In the news

Eunice Spry is starting to make the rounds in all sorts of places. Following a mention of the times education supplement on the bbc, I searched and found this article with comments such as

Eunice Spry, the foster mother convicted last week of abusing her children by forcing them to drink bleach and beating them with a metal bar, had withdrawn her children from formal schooling.

and

Myra Robinson, an inspector with nine years’ experience, regularly sees children who have been withdrawn from school for an inadequate alternative. “All the rights are in favour of the parent,” she said. “But who is going to stand up for the rights of the child?”

The circumstances of a significant proportion of home-schooled children are “a real cause for concern”, she said. Recent cases include a boy with learning difficulties who was unable to speak coherently by the age of five, or write his name by 10, and received no visible support.

Other pupils were unable to produce work samples on demand or demonstrate an understanding of basic skills, despite parents’ claims about their level of education.

Now, let’s straighten out a few misconceptions here.

1) child abuse, and hiding your children from school so that you can abuse them is not home education. This case happened several years ago, before the Victoria Climbie case, and monitoring of children at risk is supposed to be different now already.

2) home education inspectors are supposed to be checking educational provision, that’s what they are employed to do. They are not actually employed to cover welfare concerns, we have social workers for that sort of thing. Given the change of procedures mentioned in point 1 above, we do not need to improve home education inspectors access to children to assess welfare concerns.

3) if a child has really been left with no visible support for five years and the home education inspector knows about it, it isn’t only the parents who are failing here. We have known quite a few families who have been offering a great deal of support, just not in the format the inspector chooses to recognise, who have been harassed a lot quicker than 5 years into the journey.

4) you don’t have to produce work to learn. It is easy to produce reams of written work without learning.

5) there’s an awful lot of schooled children who are unable to demonstrate grasp of basic skills.

Actually, the headline in the TES says it all. ‘35,000 lost to schooling.’

Perhaps. Maybe there are. But schooling isn’t synonymous with education, and it’s home education that we’re attempting to provide. Do we have to go on explaining the difference?