it would be vital for the inspectors to have extensive personal experience of home education, and even then the problem of individual differences would be difficult to take into consideration. Professions often regulate themselves through a peer system, but we are expected to be judged by people who the evidence strongly suggests do not understand how we do things, and in fact are so far from understanding us that they don’t even recognise their own failings in this respect.
I can’t provide you with figures on home educated children following A level sciences, but i can tell you that I personally teach around thirteen children the three main IGCSE science syllabi (AQA) out of school and am achieving positive results. The chief problem here is with the limitations of those syllabi – they are generally not advanced enough for these children. They have a median age of about ten. Whereas children who are educated otherwise than at school are generally ahead of the curve, A levels are not necessarily our concern because they are generally studied past the age of compulsory education for the children at that age, though i’m aware that this will shortly change.
I can’t comment on Muslim children because i’m Christian.
It is indeed the case that the whole of society has an interest in children’s education. That is one reason my children don’t go to school.
My dd has an IGCSE which she got two yrs ago. She is now 16 and studying with the Open Uni. She has no intention of taking A levels.
I know a couple of muslim families who are educating daughters and sons to a high standard (darn sight better than school!)
If Badman found evidence that EHE Muslim families were not educating girls where is it?
As for Europe and it’s often draconian anti home ed approach. Lets not copy something so bad. New Zealand and Canada offer better models and so do many states of the USA. Texas would be an example of good practice with homeschooling. New York would be an example of appalling practice. I don’t particularly like the Ohio or West Virginia approaches – but at least the families can teach what is best for the child even if there are state tests.
This Bill will leave arbitrary decisions up to untrained LA staff. Lovely.
If people in the House of Lords had been one-tenth as interested in preventing school standards of discipline disappearing down the toilet over the past few decades, maybe they wouldn’t know be having to waste their time pontificating on ‘home education’. Of course, your post about ‘science a-levels’ and ‘top universities’ rather gives away your class prejudice that anyone who wants different things in life – maybe to be a top musician, or actor, or architect – or is not quite ‘of our class, dear’ is probably a bit of a troglodyte and best avoided.
The rich and wealthy have been taking their own decisions about how their children should be educated since Methuselah was a boy, but heaven forfend that those in a different social class or religion might try that one out.
There is an awful lot of cant and hypocrisy in this whole debate. One can hardly blame parents if they are fed up with government wanting to control every single aspect of what their children are taught, but cannot ensure that well-mannered, polite, literate children who are not rude or aggressive are churned out at the end of the conveyor belt.
If schools responded more to what parents want, who are ultimately picking up the tab, and less to what Government ministers want in their latest bout of initative-itis well, there might be less demand for home educating.
Dear Baroness,
Most children would be frightened of a stranger who enters their home to question them alone without a parent present. If they need help, it is that they never have to endure an interview in their own home, by an adult they don’t know, fielding questions about their home life, educational abilities, emotional wellbeing, hopes and dreams for the future. You may not be aware that a large proportion of home educated children have special educational needs. Your remark about them needing help sounds flippant and ignorant. Many of these children do need help which their loving parents are providing to the best of their ability. In very many cases, your society that has “an interest” in these children failed to have enough interest to help.f
What kind of society are we living in if parents cannot be trusted to educate and care for their own children. Is it because they have not abdicated their parental responsibilities to the State that makes them suspicious and in need of regulating?
I am grateful to you for entering the debate. I do hope you will be able to see through the hysterical smokescreen of the government and inform yourself of the facts.
“If home education is as good as is claimed, then there is nothing to fear from some inspection.”
Bloody hell. Is there no end of this ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide, then you won’t mind the government sticking it’s nose in’ attitude from politicians?
I agree that home-schoolers should not have unregulated control, but the arguments that are used to promote regulation seem to consistently point, not to checks-up on the progress of children, but to a full-scale invasion from social-services.
I will repeat my questions here as well as on Lord Soleys Blog
Can you please point me to the part of the Bill where it will benefit home educated children ?
Where does it put the childs needs first? Not just resources ? Funding? Support? But the child’s desires and preferences?
Especially for those children with special educational needs, such as autism ,ADHD, dyslexia, etc
Those children who were failed by the state school system are often home educated.
So where is the area of the bill dedicated to those special children ?
Where is it written in the bill that there will be specialist knowledgable support and help from TRAINED professionals for every form of SEN? Not just from any LA official, with his or her inbuilt biases as to what a suitable education ‘should be’, not one who may or may not have any indepth knowledge of Aspergers, Dyslexia and a wide and complex range of other learning difficulties . Can you find it?
There really is nothing of any benefit to home educated families within this bill!
It offers the possible use school of libraries! Yet we already have access to far superior public libraries , we already go to museums, our children already have music lessons, we already use sports facilities and share science resources etc.
We have been left without support and funding for so long that we have actually benefitted from it.
We have the world as our classroom and far more diverse subjects available to our children . There are no constraints.
In fact the majority of Home educating families do NOT actually want funding or support. The vast majority want to just be left to get on with teaching/ facilitating learning, without interference from those who do not understand what Home Education actually is about.
We are saying very politely, en mass “No Thank You ”
We do not wish to cost the state anything. Keep your money and aim it at children KNOWN to be at risk..please!
Yet no one listens to us.
Do you not understand how the threat of SAO for not registering a child with the state, will FORCE children back into a system that has FAILED to educate them and it will do this regardless of what education they are getting ‘at home’ ..even if it is extremely successful and the child is thriving and learning well at home .
No registration = No Home Education! Full stop!
Yes ,failure to register will be enough to put them back into school. Even if the child or their parents do not wish this to happen! Even if that school has failed their child before.
The school system fails to cope with special needs children .We all know it.
They are deemed too individualised to be taught in a way that REALLY suits their complex needs .Mainstream schools are for mainstream kids..whatever they are!!
SEN children have to blend in with the class and for some it simply is impossible. Some are lucky to get 15 mins a day ‘one to one’ support from a classroom assistant (more often untrained in that child’s SEN) and those children with conditions that affect their behavior are simply classed as disruptive and their condition/behavior is often then seen to be affecting the education other members of their class get too. That doesn’t please the school or the other parents.
Parents who choose to teach their special needs children at home are doing the state a favour!! They lower class sizes and reduce the amount of SEN children in schools and yet are deemed potential abusers or failures for doing the very best for their children.
How nice of the state to spread these lies..for that is what they are!
How can we respect or trust a government that tarred ALL our names?
We have put up with being considered, religious freaks, child abusers, to be seen as parents who lock our children away from society, to be not giving them the same ‘opportunities’ as those children in school…..oh the list goes on dear Lord and to be honest, we are all a bit fed up of it!
But then wouldn’t you be if we constantly accused you of failing your child or of being a potential abuser , even without ANY evidence to prove that you were?
It has been extremely unfair.
To be honest I am amazed at how home educators have remained so polite and still take the time to communicate eloquently about home education with those very people that are tarring our names and making incorrect assumptions.
But you see , we love our children, just like I am sure you love yours. We know we are doing the best for them. We know them better than anyone else. Can you understand that?
Parents of SEN children have often had long frustrating battles to try to get statements for their children within schools, only still to be failed by the system. The choice to home educate is often precisely because their children require a very individualised form of teaching, that the schools simply cannot give .
These children get 24hr ‘one to one’ when *’home educated’.. not 15 mins!
Yet this bill threatens to send those very children back into school, if their parents do not comply with what the state classes, as a ‘suitable’ education.
What is a suitable education? The bill does not define that either.. But then can anyone? Every child is different..one size does not fit all.
How can parents now be expected to accept the state intrusion into their homes and way of life and way of educating ,when it is the very state that often forced them to make the choice to home educate initially! When it has been the state that broke the trust.
These people have been failed by the system and yet are now expected to allow the state system to tell them how to do things. Even when the state couldn’t do it right for their children initially.
It makes no sense to anyone with any understanding of how children learn ….and it is no wonder why so many parents feel there is no trust/bond between them and their local authorities anymore!
Also you say that we mustn’t class our children as possesions. I agree , my child is her own person…..and yet confusingly that is indeed what the state aims to do.
The state aims to be the one who decides what is best for the child. It wants to own that right to decide what’s best for a child, a child that I nurtued in my womb for 9 months, a child I gave birth to, a child I cared for when poorly, a child I taught to speak, a child I toilet trained, a child that I brought up, taught manners and compassion to, fed and cared for.
Why should the INCREDIBLY important decision as to how she learns suddenly be handed over to the state as soon as she is 5?
If the state has no evidence of wrong doing ,failure to educate or abuse by the parents at all ,why should the state be the one to decide how the child is educated, when it has been me that has been trusted to bring her up without suspicion or interference from anyone until school age?
What happens when children reach 5 yrs of age? Do all parents suddenly become abusers or unable to know what is best for their children? Can I see proof of this anywhere?
This Bill needs to be understood for what it really is.It is NOT about education or the childs needs, it is about mistrust of parents and that in itself is why so many home educators opposed it.
Accusations and mistrust are not the way to forge working ,trusting relationships.
A vast majority of Home educators oppose this bill and I am one of them.
* home education is NOT restricted to IN the home
Home education IS ALREADY REGULATED.
Can you read?
Dear Baroness Deech, “If home education is as good as is claimed, then there is nothing to fear from some inspection.” We hear this so often – but alas there is something to fear; the home educating community has experience of inspection, experience of inspectors judging home educated children by the only standard they understand i.e. the way things are done in school, experience of inspectors who have a prejudice against home education, experience of inspectors who advocate “tough love” (forcing a child traumatised by bullying back to school) and experience of inspectors who blithely recommend that a child returns to a school that has failed, despite the parents hopes over several years, to meet its needs (special or otherwise). It is, more often than not, not a child’s generalised fear of strangers at issue here, but a well-founded fear of the power of an ignorant official. Sadly relationships between home-educators and local authorities are poor in many parts of the country as a result of such ignorance, vastly too poor at this stage for talk of training for officials to cut any ice.
It is common to be thought to be overstating the case on this issue but readers of these comments are asked to think twice. An acquaintance of mine recently had a meeting with the local authority to discuss her daughter who had been experiencing long-term, serious bullying at school. When the issue of home-education was raised she was told that home education was illegal! Luckily she knew better, but the point I wish to make is that 15 years ago when I first started home-educating, such stories used to shock me, now they are commonplace – I have heard similar tales of ignorance and prejudice so many times. Home educators do care about the rights of children and about abuse. Our outrage is about another form of abuse, the abuse of power that we fear will follow this legislation.
No! Do NOT try to play the ‘if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear’ card. We’ve seen too many cases where people with nothing to hide have found that something as innocent as being half way through decorating when an ‘official’ paid a visit got them investigated by social services. Our homes are private, they reflect who we are and as such allow FAR too much scope for the personal prejudices of LA officials, especially when they are given the kind of wide ranging powers that this bill proposes. Check out MP C Flint’s contribution to the Commons Bill Committee on last Thursday, the bit where she described how an EHE report included reference to incense burning.
Your comment about a child frightened of strangers coming in to their home shows a shocking lack of knowledge of SEN children and the aftermath of school bullying. You miss that point that the ‘stranger’ in question isn’t simply some random person they haven’t met before but a government official with power over them. Someone who is going to question them, demand that they perform like a trained animal and if they don’t do it ‘right’ they can be sent back to school. That’s not irrational fear of strangers, that’s a perfectly sensible thing to be afraid of!
With legislation already in the works you ask about academic results? Wouldn’t it make sense to research that BEFORE legislating? And that’s a rather small horse you’ve got there following an enormous cart.
Do you have any evidence that Muslims are home educating so they can prevent their daughters getting a suitable education? As a reminder LAs do already have the power to intervene IF they have reason to believe there is a problem with a particular child. Do you think they’re afraid of being called racists? Is that what’s behind the push to regulate ALL home educators, the desire to check up on particular ethnic minorities without it being obvious about it?
The whole of society has a darn sight MORE interest in seeing that schools paid for with OUR TAXES start to provide an acceptable level of education. Since that is far, far from being the case I suggest that the government ‘getting it’s own house in order’ would be a far more productive use of the time and money being wasted harassing home educators.
Quick question. How many science A levels did you get to study Law?
Me and the wife only have 7 science A-levels between us, and 4 science/engineering degrees between us. Published scientific papers between us over 30. Are we unworthy to “teach” our children. Do you not think we might spread our experience and knowledge between other HE children. At least they’ll have knowledge of science and engineering. And at a far higher level than those processed through your preferred educational system. Oh, and they’ll be far safer.
I suggest you go and boil an egg rather than the other thing I usually suggest people to boil when I read this sort of thing. It will take longer than it did for you to come up with this “reasoned” response to the comments on your last blog. I’m not being rude, I.m being honest, which is more than Badman and the DCSF have managed.
I have to endorse this wholeheartedly and condemn the ignorant lawyer lord. We are in a similar position – scientists in academia and industry and know other similar home educators. People like us, Lady Deech, allow you to pursue your privileged and unproductive existence which would otherwise continue (and probably end at an early age) in a damp, dark cave.
A key reason for home educating is the dreadful state of education, particularly in the sciences. GCSEs are worthless and A-levels are heading the same way.
We have grown weary of propping-up an economy run by treacherous fools such as lawyers and PPE graduates. Instead of debating inspection of home educators we should be considering the punishment regime for the people that have made such a mess of our nation.
I have *no* science A-levels, my husband has one, and I fully expect my daughter’s scientific knowledge to outstrip mine sooner rather than later (she’s 7, wants to be a vet and is passionate about science), although I am enjoying learning stuff with her that I was never that interested in at school. I am however, according to our LA, “qualified to teach her English” because I have a degree in it. sigh!
While I’m here might as well point out that my daughter is Muslim and I;ve not the slightest desire to force her into marriage or deny her an education and I VERY much resent the suggestion that I do! If I didn’t care about her education, I could have left her at school where she could have carried on being too unhappy to learn, but that would have beeen fine!
My son was told by his teacher that I would be imprisoned if I didn’t take him to school, he spent 6 months terrified that every knock at the door would mean I would be carted off, every police car he saw he would beg me to dodge into a shop. He was just 7 years old at the time. There is a lot more to our story which is mosy certainly not unique, but I would have been failing him as parent if I hadn’t protected him at that time and refused a stranger coming to our home, your comments are very uninformed.
What an extra-ordinary blog.
Why should science A-levels and proportion at top Universities be a benchmark? With what will you compare? National average, which would ignore the high proportion of Home Educated children with Special Educational Needs. Best state schools? With what? And why should it matter. Suddenly what is best for the child is equated with are they being taught to Oxbridge standard! Strangely many of us believe that helping the child achieve what they wish to achieve is what is important, and if my son wants to be a plumber then I will support him and I don’t care if that means he fails to achieve his ‘full potential’.
“The whole of society has an interest in how each child is educated.” is an idealogical belief, not a law of nature. That belief has as it’s logical conclusion a forced hegonomy and a huge reduction in the diversity of society. A diversity which has been one of Britain’s past strengths. Because what you are actually saying is that the State has the right to dictate exactly what a child learns.
We are already suffering from a school system that is terribly monochromatic. One system of teaching, one curriculum nursery to secondary, and all in the name of what?
He’ll certainly be earning more money as a plumber, than an Oxbridge Science graduate.
So that’s ‘economic well being’ ticked.
As a Canadian, I am deeply offended at the racism, bigotry and absolute disregard for the facts that I see in the comments of this blog post. I have blogged my own reply, here:
http://kellygreenandgold.wordpress.com/2010/02/10/aristocrats-or-autocrats/
Your ignorance and lack of empathy is absolutely jaw droppingly staggering.
In the case of “The innocent have nothing to fear” argument, the key point is usually that our objections have nothing to do with our guilt or innocence, but with our right to privacy. We don’t want to be scrutinised at every turn because constant scrutiny is an intrusion into our privacy. Consider, for example, that what we get up to in our bedrooms may be nothing to be ashamed of, but most of us still wouldn’t want others to stand around and watch.
http://maire-staffordshire.blogspot.com/2009/06/i-have-spent-afternoon-searching-web-as.html
I cannot believe that those that see themselves fit to rule us would use such a naive argument.
Sadly, I think your new comments highlight even more how out of touch you really are with the issues behind the new bill, and I join others in asking whether you have actually read the Bill, the debate transcripts and taken the time to speak to home educators to discuss their very geniune concerns before posting?
How do you propose to inspect home education? Against a school education? This has already been agreed to be unworkable, so what would be the point of these inspections?
Where would the inspections end? If the state get the power to inspect home educators, simply because they are with their children between the hours of 9am to 3pm, what is there to prevent the government to extending these inspections to others over time?
Can I also suggest that you retract your comment about Muslim girls. I have Muslim friends who will find this deeply offensive and racist.
If the standard of education when my sons went to school was the same as it is today, I would have educated them at home too.
Most left school at 14 in my day. We went to school when the school was opened and not closed because of bombing. Yet I think the standard of education was better than it is today. Even if the school leaving age was raised until the age 18, all that would happen would be that the lessons would be drawn out and no further or extra education would be provided. I doubt there would be enough teachers to fill the gap anyway. I doubt very much today’s teachers would be able to cope or control them either.
I will say one thing for education on the continent. They speak foreign languages better!!
flip, so we’re a “lobby” now are we? a few thousand insulted parents who happen to know each other through various support groups, and a few post quite rightly on your ill-informed blog and thats the best counter-argument you can think of is it?
I’m too disgusted to add anything
I find it astonishing that you have failed to differentiate between ‘England’ and the ‘UK’. The two are not synonymous.
Scotland, which has a separate legal system and different education legislation, has in place statutory guidance on home education which was issued by the SNP Government following a meaningful consultation and independent research by the SCC. However, Graham Badman inexplicably chose to ignore Scotland completely when looking at other models. Maybe the accent was too difficult to understand, or SNP policies were simply too unpalatable?
Scottish Education Minister Michael Russell has demonstrated his willingness to listen to and engage with home educators in Scotland. His counterpart south of the border might have learned some valuable lessons from him if he hadn’t been so busy playing the school bully.
You really do not understand the concept do you? This is about the State invading the privacy of MY home! The state says that children are not the property of their parents and we say they are not your property either. What is our property is our home. A man’s home is his castle and in the Convention on the Rights of a Child it states that their privacy at home will not be violated, yet these inspections will do just that!
Just exactly what will these so called ‘inspectors’ be inspecting?
May I come to your house and inspect your home to ensure it’s suitable? I bet the answer is a resounding NO! You most certainly may not! This is how we feel, we want our privacy.
Have you not read the recommendations? These inspections will take place over the course of three visits, one visit to last eight (8) hours followed by two further ones lasting four (4) hours each. Then 50% of all families will receive three (3) further visits again one for eight (8) hours and two more for four (4) hours. Childminders who take care of OTHER people’s children in THEIR homes are only subjected to a visit once every three years. Schools are only subjected to visits every three years, again they look after OTHER people’s children in a completely separate facility from their home. Why should home educators be “visited” or “inspected” so much more rigidly than these other people for looking after our OWN children in our OWN home?????
This is an issue of privacy for me and not of fear that I am not providing a suitable education!
I work full time(from home), I study (via distance learning), I teach my children their school lessons, AND I manage to clean my home without any paid help! I am also in the process of starting up two businesses in addition to the work I do! I also cook nutritious home cooked meals (not ready meals) for my family.
I am not worried about the “suitability of education” that I am providing, because I know that the education I am providing is better than at school, hence I took my child out of school because the standard of education was so poor.
What I am worried about is the lines that this inspector will get to cross and they will have me over a barrel and there is NOTHING I can do! This is like dealing with the bullies who work at airport security!
They get to strip search you, cavity search you all in the name of “security” regardless if they suspect you of anything or not! If they don’t like the colour of your socks they get to take you into a room and do these unspeakable things to you. I know that you are in favour of these actions all in the name of the war on terror! I for one do not like being manhandled and mauled by someone.
These inspectors can make up whatever hoops they want for us to jump through as they go along and there is nothing we can do! If this is about quality of education (which is clearly is not because the term safeguarding is used very often in this bill and debate) there are other ways of ensuring quality of education, none of which involve having to be at someone’s home for 16 -32 hours a year. That is NOT light touch and that is far from supportive.
You will have to forgive us if we have a very unfavourable view of government employees! We don’t trust anyone who has all the cards stacked in their favour and can make rules up as they go along. I know someone who was told in one of these inspections “I know you don’t have to follow the National Curriculum, but I’m going to tell you that you have to do it anyway!” What kind of nonsense is that? How does that provide support? How does that foster trust? It doesn’t!
If I wanted/needed the support of the state, I’d be on the dole. I don’t need the support, don’t want some judgmental ignoramus telling ME what “targets” I have to teach, when clearly the state system of “targets” doesn’t work. When I had the misfortune of having to deliver a baby in this country, I was stuck in a horrible hospital, apparently it’s the best in the country and if this is considered the best, I’d hate to see the worst! But I digress, while I was in hospital, not one midwife who was charged with my care had had a child! Yet they were trying to tell me an experienced mother how to look after my new baby! THEIR recommendations that I HAD to follow resulted in MY baby having to go to SCBU! When I took charge of her case and went about caring for her in my way, guess what, it was the RIGHT WAY for her! My experience with government employees is exactly this, someone who knows nothing about anything acting like an expert on everything and fouling things up and in my daughter’s case it had life threatening consequences. MY way was the right way, their way clearly was not!
Oh, if this draconian Bill becomes law, this inspector had better make sure they have a leg bag because they aren’t using MY toilet (see that is my property), they aren’t sitting on MY chair (again something that belongs to me) and they won’t be eating MY food or drinking from MY cups or glasses. They also won’t be getting a glass of water from MY tap. Their shoes will have to stay outside (I hope it’s a rainy day). If they need to use the “facilities” they will have three choices, either hold it, or use “nature’s facilities” (a tree) or go to the local supermarket which is a five minute walk from my place because MY toilet is not a public toilet!
So, when are we all coming to your house? You seem to think it’s alright for the State to be in my house so often, I want to go to all the State’s houses, so first I want to visit Gordon’s house, then Ed and Yvette’s house and while there I want to take their children into a room without Ed and Yvette being present and ask them how they feel about having the parents that they do, and if they like going to school and if their parents make them rush about trying to get out the door for school. I bet I know what their answer will be. Oh no, Mummy and Daddy don’t take us to school, our nanny takes us and collects us and then puts us to bed at night.”
Right, so who wants to sign up for tours of of the houses where the MPs live and all members of State? House of Commons and Lords alike. No one should be exempt from these monitoring visits. We want to see how you spend our money especially with all these expense claims scandals.
Anyone game? I think that would be a wonderful educational experience for children and adults alike. Goodness knows it sure would be a social education, we’d be interacting with a variety of people.
Any takers?
To answer Morgan’s post, obviously she can’t read or she would not be spouting such unbelievable drivel.
If this were about education monitoring, there are other ways that are cheaper and more effective to do this. The families could send statements in or send in some work samples. This as I have said already is clearly NOT about education monitoring but about the state sticking its ugly nose where it doesn’t belong! Before the state comes into MY home and tells ME how to educate the children that I have, they had best put their own house in order! Put the State education system in order. If your system would work, which it clearly does not for so many people, then I would not have had to remove my daughter from it. This I have said in a previous post and in my letter that I sent to the House of Lords!
Put your own education affairs right first before you start telling people how to run theirs!
“Just exactly what will these so called ‘inspectors’ be inspecting?”
Sue writes some perrttyy long invective about human rights of the child being infringed on the basis of the inspector looking at the decor and paint work of the home.
Sue should be reminded of the distinction between ‘content’ and ‘form’.
The inspector is ONLY concerned with the
CONTENT OF THE WORK DONE OR IN PROSPECT.
Inspector would NEVER comment about the
untidiness,dirt, squalor and so on of the home. The NSPCC might.
Sorry, that might be the case on your planet, but the reality experienced by home educators in England is closer to Sue’s version than your ideal one. This is why I started, right at the top, with the bit about variability of inspections.
If you have a really neat and tidy house, it can be considered as too sterile a place for proper creative learning. If you have an untidy house it can be considered too chaotic for proper learning, and if the inspector doesn’t like you then there’s no gap in the middle.
This is why home educators do not want inspectors to have more powers, because there are too many cases of them abusing the ones they’ve already got.
The example about decor is a real one, which was covered in the media in the past few months.
I am sad to say, that you are in fact mistaken.
What the inspector ‘should’ inspect and what they choose to comment and make judgements on are often very different things.
I have experienced it myself.
Please remember that every Local Authority is different as to how they treat/view/ support home educators.
There are some good counties to live in and some very bad ones! It shouldnt be like this!
Every inspector is an individual.
The attitude towards home education varies so much from LA to LA and inspector to inspector that we are never quite sure how we are going to be judged.
Home educators have had cases where them simply burning incense in their homes, has been commented on in reports and remarks like them being part of ‘the brown rice and sandals brigade’ have been made.
There have been instances when problems have been caused for families because the house was considered ‘in turmoil’ (purely due to redecorating) and therefore was considered not condusive to education! The list goes on.
Even a child being in it’s pyjamas is remarked upon and considered worthy of investigation
One family were actually reported to her LA by some policemen who were doing door to door enquiries in her area . They went on to question her as to why her children were at home AND in pyjamas at 10am and when she explained they were home educated, they then reported her to her LA and she had to jump through hoops to satisfy them as to why her children were in their jimjams that day, at that time.
For goodness sake!! Can no one see how this is unfair and totally unrelated to how they learn. Who needs to know this and why? What a waste of government money chasing up pyjama wearing children! How can it in any way hinder learning ? If I wore a pair of odd socks and a pink tutu would I be considered unteachable ? How do skirts or trousers make your brain work better? We all know it’s a farce don’t we , yet home educators HAVE to put up with this kind of uneducated bias all the time.
It is ridiculous that interior design or what children are wearing are even noted down! But I can assure you they are and are often used against families succeeding in giving their children a very good education.
Parents are at the mercy of inspectors personal biases. Biases as to what a home ‘should’ look like in order to provide a surrounding suitable for learning.
There are inspectors out there with biases about cultural differences, religious differences, educational choice differences too and preconcieved ideas of what a home interior should look like.
No EHE inspectors that I have heard of are home educators or has been home educated.
They have school backgrounds. Many have been heads of schools.So they will come into the job with preconcieved ideas about education in general. A view based on what they have experience/knowledge of.
Judgements are very often made on what they see when they walk in the door. First appearances and all that!
The wrong conclusion is often be made.
I know of exceptional home educators living in high rise flats on rough housing estates , with no home computer , poor quality interior decorating (due to being on low income) yet still achieving remarkable results! Yet on first inspection many could think that the family could not possibly provide resources to enable that child to learn. They would very be wrong.
Assumptions and ignorance as to how children learn out of school, away from classrooms, away from timetables and assessments, away from the National Curriculum, can cause lasting damage for the child and the family unit.
We can’t help that mistakes are occasionally made, I know that, it happens in all aspects of life. But as you can see from the Lord’s attitude here in this blog, people with no experience of home education come into it with views already fixed in their minds.Not even having researched it by talking to home educators.
Inspectors are often no different to Lord Soley and Baroness Deech.They have closed minds and fixed views of how things work. Their way is considered the only way. They appear to think they knowm our children better than we do.
We do have a few very supportive LAs.
But sadly far too many bad ones, who hold biased views on education, based on personal experiences/ employment in mainstream or private schools.
Home education is something to be stamped out in many Local Authorities.
The government says: Every Child Matters? Does it really?
Please can you provide us with the same information your asking of the home educated community.. What percentage of school – state schooled children are doing There should be information on (a) the numbers and results state schooled children taking science A-levels, and (b) their entry to the top universities. There should be some safeguard against schooled children, not receiving the equality of opportunity that would be offered at school, or should be; and reassurance that children who are not English speakers are learning the language. after all i do believe there are hugh failings in these dept!
However whilst you find out these answers.. May be i can give you some facts..
I recently was blessed with an invitation to a home schooled party with my 5 year old. There was 20 plus children there, none of them were over 14. However out of these circ 20 children.. 6, yes 6 of them had already sat GCSE’s in MATHS, PHYSICS and ENGLISH.
All of them had passed them at B grade or above.. NONE of them were receiving private tuition, or any funding from the LEA.
I was well and truly shocked, but pleased, and as a new person, not one child didn’t ask me my name, speak to me looking at my eyes, and answer my questions… They were all keen to learn, talk and socialise, and i felt no reason to be worried about our local home education community…. LEAVE home educated children alone…. Its the children who DONT want your inspectors to inspect them.. Kids are NOT daft.. They know when there are being tested, and most children, like adults DONT like it!!! and like it or not, if your sending some one in to see a child, for ANY reason, medical or otherwise.. your TESTING them!!!
“There should be information on (a) the numbers and results of home schooled children taking science A-levels, and (b) their entry to the top universities. ”
Of course, this Bill will do nothing to provide that information, since A Levels are not usually taken during the period of compulsory education. Neither is university entrance common in under-16s. I never took a science A-Level, or any A-Levels at all, but I did get a place in a university to study for a BSc; do science degrees count for as much as an A-Level or five A*-C GCSEs in the Government’s view, these days?
“There should be some safeguard against home educated Muslim girls, or any others, not receiving the equality of opportunity that would be offered at school, or should be; and reassurance that children who are not English speakers are learning the language. The whole of society has an interest in how each child is educated.”
I am appalled this comment. Do you seriously mean that Muslims need closer scrutiny than other ethnic groups? That cultures which employ a language other than English as their first language are educationally inferior? Are you really suggesting that monitoring should be biased according to the religion and cultural background of families?
Society has no interest in *how* each child is educated, only in how well educated they are when they reach adulthood. If a child studies geology at six and learns to read at ten, instead of the other way round, what difference does or should it make to that child’s future prospects?
“Society has no interest in *how* each child is educated, only in how well educated they are when they reach adulthood. If a child studies geology at six and learns to read at ten, instead of the other way round, what difference does or should it make to that child’s future prospects?”
This, exactly.
There’s no more room on that bandwagon m’lady. Bit behind the times aren’t we? Muslims are not as extreme as you appear to think, a handful maybe, but not enough to tarnish the whole Muslim community in the UK. And why should we be so interested in science a-levels? It’s no-one’s business how parents educate their children other than the parents. If someone doesn’t have faith in the school system then it is their choice and their right to provide alternative means. I think you should take time out and visit these families and groups and see for yourself what goes on rather than speculating on second hand and frankly prehistoric information and views.
We are not a “lobby”, we are parents. We are people who care about our lifestyle, our choices and our children and wish to preserve that lifestyle for our family.
Politicians keep talking about the rights of my children as something separate from our rights as a family, as if my rights and duties are somehow naturally at odds with those of my children.
MY children, all 4 of them, are well aware of their rights. They have school as an option, one of them recently exercised her right to try it and left after one very successful term, feeling that frankly she cold make better use of her time by returning to HE. What my children are most concerned about is having their rights to be home educated eroded. My children, age 11 and under are well aware of the political process currently passing judgement on them and it has thrown their choices and rights into stark contrast before them. They are significantly concerned that their right to be home educated may be taken away.
You talk as if a child being afraid of a stranger is a strange thing, that a child who is so “needs help”. That puts my position as a parent who teaches my children to have clear rules about who is safe and who may not be into some difficulty. A stranger in one place is not safe, one who falls into the “stranger danger” category – yet one who i am forced to allow into my home against my will and give unaccompanied access to my child is safe purely because the government says so?
Well. If i agree to that, what kind of parent does that make me? If, by horrible chance that government approved “safe stranger” turns out to be someone akin to the recently convicted nursery worker, who is to blame? Me for allowing them in, or you for sending them?
My eldest used to be afraid of the sound of hand dryers in public toilets, for no greater reason so far as we could tell than that they were loud and made her ears feel funny. So we, as her parents, chose to hustle her past them, not use them and mutter reassuring words as we dashed from public toilets when someone activated one. By a staggering piece of luck, she has turned into an 11 year old who isn’t afraid of them (shock, horror, parent gets it right). But by your logic, she would have been a child who needed help – so perhaps she would have been better served by being locked in a public toilet with 10 of them on permanently until she got over it?
No, Baroness. I will not decide that my 5 year old need “help” because she fears a stranger who comes into her home and wishes to speak to her alone and ask her questions about her life. I will respect her judgement, respect her learning the things i have taught her about people needing to earn trust before being given it and support her all the way if she chooses not to trust that person simply because people have decided that a parent who wishes to spend time with their children must be suspect.
Please, have the courtesy to respect the people who you work for – us. We are not a lobby. We are people. And we are people here commenting because you are passing ill-informed judgement on us and we wish to ensure you understand us better before you do so.
I would like to quote a home educated child here – “Nothing to hide, everything to protect”.
Home education is parenting. And as many parents will know parenting is a hugely diverse, often conflict ridden subject.
Home education goes through every strand of life, much as the parents of schooled children home educate and all children’s education starts at birth at home with their famliy.
It is frought with emotion, with parents under continuous pressure to do it in a certain way- and the certain way will vary.
The huge controversies over what is best for a child start during pregnancy and never go away. As a breastfeeding supporter I hear women every week who say that everyone tells them to do something different.
There is no one way to parent – to feed a child, to help a child sleep, no one approach to discipline etc – and no one way to educate.
You just don’t get it do you? Have you read the Bill? This Bill introduces a licencing system to Home Ed and the criteria is set by politicians.
I see you are Jewish. How would you like it if an inspector came into your home and said you shouldn’t be teaching your child about the Jewish faith and therefore they must go to a CofE school? This Bill will allow whoever is Sec of State for Education to introduce rules just like that however and whenever they like. That is not freedom in a free country. It is fascism.
As for your comments about a child needing help if they can’t cope with an inspector, have you heard of the term “autism” or has it passed you by?
My son doesn’t like strangers in his home. He’s not autistic, he just doesn’t like strangers in his home. When I was pregnant and had the midwife visit, he ran upstairs. This is a woman he’s met many times, and who was curious about a baby she helped deliver. When we went upstairs to see him and ask him to come out, he ran out of the room and down stairs. Is there something wrong with him? No. So whatever reality you are living in, you need to climb down from your ivory tower and get real.
If a child is frightened when a stranger comes into the home, the child needs help, not continued protection from seeing any strangers.
The above quote seems to me to drive right to the heart of the disparity between the home educating community and those who do not truly understand the reasons for their anger. It is a question of context. The quote assumes the child in question is frightened of all strangers, and has been encouraged/made to feel this way by seclusion. However, this is not the context of the argument.
The context is this; A stranger comes to the house, because they are a stranger their opinions, biases and preferences are unknown. The stranger works for an organisation that has at best, been unhelpful in the past and at worst has been the major source of pain, frustration and emotional turmoil for the family. The family must allow them inside the home on pain of prison sentance, fine and/or having their children removed from their care whether they want to or not. Once inside, the stranger is tasked, by law, with inspecting the family – in the home, education is not separated from daily life or parent and child interaction and therefore cannot be separated from parenting even in families who use the most formal methods of enabling their child’s learning, therefore what the unwelcome stranger is in fact judging is the family’s way of life, their parenting skills, their relationship with their children and the home they live in. It is highly unlikely that the stranger will have any first-hand experience of home education themselves or that they can view cultural or lifestyle differences that are unfamiliar to them without suspicion – it is human nature to be wary of that which is unknown. This stranger will then remain in the home for a number of hours, with the power to demand to see anything they wish whether that be something the child has produced, the child’s bedroom or the child itself and the family will be forced to comply on pain of prison, fine and losing their way of life. The child, whose work may be private to them, whose bedroom is a haven to get away from the world and who may have serious concerns over talking to this stranger without the support of their parents presence will be put in a position of powerlessness, forced to allow the stranger to violate their privacy with no recourse to protest. The child, and family, will be well aware that it’s performance for the stranger may well be a big factor that determines whether or not the family’s way of life will be preserved. The child will be afraid of ‘getting it wrong’, they will be afraid that they may, personally, be the one who destroys the status quo by not being good enough or saying the wrong thing. They will pick up on tensions from the parents who may well have serious concerns over the stranger – they are afraid for their child because they know so little about the stranger. Is this person a liar who will claim untrue things about their family and their child? Is this person a manipulator who will persuade them or their child to say things they do not mean? Is this person prejudiced against something important to the family, such as race, economic status, the area they live in, religion, certain parenting phillosophies, transient lifestyles? Is this person abusive? Is this person close-minded? Has this person any real experience with things that may be affecting your child and understand how they may make the child react to them, such as disabilities, previous trauma, special talents, mental illness, intense emotions, high intelligence? Is this person even aware that the child is affected by these things? The parents are afraid of the power this stranger wields, as nothing in the law puts any limits on the reasons this stranger can give for destroying their way of life, allowing this total stranger to make an entirely subjective judgement that could easily be based on something as simple as a clash of personality and gives the family little recourse to appeal against any such judgement.
Worse yet, this person may not be a stranger. It may be the family have to deal with someone who has already made their life a misery in the past, either by causing or exaserbating serious problems at a time when a particular family may have been trying to sort out issues with a school or who has previously visited them before the law altered and shown a lack of understanding of home education practices, severe prejudice or, as is actually quite common, a lack of understanding of the law and the respective duties of themselves and the families within it. The prospect of seeing such a person again in a state where that person has all the power even within the families own homes, while the parents have no protection in law would be beyond frightening.
You say we have nothing to fear from inspection if what we are doing is ‘as good as is claimed’, but the fact of the matter is, there is no one right way of educating your child just as there is no one right way of living. The effectiveness of an education can only truly be measured in the adult the child will become, and suitability is not a universal standard but implict on the individual needs of each child. What looks like ‘poor’ education to an outsider may be precisely what that child needs at that particular time and unless an inspector knows the child well and is open to educational phillosophies that they may personally not believe in, know about or understand, appearances may be highly deceptive.
This law will expose thousands of families to insitutionalised prejudice, where many ‘inspectors’ will hold it as a black mark against them the very fact that they are home educating. This already happens, and while major strides in many areas have been made towards improving this, the proposed law will put that work back by decades because by it’s very nature it legalises suspicion against a sector of the community whose only ‘crime’ is to live differently.
What other niche group is forced to accept forced entry into their homes by inspectors whose sole remit is to judge their lifestyle? The answer is None.
What other group is forced to expose their children to legal invasions of privacy, both material and mental, without being able to stand up and protect them should the child beg to have it stop? the answer is None.
The proposals are based on nothing but rumours and fears that have no basis in fact, elevating misconceptions and hearsay to the status of law. They are written by those who niether understand the nature of home education nor care to learn. Nor do they accept that it is the parents duty to educate and care for their child but confer that duty onto the authorities (who also have serious objections to these plans in many cases as they not only add extra costs in time, staff and resources without allowing for extra funding, but by making them responsible for the education and welfare of these children it lays them open to a legal quagmire where they will be blamed for any failing and is likely to ultimately lead to court cases with families suing them for breach of duty if a child forced into school does not receive the promised ‘suitable’ education).
It is my duty to protect my children, to be their voice and their strength and to guide them through the world until they are capable of taking on those tasks themselves. These proposals will reduce my ability and effectiveness in this and teach my children that their parents are not capable of caring for them. They will grow up in a world where home education is treated as a form of child abuse – by singling us out for inspection, the general perception will inevitably be ‘Oh, there must be something dodgy going on or they wouldn’t be forced to submit to it would they?’ They will reduce the ability of parents who wish to start home educating to do so. This is never a decision taken lightly and to add a layer of heavy beurocracy to what is already a terrifyingly huge responsibility while at the same time erroding family autonomy and privacy will cause many parents to leave their children in unsuitable, and in some cases extremely harmful, situations when they would otherwise have put their child’s needs first.
All these things will harm my children. They will grow up feeling powerless against the whims of the state, fearful that one wrong move will cause their parents to be imprisoned and in all likelyhood expose them to the worst sort of behaviours from those, official and public, who will assume the law means home education = bad family.
No other country has measures such as those proposed. No one in their right minds can call them ‘Light-touch changes’.
You are concerned over a mythical beast, the ‘possibility’ that some home educators may not be doing a good job, that a hypothetical child may not be getting what they need. I am concerned for my very real children, who really do exist.
You cannot educate everyone to the highest level, not in your schools and certainly not with the current proposals which actually demand the quality of education not be taken into account when sending a child back to school in the case of their parents forgetting or refusing to fill out the paperwork. You cannot save everyone, especially when social services are understaffed, undertrained, underfunded and are known to have be unable to prevent bad things happening within families they know extremely well.
The education of one child is not worth the harm this law will do to thousands of others.
Please, I understand it can seem strange and suspicious to people who have no experience of home education, but don’t, I beg of you, attempt to judge it or worse, pass laws on it, before taking the time to look into it. Read some books – Alan Thomas’s ‘Education at home’ is a good place to start, Paula Rothermel has studdied home education and it’s outcomes, and writers such as John Holt and John Taylor Gatto talk about things that are the basis of many home educators phillosophies. Then, check your laws. Look at the current legal position and the court rulings made based on it, and consider them carefully. Then look at the new proposals and take the time to wonder what it would be like if you were part of a family forced to abide by them. Laws should not be made without consideration for those who will have to live with them. Laws should not be made without evidence that they are necessary. Laws that detract from a person’s civil liberties should not be rushed. Laws that impact on the ancient duties of parents to their children sould not be passed without good-quality, in-depth, carefully constructed, unbiased, accurate and truthful research into the facts and the impacts.
The history of these proposals is at odds with good practice in law-making. The fear and dissention in the population is real. Would you harm, not just me and my children, but the whole of Britain’s legal system with an ill-thought-out law based on pre-conceptions and flawed data that has been complied so suspiciously quickly it was announced before the results of the consultation and the government’s own Select Committee inquiry of the review it is said to be based on were announced and left to go unchecked despite both disagreeing strongly with the proposals?
I would hope that the Lords are all individuals of strong character who are capable and willing to investigate all aspects of a situation and forming their opinions based on the evidence without being swayed by a party line. I hope that my hope is justified.
You call us a ‘lobby’ so you can consider us manipulative and politicised, rather than have compassion for us as parents.
The old argument that if we have nothing to hide then we have nothing to fear is not one that resonates at the heart of a democratic and free country. It is equally true that you can have nothing to hide and yet feel the need to protect your human rights from disruption and liberty/privacy from routine oversight.
You patronise us about our children needing help to adjust if they don’t want to receive uninvited, routine (sometimes very divisive and quite verbally aggressive) interventions from LA officers (read the cases Baroness) … but you make no account for the very high rate of disability in the home educated population … particularly disabilities such as Asperger’s and other forms of autism. Do you not also think that children in school suffer from some forms of stress as a result of being inspected. Teachers and heads certainly do. They also transmit that routinely to children in schools (whether they intend to or not … I’ve been a teacher and seen it first hand). Do you not think HE parents will suffer from the same stress.
The action is not proportionate to the risk. It is evident from LA responses to Badman’s review. We actually have a very significantly lower level of welfare issues within our community.
The Government will withdraw £449M from universities very soon. My husband, a professor and director of research at Manchester University, says that this will cripple many universities, within a system which contributes an enormous amount to our GDP. Meanwhile, the Government are allotting £500M (over the next 10 years) to an HE inspecting bureaucracy that has been heavily criticised (by others, not just the ‘lobby’ you refer to). Very little of that will directly benefit HE children, even the SEN ones. It has been said that this bureaucracy will not manage what it is intended to manage, even if there were welfare issues to manage.
Meanwhile, my eldest daughter is in the second year of a degree that will not exist next year because of the cuts. Her university (Bath Spa) will certainly collapse as it is at the brink of collapse before the cuts come.
Why not use that £500M to protect the universities and the degrees of those very young people who have been encouraged into debt by the Government and will yet find themselves betrayed by the Government by having no degree to show for those debts when their universities collapse? My daughter is one.
I am saddened by your ignorant, arrogant assumptions. You seem determined to remain so. Why not challenge yourself by checking out the whole picture. It would show considerable integrity, which is what I hope you were demonstrating to ‘school girls’ when you did your outreach.
I would love to think our Lords had integrity, as so far I’ve seen that our Government has little. I have been politicised by this process, where before I was a staunch Labour supporter all my life.
Dear Baroness Deech,
You said, “If home education is as good as is claimed, then there is nothing to fear from some inspection.”
Statistics world wide show that home education is equal to or better than what the government provides. People do not need to come into my home to understand that home education works. Experts the world over can tell you that. Yet, you refuse to look/read/listen to them and rather rest upon your own superior knowledge.
I am not afraid of having someone in my home because of what they might find. I am opposed to having someone in my home, because it is my home.
Do people come traipsing through your home to see how good a Lord you are?
No, you are known by your fruit, what you produce. As is a home educating parent. You could talk to my child on the street, in a doctors surgery, at the hair dressers or on Parliament steps.
You really don’t have to swing by for afternoon tea, and nor do you have to try and motivate me to welcome you into my home by manipulating me with your ‘nothing to fear’ arguments.
Having home educated in Australia and been subjected to such a process I have nothing to fear from it. My inspectors were always kind and supportive (I got lucky, friends did not), my experience was not negative.
I oppose the process because it is a farce. The regulation process does not prove I was a good home educator, it proved that on the day of the visit we looked good and on paper we looked superb.
But what will be the real proof regarding my children’s education is whether they are prepared to face anything life throws at them, academically, socially, emotionally, physically, spiritually and mentally. And that my dear is a life long process of education, and not something that can be determined by a routine inspection. It may just require Britannia to have some faith in her good subjects in the same way we place good faith in our leaders to lead in a worthy manner and in our decision makers to be well informed.
You said, “If a child is frightened when a stranger comes into the home, the child needs help, not continued protection from seeing any strangers.”
Well that depends on the situation doesn’t it? As a parent I teach my children the concept of stranger danger. They are made aware of the tactics paedophiles for instance use to tempt children away from parents or manipulate their behavior. And as paedophiles can crawl their way into every section of society, both high and low (as news papers readily report) I am not that comfortable with leaving my children alone with people I do not know.
The UK has the chance here to be a world leader in terms of their stance on home education and regulation. England in particular given its already wonderful acceptance and freedoms regarding Education Otherwise, could be on the doorstep of becoming hugely progressive depending on the outcomes of this bill. They could well go on to be a nation that is not afraid to support those who take alternate routes and actually be the clever country they dream of being, by allowing minds to be freely educated at home. Allowing the freedom for minds to be encouraged to think outside the square in ways that unique cleverness often demands.
But alas I feel they will most likely make the same mistakes as their European counterparts, despite statistics, and end up in the same sandbox as all the other mediocre decision makers.
There does not need to be information regarding GCSE’s or A Levels because these are NOT the only methods of education that home educators are using. These are the ones that work best for the State. And as for entry into top universities, not everyone needs to go to university to succeed in life, and certainly one does not always need to go to the ‘top’ ones to be successful. Sometimes success is measured on different scales, depending upon where one’s values lie.
If you have a cultural or religious issue with Muslims then why not deal with it in a different forum, why should your personal concerns regarding the Islamic faith be intermingled with Home Education?
And indeed the whole of society has an interest in how a child is educated, and that is precisely one of the reasons mine are educated at home. I have seen what State education and socialization does to a child.
Every time I venture on to public transport at 3 pm I experience your methodologies. Quite frankly they scare the living day lights out of me and I truly begin to wonder about our future.
But then to be honest, a stop off here provokes similar doubts within me.
“The lobby for unregulated home education”? We are trying very hard – and have been trying for a long, long time – to explain, to ask questions, to put forward arguments; in other words to engage in debate, to exercise our democratic “rights”. But is there anybody really listening? I’m afraid not. Are we getting any answers? I’m afraid not. Have you been able to counter our arguments? I don’t think so. But then, you wouldn’t want a proper debate, would you? Because this whole issue isn’t about finding out what’s right and wrong, nor is it about the good old “best interest of the children”.
You of all people should now that current legislation offers enough safeguards for the children you appear to be so concerned about, both from a welfare as from an education point of view.
Which reminds me: When do we get an answer to Naomi’s questions? I’m not holding my breath. I shouldn’t be wasting it, either.
Baroness, you say: “If a child is frightened when a stranger comes into the home, the child needs help, not continued protection from seeing any strangers.” With all due respect, you betray a misunderstanding of child development. As someone who has experience of child protection social work, one of the indicators that we look for is how a child is with strangers, including ourselves when we visit. A child who acts as you described is actually a very healthy sign. Any indication of concern would be a function of how that child interacts with its parents. Unfortunately, there is nothing to indicate in the Children Schools and Families Bill that education inspectors will have the kind of training that they need to be able to assess parental/child interactions accurately as that would require them to have a thorough grounding in attachment principles.
I applaud your concern for the welfare of home educated children, as no body wants children to suffer ant harm. I wonder though that since the group of children are those most vulnerable to abuse are those under 5, and in particular who have a step-father, would you support compulsory inspections of such households. After all, innocent step-fathers should not object as they would have nothing to hide.
I look forward to your canvassing of such a measure to ensure that all children are kept safe, given that children are 40-70 times more likely to be abused by step-fathers than by their natural parents.
Regards.
Home-educators do not want you to be impressed by the vigour with which we defend our basic liberties; we want you to leave us alone. We do not want to submit to inspection for the same reason you would not want to have your privacy violated. The argument that ‘if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear’ is one of the clichéd mantras of totalitarians and their bureaucratic ilk. Would it be okay if the police entered your home and destroyed your private life because there is a small chance that you might be committing some crime? Does someone of your standing fail to understand the presumption of innocence?
Besides, we have plenty to fear; we fear people like you that might persecute us for our religious and philosophical beliefs or our lifestyles. What do you mean, ‘There should be some safeguard against home educated Muslim girls’? You wonder why we fear prejudice and then make statements of that nature! You should be ashamed of yourself. I feel embarrassed to have politicians of such little moral character represent the people in this country. Your grasp of justice is mediocre.
On a more personal level I was home-educated; I was one of the children you now so belittlingly demand get protection from their own families. My parents educated me according to an autonomous approach; I learnt what I wanted to learn at my own pace. In some subjects I was ahead of my peers, in others I was behind. This has not stopped me from being employed, paying taxes, acquiring an Upper Second-class Honours and (presently) working towards getting an MA. Yet if I had lived under the inspection regime that you demand I would have certainly been returned to a school in which I was violently bullied—a euphemism for abuse.
For all of these reasons do not be surprised when I (and many like me) are unimpressed by the vigorous way in which your flippantly dismiss our concerns.
The thing which annoys me more than anything about this post is that it betrays a belief that those in the Houses Of Parliament are our masters, whereas they are SERVANTS OF THE PEOPLE.
You to what we as a society want NOT the other way around. Of course, in our monarchist and socially stratified society you may have forgotten this because ‘mummy knows best’.
WE are the masters of our destiny, you are there to keep the peace and deliver what we ask via the election of our democratically elected representatives. And don’t you ever, ever, ever forget it.
“If home education is as good as is claimed, then there is nothing to fear from some inspection.”
According to the BBC’s recent Panorama:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00qs991/Panorama_Are_You_a_Danger_to_Kids/
at least 2500 people have been falsely accused under the CRB checking system. These innocent people will have had their lives blighted and very often their careers completely destroyed.
And goodness knows how many others have been so falsely accused and have yet to clear their names.
I can confidently assert that I have done absolutely nothing wrong in my part-time job of caring for vulnerable adults, (in fact I work my socks off), yet the Panorama programme gave me terrible pause for thought, since I now learn that anyone can now be deemed guilty on the basis of mere supposition and unsubstantiated allegations.
I have, for example, been involved in instituting Protection of Vulnerable Adult Schemes for some of the people I work with. I have incurred the terrible wrath of angry family members who in trying to get out of having to admit that they have done some terrible things, have hurled terrible and utterly false accusations at myself and my work colleagues. If these were to get back to the ISA, what would become of my career?
It is a terrible, terrible thing for a state to imagine that it can be all-seeing and all-knowing and that the populace may defer its judgement to it.
We must wise up and try to make sensible judgements for ourselves, and not defer to government for it can never macromanage accurately and will devastate lives in the process.
There are exact parallels here with what is happening to home educators. Home educators are right to be fearful, for they stand to lose their whole way of lives on the basis of a subjective allegation by an LA officer and they will have no defence to fall back on in court.
This is simply nightmarish.
One other Eu
One other European country has banned home education although I believe it still takes place there. That country is Germany, a family was recently granted asylum in the US because of this denial of their human rights. Badman was very impressed by this law, which was introduced by Hitler to ensure that no youth escaped the Nazi youth propaganda.
But of course no one there had anything to fear unless they has something to hide.
“If home education is as good as is claimed, then there is nothing to fear from some inspection.”
Nothing to hide nothing to fear huh?
Would you like to publish your bank statements, internet activity log, emails, credit card statements on the internet then please so that we can verify you are not downloading or purchasing porn or pirated or otherwise illegal material and we can verify you are not fiddling your expenses. Because as we all know, holding a public post could very well be a cover for child abuse or fraud so it’s only fair we remove the right to privacy of every last one of you.
I still patiently await a reply to my post.
My daughter will chatter away to strangers for hours, but she burst into tears when I explained to her the recomendation that she could be interviewed alone by someone she doesn’t know if that ‘official’ deems it necessary. She is a confident, individual six year old who definately knows her own mind and has been encouraged from an early age to speak her mind. If the thought of overly intrusive inspections can drive my daughter to tears I shudder to think what effect it could have on children who have issues with this kind of situation, whether they are SEN or painfully shy, like my son who will only open up to someone he has grown to know well.
We have everything to fear! But I have nothing to hide, in fact I show off my children and the ‘work’ they do all the time, because I am so so very proud of them and the wonderful things the accomplish every single day.
Its the thought that a complete stranger will come into our home, know nothing about us or the way we educate our children and be in such a position of power over us, will judge us on something they know little or nothing about.
“If a child is frightened by a stranger coming into the home, the child needs help, not continued protection from seeing any strangers”
I am staggered by this comment. Firstly, you are deeming your opinion of what a child needs to be the correct one, whilst asserting that a parent who wishes to protect their child is in the wrong. Secondly, you are assuming that all children are the same. Thirdly, you have given no indication of understanding the reason(s) why that child may be frightened. Furthermore, you give no respect to the rights of a child who may not wish to see, speak or interact with someone they do not know. You give no respect to parents, for their right to privacy and a basic assumption of innocence in the absence of any evidence to the contrary. You pay no heed, or even any mention of, children who suffer from various types of disability that may make it difficult for them to cope with new people or changes to their routine.
Saying people should be fine about being inspected if they’re doing a good job is like saying no-one should object to being arrested and questioned once a year in case they’ve committed a crime and the police don’t know. It’s like saying everyone in the country ought to have to keep a log of where they are and what they did so they can prove it wasn’t them that committed the burglary that took place the previous evening. Furthermore, what are you going to inspect? And how? Many parents remove their children from school because they are constantly being compared to a artificially set level of attainment that may or may not be relevant to them – or to anything else, for that matter. Children are deemed to be ‘failing’ because they aren’t ‘keeping up’ with work that they’re supposed to be able to do simply because of their date of birth. As the mother of an autistic child, one of the biggest problems we have encountered is the shocking ignorance and lack of training in every agency we have approached for help and support. Two and a half years of endless meetings, dozens of reports and goodness only knows how many assessments produced nothing of any use to anybody. No-one had a clue what to do. I started off teaching my son the basics – how to wash, dress, use a toilet. Then we moved on to learning how to play, how to cook, how to use a bus and go to the greengrocers. Now we’re working on language skills. How is an ‘inspector’ going to assess that? How will they decide whether or not what I do with my boy is up to their standard?
You don’t know what you’re doing. You approach things like someone on a long car journey with no map and no directions. You keep re-routing and taking the wrong turns because you have no clear overall idea of education itself or any form of living that doesn’t involve being able to fill in a form at the end of the day. You work on superficial appearances and deem ‘appropriate’ as being something that looks fine on the surface. Who is doing a better job as an educator? The parent with a naturally gifted child who loves to study and passes one exam after another with only a basic amount of input from anybody else, or the parent who spends three years teaching her son how to dress himself? You set a benchmark of ‘normal’ and if children aren’t meeting that you assume there’s a problem in the family. We don’t want or need you in our lives. I want to teach my son how to live and enjoy life and how to make the most of what he has and be as independent as possible. I don’t want to spend my year picking things that I think might keep the inspector happy.
Except that if your child is ‘gifted’ then you’re probably hothousing them and keeping them locked in their cupboard with their books and not giving them a ‘balanced’ education etc etc… There is a stick for each of us in this. We are too intense and too hands off, too religious and incapable of teaching ‘values’, preventing our children from seeing the real world and spending too much time away from our desks…
“Who is doing a better job as an educator? The parent with a naturally gifted child who loves to study and passes one exam after another with only a basic amount of input from anybody else, or the parent who spends three years teaching her son how to dress himself?”
Sarah, I apologise, it wasn’t meant as a dig or a slight towards those with naturally gifted children, I was trying to make the point that it isn’t possible to judge what’s being provided at home because everyone’s so different. My fear is that bringing in a yardstick to measure success by will create endless problems simply because there is no ‘normal’ or ‘usual’ benchmark so the ones that are put in place are always created artificially. Apologies for any offence caused.
i agree with you your doing a great job for your son. I wish you and all home educators best of luck and dont give in to Balls?DCSF
“There should be some safeguard against home educated Muslim girls, or any others, not receiving the equality of opportunity that would be offered at school, or should be;”
Nice attempt at the equal rights for girls angle but *ahem* your prejudice is showing…
“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Baroness Deech I am astounded at your crass remarks. You certainly have not conducted yourself with half the decorum that home educting parents here have.
With regards to the “equality of opportunity” you mention – I suggest you go into schools and speak to the young girls there about the sort of comments, language and sexual assaults they are subjected to by their fellow pupils (and sometimes their teachers) and find out whether they feel there is equality. Then try talking to the disabled children, taught in unsuitable environements by teachers with no special needs training who are expected to cope because they have an LSA sitting next to them – that’s assuming the parents managed to find the energy and the money to fight the LA for two years to get a statement. Once you’ve done that, perhaps you could also try to work out why schools in poorer areas tend to produce fewer students for the top universities (the ones you want to see evidence of home educated children going to) and then decide whether they enjoy equal opportunities as well? The only way my son can be treated as an equal is by not sending him to school. In school, he’s simply a name on a file that no-one has much of an interest in.
Yes on reflection home Education should be
inspected if there is any doubt; it has been for the least 30 years, to my certain knowledge, when there is any doubt about what is being provided to the child.
Another experienced adult to make creative suggestions about different ways of doing things for the parent or home educator can only be very valuable.
County does not hesitate to provide such a
member of staff to go inspect.
‘On reflection’? Well, as you have reflected on this issue, perhaps you care to share your measured opinion. Please tell me why families should have to submit to this: ttp://kellygreenandgold.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/nothing-to-hide-it-dont-matter-honey/ Please, enlighten the rest of us as to why we should be presumed guilty until proven innocent? Browse through all the other messages and address all the concerns; you should have little difficulty with this task given how you have reflected on this issue.
“Please, enlighten the rest of us as to why we should be presumed guilty until proven innocent?”
Guilt and innocence are concepts of criminal law, not of home learning.
“Free” education is not free. If you do badly at it, it comes at a very high cost indeed.
The concept of the state monopolists is that you are wasting something that is very precious indeed, that has a very high value, even though they say it is FREE!
Guilt would be the measure of waste; innocence the measure of use.
I only say that in the context of the state with which the Baroness is concerned, HE inspections have always taken place, since 1944, to my certain knowledge, and that continuing to do so may not be unwise.
I have also said below that you are not unwise to insist that the cost to YOU of state schooling is so high, and of such a different measure to that which the state claims to provide, that you have opted out of it entirely.
The state claims that their perception of
what you get for nothing, but which is very valuable, is the same as what you claim to be of no value at all!
If that is so, and you are prepared to back your opinion with the Courage of your “convictions” then in the last resort you would take the matter to a court of human rights, or the court of appeal.
Those are very different kinds of “conviction” from the ideas of “innocence” and “guilt” that you have introduced above.
Such a conviction is a political conviction of responsibility for your own actions, whilst being guilty or innocent is to do with criminal law, and a claim that you are NOT responsible for a certain action.
Your conviction that you have certain human rights is not the same at all, but it is for you to argue, not for me.
In general home educators have plenty of experienced adults to help them: other home educators. Imposing ‘advice’ from a local authority inspector is likely to be unwelcome, but having someone who can be contacted in an advisory role rather than an inspection role by parents would be more helpful because those who didn’t need such advice could get on with things.
It’s all about freedom of choice – isn’t that what Blair and Brown wanted to give families regarding education? A great shame that this proposed legislation threatens to end that choice.
I would respond to your later post but there’s no reply button.
There is a Law which requires parents to provide their children with an education. In Law, the form, content and venue of that education is left to the parents, provided the education is suitable to the child.
If we do not provide an education to our children we are breaking the law, so to be accused of not educating our children is to be accused of breaking the law. If we are to be inspected twice a year to see if we are breaking the law – even when there is no reason to suppose we are, we are in fact being presumed guilty of a crime.
The Government likes to claim that the inspections are to support home educators in providing a good education and that what is being inspected is the quality of the education, but the fact is that this proposed law contains no supportive measures whatever, allows the inspector to revoke the registration to home educate on any grounds he or she chooses, directs that any child who isn’t registered must be given an SAO and then explicitly states that the quality of education MUST NOT be considered if the parents choose to fight the judgement in court.
Neither does this proposed legislation contain a single measure which would increase the safety of any home educated child, since there is already legal provision to do everything proposed with only the small, inconvenient exception that currently you must have reason to believe it is necessary and currently the parents have the right to use their innocence as a defence in court.
You may find the following articles useful:
To trust or not to trust, about the practicalities of monitoring.
Give me evidence, about the attitude of parents from EHE families.
Gender, tradition, education: responses, a discussion among EHE parents of the suggestion that religious EHE families aren’t educating girls.
If anyone still thinks there’s a shred of truth in the idea that “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear”: please read Mary’s Story at http://kellygreenandgold.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/nothing-to-hide-it-dont-matter-honey/ .