A new home education site

Rumour has it that when Fiona Nicholson was edged out of the lead postion at Education Otherwise by Shena Deuchars and Co, she retreated to a darkened room for a few days, chewing her nails and wondering what to do next. The answer is here;


http://edyourself.org/


This is a new site for information and advice about home education. It begins with a little bit of a white lie; claiming, as it does, that; 'this website is the work of Fiona Nicholson'. Actually, it is the work of her son Theo, but we will let that pass. I was amazed to discover that Fiona had apparently been an 'expert witness' at the select committee in October 2009! I must remember to use this gag myself, it sounds quite impressive. I had never really thought of myself as having been an expert witness before. I have a suspicion that this expression has been pinched from Paula Rothermel's site. Fiona's site is interesting though and I shall be watching with interest to see how it develops over the next few months.

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Education Otherwise

Shena Deuchars and Heidi de Wet in Swindon continue to stamp their authority on Education Otherwise. They have recently revealed, which will come as little or no surprise to those familiar with the organisation, that two thirds of EO's expenditure has been going on an office in Sheffield. This is now to be closed, marking the complete triumph of the new trustees in Swindon over the old clique in Sheffield.

Many people have noticed in recent years that Education Otherwise, once noted for being a friendly organisation devoted to helping parents who have chosen to educate their own children, has turned into some sort of aggressive political group, very ready to savage its own volunteers and members and cast them aside if they asked too many questions. It had been noticed that this trend really began around 2007. That this has not been popular with members can perhaps be seen by the fact that membership numbers are down 60% on what they were in 2006. One would have expected the Badman review to drive up membership, but this did not happen. Since the bulk of Education Otherwise's money comes from subscriptions from its members, this means that the organisation is in serious financial difficulties; it is spending far more than it is earning. This is not of course a situation which can continue. It is thought that there will be an attempt to recruit volunteers and try not to have paid staff. Of course, there may well be other reasons for the fall in membership numbers; I look at one possible explanation below.

The question is, has Education otherwise reached the end of the line now? Sometimes, groups which were once very valued and useful, fade away and decline for no other reason than that their time is over. There is no doubt that EO was a tremendous help to parents in the past and that it once had a role to play, particularly when home education was a fringe activity of which few were aware. Now that it is a well known option for parents, perhaps organisations like this have less of a part to play. If one wished to find out about the legalities and practicalities of home education in the early 1990s, then Education otherwise was an invaluable resource. Now, with so much information freely available on the Internet, there is less reason to pay an annual subscription. There are various Intrent lists, such as EO's own list which is free to non-members, for those who wish to ask questions and solicit support.

I used to belong to EO myself, but in recent years simply could not see the point in maintaining my membership. I have an idea that many others feel the same way, which might account in part for the fall in membership. I think that this year will prove crucial for the organisation. The full extent of the financial crisis which has engulfed Education Otherwise is now dawning on the new trustees and I think that the next AGM should be interesting. The rumour circulating is that certain individuals in the north of England were running EO in such a way as to help their own positions, rather than for the ultimate benefit of the membership. Surprise has been expressed at some of the claims for 'expenses' which have come to light. No doubt we shall be hearing more about this sort of thing in the near future. It will also be interesting to see if any of the new trustees decide to pay themselves for the work which they are doing. Many people thought that this was a bit of a slippery slope when the practice began a few years ago.

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The new trustees at Education Otherwise

Following the Annual General Meeting of education Otherwise, a new set of trustees are in charge. I thought that it might be helpful to provide a little information about them, in order that people could be able to have some idea of the direction which the charity might take in the future.

Fiona Nicholson is still in. She was one of the group who more or less seized control of Education Otherwise three years ago. Fiona lives in Sheffield with her seventeen year-old autonomously educated son, who has never been to school or college. It will be remembered that she provided much innocent amusement during the select committee hearing last October, when she found herself quite unable to decide whether or not she was in favour of the compulsory registration of home educated children. Still, actions speak louder than words and it was observed that Fiona never felt any inclination to notify her own local authority of her intention to home educate her son, only taking this step when the child's father was threatening to do it for her. Annette Taberner, another of the old trustees who has not resigned, also lives in Sheffield and with Fiona is part of the Northern mafia who have exercised such influence on EO for years. For a while, it was thought that Fiona's best friend in Education Otherwise was Ann Newstead, but they do not seem to be as chummy as once they were. This is rumoured to be because Fiona did not share Ann's gung-ho approach to chucking EOs money around on expensive litigation and various other profligate activities which are not really in keeping with the charity's aims. Both Ann Newstead and her husband Alexander Roarke are no longer trustees. Fiona is a great fan of the Molesworth and William books, which must surely show that she is fundamentally sound.

Shena Deuchars is a copy editor who lives in Swindon. Her daughter managed to get a place at Exeter University to study law without having any GCSEs or A levels. The whole thing was achieved by Open University courses, which is encouraging for others. Shena is a very honest and decent person who cannot fail to have a wholesome effect upon EO.

Celia McDonagh remains as a trustee. This surprised some people, who thought that she would resign along with Jo Berry. She was very involved with the Jo Berry business, allegedly passing on emails to her about internal matters at Education Otherwise. This led to threats of libel action and her resignation was demanded. She was forced out at an Extraordinary General meeting in 2006, but returned a short time later.

Some people expected that the trustees who had presided over what looked like the decline and fall of Education Otherwise would stand down en masse, but this has not happened. In fact after the AGM on Saturday, seven of the existing trustees are still around. It remains to be seen whether the reforming zeal of people like Shena Deuchars and Heidi de Wet will be able to change the organisation and bring it back to life.

There has been some talk about the accounts not being approved at the AGM, but this does not really signify. After all, they have already gone to the Charity Commission. There were discrepancies between the amounts listed in the 2008 and 2009 accounts, but this sort of thing does happen sometimes. It will be recalled that EO sacked their last auditor because they were not satisfied with how the financial position was presented in the accounts. The Charity Commission will put the accounts up on their website in due course; they have had them since September.

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Breeding hobgoblins

A few weeks ago a parent emailed me to say how much she enjoyed this blog. She said that she had unsubscribed from the HE-UK list because she had, after reading the messages there, started laying in bed at night worrying that her children were going to be taken into care! I can see her point. Reading some of the HE Internet lists and blogs, one does tend to come across a lot of scary stuff. It's enough to give anybody insomnia. Stories of parents having their children taken from them because they are home educating, social services interfering with families, oppressive actions by local authorities, the threat of having children removed for interrogation if this piece of legislation or that is passed, a 'war' on home education; the list of scare stories is endless. I have over the last year or two been put in mind many times of what the American journalist H. L. Mencken said:

'the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous of being led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.'

This is essentially what has been happening with home educating parents; a small group of people have been whipping up fears and threatening them with all sorts of dangers; dangers from which they alone can rescue them. Consider for a moment the Badman review of elective home education. I have no idea at all how the ordinary home educator might have reacted to the news that somebody was to look at the practice of home education and check if anything needed to change. We will never know, because before anybody had a chance to think about the thing, national home education groups told them what they should be thinking and feeling. On January 19th, 2009, the announcement was made that the review was to take place. That very same day, the BBC reported this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7838783.stm


'Home educators are angry'. Well of course, it was a little early to say, a few hours after the review had been launched, how the eighty thousand or so parents of home educated children in this country felt about it. What this headline really means is not that any parents actually are angry, but rather that a few people in a national organisation think that they should be angry. This is an attempt to shape and mould the opinion of home educating parents; to put the wind up them before they even have a chance to think about what is happening. It was pretty successful as well, as subsequent events showed.

Mind you, many parents seem only to happy to believe any sort of nonsense that anybody says about home education and the supposed threats to its existence. It looks to me as though a lot of them enjoy being scared about various nonexistent crises which menace their very way of life. In other words, people running Education Otherwise, Home Education UK and so on are certainly working hard to alarm parents, but they find no shortage of dupes and credulous fools willing to gape open mouthed at the ridiculous stories they peddle. Perhaps its like going to the cinema to watch a horror film; maybe these people enjoy being scared!

Let us look at another example of how the leaders of national HE groups and ordinary parents get together to enjoy a good scare. On September 19th this year one of the HE Internet lists to which I belong carried a story that the Metropolitan Police were treating home education and co-sleeping as risk factors in child abuse. It took me a day or two to track down the truth, talking to various people in the Met and speaking to the author of the piece which was causing concern. This was the Child Risk Assessment Matrix or CRAM for short. When I posted the results of my conversations, people expressed irritation. What did it have to do with me? Why was I interfering? It was as though they wanted to believe this foolishness and were annoyed that somebody had allayed their fears. Enter stage left Mike Fortune-Wood, the home educating parents' fearless champion. He wasn't convinced and was determined to get to the bottom of the matter! Talking to people indeed, I must be a gullible fool! He had made a Freedom of Information request to the Metropolitan Police and my word, he meant to find out the truth about this. Cheers of approval and relief that he was on the case. This was on September 20th. Freedom of Information requests must be complied with within twenty days and yet here we are, forty five days later and no news. My suspicion is that people like Mike Fortune-Wood and various others at Education Otherwise don't really want to reassure people about these imaginary threats. They are pleased, because it makes them indispensable. A similar scenario developed with the idea of weighing and measuring home educated children in Wales and Oldham. There is a panic, I find out what is going on, people are reluctant to be reassured and others claim to be making FoI requests. Then silence. The conclusion I draw is that many people want to be alarmed and see me as being a bit of a spoilsport for throwing cold water on their fantasies. What is interesting is that I often find that people from EO and other groups have actually been there before me and spoken to the same people. However, when they learn that there is nothing to worry about, they keep the news to themselves. Why would they do that, I wonder?

There are many motives for becoming well known as a champion of home educators. The obvious one is financial, hence the use of the term 'rent seekers', which we are seeing applied to those who are talking about home education to Graham Stuart. I do not myself believe that this is the primary reason for these people trying to maintain a sense of anxiety among home educators. I think it far more likely that it is the desire to feel important and have a chance of busy-bodying around; the same motive which caused people to descend upon Birmingham last month. I am irresistibly reminded of Rabbit in the Winnie the Pooh books. It will be remembered that he liked to boss people about and be the one organising things. Here is an extract from one of the books and it seems to me to describe perfectly how people like Ian Dowty, Fiona Nicholson and Mike Fortune-Wood probably feel. Just substitute mentally one of the above names for Rabbit when you read it and you will see what I mean:

'It was going to be one of Rabbit's busy days. As soon as he woke up he felt important, as if everything depended on him. It was just the day for organising something, or for Writing a Notice Signed Rabbit...'

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Anti-democratic activity in Birmingham

A couple of days ago I wrote about my concerns for democracy when it comes to home educators and their dealings with government, both central and local. My problems centre around the home educators and their allies rather than the local authorities and Parliament. A meeting was scheduled on October 12th for home educating parents in Birmingham to meet with the local authority officers who deal with elective home education in the city. This meeting was to be completely open, with any home educators at all welcome. The council were even laying on creche facilities for children, so that all parents could take part. Education Otherwise became involved in the business and began inviting various people from outside Birmingham. Mike Fortune-Wood from Wales, for instance, Fiona Nicholson from Sheffield and Ian Dowty from London. This changed the whole emphasis of the thing. From a meeting to discuss local issues, it began to turn into something like a national conference!

I have, as is my habit, been ringing people up and asking a lot of questions about this and the impression which I gained is that the local authority officers in Birmingham were not very happy about this attempt to bring outsiders into the meeting in this way. They originally thought that it would be just a discussion between local parents and council employees. Here is the email sent by Birmingham about the meeting before anybody mentioned bringing a barrister from London:

Please see below the final venue and agenda for the meeting on the 12th of
October.

The meeting is being held at the Council Offices, Margaret Street between
10am and 11.30 am.

Agenda;
1. Introduction
2. Issues raised by Home Educating parents
3. Response by LA officers
4. Actions to take forward

The following people will be attending;

Jason Lowther (Policy Director)
John Smail (Assistant Director, Integrated Services for Young People and
Family Support)
Michael Innocenti (Acting Head of Pupil Connect)

Gary Carruthers (Elective Home Education Advisor)
Carl Kirland (Elective Home Education Advisor)
Marie Murphy (Elective Home Education Advisor)
Alex Mroczkowski (Special Educational Needs Assessment Service)


As you know Leisure Services will be hosting a session for any delegates'
children who wish to take part and it is important that they have final
numbers
by next Tuesday (5th).

As can be plainly seen, this is an open meeting; they just want an indication of the numbers. The EHE advisors had told all the families with whom they worked about this meeting and a large turnout was expected. Gary Carruthers, one of the EHE advisors in Birmingham, said;

'I had invited over a dozen non-affilliated families myself as well as Education Everywhere. I also asked those I'd invited to ask others they thought may be interested in taking part. Jason had invited other home educators.'

No doubt that this is open to all local parents. Dozens of families have been invited; the local authority are expecting this to be a big and open event. At some stage of the proceedings, local home educating parents who wished to attend were told by the local Education Otherwise representative that it had suddenly become a small, invitation only affair and that they would not be allowed to attend. It is unclear why this should have been. Local authority officers told me that they were uneasy about the possibility of having a lot of people from outside Birmingham coming to the meeting. There has been so much bad publicity about Birmingham recently that it was feared that a newspaper reporter might attend. They also could not see why they should be providing facilities for the children of parents who did not even live in Birmingham! A fair point really. The end result of all this was truly surreal. At the meeting were people from Wales and Sheffield who were supposedly looking after home educators interests, even though they were neither home educating parents nor residents of Birmingham. Home educating parents from Birmingham who wished to attend were told that they could not do so. It would be three weeks before they were even told what had been said at the meeting.

I cannot tell readers just what a lousy example of democracy this episode is. Local home educators wishing to attend a meeting about home education in their city are barred, but members of national organisations who are not themselves home educating parents are allowed in. I have never heard anything like it in my life! This could have been a brilliant example of grassroots democracy, with ordinary parents dealing directly with the officials from Birmingham City Council. Instead, it was hijacked by people from large organisations and the ordinary parents were squeezed out.

This is a perfect illustration of why local home educating groups are the democratic way forward. The reason for the presence of people like Mike Fortune-Wood, Fiona Nicholson and Ian Dowty was very simple and had little to do with the difficulties of the parents in Birmingham; many of whom had specific concerns which they wished to raise with local authority officers and which they were prevented from doing because the meeting had become an exclusive one for 'important' people from big organisations. Education Otherwise and Home education UK feel that other local authorities are looking to Birmingham for a lead when it comes to monitoring elective home education. They are therefore anxious to change what Birmingham are doing before their methods are widely adopted. One can see this point of view, but the way they went about it meant that local home educators were sidelined and ignored in their own area. This was disgraceful and the very antithesis of democracy. It must always be borne in mind that nobody has ever voted for people like Mike Fortune-Wood or Ian Dowty, whereas the parents in Birmingham are actually voters and therefore have a direct stake in what is happening in the city. These people were the only ones who had any business at all at the meeting on October 12th.

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Undermining democracy

I am a great fan of democracy. It has its faults, but as Churchill said, 'Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time'. I am always irritated to see democracy being threatened or sidestepped in this country and unfortunately this is just what is happening at the moment with home education.

I live in a town called Loughton on the edge of London. We have a District Council and Town Council, both run by democratically elected councillors. If they screw up, we can vote them out at the next election. Parking enforcement is a big issue locally and there are usually campaigns being run about where yellow lines should be or which streets should require parking permits. This is all sorted out locally by vigorous debate among residents, councillors and local authority officers. Imagine how annoying it would be if a group of people from Sheffield and Wales invited themselves here and tried to bulldoze and bluster the council into changing their parking policies and arguing that their own ideas on the subject would be much better! I for one would object strongly. I would object even if these outsiders were pushing an agenda which I agreed with. Because they do not live here, are not voters and have not been democratically elected by anybody, they would have no business coming here and poking their nose in!

Perhaps some readers are now seeing where this argument is tending. Mike Fortune-Wood from Wales, Fiona Nicholson from Sheffield and Ian Dowty from London all went to Birmingham recently to try and persuade the local authority there to alter their policy on elective home education. Several points about this strike one immediately. Firstly, none of these people have the least particle of democratic legitimacy. They are, like the present writer, self-appointed pundits, chosen by nobody. This is in stark contrast to Birmingham City Council, who have been elected. As a thought experiment, let us try and imagine what the reaction would be if it came to light that I had invited myself to Birmingham and was trying to get the council to take a more gung ho approach towards monitoring. People would say, and quite rightly, that it was none of my business. Another point to consider is this. When I gave evidence to the Children, Schools and Families select committee last year, a great deal was made of the fact that since my daughter was sixteen, I could not be regarded as a home educator. There were angry comments to this effect on the Internet HE lists and people even contacted the select committee to complain how unfair it was. More recently, the same point has been made by people on the BRAG list; that I am no longer a home educator and therefore that my views on the subject should carry less weight than those who are currently educating their children at home. Precisely the same observation can be made about those meddling in Birmingham, such as Mike Fortune-Wood and Fiona Nicholson. They too, just like me, are not even home educators!

When local residents here in Loughton have meetings with the council to try and thrash something out, it is always done openly. Often, there is a bit in the local paper to the effect that residents are meeting next week with local authority officers or councillors to sort out some dispute. This is very right and proper and I would not like to see any such meetings being done on the quiet. It would make me suspicious. A lot of the stuff currently happening with home education though, is being done in this way. People only learn about meetings after the things have happened and even then the participants refuse to identify themselves openly, let alone say publicly what they have been saying to Birmingham Council or the Chair of the CSF select committee, as the case may be. This is very odd. If I heard that our local residents association had been having secret meetings with the town council and that none of them would talk about what had been going on or even admit to having been present, I would regard this as outrageous. So would most residents in this district.

A final point to consider is this. MPs and councillors have been voted in by the population generally, not just this special interest group or that. If policies, guidelines or laws are liable to be changed then other people have the right to know, not just those likely to be affected. Home education, truancy, children missing education, schools; all these things are matters of general public interest. Others may have points of view which they wish to express. The way that things are currently being done both with Graham Stuart's helpers and the people who went to Birmingham, means that nobody except a tiny handful of self-chosen individuals are involved in these processes. When the former Secretary of State for Education wished to change the law on home education he launched a public review and invited everybody, home educators and everybody else, to contribute their views and opinions. Later, the CSF select committee looked at the matter, again openly and publicly. This is how things are done in a democracy. The scrapping of Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill was a fine example of the democratic process at work. I have no idea what is likely to emerge from the meeting in Birmingham or the enterprise which Graham Stuart has launched. What I am absolutely sure of though is that anything which comes out of all this will have no legitimacy whatsoever. How could it? Most of those concerned on the home education side have not been elected by anybody and have got where they are simply by virtue of having sharper elbows and louder voices than others. This is not democracy.

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