The roots of confrontation between local authorities and home educators

There seems to be pretty general agreement that there is more tension between a number of home educating parents and their local authorities than was once the case. A few days ago, somebody here suggested that this was largely due to the Badman review. This is an interesting idea. There are it seems to me two main ways of looking at the situation today. On the one hand is the perspective that aggressive local authorities, acting in many cases beyond the letter of the law, have provoked peaceful and good natured home educators into becoming militant and uncooperative. By this reading of the matter, the groups of people fighting against any new laws or regulations simply represent the will of the people; they are working on behalf of the majority of home educating parents. Another view would be that those agitating so furiously against supposed local authority infringement of their ’rights’ are a small core of malcontents and trouble makers who are always arguing with various authority figures about anything at all; from fluoridation of drinking water to the vaccination of children, from the export of powdered baby milk to less economically developed nations to building nuclear power stations.

A recent debate on one of the larger Internet lists devoted to home education shed a little light upon which of these two cases is more likely to be correct. It will be recalled that during the Badman review and the framing of Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill, one of the proposals which caused the greatest anger was the idea that local authority officers should have a right of entry to the homes of those educating their own children. Of course this idea was really a non-starter; the legal complications of the thing would have tied up the British courts for years to come. It was used as a rallying cry by those who rejected the whole idea of receiving visits from their local authority. Now many local authorities have never insisted anyway on making visits of this kind and have always been content to accept written evidence of the education being provided for a child. Essex, my own local authority, are like this. This never struck me as a big deal, but of course there are those who feel strongly about it.

One might think that with authorities who simply request a written report about a home educated child’s education, that even the most militant parent would feel that there was no cause for confrontation. No visits being asked for; all they want is some idea of what is going on. A couple of days ago, I mentioned the facetious idea that the owner of one of the largest home education lists put forward, for sending a pig’s heart to the local authority. This was of course a joke, but the background to the suggestion is revealing. Somebody posting on this list had been asked by her local authority to provide an account of her child’s education. One might have thought that after all the fuss and bitter opposition to receiving visits, that this would have been welcomed as a good thing. You would be wrong to think that. This request caused a well known figure in home educating circles to suggest sending as much irrelevant material as possible, simply in order to make the whole business more awkward and troublesome for the local authority. Others seconded this, agreeing that they did not want to make the process easy for the local authority and that the more awkawrdly they reacted, the better this was for their purposes. This was bloody-mindedness on an epic scale.

It looks to an objective observer as though even where their demands are fully met and home educating parents are given the option of sending in a written report, rather than being expected to allow a local authority officer into their home, some activists will still try to create a confrontation. I have a strong suspicion that even if all local authorities accepted reports and did not even ask for visits, then the next campaign would be to refuse to provide any account at all of the child’s education, on the grounds that it is no business at all of the local authority. This attitude, and I can see it emerging clearly now as a strand in British home education, suggests that much of the more militant section of the British home education scene actually wants confrontation and conflict. Even when their demands are met, they will come up with fresh grievances. We are seeing the first stirrings of this with the anger over a council’s request for a written report; we shall be seeing more of this in the future. The more reasonable and accommodating become local authorities, the more unreasonable will become the demands of some home educators.

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Peer pressure in the world of British home education

Nobody knows how many children in this country are educated at home; nor are we likely to find out in the future. One estimate widely bandied about during the Badman review was 80,000. In a book published last year, Mike Fortune-Wood argued for a figure of 150,000. Let us split the difference and assume that perhaps as many as 115,000 are being educated out of school. Some families contain more than one child and so this might give us roughly 200,000 parents of home educated children in this country. The vast majority of these parents do not belong either to groups which meet physically nor to forums, lists and online support groups. Obviously, a list which boasts 1000 members really represents only 0.5% of British home educators. Since only about 50 members post regularly, the views expressed even on a list such as this are only those of a tiny minority of home educating parents. The same applies to groups of home educating parents who meet in libraries, church halls and so on; they are very much a minority of home educating parents taken as a whole.

Commenting here yesterday, somebody said:

‘ Some of us need the services of the LA, especially those with children with SEND. However on some lists they daren't speak out and say that they are involved with the LA in that way for fear of being attacked.’

It is of course not only on Internet lists and forums that people are nervous of speaking out in favour of visits; the same thing happens at groups which meet. Somebody else commenting, said:

‘ I know, it can be a real pain when you want a visit and people try to talk you out of it.’

All clubs and societies have various unwritten rules to which members are assumed to subscribe. For those belonging to the larger home education lists and forums, one of these is that members are expected to be in opposition to local authority involvement in home education. Those who feel differently are often ridiculed and accused of making life difficult for other parents. An argument frequently advanced is that if some home educating parents accept visits, then the local authority will expect everybody to have them. Parents who have amicable dealings with their local authority are thus represented as traitors and fifth columnists whose actions have an adverse effect on other home educators. This conformity of views is enforced by anti-local authority parents forming impromptu pecking parties and bullying others until they stop expressing their own views. Sometimes, the dissenters are removed by the list owner in order to create the illusion of unanimity. This happened recently on the HE-UK list when a member asked for one person to try and make her posts a little clearer. The owner of the HE-UK list is famous for chucking off people who speak out in favour of either visits from the local authority or even for structured teaching of children.

The result of all this is that many home educating parents feel under pressure to pay lip-service to principles to which they do not subscribe. This enables those with extremist views on the subject of home education to make out that theirs are really the mainstream opinions of British home educators. We have seen a lot of this ’tail wagging the dog’ type activity on the home education scene in this country. Most home educating parents simply get on with the business of educating their children as best they can. An awful lot of them come to some accommodation with their local authority about visits or annual reports and relations are more or less good natured on both sides. When an organisation claims to represent home educating parents and their interests, we must bear in mind that even if it is a fairly large groups by home education standards, one containing say 2000 members, this is still only 1% or so of the parents of home educated children. It is unfortunate that sometimes, as in the case of visits from local authorities, this tiny minority seeks to shape the opinions and actions of others by cold shouldering and bullying those who express what are seen as unorthodox views on the subject.

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Of pig's hearts

A couple of days ago, I posted a fairly long piece here about teaching science at home. Nobody commented all day, which prompted one person to ask in the evening, ‘is discussing actual education less popular than some other topics?’ Very perceptive! I have noticed that there is a great difference between parents who actually get on and educate their children and those who belong to organisations and Internet groups concerned with home education. I tended to associate with the first group; individuals who were passionately committed to their children’s education. Most of these did not really have time to spare for belonging to online ’communities’ of other home educators. They might sometimes have joined a list or forum to find something out, but it was not a lifestyle. I might also observe that these people, like me, regarded monitoring by the local authority as one of life’s minor irritations; something which they could cheerfully do without, but which was not really all that important.

Now you might easily suppose that most home educating parents were like this; primarily concerned with education and ensuring that their children learn at least enough to prepare them for adult life. You would be wrong. There is far more interest on the larger lists and forums in working out ingenious ways to frustrate attempts by the local authority to find out about the education being provided for children. In fact one of the people who worked on the guidelines for local authorities prepared by Alison Sauer is currently incensed at the very idea that a ’suitable education’ might be defined as one which prepares a child for adult life. What the purpose of a child’s education, other than this, could possibly be is something of a mystery to me. To give readers a flavour of the sort of discussions which occupy most of the time on the main home education lists, I might mention a debate which is currently taking place about the best way to make life difficult for local authority officers who are not insisting on visits, but are instead happy to accept written reports. The list owner put forward the idea of deluging them with all sorts of paperwork and seeing how inconvenient parents are able to make the whole process of sending in an annual report. He also made the facetious suggestion that a parent should send a pig’s heart to the officer requesting information about her child’s education. This might well raise a chuckle in north Wales, where the person proposing this lives. Working as I do in the inner London borough of Hackney, I found this apparently humorous notion stupendously offensive. Perhaps this is because there are so many Muslims and Jews working for the local authority, that even a joke about sending one of them a pig’s heart would be liable to result in disciplinary proceedings. As I say, things are probably a little different the further one gets from the capital.

It is perhaps this mindset, of people more interested in making their own and other people’s lives difficult, which explains the lack of interest in discussing education per se. When there are so many amusing schemes to be discussed for getting one over on local authority officers, why would one wish to waste time thinking about the boring idea of teaching science?

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A black mark for Lincolnshire County Council

I had the misfortune to be in Lincolnshire over the weekend. For those unfamiliar with this ghastly part of the country, it provides a glimpse of Britain before the Industrial Revolution; peopled as it is in the main by half-witted agricultural workers. My wife’s family live there and so we have to visit the county pretty regularly. Mind you, they live in Grimsby, which is positively cosmopolitan and sophisticated compared with the little hamlets one finds tucked away between the potato fields. Most of the inhabitants of these places look like inbred mutants who might have wandered off the set of The Hills have Eyes. Still, enough about my daughter’s family. While we were there, I looked in on a family I know who teach their own children. I don’t really mind this myth that I never meet real-life home educators, as long as people realise that it is a complete nonsense. I was given a copy of a letter which they recently received. Blogger won’t let me put pictures here at the moment and so I shall have to type it out. It says:

Dear Mrs. XXXX,
We are doing a review of children electively home educated from XXX, to ascertain if sufficient support is being provided to yourselves and child/ren from Lincolnshire County Council. It is also important that we understand that the educational provision your child is receiving is an appropriate and comprehensive one.
In order to undertake this review we have agreed that an Education Welfare Officer will visit you at a time convenient to yourself. It would be helpful if you are in agreement, that this officer talk to your child to hear from her first hand how they are finding the education provided, and whether there is anything else we need to assist them in providing additional support services.
It is also important that we understand whether there are any additional needs in relation to your child and whether we can provide any assistance.
I am sure that you will find these visits helpful to your family.

Seldom have I seen such a horror! If somebody wished to check on the education which I was providing for a child, the very least I might require is that the people doing the checking were themselves educated to a reasonably high standard. This is manifestly not the case here; the letter being written by somebody unable to express herself in ordinary, plain English. This communication is couched in what I call ‘ill-educated formal’. This is a style of writing beloved of the barely literate, who use odd constructions which they fondly imagine deceives readers into believing that the letter has been penned by an educated and intelligent person! Almost unbelievably, the above letter was signed by the Assistant Director of Children's Services! Let us look at this monstrosity in a little detail.

It begins ‘Dear Mrs. XXX’ and then goes on to refer to ‘yourselves’. This is of course an illicit concordance between the singular ‘Mrs. XXX’ and plural ‘yourselves’. The same solecism occurs a few lines down with ‘your child’, singular, and ‘how they are finding’, plural. Awful basic grammatical error, which alone suggests that the writer has not been educated beyond primary school. And why on earth talk of support being provided to ‘yourselves’? The correct word here is ‘you’; not ‘to ascertain if sufficient support is being provided to yourselves’, but rather ‘to ascertain if sufficient support is being provided to you’. The use of ‘yourself’ instead of ‘you’ is of course another turn of phrase popular with the illiterate and inarticulate. This is also to be found a few lines later, ’ at a time convenient to yourself’. Why not simply, ’at a convenient time’?


The second sentence begins, ‘It is also important that we ..’ In order to use the word ‘also’ in this way, it must first have been show that a previous item was important. This was not even hinted at during mention of the review of electively home educated children. On another note, one is tempted to ask to whom all this is important. Important for the child? The parent? Lincolnshire County Council? It is heartening, if a little surprising, that Lincolnshire will be talking to these children to find out, ‘how they are finding the education provided, and whether there is anything else we need to assist them in providing additional support services‘. Are only home educated children to be favoured in this way, or will the local authority be speaking to children at their schools to see how they are finding their education and whether there are any additional services which they could do with?

All in all, I do not think that this letter would encourage me to engage with Lincolnshire County Council. It is semi-literate and incoherent; not at all a good advertisement for an education department!

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The advantages of studying science at home

I have noticed over the years that although a fair number of teachers will concede that parents might be able to impart the basics of literacy and numeracy to their own children, there is a pretty general assumption that secondary education is beyond the ability of the average mother or father. Baroness Deech touched upon this last year, when she gave as a knock-down argument against home education, that it would not be possible to teach chemistry in this way. During the course of the weekend I met a retired teacher who does not know me and he said precisely the same when he heard that my daughter had been taught at home, ’Well you couldn’t teach chemistry or physics at home, could you?’ The pleasure of casually mentioning my daughter’s A* IGCSEs in both these subjects!

As a matter of fact, teaching chemistry at home is actually better for a child. Pupils at school learn in a rote fashion, with very little genuine experimentation. Any experiments which are conducted have to be done in a set way, with a predetermined outcome which the teacher will judge as correct or not. This is not really science at all and it certainly does not encourage the growth of general thinking and problem solving in a child. Nor does it enable the child properly to get to grips with the underlying principles of the subject. This is where home education scores highly. Take for example the test for the presence of protein, using the biuret reagent. School textbooks state unequivocally that this is made from a mixture of potassium hydroxide and copper sulphate. If protein is present, the solution changes from blue to violet. Now I would be hard pressed to know where I might obtain potassium hydroxide locally! Common sense tells us though that this should not be necessary. In fact when my daughter was twelve and we were doing biology, this problem arose. I asked her what she thought might act as an adequate substitute for potassium hydroxide and she at once suggested sodium hydroxide. Obvious, really; having studied the periodic table, she knew that potassium and sodium share many qualities. And of course sodium hydroxide is none other than caustic soda; available from any high street chemist's shop. By tackling problems such as these, a natural consequence of doing science in a domestic setting rather than a well equipped laboratory, my daughter was able to work out solutions to chemical problems that no textbook would ever pose. Instead of mechanically following a set of instructions, even the carrying out of the biuret test became a series of little problems in both chemistry and real life. We discovered, for instance, that the cheapest way to obtain copper sulphate was from a garden centre; thus learning its role as a fungicide.

The sterile procedures carried out in schools cannot match the ingenuity needed to conduct scientific experiments in the kitchen. Bunsen burners are of course useful as a readily controlled source of heat, but spirit lamps, candles and the gas cooker can all be substituted with greater or lesser success. Julie Webb wrote about this over twenty years ago in Children Learning at Home. She found that studying science at home presented no handicap at all academically.

As with all professionals, teachers like to pretend that what they are doing is fantastically clever and that a lay person attempting to do the same thing will result in disaster. Solicitors and doctors behave in just the same way; so for that matter do electricians, plumbers and garage mechanics. In all these cases, the people involved are really protecting their own interests, rather than those of the customer. They do not want ordinary people to do these jobs for themselves, because it would do them out of work. Teachers are no different. They are well aware that what they are doing is not really so very complicated and that any fool can teach chemistry in the kitchen of a council flat just as easily as they are able to do with a well resourced laboratory.

The ingenuity needed to study science subjects at GCSE level at home is part of the learning experience for the child. Instead of having the whole thing laid out and arranged for them as happens at school, they need to work with their parents to find solutions. This typically involves ringing an expert, visiting a museum or just using their common sense. I have not the slightest doubt that the underlying grasp of the principles of chemistry acquired in this way is far stronger and more deeply rooted than the superficial, spoon-fed approach which is so prevalent now in modern schools.

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In which I confess to having been in error

Never let it be said that I am a man who refuses to admit when he has been wrong. I have been musing lately about my daughter and coming to the reluctant conclusion that I have been mistaken in an opinion which I have several times expressed warmly on this blog. Let me explain.

I posted a link yesterday to a couple of pieces which my daughter wrote for The Guardian. Somebody then drew attention to her blog. In fact my daughter is well known in some quarters, as two recent examples will show. She had lined up an internship over the summer in a magazine. It fell through and she felt that she had been shabbily treated. I was hardly aware of this; it just seemed to me the sort of thing which happens in the life of any seventeen year-old. Imagine my surprise, when the next thing I knew was that she was up at Westminster and contacted me, telling me to turn on the Parliament channel. I did so and saw a Conservative MP asking the following of the Business Secretary:

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debate/?id=2011-07-07a.1662.3


I was more than a little staggered to find that the Early Day Motion had been signed by MPs like Glenda Jackson!

Last Wednesday we were having tea, when the BBC World Service rang her on quite another matter. They wished her to take part in a live debate about young people. For some reason, they regard her as being the voice of youth; the BBC have rung her before, asking for her views on this or that aspect of modern society. Readers are now probably asking themselves where all this is leading. Why on earth, they are wondering, is he droning on about his wretched daughter in this way? A fair point indeed. I have several times expressed doubts as to the number of home educated children who go on to become professionals such as doctors, engineers or lawyers. I have suggested that if there were such adults around, surely they would have spoken out during the debates last year regarding Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill. It occurred to me a few days ago though, that despite the fact that my daughter is pretty well known in various ways, the fact that she didn’t attend school for a single day never seems to come up or be mentioned. Last year she was part of Ed Balls leadership campaign; working in his office and meeting him socially as well. Incredibly, she never once thought to mention to him that she had been educated at home.

Actually, I think that my daughter should tell people about her home education sometimes, if only as a riposte to those who claim that home educated children end up shy, lacking in confidence and with a social skills deficit. But there, we cannot dictate what our teenage children do and say. The point is that if there is one home educated young person charging around the world and being noticed in this way without letting on that she was taught at home; there are probably others as well. I think that I was wrong to assume that home educated solicitors and vets would necessarily stand up and be counted when the subject of home education is being debated publicly. There now, I hope that readers will relish this moment; it is seldom enough that I concede that I have been mistaken. Make the most of it, for it is not likely to happen again in a hurry!

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Like father, like daughter...

It struck me that those who enjoy reading my own pieces might well find it a pleasure to have some more of the family's writing to look at. Here are a couple of short articles by my daughter, whose ability to irritate people seems to be second only to my own:


http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/webb-simone

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