DCSF Disappears EHE Guidelines down the memory hole

Well, well, well. It seems that, just before the Select Committee Inquiry into the Home Education review, DCSF disappears their guidelines from their website. How very Orwellian. Thankfully, home educators are not so daft as to rely on the DCSF to retain these things, having experienced other guidelines disappearing in much the same way.

You can still read the full government guidelines online here and here and here. I suggest that we make noise about this - twitter it, facebook it, blog about it, write to your MP about it, and the Select Committee need making aware too.

ETA: HE Forums have blogged about government data loss here.

Isn't it Amazing?

Have you seen these photos of the incredible find? I'm loving this comment on the BBC article:

"It will take years, or decades, to get answers, and we still won't get all of them.

We can't just ask questions about this hoard, either - we need to ask questions about how this hoard fits in with everything else we know.

Have we made assumptions elsewhere that aren't right?"

We've just come back from a wonderful holiday in Pembrokeshire, the second year running we've gone back to the same place. This year we spent a lot of time visiting some of the amazing neolithic monuments that the area is so incredibly rich in. Each one we visited filled us with awe - how on earth did the ancient people manage to create these incredible structures without all our *wonderful modern technology*?

We don't really know what these structures were used for, how they were built, what they originally looked like. With all our wonderful modern technology, our great modern intelligence, we just don't know. I do so wish we could all remember this, I wish it would filter into the minds of those who think they have all the answers.

Finds like the one that is chronicled in the BBC article teach us that, no matter what we think we know, there is always something new just around the corner, waiting to turn everything we think we know on it's head.

Education has always been a natural, lifelong pursuit. The ability to question, to look afresh at problems, to try out new theories and disguard them when they don't work, has stood the human race in good stead for thousands of years.

When you explore monuments such as Pentre Ifan, when you see such intricate metal work as that above, you can't help wonder (well I can't anyway) just what legacy we will leave the future. Will we have any ounce of creativity left in us to leave behind such treasure troves as the ancients did, when we have been confined to narrow definitions of what a human being should learn; when we have had the joy and natural zest for live squeezed out of us by a tick box system?

According to a recent DCSF FOI release, the government are not going to allow certain information to be released because some home educators are attempting to harass and vilify Mr Badman. You would think there must be some truly awful things being put about on the internet to cause such concern. Prepare to be horrified.

exhibit 1: photoshopped picture showing Mr Badman reading Mein Kampf

exhibit 2: a 12 second animation created by a home educated child

Creativity and gentle satire are now threats to the establishment? I'm old enough to remember Spitting Image - every week the government had to endure the most shocking leg pulling from those puppets.

I don't imagine Mrs Thatcher spent much time worrying though, do you? Satire has always been a Great British Tradition, and looking at the photos I've posted, so has creativity. And yet, we are in danger of losing both. I shall leave you with a Ken Robinson quote:

"We don't grow into creativity, we get educated out of it."

ETA: and now it looks like Darwin was wrong!

Celebrate International Freedom In Education

Happy International Freedom In Education Day! Pop along here and enjoy the carnival - but finish reading this post first ;)

I hope that the posts to date have shown how important such freedom is, and why it absolutely must be protected from the grinding state machinery with it's tick box, one size fits all, measurable outcomes, mind set.

We love our life and wouldn't change it for the world. We hope that more and more people will come to see how important it is to maintain freedom in education, not just in this country, but all around the globe. The more restrictive and prescriptive education becomes, the smaller our chances of the world becoming a better place for our children and their children. It really is THAT important.

Even if you don't currently see yourself home educating, you never know what the future might hold, and if a time comes when you find yourself needing to pull your child out of school, I hope the option is still available to you, and you don't regret thinking *it's nothing to do with me*.

Finally, my family and I (ooh get her sounding like the Queen ;) ) would just like to send a heartfelt thank you to Baroness Morgan, The NSPCC, Ed Balls and The Bad Man. You will have taken almost a year from us by the time the Select Committee Report and consultation are done and dusted. You have slandered us in the national press, you have caused us stress beyond measure, you have made us cry, you have made us seriously look at leaving the home and country we love. But, in doing all of this you have made us as a family stronger, you have cemented friendships with home educators around the country, people we would never have met were it not because we wanted to reunite in condemnation of your treatment of us. You may think you can break us, but we are stronger than you will ever know, and that in part is due to your treatment of us.

Why Should I Be Worried About The Badman Recommendations?

If you haven't already, I would ask you to go to the beginning of this blog and read through all the posts.

When you have done that, and once I have explained just what the Badman Recommendations entail, I think you will understand why you, me and every other person in the country should be worried.

AHEd have produced an incredibly thorough briefing paper which I can highly recommend reading. Gill has also done a painstaking pulling apart of the report which you can read here. I shan't attempt to cover it in nearly as much depth, I shall just offer my personal opinions, and try to explain how our family will be affected.

There are 28 recommendations in the report; some of them could, potentially, be helpful for home educators were they implemented, but of course these are the ones that the government is ignoring.

The main ideas being pushed forward, hurriedly, by government are:

• compulsory registration
• the parent providing a statement of educational approach against which the child's "performance" will be assessed
  
• annual inspections, with right of access to the home and right of access (alone if necessary) to the child

All of which might sound reasonable, if you are just looking at them superficially. As with everything though, it is always best to read the small print.

Let's take them one by one.

1. Compulsory Registration

Suggests, on the surface, that you just have to tell someone official that you are home educating your child. Sounds reasonable enough, I suppose.

However, what the recommendation actually suggests is a licensing scheme. Parents will have to have their home education assessed and approved, and there after apply annually for approval to renew their licence.

Now just hang on a minute - as we have already seen, section 7 of the education act clearly states that educational provision is the duty of the parent. It is up to the parent to choose whether or not to delegate that responsibility. It is not up to the local authority, or government, to grant permission. To alter the balance in this way will require primary legislation, and it will open the floodgates for children failed by the education system to seek compensation. Remember those statistics we saw in an earlier post: 1 in 6 children leave school unable to read, write or add up. At a time when the country is on the verge of bankruptcy, is this a wise move on the part of government?

All that aside, as I explained in earlier posts, it takes time to find your feet when you start home educating. There is the need for a proper period of deschooling if the child is being withdrawn from school. This needs to be a time with as little external pressure as possible. Having to present yourself and your plans for home education, for official scrutiny BEFORE you are granted permission to home educate, will completely wipe out this very important time for families.

Talking of deregistration, the registration recommendation also plans to tinker with deregistration on demand, something we discussed the importance of in the previous post entitled "A Life Line".

Here is that particular part of the recommendation:

"When parents are thinking of deregistering their child/children from school to home educate, schools should retain such pupils on roll for a period of 20 school days so that should there be a change in circumstances, the child could be readmitted to the school. This period would also allow for the resolution of such difficulties that may have prompted the decision to remove the child from school."

Bye bye dereg on demand, bye bye life line. Especially when you take into account recommendation 15:

"That the DCSF take such action as necessary to prevent schools or local authorities advising parents to consider home education to prevent permanent exclusion or using such a mechanism to deal with educational or behavioural issues."

So perpetuate "The Big Lie" even though to do so may cost a child it's life. As I said in a previous post, these people must accept that they will have children's blood on their hands. This is so tragically twisted when you think that the whole review supposedly came about because of *safeguarding* concerns.

2. The parent providing a statement of educational approach against which the child's performance will be assessed.

Might sound reasonable, possibly, if you don't know anything at all about home education.

The idea with this one is basically that at your annual licensing meeting, sorry, registration, you present your educational plan for the coming year. The following year at your licensing meeting your child is tested and the results measured against the previous year's plan. If the child fails to have reached the targets set for the year, no licence renewal for you.

Why is this a problem? Well, firstly because if you are following a child led approach, you just don't plan a year ahead. You'd be lucky to plan a week or two ahead to be honest. This doesn't mean that following such an approach is slack, it just means that you can follow your child's interests which alter thick and fast - such is the nature of the child.

The other problem is testing. It has been shown that testing children induces stress. That teaching to the test kills their natural love of learning, we have seen this with SATs tests. They are going to scrap SATs tests for school children, and not before time. Many home educators, myself included, are fundamentally opposed to testing, and it is one of the many reasons why we home educate. When you are with your child on a daily basis as we are, you KNOW how they are doing, you KNOW what areas of weakness they have. You do not need a test to tell you these things. Besides which, the law states that a parent has to provide an education, the child is not legally bound to take it up. Can you imagine if they were? For goodness sake, it would be complete bedlam. How do you force anyone to learn anything? You can't, it is impossible. You cannot force feed knowledge in the way you can force feed food. If all children who went to school were to be subject to such penalties for failing their SATs what would we do with them all? Certainly a case of double standards at work here.

Moving on to the piece de resistance ...

3. Annual inspections, with right of access to the home and right of access (alone if necessary) to the child.

This recommendation is just utterly horrific. It flies in the face of human and child rights (don't you love how they separate the child from other humans as though they were a totally different species? Reminds me of the way the government department responsible for this rubbish separates the child from it's family by the use of school - Department of Children, Schools and Families).

Let's get one thing clear; where there are concerns about the safety of a child, there are already laws in place which grant access to the home and to the child. This is as it should be, and is completely fair and reasonable. I doubt anyone would argue with that.

What the Badman recommendations are saying is that just because a family home educates - and let's remember that this is actually the default position because it is the parent's duty to decide how and where their child is educated - that they automatically become suspects. Let's try out an analogy again:

Imagine there is a drug dealer living a few doors away from you. The police have reason to suspect that there are drugs on the premises, and so organise a raid. Perfectly reasonable so far. Now, imagine that just because you happen to live in the same street as the drug dealer; even though you have no previous convictions for drug related crime, there aren't even any suspicions about your good character; the police decide that you could be hiding drugs in your house so they raid you too. Still sound reasonable?

What the Badman recommendations propose will mean that home educated children have fewer rights than juvenile offenders who, under the Beijing Rules, are entitled to have a parent or guardian present when interviewed.

Article 9.1 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states:

States Parties shall ensure that a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will, except when competent authorities subject to judicial review determine, in accordance with applicable law and procedures, that such separation is necessary for the best interests of the child. Such determination may be necessary in a particular case such as one involving abuse or neglect of the child by the parents, or one where the parents are living separately and a decision must be made as to the child's place of residence.

Remember, we are talking here about children being interviewed, without their parent/s present where there is NO suspicion of any wrong doing.

My own children are horrified at the idea of a stranger coming into their home, taking them off to another room and interrogating them. I can't say that I blame them. It makes me exceptionally angry that even though the government has said time and again that home education is not a welfare issue, here they are saying that actually it is. That our children are to be granted less human dignity and respect than young offenders. No, this is morally corrupt. Apart from anything else, it will leave those doing the interrogating wide open to allegations of abuse. We have a collapsing social care system. Social workers are over burdened as it is, is it really wise,will it really protect children, if we increase their workload by the tens of thousands when there is NO EVIDENCE to suggest that these children are anything but loved and well cared for by their parents?

These are just a few of the 28 recommendations. As I said, taken at face value you might wonder why many home educators are so concerned that they are considering leaving the country.

What these recommendations will do, IF they become law, is kill home education as we know it. We have been home educating perfectly well, perfectly legally, perfectly happily for 9 years. Over night that will end. We will become the subject of unwarranted, microscopic scrutiny because we choose to take the responsibility for our children's education seriously, and do not delegate it to someone else. How can this be right or just?

Perhaps, if you don't see a problem with it, you would like to come and explain to my children why they will have to be assessed and interrogated by strangers who will determine whether they can continue with the education that has served them well these 9 years.

Perhaps you would like to come back in a few years and explain to my younger children why they are not allowed the benefits of the type of education their older sisters had.

Perhaps you would like to explain it to me and my husband whilst you're at it.

Perhaps, if you have a child, grandchild, niece, nephew or neighbour whose life might have been saved by home education, you would like to explain to them why there is no alternative, why they have to continue going to the place where they are so miserable that they are considering suicide.

Perhaps you might like to consider how the complete removal of freedom in education will affect the country as a whole.

Perhaps, if none of these things concern you, you might like to consider what the world will be like when parents are no longer allowed to be responsible for their own children. We are already seeing the start of so many social problems that stem from over prescriptive, state interference in family life. These will only get worse if we allow our parental duties to be over ridden by a one size fits all, iron fisted, state machine.

These people do not care about our children, when they say that it is concern for children that is behind this they are lying, and their lie shines through in those report recommendations.

I'll leave the final word to a social worker:

"These changes would effectively put the local authority and home educating parents in opposition to each other and create a great deal of unnecessary stress for home educators. All this would be done for the sake of improved child protection. In reality, the proposed new arrangements would not result in better child protection and may actually cause more harm than good."

A Life Line

Lots of children become home educated as a last resort, often due to special needs not being met properly, school phobia, stress and bullying.

Many children's lives have been saved because their parents discovered that school is not compulsory. Many others have been lost because they didn't. What is worse, is that often there is a conspiracy of silence among schools and local authorities. Time after time we hear of parents fighting for years with their child's school, desperately asking for help. Hardly any of these parents are told that there is another option. This despicable behaviour continues, even now when home education has a much higher profile than it did a number of years ago. Only the other week there was an example of this on national TV. There is no excuse for it, and the people who refuse to tell parents that there is another way, must accept that they have children's blood on their hands. If you think I'm being overly dramatic have a look at this.

As I said earlier, in the post about the legality of home education, it is the parent who is responsible for ensuring their child receives an education, and it is EDUCATION that is compulsory, not school. Why is this not something that every parent is told when they have a child, or at least when they are being offered places at nurseries and schools? Many home educators refer to this as "The Big Lie" and whilst we are starting to make in roads into it's demolition, it's a painfully slow process, which is a crying shame because whilst parents remain unaware, children will continue to die.

Deregistration on demand is a legal right that parents MUST retain. The Badman recommendations threaten to remove this lifeline, and we must not allow it to happen. The government have tried before to remove it, and failed. We must continue to demand that this life line remains. With children set to stay in compulsory education until they are 18, it is crucially important that there is a safety net for those it does not work for. Parents should not have to jump through hoops imposed by local authorities, especially when these local authorities are failing their child, to enable them to carry out their legally binding parental duties.

Education Theories

Some people suggest that home educating your child is nothing more than a dangerous experiment.

I was in the first school year to take GCSEs and I can tell you, we felt like guinea pigs. Since then children across the country have been subjected to educational experimentation in the form of the national curriculum, SATs, literacy and numeracy hours, and goodness knows what else. SATs are going to be scrapped, maybe GCSEs will be next, who knows. Governments have always tinkered with education, and if the current one is anything to go by, they will continue to do so until they have completely ruined it for everyone.

I was lucky enough not to have to suffer the national curriculum, and I'm very glad. I had a lot of different teachers; some were good, some were absolutely awful. The ones that stick in my mind, were the ones who had a passion for their subject, who made lessons their own. I was fortunate enough to experience the same subject addressed differently by many different people - my father was in the forces, school changes and different teachers were a part of life.

Had the national curriculum been in place during my childhood I would have been guaranteed never to miss a thing in my school changes, because the tabling of subjects would not have been left to the individual teachers. The content of the lessons would have been very similar where ever I was. Would that have been a good thing? Personally, I don't think so. I'm trying to think where I read the analogy that springs to mind. It went something like this:

The national curriculum is like a fast food *restaurant* - you get the same food, delivered in the same way, for the same price, at every one of the company's establishments. Where ever you go in the world, if you go along to one of these establishments you know exactly what you are going to get.

Now compare it to a restaurant in the Michelin Guide; you never know what you're going to get, but you know it's going to be good.

IMO education should endeavour to belong to the Michelin Guide rather than the fast food chain.

The human race has been getting along OK for thousands of years. We've seen the rise and fall of civilisations. We've seen incredible creations and feats of human ingenuity all around the world. And all without a national curriculum in sight! There are so many differing theories about what constitutes a good education, it's something people have debated for millenia. If great philosophers can disagree, what on earth makes us think that suddenly, at the tail end of the 20th century, a group of politicians and civil servants had an epiphany?

Apparently teacher training used to include learning about different educational theories. These days it's all about classroom management. I brought this up with Ian McGimpsey of the RSA at a recent conference I spoke at. He agreed that it is a problem newly qualified teachers face when taking up posts. The government talks about personalised learning, and other buzz words, but when we have teachers who have themselves known nothing but the national curriculum, and who have never heard of the many and varied theories of education, how on earth can we get back to an education system that is more on a par with Michelin than MacDonalds?

The national curriculum has been the biggest, mass educational experiment since the introduction of compulsory education back in 1870, and it has failed (IMO they both have but that's another issue). Independent education, of which home education is one facet, has steadfastly stayed away from the national curriculum, thank goodness!

I'm not a teacher, yet I would wager I have more education theory books on my bookshelves than most teachers. Home educators are keeping these theories alive because they work, they have been proven to work, often over thousands of years! No, we're not the ones conducting a dangerous experiment.

If the current government gets it's way we are doomed to follow along this failing path; that would be criminal, and it must not happen. Freedom in education is so important, please help us to stop it from going the way of the dinosaurs.

But How Will They Get A Job?

Another cultural meme seems to be that you will only get a job if you go to school and get x number of GCSEs, if you fail to do that your life is doomed. How very tragic, and no wonder that our young people are among the unhappiest in Europe.

Most of the people I know have altered their career plans many times since leaving school/college/university. There is such a thing as retraining, life long learning - all these buzz words the government like to throw at us adults, apply equally to our young people.

Home Educated children are quite able to take GCSEs if they so wish, they are also free not to. They can go to college or university, if they so wish, they are also free not to. Many home educated children go on to become self employed, and find that they don't necessarily need qualifications. They have no less opportunities than those who go to school.

My eldest two have recently mentioned the possibility of going to college at some point, so that is something we will explore in the coming years. Their options are wide open, just the same as any other child their age. They just have more freedom to choose what those options will be.