Cherishing illusions

I still belong to one or two Internet lists for home educators, although my relations with those on the lists is not always what one might describe as cordial! I tend to limit myself these days to supplying information, but even that seems to provoke people. About a month ago, for example, there was a panic because some parents seemed to believe that the Metropolitan Police were treating both co-sleeping and home education as risk factors for abuse. I found out about this and passed on what I had learned. More recently, others were saying that local authority staff were in league with the NHS in two areas, Oldham in the North of England and Aberystwyth in Wales, and demanding that home educated children should be weighed and measured regularly lest they were being starved to death. This was so mad, that it didn't take five minutes to sort out.

Now of course, I neither need nor want thanks for this sort of thing. I choose to do it and then pass on any information which I can unearth. I have though been surprised that not only do I get no thanks for this, but that people are actually hostile and aggressive about it. At first I found this puzzling, but I think that I have found the correct explanation. Let me give a couple of examples of what people have said when I looked into the business of school nurses insisting on weighing home educated children. Somebody on one of the lists thought that I might be lying about contacting the school nurse in Oldham for, as he put it, my own 'aggrandizement'. Now it is quite true that like everybody else I sometimes exaggerate my achievements in order to make myself sound important, but really! Does anybody seriously imagine that the limit of my self-aggrandizement would be to pretend to have exchanged emails with a school nurse in Oldham? I think my ambition might reach a little further than this. It conjures up such a delicious image. One can imagine two fashionably dressed young women walking down Piccadilly.

'Don't stare,' says one, ' But did you see that man who just passed? My dear, that was Simon Webb. They say he has one of the most brilliant minds in Essex. He was the man who emailed the school nurse in Oldham!' Her friend turns to gaze longingly at this famous man.
'Gosh, how I wish that I could meet him! Fancy his actually emailing a school nurse like that!'

I'm sure that readers will agree that as aggrandizement goes, this is pretty tame stuff.

Less amusing was the woman who said that I must be suffering from 'mental retardation' for doing this. I have no objection to being insulted, but for somebody to use this as a term of abuse in this day and age struck me as quite extraordinary. Even more extraordinary was the fact that despite this being on an Internet list for home educators with over seven hundred members, including most of the well known names in home education in this country, not one person objected. Presumably, they are all happy to see expressions like this bandied around in a pejorative way, as long as the target is somebody like me! One feels that tomorrow somebody will post on that list saying, 'Ed Balls, what a spastic!" or perhaps, 'See that Graham Badman? Doesn't he look like a Mongol?' I am sure that these terms too will pass without remark. Shocking.

Other members of the list were not as offensive as this, but there was still an impression that I was poking my nose in and should really just mind my own business. It was almost as though they didn't want to know the truth and would prefer to believe that some local authority somewhere was strangling home educated children and boiling them down for glue. Very strange.

Now I will let readers into a little secret. I have always found that asking questions is very useful if you want to find something out. So while I have been investigating these scare stories, I have asked the people to whom I talk, 'Has anybody else asked about this lately?' Invariably, the answer is 'yes' and I often recognise the names of those who have already discovered that these rumours are untrue. This is why I mentioned that Fiona Nicholson of Education Otherwise had been dealing with Fran Lees in Oldham; to see if I could prompt her to acknowledge that what I was saying was true. She did so some hours later, but without my having mentioned her name, I suspect that we would never have heard about this.

So what do with have? Silly scare stories circulate on home education lists, stories which allege that some local authority or police force is operating a policy which in some way harms home educating families. Home educators get worked up and indignant about the rumours and do not want anybody to shatter their illusions. They get angry if anybody tells them the truth about the matter; they want to believe that these anti-home education stories are true. Well known people from organisations like Education Otherwise and Home Education UK look into the matter, discover that it is all nonsense and then keep quiet about it, allowing ordinary parents to continue believing a lot of rubbish. Why would they do that? Having found out that the rumours are false, why don't these people do what I have been doing, that is to say spread the information around where other home educators can see it?

The best comparison I can make is the situation in this country during World War I when everybody believed that the Kaiser's army were committing horrible atrocities. From time to time, somebody would demonstrate that these stories were ludicrous and would supply the facts to discredit them. This provoked anger in ordinary people who wanted to believe that the Germans were mad beasts. There was thought to be something disloyal and unpatriotic in casting doubt upon such atrocity stories. Even intelligent politicians who knew that the rumours were baseless, took care not to show their disbelief publicly. Just like the home education organisations now! The problem is that home educating parents have been encouraged to swallow any foolishness about local authorities and the Department for Education. They feel that they are at war with these people and wish to think them capable of any wicked act. These crazy tales which entail conspiracies involving local authorities, the police and NHS staff have become a form of mass hysteria. Those raising objections to these fantasies are regarded by other parents as traitors and saboteurs.

For this reason, I shall not be posting any more information about this sort of thing on any of the Internet lists. Firstly, it is a waste of time and secondly it just winds people up and makes them behave irrationally. I may from time to time put stuff on this blog about such things, but that is all. As I said above, some of the well known people on those lists find out about these things for themselves and then for their own reasons keep quiet about it. In future, I shall just leave others to find out for themselves.

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Changing the law on home education

One gains the distinct impression when reading Internet lists devoted to home education that many, perhaps most, home educators want nothing to change and for the legal situation regarding home education to remain just as it is now. In a way, I can sympathise with this view. I am myself a conservative and more or less opposed to anything new, almost as a matter of principle. It is heartening to see so many others in the world of home education who embrace this basic tenet of conservatism! Still. it seems a little odd to me that the present jumble and complicated mishmash of statute law and precedent should appear to so many parents as the being the best of all possible worlds. After all, in order to establish the position of elective home education in this country, we must routinely consider case law a century old (Bevan v Shears 1911) and also cases which had absolutely nothing at all to do with home education (R v Secretary of State for Education and Science, ex parte Talmud Torah Machzeikei Hadass School Trust 1985).

When Badman published his findings, one of the recommendations which annoyed certain home educating parents most was the suggestion that each year they should provide a statement of educational intent; something which looked perilously like a curriculum. Some denounced this proposal on the grounds that it would render autonomous education impossible. This may or may not be true, but there seems little doubt that the law provides already for such a thing, both for schools and home educators.

What actually is the duty of home educating parents as regards their child's education? That's easy! Section 7 of the Education Act 1996 tells us that;

'The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to
receive efficient full-time education'

There now, it couldn't be simpler. Just make sure that you are causing your kid to receive an efficient education to begin with and you should be OK. There is of course no definition in statute law of what is meant by an 'efficient' education. We are compelled to turn to old court cases, particularly the two which I cited above. In the course of one of those cases, R v Secretary of State for Education and Science, ex parte Talmud Torah Machzeikei Hadass School Trust 1985, Mr Justice Woof gave it as his opinion that an 'efficient' education was one that 'achieves what it sets out to achieve.' That seems that's quite clear, I hope.

The implications of this piece of precedent are sobering. Forget about home education for a moment. In fact forget about any sort of education and ask yourself this. How in day to day life do I know of any task or undertaking whether I have achieved what I set out to achieve? For example laying out a garden, decorating a room, writing a blogpost or sorting out the sock drawer. The answer is fairly obvious. You will know if you have achieved what you set out to achieve because you knew what you were setting out to achieve. You compare what you were planning to do with what you have actually done and see if the two things match. This seems pretty straightforward. How does this tie in with the definition of an efficient education which we are legally obliged to provide for our children? Plainly, if we do not know what we are setting out to achieve, then we will not know if we have achieved it. So we must have a plan to begin with, before we even embark upon the enterprise. How could it be otherwise?

A plan for providing an education is, essentially, a curriculum. Or, at the very least, it would be a statement of educational intent. It would be what the parent is setting out to achieve. Without this plan, he will be quite unable to fulfil his legal duty of providing an efficient education for his child, because how would he know whether he had achieved what he set out to achieve? There is not the slightest doubt that a plan must exist in the parent's mind if he is to have any hope of providing an efficient education. What is the objection to his sharing this plan with others? In other words, we can see that he must have a collection of aims in his own mind for the education which he proposes to provide. Without these aims, as we have seen, he could not be sure of achieving what he set out to achieve and we know that he is legally obliged to do this.

The case for a statement of educational intent is thus unanswerable as the law stands. Such a statement must exist for every home educator, even if it is not committed to paper. This is just one of the implications contained in the current law. There are a number of others, equally surprising and alarming to some parents.

Because the current legal position which affects home education has built up in a haphazard fashion over the last century and nowhere mentions home education per se, we are bound to find ourselves struggling. The law as it stands leaves plenty of room for abuse by local authorities, as others have observed. It also offers scope for parents who are not providing their children with an education. It is high time that home education became a recognised and legally defined choice for parents. The duties and obligations of both local authorities and parents should be plainly set out in a way which reflects the realities of life in a twenty first century Western democracy. The real risk to home educators lies in the current way that home education is being affected by various new laws as they are added to the statute book, laws which are framed without any thought of home education but which nevertheless have a profound effect upon a home educating parents. Things such as the amendment to the Education Act 1996, Section 436A, which laid upon all local authorities a duty to identify children missing from education. It is in the steady drip of such new laws that the real threat to home education lies, not in regularising the practice and putting it on a proper legal footing.

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Update about weighing and measuring home educated children in Oldham

I have been in contact with Francesca Lees, who is the School Health Advisor for Oldham Primary Care Trust. She says;

' I would only weigh/measure a child regularly if there were possible concerns about a child's weigh or growth, or if a child is subject to safeguarding procedures i.e
a child protection or 'child in need' plan. '

She is very keen to discover who is making up these ridiculous stories and what the motive is for frightening parents in this way. Does anybody here have any ideas about this? Fiona Nicholson has also been in touch about this and I hope that Education Otherwise will also act to dispel this rumour.

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Attempting to limit the freedoms of home educators

Yesterday I posted a humorous piece about the fact that I am often being told that I have no place in the debate on home education because I am no longer a home educator; the reason for this being that my daughter is now seventeen and attending a Further Education College. Somebody commented with the surprising news that those who make this objection are not really saying this at all. They are rather complaining that I am 'attempting to limit the freedoms of current and future home educators', instead of trying to maintain these freedoms or offering help to other home educators. Apparently, by not understanding this convoluted metaphor, I am 'displaying my ignorance'! Well it sounds a bit odd to me. Why can't these people just say what they mean? Why not say, 'You are attempting to limit the freedoms of home educators', rather than 'You are no longer a home educator'? Still, let us assume that this is true and see where such a claim might lead us.

The first thing to say at once is that although I am pretty nifty with words, I doubt if there exist in the English language adjectives powerful enough adequately to convey the depth of my indifference to the 'freedoms of home educators', if by these are meant the freedoms of those adults responsible for furnishing children with an education. Those supposed freedoms are right down there with 'parents' rights'. I have no interest in them whatsoever and never have had. My only concern as far as home education goes lies in the right of children to receive an education. Nothing else really matters to me in this debate. So anybody hoping to engage me on the topic of 'home educators' freedoms' or 'parents' rights' might as well spare their breath.

Let me set out the perspective from which I have always worked and then explain why I feel that my aim is actually precisely congruent with that of all other home educators. (And for that matter every local authority officer and civil servant at the Department for Education). I educated my own child. I did so because I felt that I could provide her with a better education than that on offer at the local maintained schools. For this reason, I would have fought hard against any attempt to make her go to school. She was entitled to the best education available and was receiving it. This had nothing whatsoever to do with my 'freedom as a home educator'. She had a right to an education and was getting it. If I had not been able to provide an education at least as good as that on offer at a nearby school, then her right would have been to go to school. This seems to me to be quite clear. My freedom to educate her would not have entered the question. She was entitled to the best education available.

Because parents have a legal duty to cause their children to receive an education, a right is created for the child to receive an education. Duties create rights and rights create duties. In this case the duty creates a right for the child, but no corresponding right for the parent is created. Talk of the 'freedoms of home educators' is absurd.

The current system is not perfect; no human invention can ever be that. Some children are not receiving a good education. This is the case with those at school and it is also the case with children being educated at home. If we change the law or revise the 2007 guidelines for local authorities, there will still be some children who are not receiving a decent education. There is nothing we can do about this; it is in the nature of the Universe. I assume that everybody concerned with home education in whatever capacity is acting with good will. I assume this of the local authority officers, the autonomous home educators who despise me for a Quisling and also of people like Graham Badman. I take it for granted that they all hope that as many children as possible will receive a good education. I believe that the home educators who oppose any change in the status quo want this and I also assume that the people at the Department for Education want the same thing. I certainly want this very strongly. In other words, all parties acknowledge the right of children to receive a good education. Everybody also knows that some children are not getting an education. This is what I meant earlier when I said that my aims were congruent with those of other home educators.

As things stand, some home educated children are receiving a good education while others are not. If we change things, then some home educated children will begin to receive a better education than they had been doing. Of course at the same time, the education of some other children will be compromised and their education will be worse than it was before. We cannot fully foresee the consequences of any action or inaction. All parties want the greatest number of children to be receiving an education; they have different ideas on how to go about achieving this end.

I have been accused of wishing to erode the 'freedoms of home educators'. As I think that I have made clear, this simply does not enter my thinking for a moment. As things stand, the current system with regard to home education is letting down a number of children. I think that there is scope for improvement; I do not believe that the system we now have is the best that can be possibly devised by men and women. It has arisen accidentally and owes more to Edwardian court cases than it does to any rational consideration of the situation in the twenty first century. I would like to see a new arrangement, one which would more robustly secure for children their right to a good education.

We are all of us working towards the same aim. I feel that the measures which I support would maximise the numbers of home educated children who received a good education. Those who oppose any change feel the same thing. Local authorities believe that their own policies will also tend towards this end. I feel just as strongly as others about this subject; the only difference being perhaps that I am able to behave in a fairly good natured way over it. Those who claim that I am attempting to limit the freedoms of home educators are quite wrong; I simply do not care about these so-called freedoms. I care about the right of children to an education and have in the past worked hard to secure this right, both for my own child and the children of others. I shall continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Portraying this current debate as some Manichaean struggle between the forces of darkness on the one hand and a noble and heroical band of parents fighting for their ancient liberties on the other, is too silly for words. Everybody wants the greatest possible number of children to receive an education; we differ only in how this may be achieved.

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No longer a home educator

I am still on one or two home education lists and a short while ago an old friend of mine, firebird2110, expressed surprise at this. She gave it as her opinion that since I was no longer a home educator, she could not see why I was on any HE lists at all. This is a fair point. Before I explore it a little, I must mention one thing which puzzles me about the woman who raised this question. She describes herself as a 'wool crafter'. I have racked my brains trying to work out what this might be. I even went to the length of sending her an email asking about this, which she was churlish enough to ignore. My best guess is that this is simply a New Age way of describing somebody whose hobby is knitting. I would be grateful to anybody who can shed light upon this.

The suggestion that I am no longer a home educator is clearly predicated upon the assumption that a genuine home educator is one who has a child aged between five and sixteen who is not a registered pupil at a school. People have in the past said of me, 'It does not matter to him, any new law would not affect him and his child'. It is a very curious thing, but that using this as a definition of a home educator would cut the regular numbers on some of the Internet lists by about half! I am not going to name any names, but a large number of those who post regularly on those places, and here if it comes to that, either have children over the age of sixteen or children under sixteen who are at school. This is the case with some of the most vociferous 'home educators', some of whom have not technically been home educators for years. Others have children who are not yet five, into which category firebird2110 herself fell when first she began posting on the lists.


There does seem to be something about home education which causes people to remain hanging about the scene even when their kids have turned sixteen and gone to college. All of which confirms what I have long known; that home education is about more than just education. If it were just another form of education, then people would drop it as soon as their kids were no longer involved. You would find it a little odd if a parent carried on hanging round the school gates once their child had grown up, but this sort of thing seems to be pretty common with home education. I wonder if anybody can shed any light upon this curious phenomenon? Of course some former home educators see a chance to make a few bob out of the business now that their children are older. We can see that with one or two people who are making a living out training local authorities and of course others writing books about it! Any thoughts about this phenomenon would be good to hear.

I must mention that after Firebird2110 and I had had this little disagreement, another anonymous poster weighed in with a post in which she claimed that I hated women. Her grounds for believing this were that she had noticed that I was more often scathing to women than I am to men. What nonsense! I am rude and unpleasant to everybody in equal measure. The fact is that there are roughly ten times as many female home educators on blogs and lists as there are men. This means that I am horrible to about ten times as many women as I am men; it is a statistical artefact. Unless it was being suggested of course that I should be more polite and deferential to women than I am to men. If so, I cannot really go along with this Victorian view of the proper relations between the sexes.

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Home educated children and access to health services

I have, as I have said in the past, been involved in helping parents of children with special educational needs to de-register their children from special schools. This can be a little more complicated than de-registering from an ordinary maintained school, because of Regulation 8 (2) of the Education (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2006, which specifies that the permission of the local authority is required before a child at a special school can be removed from roll. In practice, this is seldom withheld, but a variety of tactics are used to try and discourage parents from taking this step. These gambits are not used maliciously, but are brought into play because the school and local authority genuinely believe that the child's needs can be better catered for in an institutional setting rather than at home. Needless to say, I feel that they are mistaken in this.

A popular way of discouraging parents from taking a child with special educational needs out of school is to claim that the services which she needs can only be provided within a school setting. The Ofsted survey undertaken in 2009 (Local authorities and home education Ref. 0902670) found this practice to be widespread. A mother whose child was receiving physiotherapy while registered at school, mentioned that she was considering home education. She was told that it was a case of, 'either school and services or home education and nothing'. Nor is this an isolated example. Statements like this by a school are scandalous and often untrue. Many health services such as speech therapy and special dentists are available by open referral; in other words no professional is needed to arrange them, it can be done by a parent or friend. This is not widely known. I get pretty angry about this sort of nonsense.

Nor is this problem limited to home educated children with special needs. When I wanted my daughter to have the meningitis C vaccination some years ago, I was initially told that the whole programme only took place at school and that it was not possible to provide it for any child except through a school. It was quite a struggle to prove to them that they were mistaken about this! I had a similar difficulty with the HPV vaccination. These practices vary a good deal between different health services and local authorities. It was for this reason that I was extremely irritated to see that when a local authority like that in the area of Aberystwyth goes out of their way to ensure that home educated children have equal access to these things, it becomes the subject of untruthful rumours on home education lists. Access to all the health services which children at school enjoy should be and is a basic entitlement of all children, not withheld from those who do not attend school.

The School Entry Health Check is given to all children starting school. Obviously it is done with the permission of the parents, but I can't imagine any refusing. It picks up on hearing and sight problems, stuff like that. Children who do not go to school can miss out on this and some do not ever have their hearing tested. This could be a problem, because apart from deafness, which most parents would notice, the sweep hearing test can uncover problems with hearing certain frequencies. So a child might have good hearing but be unable to hear high frequency speech sounds such as 'S' and 'C'. This can harm his language development. School nurses routinely tell parents that 'all children have to have these tests'. I am sure that they say the same thing to the parents of home educated children and this might be where the ludicrous stories originate of children being dragged off to the school nurse against their will so that they can be weighed and measured.

All children are entitled to every health service which is on offer. When local authorities work towards this and try to make sure that a full range of such services is available, they should be commended. If when some LA makes an initiative in this direction they are at once bombarded with Freedom of Information requests, it will make other local authorities less likely to offer these services to home educated children. This would be a very bad thing and I cannot for the life of me see how it would be to the advantage of any home educated child.

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More about weighing and measuring

While some are still sharpening their coloured pencils in readiness for firing off strangely worded demands for information from local authorities, I have been speaking to the people involved with home education at Oldham. The suggestion has been made that home educated children in this area are being forced to have their children wieghed and their height measured every six months in order to ensure that they are not being starved to death. This move was supposedly in response to the death of Khyra Ishaq in Birmingham.

Fortunately, I have a sister in Manchester who used to home educate her own son, as I have perhaps mentioned in the past. She knows one or two people and I am pretty sharp at ferreting people out myself and so today I can report that this does not seem to be a cause for concern. The nurse doing the weighing and measuring is called Fran Lees and the woman who visits home educating families is Sue Casella. Nobody seems to have any complaints about them and, like the home education service in Ceridigon, they simply offer the services of the school nurse and so on. I have no idea at all anyway how anybody would force a parent to allow their child to be weighed. Is the suggestion that Sue Casella is dragging them into a car and then thrusting the child at the nurse and demanding, 'Weigh this one, Fran!'

It all seems very unlikely and until any further evidence emerges, I don't think that there is anything to be worried about. More details needed, including the testimony of parents whose children have actually been subjected to this treatment. It is certainly the case that Sue Casella has advised people that it is wise to have their child's health checked regularly in some cases and she has made appointments for them to see the nurse, but I have no reason to suppose this was done against anybody's wishes.

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