Making It Up

as we go along

home education consultation

Brief reason for home education.

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Today in the post I got a form from college – additional information for home educated students. There was a little box headed up “brief reason for home education”.

Brief? You want me to summarise how we came to home education briefly?

There were a couple of years of research that spun off reading I did while on a PGCE way back in the 90s. (Eek, that’s a long time ago now.) There wasn’t an awful lot kicking around back then, but enough to whet my appetite.

And then I kept looking, and I kept searching. And when I had children, starting in the early 2000s I was still intrigued by the idea of home education, and I really didn’t like the way primary education was going, with the national curriculum and very little flexibility for schools or teachers to actually meet the needs of the children in front of them.

So we found Muddlepuddle, and other families with young children who were home educating, and local groups who met in soft play areas, and annual camps, and holidays in youth hostels, and gradually more and more families online and we didn’t look back. (Apart from the Montessori school segment while I was working, but it’s hard to home educate when you aren’t actually at home to do it and Montessori is an interesting educational philosophy too.)

And then we moved to Suffolk 10 years ago, returned to full time home education and had more children who haven’t been to school either.

For a while we did ‘normals’ – a bit of maths. english, science, maybe some history, a bit of french, dabbling in the curriculum approach. But as the older children got to secondary age, it became apparent they had their own ideas and interests and as long as I could see that they were doing stuff, that’s what we did.

Appears to have worked. Big went into school, her choice, and held her own perfectly well. She’s just finished A levels, works as a lifeguard, and has Plans. Small (NotSoSmallTeen most often these days on twitter so as not to confuse people who haven’t read 15 years of archives and think he might actually be little) has just done his GCSE Maths and English in a year with a not very local college. They were only teaching foundation maths, but got in touch (in February!!) to ask if he wanted to do higher, so we did, in a bit of a rush, and fingers crossed it went well enough. Don’t know until results day obviously, because he didn’t do months of mock papers like they do in schools. (He also didn’t do 28 exams and a lot of stress.) He’s planning music at a college in September and if you’d told me that 4 years ago I’d have laughed until I cried.

They need room to grow and explore, and yes my role is to guide and facilitate and at times challenge and push, and sometimes catch and hold. It’s parenting, without a communal safety net of professional educators, and it can be terrifying and exhilarating and actually, if something doesn’t work out first time, you go around again. It’s schools that demand that things be done to a particular schedule, and it doesn’t always work, or colleges wouldn’t be having to do maths and english over and over again for 16 yos, would they?

There’s been a lot in the news about home education recently, and it’s about monitoring and maybe curriculums and evidence of progress, and so many times over the years that isn’t how it’s worked for us. It would be a massive shame if people who can’t imagine education outside of a school get to constrain home education because so many children don’t work like that, don’t learn like that, and will be damaged by it. And so we fight on – because I’ve two younger children I want to have the chance to find themselves, explore the world, and chase down a passion just like their elder siblings have.

Now, tell me precisely how to fit that briefly in a box?

(I put philosophical 🙂 )

Heads up

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Home education mentioned in new consultation document.

Home educated pupils

80. The Government also proposes to introduce a scheme allowing local authorities to claim for funding for pupils educated at home where services are provided to these pupils. This might include giving them access to school facilities or paying the entry fees for exams sat at school. The proposal would allow local authorities to claim for 10% of a unit of funding for home educated pupils in order to provide these services. This is consistent with the recommendations of the Badman Report.

Consultation with full document can be found here.

I won’t have time to read and digest this properly til tonight, but I’m dropping it here now so that if ppl have thoughts to share they can, preferably on the blog so I can find them!

I thought I'd seen it all.

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This week the submissions to the select committee inquiry have been made public. Many ppl have blogged their shock about some of the contents, or their pleasure in reading some of the reasoned arguments against the Badman review. Ppl have also wondered why the whole thing hasn’t just been thrown out – but I don’t think the select committee has that kind of power, and I have a bad feeling that when it comes down to it, they are going to do absolutely nothing to help us.

Some of the responses need reading several times over before you really get what’s behind them. I wouldn’t advise that you do this if you have any problems with high blood pressure though.

Take the ofsted response for example. Set aside for a moment the question of why precisely ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) feels the needs to get involved at all here – in my mind it’s nothing to do with them, parents are responsible for children’s education, and ofsted is only responsible for checking out institutions that deliver education on behalf of children.

Nevertheless, they have stuck their oar in. The bit that I’ve had to read and reread and then finally have explained to me slowly is this:

Current guidance states that parents may employ other people to educate their children and that parents are responsible for ‘ensuring that those whom they engage are suitable to have access to children’. Registration would not of itself prevent those who have a conviction for offences against children, including parents, step-parents or privately-employed home tutors, from home educating children. Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks should be a requirement of registration.

I thought that this meant that parents would have to ensure that ppl tutoring their children were CRB checked. That’s bad enough when you are talking about group ‘lessons’ where parents are usually still there with their children anyway. Do private tutors engaged by parents of schooled children need to be checked? But if you read it carefully, it can’t mean that. What it actually means is that Ofsted think that all parents and step-parents should be CRB checked as a condition of being registered getting a license to home educate.

I don’t think I’ve ever put this on my blog before. But WTF?

No.

A thousand times no.

And if you’re going down this path, surely you have to CRB check all parents. Remember that children are left alone with their parents for years before mandatory educational age. So when it says as a condition of registration it ought to say as a condition of registration of birth. At which point, if the parents are unsuitable you can have that nice little newborn away from them promptly before they get any bad habits and you’ll easily hit all your adoption targets.

Got a better explanation for what it means? Put it in the usual place.

A plea to the public

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You’re running out of time to respond to the consultation.

That’s the consultation on new registration and monitoring requirements for Elective Home Education.

The consultation is seeking “the views of home educating families, groups representing home educating families, local authorities, other agencies involved in the provision of services for children, and the public“. Home educators are involved, engaged and responding, but we’re just a vociferous minority, apparently.

Now non home educating bloggers (that’d be the aforementioned public I guess) are noticing it too. Try Potty Diaries, who’s jerusalem is this anyway if you don’t believe me. Because this isn’t just about home education. It’s not even primarily about home education.

This is about losing your freedom to choose the form your children’s education might take. If you can afford to pay, you can choose private education of course, even new labour hasn’t decided to wade in there just yet. But if you can’t afford to pay, or you just don’t want to, perhaps you are philosophically opposed to school, or perhaps you’ve tried it and it really doesn’t suit your child, at the moment you can home educate. And you can choose what form that education takes.

That’s your right, more than that, that’s your responsibility as a parent, to ensure that your child receives an education suitable to their age, ability and aptitude. And you know your child better than anyone else, so you are best suited to choose what form that education should take.

How would you feel if you chose to exercise that right to educate otherwise than by attendance at school and were told actually, you need to register. Annually. And we’ll have right of access to your home, and we’ll interview your child alone, to check that you’re doing what they want, and that you’re not abusing your child. Can you imagine being suspected of abuse just because you’re choosing to do something a little different to the average? Would you be happy about it? If the school has let you down, would you be happy to let just any old Local Authority employee into your house?

Would it keep your child safe?

Can you imagine that they are going to stop with home education? They’ve already stuck their nose into childcare – every childcare environment for children under 5 (that’s under mandatory education age) now has to follow the same curriculum. So even though these children are not legally required to be educated, the government has decided what form that education will take, unless they are at home with their parents. Where will it go next?

It isn’t, and shouldn’t be, up to the state to determine the form of education a child receives, it’s up to the parent. If you want to keep that freedom, to have that choice, please, please, support home educators and fill in the consultation. You’ve got til 23.45 on Monday 19th October.

A vociferous minority.

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From the transcript of Monday 12th session in front of the Select Committee

please note that this is currently the uncorrected version of the transcript. If/ when the corrected version is available, I’ll change my link and quote if necessary.

Graham Badman:

I believe that the EHE community has much to offer in developing our understanding of the effectiveness or otherwise of the schooling system. It holds a mirror up to the schooling system, and to that end, I have to say, Chairman, I have been somewhat surprised by the reaction of a vociferous minority-and I do think it is a vociferous minority; I can actually count the number of people who have done it. I have found the remarks of some of them offensive, but I draw comfort from an academic friend of mine who says that often personal attacks are made when logic has been defeated. I don’t regard those people as a majority. I think that I have benefited enormously from learning of their experiences, but I actually think that the change in regulation and greater scrutiny is essential for the children.

Quite a few of us have found some of Graham Badman’s remarks offensive too. And some of the newspaper articles that have been written on the back of what he said. But that apparently doesn’t count for much.

I don’t think that anything I’ve written on this blog could constitute a personal attack, so I’ve no idea if I’m counted amongst the vociferous minority mentioned above. I don’t object strenuously if I am.

I’m used to being in a minority. I’ve bounced from one to another pretty much all my life. Home education puts us in a minority, and I can see that we may well be in a minority within that minority what with blogging, camps, bit of structure and so on. Writing to my MP probably makes me vociferous, and if so, I’m proud to be so, and to encourage other ppl to get active and vocal as well.

Will you stand up and be counted too?

Consultation link again.