On debate

One of the things which tends to make discussion with home educating parents a little heavy going at times is that they often seem to take a debating point about their philosophy as an attack on their parenting skills or general lifestyle. This is I suppose inevitable. As parents, we are naturally sensitive about any implied criticism of the way that we raise our children. When we have chose a somewhat bizarre and heterodox method for bringing up our children, we are bound to be on the lookout for anybody suggesting that it actually is a bizarre...

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Children 'owning' their education

I have in the past read on various forums of children 'owning' their education. I have always dismissed this as the sort of irritating, New Age psychobabble in which some parents seem to delight. (Often the same ones who are against vaccinations, in favour of homeopathy, opposed to teaching and claim to be spiritual rather than religious). A couple of days ago, somebody here explained what is meant by this phrase. It apparently refers to children for whom 'their mind and what they do with it belongs to them as much as their body does.'This is pretty...

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The Lord Lucas connection

A couple of weeks ago, as I have mentioned before, I received an email containing details of Alison Sauer's accounts. Alison, it will be remembered is a key member of the so-called 'secret group' who are drawing up guidelines on elective home education for the use of local authorities. The email came for an address including the name Kaycee. There was a bit of a fuss about this on the HE-UK list and it was suggested that I had actually sent the email to myself, although why I should do such a thing is not at all clear! Everybody had forgotten about...

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The quibbling pedants of autonomous education

One of the things which one observes about cults is the way in which they appropriate ordinary words and phrases and assign to them special meanings of their own. They then go mad if anybody uses these expressions in their usual, everyday sense. I have noticed this tendency a good deal when dealing with autonomous educators and it can make any debate with them time consuming and frustrating.Let us consider what people mean by the terms 'informal education' and 'formal education'. Informal education is the sort of learning which takes place outside...

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Making a name for myself

The extraordinary suggestion was made in a comment yesterday that I am engaged in a crusade, the supposed reason being that I am determined to make a name for myself. This is a pretty odd idea, but I thought that I would examine it anyway, because this is not the first time that this notion has cropped up here. Just to remind readers, over a year ago I had a couple of short articles published on home education. Since then, I have kept a little blog on the subject. This is hardly 'making a name' for myself! I doubt that anybody other than those...

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The real threat to home education

Over the last year or two, quite a few people seem to have fallen prey to the delusion that some kind of war is being waged against home educators in this country. We hear of a campaign of vilification, attempts to introduce legislation which would limit the freedoms of home educating parents and all sorts of other alarming things. The odd thing is that although I know quite a few teachers, social workers and local authority officers, I have never heard any of them say that they wish to put an end to the practice of home education. Nor have I heard...

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The problem with false positives

One of the objections raised to the regular monitoring of tens of thousands of home educated children is that large scale operations of this sort are bound to generate many false positives. What are false positives? Really, they are no more than mistakes; thinking that something exists or is happening when it is not. This expression is more commonly used in medicine and the consequences there can be horrific. Suppose that I am screening ten thousand women for breast cancer and I have a rate of false positives of around 1%. This would mean that...

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Interesting article about home education law, written by a barrister

Observing as I have that a number of ill-informed parents on various Internet lists are currently struggling to make sense of the legislation covering elective home education, I thought that this view by a barrister writing for the Local Government Lawyer site might be of interest.http://localgovernmentlawyer.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3641%3Awhat-to-do-with-home-education&catid=54%3Achildrens-services-articles&q=&Itemid...

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Guilt by association

The idea of guilt by association used to be very popular at one time, particularly in the USA during the McCarthy Era. It has unfortunately fallen out of favour in recent years, which was why I was so pleased to see Mike Fortune-Wood, owner of the HE-UK list revive this fine old tradition the day before yesterday.As many readers will be aware, I was until last summer a member of the HE-UK Internet list. Following the publication of a couple of articles of mine on the subject of home education in the Independent and Times Education Supplement, I...

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Letting the cat out of the bag

Every so often, somebody intimately connected with the world of British home education will make a casual remark which gives the game away as regarding how a lot of home educators really view education. This happened recently on the Badman Review Action Group. A discussion was taking place about the proper response of a local authority which learns that a child in its area is not attending school. The unanimous view among home educating parents seems to be that if the local authority are told that home education is taking place, then that should...

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The scourge of secrecy and anonymity in the world of home education

I have remarked several times before, that I have never seen any need personally to say anything on the Internet without signing my real name to it. Anonymous messages always smack to me of poison pen letters. Still, I am in a minority when it comes to this view; most people prefer to hide behind a pseudonym when posting, both here and elsewhere, about home education. This, combined with an almost obsessive desire for secrecy by some, is starting to cause serious divisions among home educators in this country.As readers are probably aware, a small...

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Targeting local authority resources more effectively with regard to elective home education

A couple of people commenting here yesterday made the very sensible suggestion that the way that monitoring of home education in this country is currently carried out is wasteful and inefficient. They asked why visits and so on cannot be more precisely targeted at those who need or would benefit from them, instead of the present scattergun approach, which apart from everything else, risks generating false positives. It is perfectly true that as things stand, over 90% of home visits are a complete waste of everybody's time. Those who deliver a suitable...

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Different worldviews

One of the things which those who are not home educating parents sometimes fail to realise is that an awful lot of home educators are very odd people who think completely differently from everybody else. It is not as though home educators are simply a random cross-section of the population who simply failed to send their kids to school. Many home educators conform to a particular type. This does not mean that they are all left wing or all atheists or anything like that. There are many Christian home educators and also many who, if they lived in...

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Home educated children and Child Benefit

Over on the EO list, a poor woman is currently shaking and unable to decide whether to scream or cry. A common enough experience indeed for those of us who have had dealings with Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs! She has been asked to provide evidence that the child for whom she is claiming Child Benefit actually exists and is resident in this country. This is a common enough event for many in the non-home educating community, for reasons which I shall explain. Few of them are traumatised by being asked questions in this way, unless they are in...

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The new trustees at Education Otherwise

Following the Annual General Meeting of education Otherwise, a new set of trustees are in charge. I thought that it might be helpful to provide a little information about them, in order that people could be able to have some idea of the direction which the charity might take in the future.Fiona Nicholson is still in. She was one of the group who more or less seized control of Education Otherwise three years ago. Fiona lives in Sheffield with her seventeen year-old autonomously educated son, who has never been to school or college. It will be remembered...

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Free speech about home education

When I wrote a couple of articles on home education last year for national newspapers, I was swiftly chucked off the HE-UK and EO Internet lists. The ostensible reasons for this were that I had used information from the lists to write the articles and that other parents would feel uneasy at my continued presence. I have said several times since that both arguments struck me as weak, which led some of those commenting on this blog to suggest that I must be autistic!I am observing the same reluctance to tolerate dissent or heterodox opinions now...

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The new guidelines; a summary to date

Judging from some of the questions being asked on Internet lists, there is confusion about what these guidelines are which Tania Berlow and her friends are working on. Let me just give a brief outline so that people can see what is going on.The law relating to home education in this country is very muddled and confusing. So much so, that even lawyers cannot always agree on what the situation actually is. In addition to the basic bit of law which allows home education, Section 7 of the 1996 Education Act, there are various old precedents and also...

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Rumour and misinformation

I was accused a couple of days ago of spreading rumours about who might or might not be involved in the drawing up of the new guidelines for home education. The difficulty is that because of the way that this is being done, almost everything to do with this business is rumour and speculation. Now the truth is, many people want to know what is going on about these guidelines. They wish to know who is involved, what their terms of reference are, whose idea the whole thing is, who elected these people to do this job on behalf of other parents and...

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Children Missing from Education

On one of the Internet lists concerned with home education there is currently anger and anxiety about a poster put up by the local authority in Derbyshire. It is outside, and inside, schools and nurseries. This is what it says:MISSING CHILDRENEducation is vital to ensure that all children get a good start in life.Every year more than 100 children go missing from the Derbyshireeducation system. It's important we get them back into schools.WHY DO CHILDREN GO MISSING FROM SCHOOL?-Some children simply don't start school - their parents don't enrolthem.-Other...

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More about the new guidelines

Others have noticed that in the last week or so three questions about home education have been asked in Parliament by Tory MPs. Two of the questions were identical;'To ask the Secretary of State for Education what his policy is on home education; and if he will make a statement'A third concerned the A levels and GCSEs passed by home educated children. There are two possible explanations for this flurry of interest in home education. One is that individual MPs are taking an interest in the topic of home education because their constituents are expressing...

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A problem with the new guidelines.....

As I am sure most readers are aware, a small group of home educators and former home educators are currently putting together guidelines on home education which, it is hoped, will be adopted by the Department for Children. These may replace the 2007 guidelines which at the moment tell local authorities how they should behave towards home educators. There is of course a little more to it than this. There has also been some talk of including something drawn up by this group in a forthcoming White Paper on education. This raises the possibility that...

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More about Education Otherwise

Somebody yesterday wanted to know a little more about the background to Education Otherwise's current problems. I thought that I would post a brief outline, particularly as some people elsewhere seem to be getting a little worked up.In early 2007, there was something of an upheaval among the trustees of Education Otherwise. On February 10th that year, eleven trustees resigned and eight new ones were appointed in their place. One of these new trustees was a woman called Joanna Cynthia Berry. Up until that time, Education Otherwise had always filed...

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Education Otherwise

Most readers will probably be aware by now that the Annual General Meeting of Education Otherwise was held in Oxford on Saturday. Because not enough people turned up, it was adjourned. Only four of the thirteen trustees of the charity turned up, which is very odd. I don't intend to go into all the ins and outs of the troubles which have beset the organisation over the last few years, but the bottom line is that many think that EO has reached the end of the line and that when the AGM is reconvened this coming Saturday, it is possible that it might...

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