Making It Up

as we go along

Graham Badman

It's hard to know where to start

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with the flood of press releases today.

We’ve had the government’s full response to the Graham Badman review.

We’ve had the announcement of a forthcoming review into the definition of suitable education for home educated children.

We’ve seen Graham Badman’s latest attempt at proving that home educated children are more at risk than those in school (download link).

All on a Friday. Odd time to be releasing this type of thing. They probably hoped that no one would notice, except of course for this annoying minority of EHE who keep rattling on about civil liberties. And don’t get me wrong, this is about civil liberties, and I’m going to go on rattling on about it.

Let’s take a look at that first response.

Wherever a child is educated, local authorities (LAs) need to be assured that each child is safe, well and receiving a full time education, suitable to their needs and abilities. The safety and well-being of all children is of the utmost importance and where local authorities have concerns about the safety and welfare, or education of a home educated child, effective systems must be in place to deal with those concerns.

Um, no. That’s not the LAs responsibility. That’s the parents’ responsibility and it is only up to the state to get involved if everything else failed. And I also refer you to my previous post, as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible. Given that LAs can’t educate the children in their institutions according to the guidelines above, and manifestly do not keep all those children safe, I think that they should concentrate on getting that part of their house on order, and stop trying to add all home educated children to a massive haystack which will actually have the effect of making all children slightly less safe.

And as for the idea of a review into the definition of a suitable education, what precisely are they going to review? I’d love for this country to have a debate about education, what it means, what it is and what it’s for, but I can’t see it happening, really. This looks to me like another stab at taking responsibility away from parents, who are the right ppl to decide what is right for their children. If your kids are in private school, don’t worry, I’m sure you’re next on the target list.

But I’m not about to run away from this, or any other battle over my children. They are my children. I carried them, I birthed them, I fed them, we have clothed, fed, loved and educated them and we will continue to do that. If we were to neglect them, then fair enough, there are systems in place that should protect (but all too often, sadly don’t) but choosing to home educate them according to our beliefs and philosophies, while obviously very scary to the government, is not cause for concern on grounds of either neglect or abuse.

This is where we live. This is how we live. This is my line in the sand, my family, and you will not affect them adversely any longer.

So please, just stop it now. You’re boring us.

Select Committee witnesses

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If you haven’t seen the list of witnesses for the select committee the phrase read it and weep comes to mind.

From Home Education Forums

The Children, Schools and Families Committee will be taking formal oral evidence as follows:

Monday 12 October 2009 at 4.45pm

Wilson Room, Portcullis House

Witnesses:

Graham Badman CBE;

Ms Diana R Johnson MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools, and

Penny Jones, Independent Schools and School Organisation, DCSF.

The purpose of this session is to examine the evidence base for and recommendations of the DCSF commissioned review of elective home education in England.

Wednesday 14 October 2009 at 9.30am

Wilson Room, Portcullis House

Witnesses: (At 9.30am)

Jane Lowe, Trustee, Home Education Advisory Service;

Fiona Nicholson, Trustee /Chair Government Policy Group, Education Otherwise;

Simon Webb, home educating parent;

David Wright, home educating parent, and

Carole Rutherford, co-founder, Autism in Mind

(At 10.30am)

Colin Green, Chair, Families, Communities and Young People Policy Committee, Association of Directors of Children’s Services;

Ellie Evans, Head of Children Missing Education team, West Sussex County Council;

Sir Paul Ennals, Chief Executive, National Children’s Bureau, and

Phillip Noyes, Director of Public Policy, NSPCC

No Paula Rothermel. No one from AHEd, or AEUK. The two home educating parents are both men, which doesn’t strike me as desperately representative of the demographic of home educators as a whole?

If you feel like dropping a complaint in (and I really feel you should) the email address is csfcom@parliament.uk

The Members of the Committee are:

Mr Barry Sheerman (Chairman), Labour, Huddersfield

Annette Brooke, Liberal Democrat, Mid Dorset and Poole North

Mr Douglas Carswell, Conservative, Harwich

Mr David Chaytor, Labour, Bury North

Mrs Sharon Hodgson, Labour, Gateshead East and Washington West

Paul Holmes, Liberal Democrat, Chesterfield

Fiona Mactaggart, Labour, Slough

Mr Andrew Pelling, Independent, Croydon Central

Mr Andy Slaughter, Labour, Ealing, Acton and Shepherd’s Bush

Helen Southworth, Labour, Warrington South

Mr Graham Stuart, Conservative, Beverley & Holderness

Mr Edward Timpson, Conservative, Crewe and Nantwich

Derek Twigg, Labour, Halton

Lynda Waltho , Labour, Stourbridge

so if any of them are your MP, suggest that it would be a good idea to stick a flea in their ear too.

Please spread far and wide.

Pondering that statement of intent from the home education review.

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We all have plans for the future and hopes for our children. It’s kind of what parents do. And it is our responsibility to equip our children for a life in the community that they are part of – sounds like a sound statement of responsibility to me.

But how did the Badman home education review(pdf link) leap from that to an annual statement of intent? Is it a good idea? Necessary? How would you do it?

Right at the moment these ponderings are very relevant to us, as you’ll know if you’ve read any of my previous posts about autonomy and curriculum. I’m still working on getting the balance right for us day to day, but one thing that this has brought back home to me with a resounding thud is that I could not have sat down and written a plan for the next 12 months. Well, I could, but we wouldn’t have stuck to it for more than a couple of days. And then if someone wanted to judge my educational provision against such a forced plan, presumably I’d have failed and I’d be measuring the kids up for uniform right about now.

But it’s the flexibility of home education that is its power. I have two children (soon to be three) to cater for, not thirty or more. I can chop and change how I’m doing things to respond to expressed interests and perceived needs of those two individuals, and I can know them far better than any teacher can ever know individual pupils.

For example, atm, I’ve split handwriting and spelling out of English comprehension and grammatical studies for Big. While we are still using Focus on Literacy: Pupil Textbook Bk.5, instead of her struggling to write out her answers, we talk them through together and I write them down. This has several plus points, for starters she’s having to think harder about her answers rather than just dashing something off to satisfy the need to write something down. I’m finding out about her strengths and weaknesses – her absorption of the detail of the excerpts she’s reading is phenomenal, as she quoted directly from the passage after just two read throughs to answer one question. But her ability to logically structure a sentence is probably on a par with most nine year olds – she doesn’t think where it’s going when she sets off so it wanders. Discussion allows us to fine tune this, and means, I hope, that she’s getting far more out of these short sessions together than she would out of doing it alone in a longer space of time.

The handwriting and spelling we’re addressing separately using copywork and spelling sheets, again in short bursts.

How though, did we decide on the core subjects that we’re following? Is this a curriculum that is good enough for everyone to use?

No, this is purely personal choice, based on our beliefs and experience. Tim and I have made a judgement about the skills that we value most and see being needed in the future. We are not so arrogant as to think that we can foresee what they will need in terms of knowledge in the world around them once they are adult, and we both know from personal experience that all the teaching in the world won’t get information into your head if you aren’t interested in it. What we think is important right now are the basic skills of being able to communicate verbally and in writing (hand as well as type), which means a certain level of legibility and spelling has to be achieved. We think children need room to learn to learn, and guidance to achieve that – so while we do answer Small’s frequent questions on what words mean (over the last couple of days he’s wanted to know about revolution, genre, and consistency to give just a few examples) we’ve also given him a dictionary and are showing him how to use it.

He loves to use his science book, which doesn’t just teach him about science, it shows him how to structure investigations and follow instructions. And he’s learning how to use a computer as a tool instead of just a toy – so he has downloaded things, changed his profile, created files, saved them and uploaded them. Knowing how to learn to use new tools was something I don’t think either Tim or I learnt at school, and we certainly didn’t learn about computers, the web or programming then (in the 60s, 70s and 80s 😉 ), but we’ve both managed to acquire the information we’ve needed since to have very successful and continuing careers in IT.

I can safely say that the vague bits of history that I recall about Disraeli and Gladstone have been no use to me whatsoever in my adult political life – when I’ve been interested in an issue, I’ve done research, watched TV programmes, read up on wikipedia and talked to ppl who knew about it. So I’m not worried about individual factoids when I read history

with the children, I just want to give them a glimpse of the bigger picture and we do it with fun outings and narratives. If they want to go into more detail they will – as Big has many times with Victorians, Elizabeth I and now her Lady Grace Mysteries.

So, is a prescribed curriculum necessary for home education? I don’t think so, and I think it would utterly be the wrong decision for it to be imposed, even just some basic educational standards plucked out of thin air. I think it’s individual choice and the responsibility of each and every home educating family to decide how they do it, and not something that the government should be sticking their grubby paws in to. And let’s think about it – how many of these government ministers actually have any real knowledge about education? They’ve been through it, and their children might be going through it too, but they haven’t done research, won’t listen to researchers such as Paula Rothermel who have studied it, and I don’t rate their opinions as highly as I do the home educators I’ve met who are living home education every day.

Unwarranted government intrusion into family life.

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I was watching the local news tonight, and it turns out that the two policewomen banned from looking after each other’s children live in this area, so were interviewed on the show. They were doing each other a favour – job sharing and childcare sharing, in much the same way women in communities have done for time immemorial.

Recently however, the government decided that anyone undertaking childcare for reward, and that reward could be just reciprocal childcare, needs to be registered as a childminder. Which means being qualified in first aid, having your house inspected, having to keep records and having to follow the Early Years Foundation Stage. (I’m sure I’ve missed a few bits out there, but that’s the gist of it I think.) And as these two policewomen hadn’t done any of that, looking after each other’s children was breaking the law.

Funny how we don’t yet have to do that to actually have children, but rest assured, if the government could find a way to bring that law into being, they would. After all, they are trying to control pretty much ever other aspect of family life.

The two children involved are in nurseries now, and the women are considerably financially worse off. The taxpayer is going to be worse off too, as the women are applying for benefits to assist with the elevated costs. And the majority of ppl that I’ve spoken to about this think it’s ridiculous. I’m also betting there’s a lot of ppl reviewing their holiday childcare arrangements – situations where families take it in turns to look after friends children could fall foul of the same legislation if it’s on more than 14 days a year, and that’s quite easy to achieve.

So, is it reactionary to think that a mother ought to be able to choose a friend to look after her child? Is it dragging your heels to not want to have to go through an inspection system or teach to a curriculum that many early years experts think is utterly ridiculous and has no grounding in pedagogical research? Or has the government gone a step too far, in the same way that they have over the Badman home education review?

Because they have gone a step too far. The insinuations over a small number of cases where home education has been a factor in abuse and neglect are nothing more than insinuations, and even if there were a small number of cases, it is not proportionate or targeted to bring in an annual licensing system for all home educators in response to that.

Put it this way, approx 5 children drown in garden ponds each year. Does this mean we should ban them? Or inspect them for the correct safety measures and fine ppl, even those without children, if the ponds are not covered correctly in weight bearing meshes?

No, it doesn’t. Be far more sensible to ban cars tbh, as road accidents are well up there in the cause of death stakes, and we’d be able to breathe a lot better.

We can’t rule out every cause of accident and injury to our children. We can take sensible precautions, but the Badman review isn’t that, especially when it conflates welfare with education. Just the same as demanding two friends are registered and following a curriculum – that’s another conflation of welfare and education that shouldn’t have taken place.

I am not behind the times, nor am I alone in my defiance of these laws and proposals – it is the government that is hurrying too fast into an Orwellian future that we don’t need, didn’t ask for and don’t want. Time to take a step back, Ed Balls, and listen to the ppl who are telling you you’ve got it wrong.

Are we just a crackpot minority?

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You know, us home educators who are ranting and raving about invasion of privacy following the Badman review of home education, are we just fringe nutters?

I admit we’ve made some unusual choices in our life. It isn’t standard to home educate your children after all. And if you don’t home educate them, finding a montessori nursery and school for flexi schooling isn’t particularly standard either.

But since when did making unusual choices become so worthy of suspicion? AHEd’s examination of the stats released by FOI requests show that home educated children are not more at risk of child abuse or neglect, despite the repeated claims in the media to the contrary. We should be celebrating diversity, not driving for conformity throughout education and indeed life itself. Diversity, innovation, creativity, these are the things we need for life in this day and age of frequent technological change and development.

Am I just whimpering that the world doesn’t understand me, like some goth teenager?

No, I don’t really care whether the world understands me. I won’t hide myself or my children away, or apologise for my choices, but I will fight to defend them. Not that I’ve had to, tbh, round here. Saying that I home educate doesn’t raise eyebrows, or cause ppl to move away from my children. Several families have gone out of their way to arrange playdates in fact. I don’t think home education is viewed with much suspicion here at all, and where ppl have been taken in by media spin, it has taken very short conversations to put them right again.

Sometimes it worries me that so few home educators seem to be involved in the battles against Badman, but then again, how many of the population do anything about anything these days? There’s life to be lived, work to be done, children to be raised, houses to be run. We’ve other things to do with our time and energy, just day to day things. Many home educators are raising children with additional needs, that give another layer of complication to daily lives. Some of them are doing it alone, not all families have two parents. Some are raising and educating children while running businesses to support themselves.

So I don’t think it’s apathy, and I don’t think it’s agreement with the conclusions of the review. I think that you usually get a minority who act in political cases – look at the political party membership figures for example. Or check out how many ppl actually volunteer to do anything in addition to their usual lives, it’s a small number. It doesn’t indicate that the ppl who aren’t members, or don’t volunteer don’t agree with the parties or the volunteers, it simply means it isn’t their priority.

And home educators are getting review fatigue. This government has conducted several reviews into home education and associated areas in the last few years, including compiling the currently missing in action guidelines for local authorities on elective home education(pdf link). Sometimes it seems it isn’t worth fighting on.

I believe it has to be. Despite or because of the ever encroaching nanny state, I think it is time to draw a line in the sand and say no more.

I think that we don’t need more databases, we need trust and community to raise our children and things like reciprocal childcare should be, as it always has been, acceptable in society. I think it should be fine to give your friend’s children a lift home from school, or cubs, or brownies without needing to be on yet another database. I think families ought to have freedom of choice in how their children are educated, particularly before mandatory educational age, rather than the government imposing a nappy curriculum on every childcare institution.

Am I being controversial, a heretic or renegade even? I don’t think so. Please feel free to point out the error of my ways 🙂

And if you are suddenly overcome with the urge to act, then there is a petition against the review on the No 10 website, and a consultation to be answered over the next month. I will be blogging more fully about that sometime over the next week.