According to her we are expressing ‘rage and resentment’ from a ‘mishmash of ideological views’, daring to reject ‘state interference’ and are indifferent ‘to the rights of the child’. Worse still, we make ‘accusations of totalitarianism’ and feel superior to those, no doubt including Baroness Deech, ‘who would like to help the child’. To summarise in my own words, she paints a picture of an angry, ideologically diverse, paranoid, selfish and smug group. She rightly concludes that this does ‘not paint a good picture of home educators.’ But then as it is a picture of her concoction, so that is not surprising. Yes we are angry; when people are caricatured to justify oppression that is only natural. Ideological diversity is healthy. Paranoid, selfish and smug? We are not the people meddling with her life to further a political career because we feel the need to stop unsubstantiated and imagined cases of abuse. Projection is an ugly thing.

After citing Germany (with its Adolf Hitler and EU endorsed law banning home-education) to give legal validity to her perspective, she continues on her journey into the scary unknown. ‘Since home education has no minimum hours, no curriculum and no examinations, there can be no assurance that home-educated children will receive suitable education.’ Nor can this be reason to assume that they don’t, but she goes on, ‘There are no statistics about their GCSE and A-level results, or even their 3R competence, let alone university entrance.’ Shock horror, I guess you do not know what you do not know then? Allow me to address Baroness Deech directly for a moment. Your ignorance is not a sign of our wrongdoing or a justification for intrusion; you do not investigate because something bad might be happening; you simply assume nothing bad is happening until you have genuine reason to believe otherwise. And no, your caricature is not a genuine reason for such investigation.

This is not good enough for Baroness Deech, who complains that, ‘There can be no guarantee that home-educated children will receive reproductive, personal, social, health and economic education, as is compulsory-or will be-for others over 15; nor will they receive any guarantee of careers guidance. There is no assurance that migrant children who are being educated at home, even if they can be tracked, are learning English.’ So it’s guilty until proven innocent. What guarantee do we have, Baroness Deech, that you are not a criminal of some description? None. Well I guess we will have to treat you like a criminal! Invade your home, destroy your family, mock your feeble pleas to be left alone, belittle your rage, etc. What, are you indifferent to crime? Do you think yourself superior to those who would like to stop it?

Not content to malign home-educators and conceitedly demean our attempts to defend ourselves Baroness Deech then turns her attention to an even more marginalised group, Autonomous Educators. And for someone who has ‘immersed’ herself in the topic of home-education her ignorance here is breathtaking. This is her one sentence definition of Autonomous education, the, ‘belief that children can just learn autonomously without being taught.’ What she hints at is laissez-faire parenting: neglect. Autonomous parents facilitate their children’s education. They are entirely willing to teach, but they do so with their child’s consent. They teach autonomously. And they allow the child to learn in other ways too, id est. autodidactically.

Baroness Deech wonders ‘how this worked with, say, physics, and fear that those children are being experimented on in a way that may blight their only chance in a lifetime to be presented with the knowledge and life skills that they will need.’ I can supply just such an example. My sister, autonomously educated, learnt physics at an advanced degree level through the OU. She chose to learn. And, as someone who was formerly amongst that group of children Baroness Deech is so fearful about, allow me to say; mind your own damn business. It was thanks to my education that I now have a good 2:1 degree and am working towards an MA from Manchester Metropolitan University.

And the accusation that autonomous educators are experimenting on their children from a voice of the state! Autonomous home-educators adopt a moral position; they refuse to coerce because, unlike Baroness Deech, they believe coercion is evil. They do not try to produce children according to some preconceived ideal. Whereas schools do coerce because they believe it does produce children according to their preconceived ideal—and they fall short, producing academic failure, epidemic bullying and widespread youth malaise. Resulting in BBC headlines like ‘Teens “cannot function in work”‘, ‘More schools are failing under new Ofsted checks’, ‘The school bullying epidemic’, ‘Half of British kids “don’t read”‘ and ‘UK is accused of failing children’.

Having satisfied herself with such a flippant and ignorant dismissal of autonomous parents, Baroness Deech returns her attention to the general. She adds to her caricature; apparently some of us express ‘contempt for the state in all its manifestations.’ What a crime! How dare we critique government? Note that it is not even the content of the critique that upsets Baroness Deech; it is the audacity to have contempt for the state at all. And not one of us, apparently, has ‘mentioned the welfare of the child.’ Nonsense. The entire reason we oppose this legislation is the welfare of children. Perhaps if Baroness Deech would stop talking and start listening she would be able to… but no, what am I saying? Politicians like her are singularly incapable of understanding—even when they, apparently, ‘immerse’ themselves in a subject.

And what of the successful home-educators; surely Baroness Deech does not deny that there is such a group. She does not, but in her usual style she decides that this can be dismissed on the basis of conjecture. For the successful, you see, are, ‘overwhelmingly middle class, and it struck me that the provision of home education must be an expensive effort, involving not only the likely sacrifice of a career outside the home by the educating parent, but, as has been mentioned, payment for all the outings and extracurricular activities that are usually provided by the school-not to mention the examinations and equipment.’ Again I must question this ‘immersion’ of hers. Surely she has heard of Dr. Paula Rothermel’s research demonstrating that home-educating working class parents outperform not only middle class home-educators, but middle class school attendees?

Baroness Deech then moves on to the tired cliché of socialisation. Here she faces a problem though; on her blog she has been bombarded with examples of people who home-educate and have no difficulty with socialisation. However, when the truth interferes with your ideological bias you can always resort to deception and distortion. In what amounts to the most disgraceful piece of her disgraceful speech she says that home-educators ‘were insistent that their children had socialising experiences, although whether it is correct to include trips to the supermarket, as one did, or learning French with a grandfather learning at the same time, was open to question.’ Another poster on Baroness Deech’s blog, Norma W, has ably corrected the two-faced politician:

‘This made it sound like a home educator said a French lesson with a grandfather, made for a social life, and it came across as belittling to Mrs Ford and to home education. In fact, Mrs Ford included the French lesson as only one in a long list of weekly activities, to show the overall variety of home ed activities as well as socialisation. You failed to mention her daughter’s weekly activities with 80 other home educated children, or her skating, dancing and trampolining sessions or regular sleepovers — surely more fair examples of Mrs Ford’s description of home ed socialisation.’

Baroness Deech finishes by saying that even the intrusion the government is proscribing is not enough. Home-educators should just be grateful that we are not living under Hitler’s ban in Germany, the legitimacy of which she seems to approve. She urges the political elite to ignore home-educators as she has; we are just lobbyists—a category she does not try to justify. Don’t listen to the people whose lives we plan to ruin, this unelected clown urges. After all, home educators are not representative, unlike the unelected Baroness Deech.

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!

This, exactly.

Although I disagree with much of what you said about Schedule 1 of the CSF Bill, the reason for my post is to complain about the way you represented information put on this blog by Mrs Janet Ford, about her daughter’s social life and education. I have permission from Mrs Ford to raise this matter, as she has a busy schedule for the next couple of weeks.

You said: ”The home educators were insistent that their children had socialising experiences, although whether it is correct to include trips to the supermarket, as one did, or learning French with a grandfather learning at the same time, was open to question.” (Hansard)

This made it sound like a home educator said a French lesson with a grandfather, made for a social life, and it came across as belittling to Mrs Ford and to home education. In fact, Mrs Ford included the French lesson as only one in a long list of weekly activities, to show the overall variety of home ed activities as well as socialisation. You failed to mention her daughter’s weekly activities with 80 other home educated children, or her skating, dancing and trampolining sessions or regular sleepovers — surely more fair examples of Mrs Ford’s description of home ed socialisation.

Many home educators have been upset since the Badman Report because, in that report and afterwards, they have been misquoted, statistics have been skewed and partial information has been given. As I am sure you are aware, the Select Committee had strong criticism for Mr Badman’s methodology and for many of his conclusions.

Obviously, people have different opinions over whether the state should have more powers than it already has in family life. Many home educators have a different philosophy than you do about this.

But I would hope that you would share a desire for accurate reporting of what people have said.

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Original post of Mrs Ford 9th February 2010

I do wish you could see my daughter’s schedule before you make such comments. This week – Monday – skating with the home ed group (she got asked out by a school kid there, who thought it appropriate to follow her round shouting he wanted to bang her), followed by a French lesson with her Grandad (they are really enjoying learning the language together in spite of a 66 year age gap), Tuesday – English GCSE oral (two years early),but would usually be the weekly home ed meeting where she meets up with 80 or so other kids, Wednesday GCSE English Oral, but would usually be her Japanese lesson followed by a dancing session with the home ed group, Thursday – trampolining, followed by a talk on healthy eating followed by swimming (the home ed group has had to organise 3 groups to run concurrently at the leisure centre as over 70 kids signed up to this), Friday – meeting with friends to go shopping in town, Saturday – lunch with family and friends, Sunday – meeting with friends to go to the cinema. She is actually at home this weekend, usually she is booked up for sleepovers with her schooled friends who are not available during the week, poor things.

Incidentally, even though she didn’t decide to do a GCSE English and English lit until very late, and so had to do her 18 months worth of coursework within 6 weeks, we just got her marks for the coursework, A for English Lang and A* for English Lit, so her hectic social schedule doesn’t seem to be affecting her marks.

We would love to meet some of you people who have the power to completely change our lives and the way we educate our children, and as you have this power, it does seem only fair that you should at least make the attempt to understand how it can affect us. It is very easy to make judgements and pass laws without understanding the devastating effect this could have.

In our case, as we educate autonomously, with very little written evidence, using conversation, exploration, hands on experience and experimentation rather than workbooks, so anyone judging the content of our education would probably decide our children were not doing enough – yet our daughter has been tested by the school that is hosting her GCSE work, and got the highest score of any child they had ever tested, and our son was the youngest ever entrant on a PhD course at Manchester school of medicine. This is why we object to having people coming into our homes to make judgments on the content of our educational provision, who don’t have any knowledge of the methods used, as autonomous home education looks nothing like conventional school education, and yet it works exceptionally well.
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I am saddened that you appear to disregard people who are trying to reach out to you – Real people who are trying to tell you that Schedule 1 has great potential to harm their families and hence their children.

Sincerely
Norma Wilshaw

Lobbying: Given the number of people involved with the EHE review who have commented on the lack of consensus amongst home educators, I am surprised that the Baroness sees responses from parents as a ‘lobby’.

Inspection: As the Baroness must be aware, systems of inspection involve two principle factors; what, or whom is inspected, and who is doing the inspecting. There are significant constitutional implications in making home educators (council tax payers) accountable to their local authorities (service providers/commissioners). In addition, local authorities can hardly be expected to be impartial in respect of the assessment of a ‘service’ competing against one they themselves provide. Also, you make the implicit assumption that the model of education adopted by the local authority must be the right one. Given the demonstrable failure of local authorities all over the country to provide a suitable efficient education to many children, I feel this assumption is questionable.

Strangers: As the parent of an autistic child I would welcome help for my son to overcome his developmental difficulties – which include his reluctance to talk to some strangers. The Baroness does not appear to be aware of the scarcity of support services in this area. In addition, as previous posters have pointed out, the child might not be afraid of strangers per se, but might, with good reason be afraid of someone who had the power to return them to a school where they had been failed educationally or bullied. I am aware that home education is being seen by some as a legal loophole that allows them to escape the consequences of truancy or repeated school exclusions, but the number of children now being home educated must surely raise questions about the level of satisfaction with school amongst parents and children – and let’s hear the voice of the child about school as well as home education.

Regulation: I fail to see why the UK has to be ‘in step’ with other European countries in terms of regulating home education. There are very good reasons why, in contrast to Germany, the UK didn’t ban home education when it had the opportunity to do so in 1944. I’m surprised that these reasons are frequently overlooked by commentators. Education is an exclusive competence under the Lisbon treaty. The only valid reason for regulating home education is if there is evidence that home education is failing a higher proportion of children than school education fails; and such evidence has not so far emerged.

Information: I would certainly welcome more information on home education, but fail to see why science A levels and entry to ‘top’ universities (Oxbridge, presumably) are significant. Many parents home educate their children until they are 16. Few children under 16 take A levels, so the number of home educated children taking A levels from home would be small anyway – most would be taking them at schools and colleges. And if measured against criteria (a) and (b), the state education system is not doing too well.

Equal opportunity: The first home educating family I ever met, thirty years ago, were fundamentalist Christians. Their social life revolved around church. Their four children, in order two girls and two boys, became respectively, an architect, a social services manager, a software engineer and a documentary maker. This example proves nothing of course, but it is important to note that religious fundamentalism does not necessarily close down a child’s options. And although the state education system might offer equality of opportunity, there are no ‘safeguards in place’ to ensure that young people take up that offer, because people’s careers are the outcome of the interaction of many factors, not just equality of opportunity.

For 150 years, state education in the UK has been largely structured around ideological and economic principles, rather than on evidence of the efficacy of educational methods. For 150 years, state education has consistently failed the 20% of the population with learning difficulties or physical disabilities. For years, GCSE A-C rates, the government’s own measure of educational success, have hovered around 60%. To an outside observer without children or whose children have done well in the system, a success rate of 60% and gradually improving might appear acceptable, but that might not be a view shared by one of the 40% who don’t meet that target – or by their parents.

Assessing home education using criteria derived from state education, especially criteria that state education consistently fails to meet, is a pointless exercise. You are quite right in saying that the whole of society has an interest in how each child is educated. It’s high time we, as a society, stepped back and took a good long look at how we educate our children, what works well and what doesn’t, and listened to what everybody who has been educated, including children, has to say about it.