What is wrong with the 2007 Elective Home Education Guidelines for Local Authorities?

I have been re-reading the current guidelines which were issued by the Department for Children, Schools and Families in order to advise local authorities what they should and should not be doing about home education. They may be found here;http://www.education-otherwise.org/Legal/7373-DCSF-Elective%20Home%20Education.pdfThe first thing which strikes anybody looking at these guidelines is that they are very favourably slanted towards those home educators who wish to be left alone. Local authority trying to claim that unknown home educated children...

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Secrecy

I am growing increasingly baffled about the need for secrecy of those currently trying to impose their own ideas upon home education in this country. In a recent post here, somebody commented anonymously claiming to be a member of the group working on the new guidelines for local authorities. I responded to what was said, whereupon another anonymous person chipped in saying, in effect, 'You fool! How do you know he is really a member of our secret group? He might be a member of another secret group entirely'. Because they both insist on remaining...

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How can one person hope to teach all those subjects?

Critics of home education tend in the main have a pretty limited repertoire of stock arguments which they level against the practice. Socialisation is of course one of these, as is the 'fact' that it is unhealthy for a child to spend all day in her parents company. The other old standby is, 'How can one person hope to teach all those subjects?' We saw a variation on this theme yesterday, when somebody commenting here quoted my saying that I did not trust anybody else to educate my child. This was taken to be a sign of some sort of mania. The very...

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The rise and fall of mass movements

At various times in my life I have been part of what seemed to me unstoppable movements which would irrevocably change society. In the late sixties and early seventies, it was the commune movement. Groups of people would move into large houses and live as one large family. For a time, communes were being started every week and for a few years, the movement grew at a dramatic rate. This, we thought, was the death knell of the nuclear family. Our way of life was so obviously more healthy and open that eventually most people would see the light and...

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The 'secret group'

I have watched with interest as the main representative of the home educating community in this country, at least as far as the Department for Education are concerned, has changed from being Education Otherwise to the so-called 'secret group' led by Alison Sauer. I am sure that we are all aware that EO has been in a somewhat chaotic state lately, but even so this is a remarkable change in perspective.I was at first a little puzzled when I read the document which Alison Sauer circulated. It had the appearance of something put together a little hastily...

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Home educating parents plan free school

http://www.oxfordtimes.co.uk/news/8722603.Mums_plan_county_s_first__free_schoo...

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Interesting piece from the USA

http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/education/schooled/article_fec2051a-04ca-11e0-b4ce-001cc4c03286.h...

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Reasons for deregistering children from school

A few days ago I posted a news item about a child who had been taken out of school in Manchester and whose father had subsequently tried to murder her. I gave this post the rather ironic title of 'A far from perfect case of home education'. Here is a link to the case;http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1340728/Father-carried-knife-attack-teenage-daughter-wanted-to-college-jailed-10-years.htmlIn retrospect, it was a mistake to use such a title; many of those who comment here are humourless and literal minded individuals who almost certainly...

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Children of God

This evening the whole family are, as usual, off to midnight mass. For those unfamiliar with this strange event, it involves much incense, ringing of little bells, kneeling and genuflecting and culminates in a shaman figure summoning down the spirit of his god to come among us.I have never doubted for a moment the existence of the Deity. The very fact that there are so many good people in the world doing kind things seems to be sufficient proof in itself of that particular proposition. As for virgin births and people coming back from the dead;...

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A far from perfect example of home education

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1340728/Father-carried-knife-attack-teenage-daughter-wanted-to-college-jailed-10-years.h...

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A very interesting account of home education;http://www.opposingviews.com/i/muslim-mom-why-i-homeschool-my-childrenA lot of this sounds pretty similar to accounts by God-fearing, Christian parents in the USA. The fact that the family have no television or games console in the home may be among the most important factors for succe...

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There are other qualifications besides GCSEs.

I have in the past been accused of an obsession with GCSEs and also of ignoring all the other qualifications out there, such as Open University courses. This is quite an interesting point, because my daughter herself almost went along this path. She did a few units of an OU course when she was eight, but in the end it was decided that International GCSEs were a better bet.There are quite a few things to be said in favour of GCSEs and some things to be said in favour of OU courses. As far as GCSEs go, they are a standard measure of education. I...

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Marvellous irony

I am and have for many years been, fanatically keen on home education. It is the one thing about me which most people probably know. Part of my work entails helping parents to de-register children with special educational needs from school and I am always happy also to lend a hand with this sort of thing in my private capacity. For the last fifteen years, since I withdrew my oldest daughter from school for part of the week, I have harangued anybody who will listen, with the virtues of home education, particularly as compared with the average maintained...

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Bad news for home educators

One of the more irritating aspects of home education is that while pupils in schools take all their examinations free, courtesy of the taxpayer, home educating parents who save the state around £3000 a year for a school place, also have to pay for any GCSEs that their children take. Still, it might be argued that this is something that we should take into account when we decide not to send our children to school. We assume full responsibility for our children's education and there is an end of the matter. Every IGCSE that my daughter took cost...

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Alison Sauer presents the first fruits of the 'secret group'

I have been looking at the document which Alison Sauer has been circulating about certain local authorities. Before I discuss it, I must mention that this has cleared up a puzzling little incident which occurred a couple of weeks ago. On December 8th, Tania Berlow drew people's attention to a website on home education. It may be found here;https://sites.google.com/site/thehomeofeducation/educationalThere was some pretty negative reaction to this website from some members of the EO list and as a result, a few things have been deleted from it. A...

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Missing the obvious

I sometimes wonder if my wits are slower than those of those around me. Others seem to know things about the world which I cannot quite grasp. The day before yesterday, it was the dangers of the Internet for children; today it is the motives of local authority officers. Now I have not the least doubt that among the staff employed by the hundred and fifty or so local authorities, there are many busybodies and also not a few people who are more concerned with drawing their salaries than they are with helping the citizens in their area. Some of them...

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Local authorities planning together on elective home education

From across England come eerily similar stories of local authority officers behaving in what some home educating parents see as unjustifiable ways. This centres in the main around requests to see the child physically and discuss with parents and child the nature of the educational provision being provided. The rationale behind this is fairly plain. It is easy enough for a parent to write that a child visits the library, plays the violin and belongs to various clubs; this does not make it true. Some local authority officers have found that when...

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Internet security, Part 2

I have for some years been puzzled about all the fuss about the dangers which the Internet poses to children and young people. What is particularly interesting to me is that when I ask ordinary people what these dangers actually are, they seem unable to tell me! I am very much inclined to think that it is another aspect of the obsessive protection which so many parents today are determined to afford their children; protection which does them no favours once they are a little older. The peak age for deaths from road accidents among children and...

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Internet security

Those over the age of thirty five or forty, the generation which did not grow up with computers, always seem to assume that there is something uniquely dangerous about the Internet and that one must be fanatically cautious about what is said and done there. Somebody commenting here recently, for example, had been trawling the net and seeing what could be gleaned about me and my family. There is quite a bit, including various new items which concern my daughter.It is not really very hard to track down people's personal details. If a news item about...

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Secrecy

Between September and December 2009, Ofsted circulated questionnaires in and visited fifteen local authority areas with a view to finding out the views of home educating parents on a wide range of topics. They spoke face-to-face with a hundred and twenty parents and a hundred and thirty children of home educators and received the views of many more via their answers to the questionnaires. It was a worthwhile project. Among other things, this research uncovered evidence of offrolling and also the fact that parents of children with special educational...

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Resentment at being forced to do something

One of the things which I have noticed during the recent debates about the behaviour of the local authorities in both Birmingham and Suffolk is that the people commenting on the Internet lists are very angry. Actually, they are not just angry about the doorstepping by local authority officers; some of them seem to be in a permanent state of fury! This is curious, because I thoroughly enjoyed being a home educator and I was happy for most of the time. Educating my child was a source of great joy to me and this joy permeated my entire life. It was...

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Doorstepping in Suffolk

I have been trying, not for the first time, to try and make sense of what is happening in the world of home education by putting myself in the place of the participants and thinking how I would feel and act. In Suffolk, at least one parent has received a letter from the local authority, saying that because they have not seen the home educated child for five years, they wish to pop round and assure themselves that the child is still physically alive and well and in the county. There have been predictable howls of outrage about this.Let me first...

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He was one as well!

Many years ago, I used to spend a lot of time in the company of homosexuals. Hardly surprising, since I was hanging round the Gay Liberation Front, who at that time had a commune in Penge. Something which I noticed was that a certain type of 'gay' person, usually the camp, theatrical ones who sprinkled their conversation with Polari, constantly claimed that many famous people were or had been homosexual. They would say, 'That Henry Cooper; he's gay. Well known fact' or 'Everybody in theatre knows about Sean Connery'. Something which I soon noticed...

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Implications of higher estimates for the number of home educated children in this country

Different people make different guesses about the number of electively home educated children in this country. These guesses though, remain just that. Paula Rothermel a few years ago produced a figure of almost half a million, the York Consulting research suggested perhaps a twentieth of that. When Graham Badman put forward the figure of a possible eighty thousand, some claimed that this was a wild exaggeration.The reason that the estimates vary so greatly is that different people are trying to prove different things. Since nobody has the least...

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Doing the maths

I mentioned in passing yesterday that 99.9% of people sent their children to school. Upon which, predictably enough, somebody challenged me to 'do the maths'. Actually, the real figure is probably even less than this. The most thorough study attempting to discover the prevalence of home education in this country was the survey carried out in nine local authority areas by York Consulting. This took place in 2006 and was called; The Prevalence of Home Education in England: A Feasibility Study. In the nine local authority areas at which they looked,...

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Public opinion

One of the difficulties which everybody has with home educating parents is that there seems to be a far higher proportion of crackpots and cranks among them than is the case with the general population. In other words, if you were to take a group of home educating parents and set them alongside a group of people who sent their kids to school, the home educating ones would contain more peculiar individuals than average. This is not necessarily a bad thing of course. Weird and atypical people sometimes produce great inventions, write fantastic poetry...

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