What's all this nonsense about statism?

I have noticed lately that one of the buzz words in home education is 'statism'. It seems to have knocked 'conflated' from top position lately in the ramblings of some home educating parents, being used recently as an insult directed against me. I really cannot imagine why home educators have taken to using this term. Statism is to do with strictly centralised government control of people's activities. Graham Badman's recommendations and Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill, on the other hand, put forward a federal solution, where locally elected assemblies would assume power for the monitoring and supervision of elective home education. This is precisely the opposite of statism. Rather than power being centralised by an authoritation government, it is devolved to democratic regional assemblies who would, as now, have a great deal of discretion as to how the edicts from central government were enforced. This may be undesirable, but it is certainly not statism.

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A good idea from Birmingham City Council

I am not in general a huge fan of Birmingham City Council. Their record on child welfare is abysmal and they seem to have a knack of screwing up generally where social services are concerned. Nevertheless, they have recently come up with a pretty good idea about home education. Here is their latest policy on elective home education;

http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/cs/Satellite/home-education?packedargs=website


Predictably enough, many in the home educating community took one look at these guidelines and then exploded with uncontrollable fury. Hidden away though is an idea which if generally adopted might end a lot of the conflict between local authorities and autonomous home educators.

One of the recommendations contained in the Badman report to which many home educating parents objected was the eighth clause of Recommendation 1. It says;

At the time of registration parents/carers/guardians must provide a clear statement of their educational approach, intent and desired/planned outcomes for the child over the following twelve months.

This suggestion found its way into Schedule 1 if the Children, Schools and Families Bill and caused a good deal of anger. Personally, I couldn't see what all the fuss was about, but I don't propose to go into that now. For whatever reason, the fact is that a lot of parents didn't like this scheme and felt that it would restrict them and harm the type of education which they were providing for their children. Birmingham have come up with a way round this objection. They say in their guidance;


During follow up visits you will also be asked to provide the adviser with information on the education you have been providing for your child and the progress being made.

Nothing could be simpler. If parents who wished to educate their children at home were given a year to get on with it without any interference from the local authority, the only proviso being that they would be expected after twelve months to give an account of what their child had achieved or done in the course of that time, then everybody would be happy. Parents could simply continue to allow their children to direct the course of their own education as before. All that would be needed would be for the parents to keep a record of what was being covered over the year and what the child had learned. Nothing could be simpler. It would not affect the child; the parents could write up their notes after he had gone to bed. They would not even need to say that they were doing this, lest they upset the delicate balance of this type of education. The local authority would also be satisfied. They would have a comprehensive account of the child's development over the previous year and be able to see how effective autonomous education could be. The more that they saw what such children were achieving, the less sceptical they would become about education like this.


Most parents are, after all, only to happy to boast about what their kids have been doing lately! I was sometimes a little vague when meeting with my local authority what direction my daughter's education might be taking in the future, but I always gave them a full account of the preceding year. They had a list of the operas and plays we had seen, books that she had read, museums visited, lectures attended, music examinations taken, the whole works in fact. It seems to me that this might well prove to be an ideal compromise which would satisfy everybody concerned. The local authority would be satisfied that the children were receiving an adequate education and the parents could provide this evidence without altering or affecting their child's education in any way whatever.

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A bit more about the new guidelines

Graham Stuart said;


'I have spoken to a number of different people about this (including the Minister) and hope to come forward with a proposal for everyone to look at, dispute, improve etc to deliver the above aims. I have initially asked a few people to help come up with a first draft'

Alison Sauer is one of these people and there are definitely others, at least according to Graham Stuart. Much is being made of the fact that one of these does not live in the UK, which suggests to me either Paula Rothermel, Kelly Green or possibly Alan Thomas, depending upon whether he is currently in England or Australia. Anybody have any ideas about who is actually doing this? More to the point, who is paying for this and is it actually part of a government initiative? The fact that he has apparently spoken to Michael Gove, suggests that it is being done as part of an official policy. In other words, is this some private project of Graham Stuart's which he is working on with a few friends or are these guidelines likely to be adopted by the Department for Education? If the latter, then it is strange that the whole thing has been done in private so far without any sort of announcement. I am aware that Graham Stuart is Chair of the CSF select committee, but I am far from convinced that this gives him a mandate for enterprises of this kind!

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The mental health of home educating parents

Local authority officers visiting home educating families realise full well that an hour or so is not long enough to establish the quality of the education being provided for a child. Traditionally, they really limit themselves to checking three things. Firstly, that the child is not being kept out of school in order to work, secondly that it does not look as though she is being abused in some way and finally that the parents do not seem to be completely mad. When I have talked about this before, several people have pulled me up and asked if I think that a parent with mental health problems should be forbidden to home educate. This is a fair question. After all, we don't usually assume that somebody is unfit to care for her children just because she are bipolar! Still, in the case of home education, things are a little more complicated.

I have been moved to reflect upon this by my observation over the last week or two of the increasingly fragile state of one fairly well known home educating parent. Just as green ink is always a warning sign when used in letters to newspaper editors, so too is a blog whose posts are made in 24 point typeface in alternating Red, green, yellow and magenta. I do have the impression that the home educating community contains rather more than its fair share of people with mental health problems. Mind you, it is a little hard to tell. Few home educators, including the present writer, are completely normal and it is sometimes difficult to know where eccentricity ends and madness begins. In other words, while it is true that many home educators are a bit, or indeed very, odd, it is not easy to gauge the percentage who are actually ill. Anyway, does it matter? There are plenty of parents with varying degrees of mental health problems whose children are at school. Why should home educating families be looked at differently?

I think that the possible consequences of a mentally ill parent educating a child at home are different from one who send the child to school in the usual way. I think that the child of such a parent could be in a sense at risk. I do not mean the sort of risk which we saw in the dreadful case in Edinburgh recently where the three children died in tragic circumstances. One can never guard against such tragedies. I am thinking more of the effect on a child of spending most of their waking hours with a person whose world view might be horribly distorted and irrational. Of course, I recognise straight away that most parents, mentally ill or not, manage to give their children some foolish and wrong headed views about the world, whether they go to school or are taught at home. My own daughter was raised on scripture and some might say that filling a small child's head with a lot of stuff about people being raised from the dead and so on is pretty weird! We also come to the question about the limits of what society may reasonably take an interest in. If I wish to teach my child that somebody was raised from the dead, then what right have I to say that another parent should not teach his child that the Jews are taking over the world or that aliens are eavesdropping on her thoughts via the television? This is not an either/or situation, but rather a spectrum.

There does seem to me though something a little worrying about the idea that somebody displaying the florid symptoms of a bipolar episode could be the only adult influence upon a young child. There has been some concern in the past among local authority officers that the home educated children of such parents are acting in effect as nurse companions. I suspect that these are likely to be isolated cases, but there is the more general fear that children might get caught up in the conspiracy laden atmosphere of certain elements of the home education movement. They might grow up believing that nothing ever happens by chance and that every unfortunate accident is part of a wider and deeply sinister conspiracy against their parents' chosen lifestyle. Link to the 2007 guidelines on home education missing from the DfE website? Oh no, the government are trying to suppress our rights! This sort of low level paranoia is pretty widespread among many home educators. If you throw in a number of dedicated activists with definite psychiatric problems, then you run the risk of creating a feverish backdrop of anxiety and imaginary attacks by government agents which must result in quite a few children being raised in homes which resemble the X Files! This can hardly bode well for the children's own mental health and future prospects of becoming normal, well balanced citizens.

As I say, I would be interested to know if anybody else has the feeling that the proportion of mentally ill parents is higher among home educators than the general population? If so, then this might not only have implications for the children, but also go a long way to explain the extraordinary atmosphere of persecution and government conspiracies which seems to pervade elective home education in this country.

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Update on the proposed new guidelines

It seems that the person who has been writing the new guidelines in collaboration with Graham Stuart is in fact Alison Sauer, who provides training on the subject of home education for local authorities. I cannot help wonder who is paying for all this; if the taxpayer then there does not appear to have been much transparency! I am sure that now we know one of the people involved, everything will become a little clearer.

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Graham Stuart and his helpers

I never quite took to Graham Stuart. He always struck me as a vain opportunist who found in home education an obscure topic about which he could swiftly become Parliament's expert. After the select committee hearing, when the various teenage offspring of members of Education Otherwise approached him, he gave the impression that he saw himself as some matinee idol being mobbed by his fans. One could imagine his saying, 'Oh shucks, you guys! You want to talk to me and ask for my help? Why, I'm just a regular guy, but I'll surely help is I can'. He put me in mind of a Tory version of Robert Kilroy-Silk.

Something which I noticed at the select committee was that although I turned up alone, as did Jane Lowe, Carole Rutherford and Zena Hodges, Education Otherwise arrived mob-handed, accompanied by a contingent of amiable but persistent teenagers. These were the same bunch of youngsters for whom Ann Newstead's husband put together a website which for a while posed as the voice of home educated youth, being allegedly completely separate from Education Otherwise. It will be remembered that during the Badman enquiry the idea of adopting something like the Tasmanian system for home education was briefly floated. I don't know who suggested this to Badman. Paula Rothermel was wandering the world following a series of personal misfortunes and she fetched up in Tasmania for a while. Perhaps she gave him the idea. But at any rate, nobody showed any interest in this except of course for Education Otherwise. For the 'Tasmanian Model' to have been a real proposition, the Department for Children, Schools and Families would have needed a partner from the home educating community. Since for many who are not actually home educators, Education Otherwise is home education in this country, they were seen as the logical candidates. After all, anybody wanting to know about home education always goes to them first, whether it is a newspaper reporter or a government enquiry.

During the select committee hearing itself, one of the members wanted to know if home educators would be in favour of a simple registration scheme, whereby the location and educational setting of every child in the country would be known to their local authority. I was of course in favour; Zena Hodges, Carole Rutherford and Jane Lowe were not. What was Education Otherwise's position on this point? We will never know, which struck me then as very strange. The Chair tried sympathetically to extract an opinion from Fiona Nicholson, who was representing Education otherwise, but to no avail. In the end, he said in exasperation, 'Okay, that's a don't know'. I wonder if anybody else finds it odd that after all the preparation, the moment that we have all been waiting for, for home educators to have a say about Badman's proposals, and Education Otherwise don't even know if they are against one of the key points?

Graham Stuart kept in touch with Education Otherwise after the select committee hearing and formed quite a good relationship with various individual members. Even after the defeat of Schedule 1 of the CSF Bill, he still seemed to have time for them; there was no question of just shaking hands and a parting of the ways. I was therefore curious to learn of the rumour going the rounds that he has been working with certain home educators to draw up new guidelines for home education in England. Now since Education Otherwise were quite keen on the Tasmanian idea and bearing in mind that they did not know whether or not they were in favour of compulsory registration, some people are convinced that it is they who have been working with Graham Stuart. What is curious is that Graham Stuart has already claimed that things cannot remain as they are with regard to home education. As Chair of the Children, Schools and Families select committee, we should take note of what he says on this subject.

I freely admit that all this is based upon nothing more than rumour and speculation, but nevertheless it seems to me that something is in the wind and that the chances are that Education Otherwise has a hand in it. The problem would be of course that something of this sort which might affect thousands of home educators should not be undertaken in a hole and corner fashion, but out in the open. Graham Stuart has said that he is not in favour of monitoring and inspection, but I note with interest that he has carefully avoided mentioning compulsory registration. Since Education Otherwise also have an ambivalent attitude towards this, one wonders what might be hatched up if they are indeed working with him.

For my own part, I am of course quite agreeable to the idea of registration. It is however a controversial idea for some home educators and I feel that any such moves should always take place in the public eye and not as a result of meetings conducted on the quiet. For this reason, I would like to know a little more about what Graham Stuart is up to. It would be unfortunate if some new scheme were produced and included in the forthcoming White Paper on education. Anything of this sort needs to be thrashed out openly among all interested parties and not given some dubious legitimacy on the grounds that it has Education Otherwise's seal of approval.

Of course, Michael Gove might feel a bit silly about introducing an actual new law about home education so soon after the CSF Bill debacle. It is more likely that what is happening is that statutory guidelines are being drafted which would tell local authorities how to interpret the current law. According to one cagy source, somebody who does not even live in this country is involved in all this. Could this be a coded reference to Paula Rothermel in Switzerland?

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Deschooling

It is more or less an article of faith among some home educating parents that children and teenagers are natural learners who are inquisitive and enthusiastic about pursuing their chosen interests. All this is perfectly true. Sometimes. Some, on the other hand, are lazy and incurious, wanting nothing more than to stay in bed until lunchtime before slumping in front of the television for the rest of the day. We know that this is the case because we see various cries for help and advice on the Internet lists from parents who are at their wits end over this sort of behaviour on the part of their teenage sons and daughters. The standard advice given to the parents of such children is to relax and stop worrying. if they wish to get up at two or three in the afternoon, that is simply their biology at work. if they wish to watch television all day, that to is fine. They will probably get fed up with doing this after a while. Try a period of deschooling, just let them slob around for a while. The recommendation is one month of 'deschooling' for every year spent in school. The idea is that the toxicity of school needs time to leach out of the teenagers system! So a fourteen year old who has just been de-registered should spend the next nine months or so doing nothing at all. That will help in the run-up to his GCSEs!

Those of us who work in certain areas will be aware that for many people, getting up at lunchtime and spending the day watching television is quite a popular lifestyle for those wholly reliant upon state benefits. They do not seem to get fed up with it, no matter what the well meaning advice given to home educating parents might suggest. The problem is that the sort of people who dish out this advice are often intelligent people who read a lot and are not very keen on television. They just cannot conceive of anybody choosing this lifestyle and so reassure anxious parents that it is just a phase their kid is going through. By the time that the kid is sixteen or seventeen and it has become clear that this is how he is planning to spend his life, it is often too late to do anything about it. All you can then do is say, 'Well, he can take GCSEs at any age and if he wants to he can always study with the Open University'.

Local authorities have noticed a third spike in de-registration from schools. Traditionally, de-registration took place in the first year or two after the age of five and also at the changeover from primary to secondary school. They are seeing a lot of thirteen and fourteen year olds these days being taken out of school. The worry is that many of these children might end up doing little apart from watching television or surfing the Internet. For some, this is not a problem. They can learn a lot on the Internet! It is these children about whom many are concerned. because if once they get into the habit of staying in bed half the day and doing nothing except staring at a screen, this can easily become their chosen lifestyle. They are liable to become unemployed, indeed unemployable in later life. We have no idea how common this is, because of course official interest ends on the child's sixteenth birthday. This was one of the concerns which prompted local authorities to try and acquire additional powes for the regualtion of home education.

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