I have over the last few days pointed out one or two difficulties which are likely to arise with the new guidelines which have been produced by Alison Sauer. Still, perhaps they won’t be adopted in the end? Even so, a considerable amount of damage has already been done. Influential MPs such as Graham Stuart, Chair of the CSF select committee, and Lord Lucas have learned a lot about home education from their dealings with Alison Sauer. They evidently believe that she has given them an objective view of home education in Britain and they have now passed her views on to Nick Gibb, the Schools Minister. The thing is, they have been given a weird and distorted view of home education and unless somebody sets them straight, the home educating community in this country could be heading for trouble.
I want to look today at how Alison Sauer thinks that home education works in this country. She explains that it is a spectrum with autonomous or child-led education at one end. This is fair enough, although there might be a problem with her understanding of this concept. Still, it is true that some home educators call themselves ’autonomous’ or 'child-led’; it is a genuine trend in British home education. At the other end of the spectrum is, according to these guidelines, ’school-at-home’. Now I have never in my life heard anybody say that they are a ’school-at-home’ educator. That's because this is a pejorative expression coined not by those who follow a structured education, but by unstructured educators who wish to be derogatory about structured home education. Many structured home educating parents are really irritated by being described as doing ’school-at-home’. To use this phrase to describe home educators who actually teach is a little offensive. Has anybody ever heard of a home educator who says, ’We do school at home’?
According to Alison, such parents use a curriculum to cater for the whole of their children’s education. Has anybody ever met such a parent? Even more bizarrely, she claims that such families:
‘maintain a clear distinction between education and leisure, and often keep the school rhythm of terms and holidays’
This is such nonsense that it made me laugh out loud! Has anybody here ever heard a structured home educating parent say, ’No more education for Jimmy for the next few weeks; the local schools broke up for Easter yesterday’?
I can imagine that at this point some autonomous educators are chortling with glee at the idea of structured education being misrepresented in this way. Perhaps before they fall off their chairs laughing, they should read Alison’s description of autonomous education, where they will learn that ’learning takes place without teaching’
The strange ideas contained in this document may well have been accepted by people like Graham Stuart and very possibly Nick Gibb as being the standard model of home education in this country. It is not; it is one person’s idea on the subject. When that person believes that, ‘A Local Authority is responsible for any child of compulsory school age that has been brought to their attention as having, or probably having, special educational needs’, you are in serious trouble. Even if these guidelines end up in the bin, the damage has been done and some in parliament have now a strange and distorted view of what home education in this country is actually about.
