NASWE

Way back in May a fellow home educator and I were at a conference about informal education. During the lunch break we got chatting to a delegate who had attended the NASWE conference earlier that month. She told us how, at conference, Badman had presented his report to the delegates. (It was later denied that the report had been presented.) Interestingly though, one of the things that she told us was that Badman was going to suggest,was that the home educated child be interviewed on their own. My friend and I both laughed at the madness of such a suggestion, and the lady hurriedly told us she may have misheard. Clearly though her hearing was excellent.

The NASWE says this about Badman's speech:

Graham Badman CBE MA – Graham spoke about Elective Home Education and he expressed his concerns about the estimated 80-100,000 children in England who are currently not in any Educational setting. You might be surprised to learn that there are only 8,000 children officially registered with local authorities as being ‘home educated.’

If Badman didn't have an idea of a figure on Monday at the SCI hearing, how did he have one in May for the NASWE delegates?


NASWE made a submission to the original consultation but they refuse to release it to home educators, as does the DCSF.

But we can get an idea of it's contents here.

Now these are the people who will, no doubt, be doing the dirty work our Graham has planned. Interviewing our children alone, probably making the initial decision as to whether or not a parent gets their Home Education Licence, and indeed if they are allowed to renew one year on.

The NASWE website is rather interesting if you have the stomach to click through to some it's articles.

This one, for instance. The article is basically a battle plan for EWOs based on the battle plans of one Sun Tzu. Could this explain Badder's fixation with Oriental history? He expects Home Educated children to have knowledge of Oriental history [scroll to Q38], perhaps he means through experience of EWOs.


ETA: AHEd have a copy of the NASWE response to the guidelines consultation here and suggest that:

"Any guidelines that govt issue are quite likely to be (mis)informed by the information provided by NASWE (among others)."