Put not your trust in princes

I feel a little bit sorry for those who were so enthusiastic about the support they thought that they were getting from Graham Stuart MP. In case readers have forgotten, this was the fellow who was very keen to support home educators and swore that he would defend their interests against statist interference by Ed Balls & Co. There is currently a lot of dissatisfaction among some home educating parents at the introduction of one of Graham Badman's recommendations. People have been beetling off to Graham Stuart's Facebook page and urgently soliciting...

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More about changes in the Pupil Regulations

Predictably enough, the change to the 2006 Pupil Regulations, requiring schools to keep de-registered pupils on their roll for twenty days before deleting them, is generating a good deal of sound and fury among the usual crowd on the home educating lists and forums. It is hard to see what their objection to this move is, except as a matter of general principle on the grounds that Graham Badman first suggested it. As far as I can see, this will benefit those who are considering de-registering their children because of problems with the school. Let...

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Changes in pupil registration regulations

Regular readers will recall that I have several times written here that although there may be no specific new laws planned around home education, many of the recommendations of the Badman report could be introduced in small stages, simply by modifying existing laws. We have seen this happen in recent weeks when one of the suggestions made by Graham Badman was slipped in as an amendment to the Education (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2006 - as amended by The Education (Pupil Registration) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2010. This...

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Home educating parents expecting to be treated differently from everybody else.....again

Most people dealing with their local authority notice that the authority often makes mistakes or gets muddled up about the precise legal position of various matters. Property developers, for example, often find that they know more about planning law than do the local authority officers with whom they deal. There are so many laws and by-laws that it is not surprising that councils get a little confused from time to time. Sometimes of course, they also try and bluff people by misrepresenting the law. On some local land owned by Essex County Council,...

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The limits of parental rights

In America and also increasingly in this country, the debate about home education causes people to raise the question of parents' rights, as opposed to the rights of the state. It is suggested that the state is now trying to take over the role of parent and interfere in family life a little too much. I don't personally buy this; society has always had a stake in the welfare of children. Those arguing against state interference in their 'right' to home educate, often bring up other supposed rights that the state is trying to deprive them of in relation...

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Secular and Christian home educators in Britain

There are in Essex, where I live, quite a few Christian home educators. Up by Harwich are loads of Jehovah's Witnesses, there is a self-contained community in the countryside, a bit like the Amish and there are even the remnants of the Peculiar People of Brentwood, some of whom refuse to send their children to school. I also know a number of individual home educators who are regular church goers. I was never sure whether this accurately reflected the national picture in the UK. When one follows the groups on the Internet, there is often the impression...

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Canadian home education

Interesting bit about home education in Canada;http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Learning+home+front/4498892/story.h...

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Inclusion as a possible factor in the increasing numbers of home educated children in Britain

We saw yesterday that quite a few children with special educational needs in this country are educated at home. According to some research, they could account for as many as a third of home educated children. If so, this might suggest that something like thirty thousand children with special needs are at home, rather than being taught at school. Christine, who knows a good deal about this subject, said that the largest group are those on the autistic spectrum and this seems to tie in with anecdotal evidence from various sources.A common reason...

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Home educated children with special educational needs

Any debate on home education must take note of the fact that a large proportion of the children deregistered from school have special needs of one sort or another. What do we mean by 'special needs'? This term first became widely known as a result of the 1981 Education Act and has come to replace expressions such as 'disabled' or 'handicapped'. Now there is a slight problem with this terminology. Most ordinary people know perfectly well what they mean by 'disabled' or 'handicapped'. They mean people who are blind, deaf, in a wheelchair or have...

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Another needless panic by home educators

If only more home educating parents would just pick up the telephone and speak to people, rather than spreading rumours on the Internet, then the world might be a less anxious place for them. This piece appeared in the Guardian:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/mar/21/jeremy-hunt-hints-rules-murdochCommon sense tells us that it is nothing at all to do with home education, despite the fact that in the third paragraph from the bottom, mention is made of 'home education'. A quick call to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport confirms that...

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Checking that parents are capable of educating their own children

There is a pretty general assumption among many home educating parents in this country that any attempt to check that they are actually able to undertake their children's education is a gross restriction on their liberty as parents and probably an infringement of their rights into the bargain. So it was a couple of years ago, when the old Department for Children, Schools and Families proposed that all parents should have to engage with their local authorities and demonstrate that they had at least given home education some thought before they...

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Abolishing 'home education by default'

There was some discussion yesterday of the fact that many parents home educate because the school which their children attends does not come up to scratch. This can be for serious reasons, such as that it does not protect a child from bullying or cater sufficiently for some special educational need or for more trivial causes such as failing to allow time off for chess practice. The remedy is to improve the standard of maintained schools and make it plain that they are at fault if a parent feels so dissatisfied that she deregisters her child. The...

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Are the numbers of children being educated at home still rising sharply?

There can be no doubt at all that in the decade or so between say 1998 to 2008, the number of children being educated at home in this country rose dramatically. I have seen it suggested that there was an exponential rise in numbers from the time that access to the Internet become common. Some interpreted this steep climb as being evidence that home education in Britain had become an unstoppable force and that the numbers would eventually rival the proportion of children educated in this way in the USA. That this will actually happen, seems less...

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Is Michael Gove up to something on the home education front?

After the fiasco of Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Act last year, I can't see any government having the appetite for a major confrontation with home educators in the near future. The game is simply not worth the candle. This does not mean that things will stay the same for ever though, or that there will not be relatively minor changes to the existing legal situation. Mind you, this hinges around what one would describe as a 'minor change'. What most rational people would view as being a minor change might very well prove to be...

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Motives for claiming that children have learned to read without being taught

The chances of a child fathoming out an alphabetic code like that of written English without explicit instruction are slender. Let us not mince words; they are virtually zero. The left to right progression of the symbols, silent letters and all the rest of it, can only be mastered by being taught. Nevertheless, quite a few parents claim that their children learn by themselves, with little or no teaching. What motivates people to assert something so unlikely to be true?We all want to believe, and also to persuade others, that our children are special....

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One of us

The human race seems to have a natural tendency to split itself into groups of varying sizes, the members of which claim to be better, more virtuous, cleverer, healthier or more beloved of God than all the other groups. Examples of such groups include supporters of Chelsea football team, Catholics, Girl Guides, Freemasons, Republicans, police officers, home educators, Nazis and even entire nations such as the French or English. Not infrequently, the identity of these groups is inextricably bound up with their opposition to other groups, whom they...

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Bad news for home educators who don't want visits from their local authority

Here are two small news items which may, in the long run, make it harder for home educating parents to refuse visits from their local authorities and just send in written reports from time to time:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12764054http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5ibFxE9lwF5VbFQgb0kju3fAWotQQ?docId=N0305631299259261316ABefore I write another word, bearing in mind a couple of the people who comment here regularly, I should make something crystal clear. I am not suggesting that home educated children are any more likely to...

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Another odd coincidence

Two more more curious coincidences on the Johansson case as it may be connected with Christopher Warren. Warren's group is also known as the Mishpachah Lev-Tsiyon. We find that;'Mishpachah Lev-Tsiyon (MLT) is the name of a small Christian denomination with an association of assemblies or congregations having close Messianic Jewish and Evangelical Christian affinities, with centers in Arvika municipality, Sweden, Oil City, Pennsylvania and Andhra Pradesh State, India. It describes itself as "plotting a mid course between these two". The group is...

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A little more about Christopher Warren and a possible link with the Johansson case

This link leads to a site with more information about Christopher Warren and the NCCG.http://www.nccg.info/fastfacts.htmlThere is one very alarming thing here; that he recruits members via the Internet and that some then travel to Sweden to join him. He is apparently very keen on single mothers with fourteen or fifteen year-old daughters. For this reason, I urge the owner of the Badman Review Action Group to remove the link to Warren's site from the list. There is also something rather odd. You will find mention here and elsewhere on the Internet...

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Trust me, I'm a home educator!

Since I am apparently on the verge of being banned from the Badman Review Action Group and shall not, in any case, be posting there again, I feel free to speak my mind pretty freely about recent events on that list.On February 27th, a man called Christopher Warren posted a message on the BRAG list, providing a link to a website which he ran. He was greeted enthusiastically and people hastened to endorse and cross-post details of his site to other home education lists. He now features quotations from those who welcomed him to BRAG on his website....

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More about Pastor Warren

I thought that readers might like to read a little more about Pastor Warren and his strange beliefs. The NCCG, which he founded and controls, is regarded by some as a cult. See:http://www.nccg.info/strangebeliefs.htmlReaders will be surprised and perhaps sightly disconcerted to learn that gay people are not the only ones who have demons in them; those born out of wedlock suffer from the same problem! So too do schizophrenics and even flu is caused by demons. And of course, they are piloting the flying saucers.....

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A prominent supporter of the Johansson family

I am always delighted to see particularly awful examples of hypocrisy and double standards. A few days ago, somebody posted on the Badman Review Action Group list, denouncing me and providing a link to a piece which he had written about me. You may find it here;http://freesweden.net/smear_campaign.htmlThe author, Christopher Warren, says of me; ' Smearing and slandering innocent people is, in my opinion, a diabolical act.' Plain enough. Later on though, he quotes approvingly a 'representative of the homeschooling community in Britain' who says...

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Giving children options or making their decisions for them?

One of the most enjoyable aspects of home education is the freedom to teach absolutely anything which one wishes. I happen to believe that all children need a broad and balanced education, whether they will later be artists, musicians, university lecturers or road sweepers. Because I have mentioned the importance of this so often, the idea has grown in some people's minds that I am preoccupied with academic education to the exclusion of all else and that perhaps I had planned my daughter's life upon a certain path which would culminate in her going...

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My 'smear' campaign against the Johannson family

I recently posted on the Badman Review Action Group list, sounding a note of caution about support for the case of Domenic Johannson, the boy taken into care in Sweden. As it is presented, this case is one of a home educated child taken from his parents by the state just because he was being educated at home. As is usually the case with real life; things are a little more complicated than that. My post from BRAG was then sent to somebody running a website in support of Swedish home educators and the result was this:http://freesweden.net/smear_campaign.htmlMy...

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Cooperative parenting; replying to my sock puppet

Sometimes, people commenting here feed me the lines I need in so neat a fashion that I am frankly astounded. It is almost as though these individuals are my sock puppets; setting themselves up for me to knock them down again! One such commented here on the post I made yesterday, saying;'I think there are 2 ways to have gentle "well behaved" children,1. Frighten or embarrass them into it.2. Behave in a gentle well behaved way and show them that that's a good way to be.'This is, at least on the face of it, an interesting idea. Of course it is a piece...

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Coercive Parenting

Some readers may be unfamiliar with the expression 'coercive parenting'. It is used by some very liberal and laid back parents to describe what most of us would call responsible parenting; setting boundaries for our children, seeing that they clean their teeth at night and go to bed at a suitable time; this sort of thing. The idea of coercive parenting or coercive education is popular among some autonomously educating parents. They present it as the undesirable opposite of their own methods. Some ordinary parents say that they find the term 'coercive...

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Regretting the end of childhood.

I have observed a number of times recently that as our children and the children of friends and relatives get older, quite a few parents seem to regret the fact that their little ones are no longer children. They are apparently sad to find that the children who once hung on their every word are now challenging and disputing anything and everything which their parents say. Some parents express this openly, by saying that it is a pity that their children have grown up. I find this faintly shocking. I can't imagine that they would really prefer their...

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Are home educators normal?

I must begin this piece with a confession, a confession which may perhaps not come as any great surprise to my readers; I am not a normal person. Of course, by definition, anybody who fails to send his child to school must be abnormal. After all, if 99% of the population are all pursuing one course of action which is seen as being wise and good and I am one of the 1% who refuse to do so, this automatically makes me an oddity. There is though, a little more to it than that. I was a strange and atypical individual long before I officially began to...

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Home education case

This is not exactly a brilliant piece of publicity for home education:http://www.thesun.co.uk/scotsol/homepage/news/3453184/Theresa-Riggi-banned-her-kids-from-playing-with-other-children.htmlBefore anybody says anything silly; no, I do not believe that this is typical of British home education. It might not exactly endear the practice though, to those who know nothing about it but what they see in the pape...

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Some cult-like aspects of autonomous education

A week ago, when somebody joined the HE-UK list because she wanted some solid information before taking the serious step of deregistering her child from school, Mike Fortune-Wood was quite open about his contempt for facts and figures when it came to home education. He asked bluntly, ' why do you want hard figures, in what way are they likely to help you?'Now of course most of us would, if considering a new educational setting for our child, want to know a little about it. What are the future prospects if my child follows this course or that? How...

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This blog

When I began this blog in the summer of 2009, I hoped from the start to make it a team blog, with anybody who wished to do so contributing posts. I invited people like Mike Fortune-Wood and Fiona Nicholson of Education otherwise to join in this enterprise, but there seemed no enthusiasm for such a scheme. Because it was public and accessible through google, I thought that this might be a good place for those who believed in autonomous education to speak directly to the public and explain their beliefs; as a counterbalance to my own views. It was...

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Strict adherence to a curriculum in informal home education

Over the last two days I have explained how informal education may be used to cover anything from learning to read to studying for GCSEs. Several important points were raised by people commenting here and I thought it worth addressing three of them in detail. These were the extent to which concepts in a subject like physics could be taught informally, what would happen if a child were completely incurious about the world and asked no questions and finally, what would happen if one told the local authority that one intended to cover a certain topic...

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