On the fringe

Imran Shah, a home educating parent from the south of England, is by all accounts a competent enough social worker. If I wished to know anything about child protection procedures for example, he is certainly a man whose opinion I would value. Unfortunate then that on Saturday he chose instead to deliver a lecture about neurology and endocrinology; subjects in which he is ’interested’. Mike Fortune-Wood would similarly be worth hearing if he talked about setting up a large support network for home educators. He is probably not a man though whose views on the law I would seek and yet this was a subject on which he felt able to pontificate at the same meeting on Saturday. Call me Mr Old-fashioned, but when I want to know about the law, I tend to go to a solicitor or barrister! Nor would I go to somebody who studied anthropology at university if I wished to find out about the acquisition of literacy and I think that Harriet Pattinson knows who I am talking about here.

One of the things which I have noticed about home educating parents is that they have a tendency to follow people who are not accepted experts in various fields. There are many neurologists and they have written books on the subject. Their work appears in peer-reviewed journals. Why not read what these men and women have to say about their specialist subject, rather than relying upon what a social worker tells us about what they have discovered? Some people have spent their professional lives studying in great detail the process whereby children learn to read. They too have published books about this. Why not read these books if you wish to know about the acquisition of literacy? I suppose that the answer is that people like Harriet Pattinson, Mike Fortune-Wood and Imran Shah are known to be autonomous home educators. This is fine and dandy, but does not of course make them experts about law or neurology. It simply means that they will tell other autonomously educating parents what they wish to hear; confirm them in their own beliefs if you will. This may be comforting and reassuring, which is why all those home educators gathered in London last Saturday, but it won’t really teach anybody much. They would have gained more from a couple of hours spent researching the topics in the local library. Or, they could do what I do. When I want to know something about some specialised topic which touches upon home education; I ask the experts. Even world famous scientists will often respond to email questions or answer phone calls. I am guessing here though that most of the audience did not really come to learn about either neurology or law; they wanted people to tell them that they were doing the right thing and not, as many privately fear, screwing up their kids educational chances. From that point of view, the day was a resounding success!

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Some cult-like aspects of autonomous education

A week ago, when somebody joined the HE-UK list because she wanted some solid information before taking the serious step of deregistering her child from school, Mike Fortune-Wood was quite open about his contempt for facts and figures when it came to home education. He asked bluntly, ' why do you want hard figures, in what way are they likely to help you?'

Now of course most of us would, if considering a new educational setting for our child, want to know a little about it. What are the future prospects if my child follows this course or that? How will colleges and prospective employers view this type of education? Almost all of us would ask questions of this sort, trying to elicit a few 'hard figures'. Such an attitude is not encouraged in circles where autonomous education is rife. There are I think two main reasons for this. First of course, the statistics are simply not available. Secondly, following autonomous education, a major strand of home education in this country, is more than simply choosing one pedagogical technique over another. It is very different from deciding to teach reading by synthetic phonics as against using look and say, for example. I chose to use look and say, but I have never encountered any bitterness and hostility from teachers who prefer phonics! There is something to be said for both methods and which you decide to use is a personal matter. This is very different from autonomous education, which displays many of the characteristics of a cult rather than a means of education.

There is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes a cult. I go to church every Sunday and would not class Christianity as a cult, but there are those who would. Most agree that Scientology is a cult, except of course Scientologists themselves. There are however a number of generally agreed characteristics which all cults share and I want to look at autonomous education in the light of these and see how it shapes up.

People drawn to cults are often in distressing circumstances, whether physical or mental; drug addicts, alcoholics, prisoners, the poor, those with borderline personality disorders, the grief stricken and so on. In this context, it is interesting to note the huge proportion of home educating parents who have withdrawn their children from school because of bullying or due to the school not making sufficient provision for their child's special educational needs. Watching one's child suffer must be among the most distressing experiences which any parent can endure and it strikes me that this group would be prime candidates for being attracted to some cult.

The attraction of a cult to those in distress is that it offers one simple explanation which will solve all the problems and remove the suffering. Whether it is accepting that you are a miserable sinner or acknowledging the need to write a letter deregistering your child from school, the answer is to stop asking questions and seeking rational explanations and just join the group. Once you have done this, all will become clear and your problems will be solved. To a suffering parent, this is an attractive proposition. Once they join the group, they receive unconditional love and acceptance. They belong. I am not going to quote any of the posts here from home education lists, but I suggest that readers who belong to HE-UK look at what is said to parents who announce that they are going to make the decision and invite home education into their lives. It is like a camp revival meeting! established members of the group on HE-UK may not actually cry, 'Amen' or 'Yea, Lord' or 'Preach it brother', but this is certainly the general sentiment. Another parent saved! This is precisely why the woman asking for information was viewed with such suspicion. She was not coming to the light through suffering, in the approved way. Instead, she was treating the matter as a rational decision. Big mistake! The true home educator does not weigh up the pros and cons cooly in this way, but makes the decision on faith alone. Unless she has reached this point by travelling through a vale of tears, there are those who would not view her as being a true member of the community. Asking for facts and figures indeed!

Having joined the family, new members are able to take on a new identity; that of home educators, often autonomous ones. They can say to others. 'We're autonomous', just as newly baptised Christians can claim, 'We are saved'. They are now set apart from the world. Often, it is at this point that they begin saying things which in the outside world might sound a little bit mad. This is common in cults, religions and autonomous home education. I have myself attended meetings where people would remark casually that they have been washed in the blood of the most precious lamb; not the sort of thing one would generally say down the pub or in the supermarket! It is the same with home education. Initiates will say things about the teaching of children which would cause most ordinary people to choke in disbelief.

Essentially, these parents find an identity in autonomous home education. They are no longer misfits and cranks, but have instead found a group where they can be themselves and nobody looks askance at them. The benefits to the parents are obvious; the advantages to their children less clear. I have only scratched the surface of this phenomenon today and I hope to explore the topic further over the next few days.

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Ruthless action on the HE-UK list! (again)

Fans of HE-UK, which according to the list owner Mike Fortune-Wood is going from strength to strength, might sometimes notice that everybody there seems in general to be singing from the same sheet. This is a little strange when you have a couple of thousand members. The explanation is fairly simple. We saw a few days ago that somebody asking too many questions is likely to meet with a frosty response and the suggestion that she must be some sort of infiltrator and not somebody with a genuine interest in home education at all. I posted humorously about this yesterday. Readers may have noticed that one of the people who commented light heartedly about my post was Loz, who is herself a member of the HE-UK list under her own name. Incredibly, she has now been thrown off the HE-UK list, presumably for not disagreeing with me strongly enough here!

This is how things often work in the home education world and it is the way in which the appearance of a united front is maintained, promoting a certain orthodox view to which all home educating parents are expected to subscribe. Those who are happy to cooperate with their local authorities are routinely made to feel like Quislings and collaborators; anybody not bitterly opposed to the regulation of home education is not welcome on most lists and forums. Because any dissenting voices are thrown off the lists, as Loz was this morning, it enables some home educating groups to claim that all home educating parents agree with them about everything. How could it be otherwise, when those who even ask too many questions are treated like lepers? That somebody would be thrown out of a major home education support list in this way purely for engaging in a little banter with me here is really quite disturbing. It is not the first time that it has happened though and I don't suppose that it will be the last. The next time that we see a home education group claiming that all their members support this or that point of view, it is worth remembering that maintaining this unanimity has been achieved by chucking out anybody who disagrees!

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Asking too many questions

Anybody considering an enterprise such as buying a car, moving house, applying for a job or changing the whole style of their children's education would be well advised to look into the matter carefully before making a final decision. This is only common sense. A first step would be to gather as many facts about the projected course of action as possible and then examine them carefully before deciding whether or not to proceed. This is particularly so when what you are planning will have a dramatic effect upon the lifestyle and future prospects of your children. It was heartening therefore to see somebody posting on the HE-UK list, not to announce, as is all too common, that she had withdrawn her children from school and did not know what to do next, but in order to request as much information as possible about home education so that she could make an informed decision about whether she wished to undertake it. She headed this thread, 'Considering home education'

Incredibly, this attempt to find out a few basic facts about home education was treated with the gravest suspicion by others on the list. A parent who wished to think carefully before deregistering her child from school? Somebody who wanted to look at the facts first? Must be a dangerous troublemaker! Why on earth should she ask about the efficacy of home education or want to know about any research on the subject? Why was she wanting to know about the long term prospects if she chose to home educate; GCSEs, further education and the attitudes of potential employers? The list owner, Mike Fortune-Wood, urged others on the list to refuse to answer these questions. Addressing her directly, he challenged her motives and asked what use facts and figures would be in making a decision such as this. Others swiftly joined in, starting a new thread called, almost unbelievably, 'Too many questions'! This simple request for information had, according to one parent, 'started alarm bells ringing' for her. The idea that it would be possible to ask too many questions before making a decision of this sort about one's child's education is so absolutely mad that it leaves one clutching one's head and reeling with disbelief! Presumably, those who feel this way withdrew their own children from school without asking too many questions or giving the matter too much thought.

This incident says a great deal about home education in Britain today; none of it good. Part of the animosity which was displayed towards the person making this post was motivated by the fact that her concerns were entirely educational and not related to problems at school or a desire for a different lifestyle. This in itself raised hackles; it is a rare parent in this country who chooses to home educate for educational reasons! Another thing which put people's backs up was that here was a person wishing to make a rational decision by examining all the available evidence before making up her mind. Again, this is at odds with the way such decisions are often made by home educating parents in Britain, that is to say either when they have reached such a point that there seems to be no choice in the matter or as an instinctive desire for a particular mode of upbringing for their child.

Withdrawing a child from school is a very serious decision indeed. It is common enough to hear of parents who have taken this step and are then at a loss to know what to do next; one sees them all the time on the forums and lists. Joining a list like this and asking for information first, before taking the kid out of school, that is an unusual person indeed!

This business also touches upon another aspect of British home education; the almost visceral distrust of research on the subject. Whoever the person asking for information was, whether she was even a parent at all, there could hardly have been any harm in pointing her towards Alan Thomas and Paula Rothermel's work on home education. The fear expressed though was that she might have been a 'researcher', one of the most feared and alarming characters whom a home educating parent might encounter! It is because of this ridiculous attitude towards researchers that so little is known about home education in this country. Even a sympathetic researcher like Paula Rothermel found that 80% of those whom she asked wished to answer no questions about what they were doing. Education Otherwise found the same proportion a few years later when they tried to conduct a survey among their members. I won't even mention the campaign to boycott the Ofsted research at the end of 2009.

Fortunately, some members of the HE-UK list have realised what a completely bonkers view the 'Too many questions' approach was giving of home educators. More information has been forthcoming, although the list owner is still deeply suspicious of somebody who could even think of asking all those questions! This little incident casts a revealing light upon home education in this country and I shall be exploring some further implications over the next day or two.

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Mike Fortune-Wood explains about 'honour and personal integrity'

Now I think that some of the old hands on the HE-UK list, should not be saying too much about people who take posts from that list and disseminate them to third parties. We saw Wendy Crickard make a fool of herself doing this a few days ago and now it is the turn of the list owner, Mike Fortune-Wood. He says, referring to me;

'I rely largely upon the sense of honour and personal integrity
of those who apply for membership. Unfortunately these values are not
universally held notions'

This is shamelessness upon an heroic scale! Just to remind readers, I belonged to this list for a couple of years before being chucked off at the end of July 2009 because I had written newspaper articles supporting the recommendations of the Badman review. Immediately, the HE-UK list became a clearing house for all sorts of rumours and downright lies about me. Cheerleader for this campaign was Mike Fortune-Wood who, posting as Maesk123 on the website of a national newspaper, published the details of a post which I had made to his list, a post which I had assumed was being made to a private list. He also used the same place to try and spread the story that I was a colleague of Graham Badman's. So let's get this straight, it is compatible with 'honour and personal integrity' to use a false identity to spread untruthful rumours about people in the press and publish private posts from this list to a newspaper? As my daughter would say, please!

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A new home education initiative

Once in a while one encounters something in the world of British home education which makes one feel like shouting; 'For fuck's sake! What is wrong with these people?' Readers will be relieved to hear that, as usual, they will be spared such vulgarity here. Instead I intend to discuss this matter in the calm and rational manner which has ever been my trademark; merely limiting myself to offering a few words of wise and good advice.

Staffordshire County Council, whose approach to home education has left somewhat to be desired in the past, has announced that they intend to start a support service for home educating parents. It is described like this in a local newspaper;

'Home-Educated children in Staffordshire will soon be able to get resources, tips and other support with their studies from a new online learning service.

Staffordshire County Council is planning to launch the 'Learning Platform' in the summer, initially through a pilot scheme.

It will also include a forum so young people and parents can chat online to other families who educate youngsters at home instead of school.'

I might remark that I advocate something of this sort in my book, Elective Home Education in the UK (Trentham Books, 2010). I said;

'A good many home educating parents would welcome practical help and advice from experts such as teachers and psychologists. Teaching one's child can be a lonely and on occasion unnerving process. Most parents, even the most confident, need reassurance and support from time to time....

Parents with questions about anything from the legal position surrounding home education to the age at which a child should be reading independently could be sure of hearing views from teachers and from other home educators. However, Several of the most popular existing support groups on the Internet bar professionals from membership. So myths, half truths and outright falsehoods proliferate.'

There now, I couldn't have put it better myself!

The news of Staffordshire's new scheme is being described on the HE-UK list as 'registration through the backdoor'. It is worth pointing out that when people are trying to do something 'through the backdoor', they seldom advertise the fact by sending a press release to the local paper. The person who first posted about this, says that it is a 'carrot and stick'. I am baffled as to what the stick might be. We don't even know that those joining this scheme will have to identify themselves to their local authority. In some areas, Hampshire and North Yorkshire for example, it is possible to join in activities and obtain information from the local authority like this without being officially 'known'. Others commenting on HE-UK express the hope that this will be boycotted.

Try as I might, I am unable to grasp the objection to this, although judging by the response it is certainly regarded as a bad thing by some people, including Mike Fortune-Wood. Here is an opportunity for parents who might be isolated, to ask questions of professionals. Perhaps they might want to know what children the same age as theirs who are at school are studying. They might have questions about GCSEs. Maybe some readers here could help me to get a handle on this and explain why anybody in their senses should oppose this enterprise?

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Doing the maths

I mentioned in passing yesterday that 99.9% of people sent their children to school. Upon which, predictably enough, somebody challenged me to 'do the maths'. Actually, the real figure is probably even less than this. The most thorough study attempting to discover the prevalence of home education in this country was the survey carried out in nine local authority areas by York Consulting. This took place in 2006 and was called; The Prevalence of Home Education in England: A Feasibility Study. In the nine local authority areas at which they looked, Hopwood et al found that the percentage of home educated children know to the authority varied between 0.09 and 0.42. this is less than half the 0.1 which I suggested yesterday. Even these figures may be inflated. When Ofsted conducted a study in fifteen local authority areas, they discovered that the numbers of electively home educated children fluctuated wildly throughout the year. In one authority, there were six hundred and thirty in September, but this had dropped to four hundred and thirty or so by June. People begin in September, full of enthusiasm and then a third of them have given up by Christmas!

York Consulting were criticised for choosing local authority areas with a high proportion of Gypsy/Roma/Traveller families and this too could have artificially inflated the numbers, as compared with the other hundred and forty or so local authorities at which they did not look. Even if you assume that the numbers of home educated children are roughly double that of those actually known to the local authorities, this would still only give a maximum figure of 0.84% of children aged between five and sixteen, well below the 0.1 which I claimed yesterday.

I notice that in his revamped website, Mike Fortune-Wood is suggesting that there might be eighty thousand children being educated at home. I am curious to know upon what he bases this figure. He seems to have taken the number of children known to local authorities at the beginning of the year, rounded it up and then quadrupled it! I would be interested to know his rationale for this method of calculation. One might as well simply multiply by the date and add the change in your pocket in order to obtain a figure!

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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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Nailing an old canard (again!)

Every time I think that I have dealt finally with the story of how I lied to get onto various home education Internet lists and then abused their trust by publishing newspaper articles containing information taken from these lists, I find that after a month or two somebody tries to start it up again. Yesterday, somebody who comments here regularly said;

'if my memory serves me correctly, you were barred from HE-UK because you put material from the site in the public domain without the permission of the poster or the list owner.'

This is of course absolute nonsense. I joined the HE-UK list in 2007. I joined using my real name and personal email address, although it would have saved me a lot of trouble had I done what everybody else there seems to do and used a false name. At the end of July 2009 I had a couple of articles published in the Independent and the Times Educational Supplement about home education. here is the one from the Independent;

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/simon-webb-we-must-get-tough-on-home-schooling-1764348.html


There is nothing at all in this article apart from what is freely available to any member of the public on open websites. I was keenly aware that I should not use anything which I had learned from the lists and so restricted what I wrote to information from the public domain. I quoted from an account of autonomous education found on the Education Otherwise site. It is here;


http://www.education-otherwise.org/HE/LS5.htm



Soon after this was published Mike Fortune-Wood, the owner of the HE-UK site, posted a comment on the online version of the article in which he claimed that I had lied to gain admission to his list. This was not true of course and he was too ashamed to sign his own name to this comment, preferring to use the pseudonym Maesk123. He also included a post which I had made on the list. Up until that point, I had assumed that all comments which people posted on this list were private and meant only to be read by those on the list. Other members of this list then began to publish my comments from the list in various places, including writing to the editors of national newspapers with quotes from them. Later on, things which I had posted on this list began to appear on blogs and websites across the world! On October 7th 2009 Wendy Crickard posted a message on the HE-UK list asking for details of previous posts of mine made to the list. She explained that she wished to show these to Linda Waltho MP, who was sitting on the select committee.

One might have thought that if anybody on this list was really concerned about the privacy of messages which were posted there, then at least one person would have raised an objection to this. In fact Janet Ford, another of those who seems to be ashamed of her own name, posting as Mehetabel, started a new thread called, '[HE-UK] Simon Webbs previous posts for Wendy :-‏' She then listed every post of mine that she could find, so that others could pass them on to MPs and anywhere else.

It was at this point that I realised that the posts which people made on the HE-UK list were not really regarded as being private at all. It was clear from the fact that nobody objected on the list to all this, that all the members found this it quite acceptable to use posts in this way and to publish them anywhere. From that time on I have not bothered at all about the privacy of this list.

I hope that it is now plain that I did not put anything in my two articles from any of the home education lists to which I belonged when I wrote them. I hope it is also clear that when one finds that all those on a private list, from the list owner downwards, are perfectly content to publish private messages across the Internet, in national newspapers and even submit them as evidence to a select committee, then the idea of a 'private' list is no longer really possible. It is clear that private messages on such a list are really regarded as public property. I have behaved accordingly ever since this happened. I do hope that this will be the last I have to write about this topic.

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An important anniversary

I must crave my readers' indulgence as I reflect that this blog has now been running for just over a year. I have been prompted to muse about this by something which I was reading on the HE-UK list recently. A new forum for home educators has been started, called Other(wise) Inclined and the woman who started it mentioned the fact on the HE-UK list. Mike Fortune-Wood, owner of the list, rather sniffily expressed the view that nobody really needed another HE forum and he couldn't see why anybody would want to start one. Others agreed. This struck me as being a bit strange. Imagine if somebody commented here and said that they were starting a blog on home education and I told them that it wasn't necessary because there were already enough blogs on the subject! A little thought though, made things clearer.

I have noticed lately that very few people are posting on either the HE-UK or the EO list. I have observed the same thing about the Badman review Action Group. In fact, looking at a typical day recently, August 17th, I see that the HE-UK, EO and BRAG lists had a total of only twenty four posts. This blog, by contrast, had forty seven; in other words twice as many as the other three lists put together. The number of visitors who come here without posting is of course much greater than that. I must confess that I was a little surprised to discover that numbers of some HE sites have fallen so dramatically. I see that poor Mike Fortune-Wood has now been reduced to trying to drum up visitors for his website by pimping it on BRAG and other lists.

Why are so many people coming onto this blog? Well of course it might be that they are attracted by my facility for (hem, hem) turning out such brilliant prose. I am inclined to doubt this. The writing is competent, but not really worth reading for its own sake. Initially of course, many people came here to hurl abuse at me and denounce me as a traitor and quisling to the cause of home education. Those types seem to have left though. It certainly can't be my winning personality and engaging charm which draws people because, as is generally known, I am an exceptionally abrasive and unpleasant sort of fellow. Exchanging comments with me is about as agreeable as having root canal treatment! Perhaps I am asking the wrong question. Maybe its not that this is an especially wonderful blog, perhaps it's that the other places where home education is discussed have something about them which people don't like and they come here because it is different.

A couple of years ago, there were some very spirited debates taking place on the HE-UK and EO lists. I say 'spirited'; downright vicious would be more accurate. In fact I have never encountered anything like it in my life. New members would join, express an opinion and be immediately savaged. It really was quite exciting. Many of the people who hung out on those two lists seemed to be permanently angry. One or two of them are still around. Ruth O'Hare from Godalming, AKA firebird2110, for instance. Anybody remember the angry pixie from the Faraway tree? That's what she always reminded me of. Also a bit like some retired colonel in Tunbridge Wells, going purple in the face every five minutes over some imagined slight or other. Of course, these angry home educators provided a certain amount of innocent amusement, but the novelty swiftly wore off. Many parents would join the lists, watch what was happening and then leave. The atmosphere on those places really was poisonous, with people being bullied and driven off a lot. I have remarked before on the irony that some of the worst offenders seemed to be mothers who had taken their children out of school due to bullying.

Now I fancy things are a little different here. True, I piss people off with my smug arrogance, but then again some of the people who comment here piss me off, so honours are pretty well even on that score. What I do notice is that there do not seem to be any really unpleasant arguments; people give the impression of trying to find common ground. Also, there is a good deal of humour, which has always been lacking from some other blogs and Internet lists on home education. All in all, if one forgets about the odd mad chess playing father, I think that this is a rather good natured and easy going place to visit, compared as I say with some home education sites.

Well, that's it folks. I'm not much given to nostalgia, but nor did I feel able to leave such a significant anniversary unremarked. Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

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Naming and Shaming alert!

Looking at the comments here over the last few days or so will have shown what a tough line my readers take towards lying. The idea that I might once have used an assumed name when writing for newspapers has particularly shocked those of delicate sensibilities. One person said that I;

'has mentioned frequently that he lies if it will benefit his career and thinks everyone else does it.'

This was a reference to the possibility that I might in the past have used a pseudonym. This debate rumbled on for a few days. Unfortunately, those posting rather spoiled their own argument by hiding behind pseudonyms themselves, but we will leave that for now. I am vastly obliged to a reader, who wishes to remain anonymous, for telling me of the existence of the article below;

http://www.theecologist.org/green_green_living/home/268824/how_to_home_educate.html


It is of course written by Mike Fortune-Wood, who runs the HE-UK list. He wrote it under a pseudonym..... What makes this such a breathtaking bit of hypocrisy is that Mike Fortune-Wood, or Fortune-Lee I don't know which is his real name, has been forthright in denouncing me for this very practice, accusing me of lying about my name. I am now informed that he laughingly admits to using false identities to plant stories in the media and elsewhere about home education. This is certainly true. When he wanted to criticise me on the online edition of a national newspaper, he signed the message not with his own name but as Maeske123. Perhaps he couldn't remember that day whether he was called Fortune-Lee or Fortune-Wood; he is a man of many identities and presumably of more than one face!

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