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.