The new guidelines; a summary to date

Judging from some of the questions being asked on Internet lists, there is confusion about what these guidelines are which Tania Berlow and her friends are working on. Let me just give a brief outline so that people can see what is going on.

The law relating to home education in this country is very muddled and confusing. So much so, that even lawyers cannot always agree on what the situation actually is. In addition to the basic bit of law which allows home education, Section 7 of the 1996 Education Act, there are various old precedents and also a number of more modern pieces of statute law. The Education (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2006, Children Act 2004 and of course a new section added years later to the 1996 Education Act. Section 436A, laid upon all local authorities a duty to identify children missing from education. Section 437 goes on to specify that home educated children receiving a suitable education are not to be regarded as being missing from education. The result of all these laws is that local authorities sometimes get a bit mixed up about what their legal duties actually are when it comes to home education. For this reason, in 2006 it was decided to try and produce some guidelines for the local authorities, government approved guidelines which would explain their duties. Between August and November 2006, York Consulting Ltd. undertook a study for the Department of Education and Science, which in May 2010 became the Department for Education. Their brief was to examine elective home education in England and try to identify any perceptible trends.

The result of York Consulting's work was that in 2007 the Department issued the Guidelines for LAs on elective home education. They can be found here:

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatters/publications/elective/


The aim of Tania Berlow's group is to rewrite these guidelines. There are two difficulties. Firstly, the guidelines are not statutory. This means that local authorities can ignore them is they wish. The second problem is that the current guidelines could hardly be made more favourable to home educators than they already are. For instance, they say;

2.7 Local authorities have no statutory duties in relation to monitoring the quality of home education on a routine basis.

Some parents may welcome the opportunity to discuss the provision that they are making for the child’s education during a home visit but parents are not legally required to give the local authority access to their home. They may choose to meet a local authority representative at a mutually convenient and neutral location instead, with or without the child being present, or choose not to meet at all.

3.11 Local authorities should bear in mind that, in the early stages, parents’ plans may not be detailed and they may not yet be in a position to demonstrate all the characteristics of an “efficient and suitable” educational provision.

3.14 It is important to recognise that there are many, equally valid, approaches to educational provision. Local authorities should, therefore, consider a wide range of information from home educating parents, in a range of formats. The information may be in the form of specific examples of learning e.g. pictures/paintings/models, diaries of educational activity,
projects, assessments, samples of work, books, educational visits etc.


In fact it is hard to see how these guidelines could be any better from the point of view of home educating parents. They already make it clear to the local authorities what they can and cannot do. Why do they need to be changed? Of course some parents are not happy with the law itself and want that to be changed. This is quite a different matter and there are, as far as we have been told, no plans for this.

So much for the background. The only public face of the changes to the 2007 guidelines is of course Tania Berlow. Two slightly alarming things have been noticed about her more recent posts on the Badman Review Action Group; one relating to form and the other to content. Tania seems to be falling into the habit of emphasising important words by the use of capital letters. Rather like THIS. This is SELDOM a good SIGN and unless she is CAREFUL, she might end up using GREEN or YELLOW ink like another well known home educator! The second and even more chilling feature of her latest post is mention of the New World Order. Now in my experience, once people begin talking of the New World Order it is only a matter of time before we start hearing about Rosslyn Chapel, the Illuminati, Area 51 and Prince Philip being responsible for Diana's murder. It is devoutly to be hoped that there will be no mention of either the New World Order or any of these other topics in the new guidelines!

If Alison Sauer's company, Sauer Consultancy, has been officially commissioned to do some work on behalf of the Department for Education, as York Consulting was in 2006, we should be told. It is high time to drop the secrecy and come out into the open. When York Consulting carried out their work in 2006, work which led to the publication of the 2007 guidelines for local authorities, there was none of this secrecy and I cannot for the life of me see why there should be now. The only reason which I can think which would explain this lack of openess is that something a bit fishy is going on.

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Rumour and misinformation

I was accused a couple of days ago of spreading rumours about who might or might not be involved in the drawing up of the new guidelines for home education. The difficulty is that because of the way that this is being done, almost everything to do with this business is rumour and speculation. Now the truth is, many people want to know what is going on about these guidelines. They wish to know who is involved, what their terms of reference are, whose idea the whole thing is, who elected these people to do this job on behalf of other parents and many other things besides. Apart from Tania Berlow, none of those involved are prepared to identify themselves. This means, inevitably, that we must fall back upon guesswork and cloak and dagger to find out what is going on. This is far from satisfactory.

I have been sent various pieces of information and also misinformation about all this. The most recent bit of misinformation was a copy of Alison Sauer's Business accounts and credit rating, together with the claim that Mrs Anon, who regularly posts here, is Alison Sauer's secret identity! This is of course completely untrue, but it does make me ask myself why people would be going to such lengths in order to muddy the waters!

How could this current situation have been avoided? Very easily really. If the people who had agreed to undertake this work had set up a blog specifically devoted to the new guidelines and announced that they welcomed everybody's views on the subject, that would have stopped all rumours before they had even begun. It costs nothing to set up a blog like this one and they could have named themselves and explained precisely what they were doing and why. Such a blog could then have been advertised on the main HE Internet lists and then the whole thing would have been open and above board. This would have stopped all the rumour and speculation from starting. Instead, Tania Berlow has become the public spokesperson of the group and the only source of information about what is actually being done. This is far from satisfactory, because Tania is a woman who never uses one word where twenty will do and despite all he posts on the Badman Review Action Group and elsewhere, we still do not really know what is happening.

As long as the group who are directly involved in putting together the new guidelines are refusing to speak publicly or post on any of the lists, the gossip, rumour and innuendo will continue and indeed increase. I dare say that readers are itching to know what Alison Sauer's accounts said, but the answer is really very little. There is something a little puzzling and that is this. We are told that she has trained fifty local authorities in matters relating to elective home education. According to her accounts though, nothing much has been going on with this company for the last five years or so. It also has a very low credit rating. This is curious. Apart from North Yorkshire and Lancashire, can anybody name a local authority which Sauer Consulting was involved with? I suppose the implication of whoever sent me this document is that Alison is not as successful as we are being told and that in fact she has not really done as much in the way of training as has been claimed. Since the original email was headed 'Financial motive', I guess that we are intended to think that she is desperate to drum up some business. Of course, this informant is not very reliable and has some reason of her own to try and confuse matters by pretending that Mrs Anon and Alison Sauer are one and the same person! This suggests that we should treat anything being hinted at but this person with a good deal of caution.

Just to complicate matters a little further, there is a suggestion that a vacuum will soon be left by the demise of Education Otherwise and that a large Internet group is hoping to fill this gap with a national organisation of their own. It is being hinted that this would be for financial reasons, rather than for the good of home educators. Clearly, the next year or two will prove interesting for those involved in home education and it seems likely that changes are very definitely on the way in one form or another.

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Children Missing from Education

On one of the Internet lists concerned with home education there is currently anger and anxiety about a poster put up by the local authority in Derbyshire. It is outside, and inside, schools and nurseries. This is what it says:

MISSING CHILDREN
Education is vital to ensure that all children get a good start in life.
Every year more than 100 children go missing from the Derbyshire
education system. It's important we get them back into schools.

WHY DO CHILDREN GO MISSING FROM SCHOOL?
-Some children simply don't start school - their parents don't enrol
them.
-Other children stop going to school, or don't make the move from
primary to secondary.
-And some families never enrol their children when they move to the
county from elsewhere.

AT RISK
Children not in education might be at risk of harm we want to ensure
that they are safe.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU'RE CONCERNED
If you think a child is missing out on school call us in confidence on
0845 058058
We can contact the family and help get their child into school.


As usual, some home educators are outraged and view the thing as an attack on their lifestyle. As usual, they are quite wrong.

Children Missing from education or CME is an attempt to find children who are not attending school or receiving an adequate education elsewhere. According to the report Out of School, which Ofsted produced in 2004, there might be ten thousand such children in this country. Some of these are children who are kept at home in order to work or look after the home. They are at increased risk of abuse and involvement in crime. Others are teenagers who have simply dropped out of school. The parents move to another area perhaps and the child is not registered at a new school. Some vanish during the transition from primary to secondary. Reading the outrage among some home educating parents about the CME initiative, one rather gets the feeling that they do not really believe in the existence of such children. They see it all as part of a sinister plot by Ofsted and the local authorities to force home educated children to go to school. Last year, I gave a couple of examples of the sort of case that CME is actually designed to detect and since there are many new readers here, I think I should describe one of these cases again. The target for CME is not home education at all. It is children missing from education. In order to identify these children it might be necessary to visit the homes of children who are not at school in order to see whether or not they are being educated. There is strong opposition to such visits by some home educating parents, but they are a vital tool in rescuing vulnerable young children.

This case is from the London Borough of Waltham Forest. An eleven year old boy left primary school and there was no record of his being registered with a secondary school. The family were Sylhetis and the suspicion was that they had returned to their country of origin. An Education Welfare Officer was sent to the house after a number of letters had remained unanswered. There was no reply when he knocked on the door, but he could hear activity and voices round the back. He wandered round there and discovered a garage/workshop which had been converted into a small factory. The eleven year old boy for whom he was searching was there, evidently running errands for those operating the machines. The place was an absolute nightmare and was clearing being run without any regard to the Factory Acts or other relevant regulations. As far as could be established, the child's mother had returned to Bangladesh and left the boy behind. His father was using him to both keep house and also act as errand boy for his business. It did not take much to persuade the father that he would be prosecuted unless his son was sent to school. In this case, there was a happy outcome.

It is cases such as this which prompt unannounced visits from EWOs. The point to consider here is that had the father sent a letter stating that he was educating his son at home and did not wish to accept a visit, then the child could very well have continued being denied an education. Some home educating parents are adamant that all that should be required for them is to state that they are providing an education and that local authority interest in them and their children should stop at once. If that policy were to be generally adopted, then it would leave many children at hazard. I have a fund of anecdotes like the one above, all involving children who were not at school but were not receiving an education elsewhere. Without conducting enquiries, some of which might be thought of as intrusive, it would be impossible for the local authority to discover that the children were not being educated. This is the purpose of CME; not the persecution of home educators. If some home educating parents refuse to answer questions or allow visits, then it is very hard to distinguish them from the parents of children, like the one above, who are not receiving an adequate education. It is then not at all unlikely that they might receive an unannounced visit from an EWO. In such a case, they will have only themselves to blame.

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More about the new guidelines

Others have noticed that in the last week or so three questions about home education have been asked in Parliament by Tory MPs. Two of the questions were identical;

'To ask the Secretary of State for Education what his policy is on home education; and if he will make a statement'

A third concerned the A levels and GCSEs passed by home educated children. There are two possible explanations for this flurry of interest in home education. One is that individual MPs are taking an interest in the topic of home education because their constituents are expressing concerns about it. The other and more likely explanation is that these questions have been 'planted' by government whips in order to suggest that people are worried about home education. The planted question of this kind is of course a very popular device in Westminster. If this is the case, then it suggests strongly that the Coalition is intending to do something about home education. The questions is, what are they going to do?

This brings us back to the only activity involving home education which we know is connected with Parliament; the famous new guidelines. Before we go any further, I would like to make it clear that I have no reason at all to doubt that all those dealing with Graham Stuart are doing so for the best of motives. I am sure that they genuinely believe that what they are doing will be for the best interests of home educating parents. This does not of course mean that they are right, nor that they are not being used unwittingly as fall guys or patsies. How could this be?

Here is what seems to me a very plausible scenario. Michael Gove, because of cases like Khyra Ishaq and the Riggi children in Edinburgh, wishes to introduce as a bare minimum compulsory registration for home educators. He is strengthened in this view by the fact that every report and almost all education professionals are in favour of such a move. He encourages, via Nick Gibb and Graham Stuart, a dialogue with various prominent home educators. ideas are generated and provisional rules drawn up. Then registration is included in a White Paper on education, with the intention of making it law. Michael Gove can then claim that a number of MPs have expressed anxiety about home education (via the planted questions) and that home educators themselves have been helping with the process of framing new legislation. Any resultant outrage will be largely limited to the Internet lists and so invisible to the general public. It will be all but impossible to ever establish what the members of the secret group did and did not agree to, because of course everything has been done on the quiet. I doubt whether newspapers are going to bother cooperating with another campaign by home educators against regulation as they did last year.

In order to see whether or not the above scenario is likely, it would help if we had the answers to one or two questions. I know that the people who are actually involved with Graham Stuart are reading this and so they could, if the wished, comment anonymously and reassure those who are worried that this is an undemocratic process likely to have a substantial impact upon home educating parents. The sort of questions that we need to ask are as follows.

Did the initiative for drawing up these guidelines come directly from Graham Stuart or was he encouraged to start this by Michael Gove or Nick Gibb?

Is there any intention, as Tania Berlow has hinted at on the BRAG list, of including anything about home education in a White Paper on education?

Has Graham Stuart given any written assurance that the law on home education will not change as a result of anything currently being done?

Graham Stuart has said that 'leaving things as they are is not an option'. What grounds did he have for saying this? What has he heard about government intentions in the area of home education?

These are four very simple and straightforward questions which could be answered in a dozen words. If the initiative for the guidelines came from Nick Gibb and there is an intention to include something about home education in a White Paper, then the chances are that new legislation is on the cards. Mike Fortune-Wood recently mentioned that he has held training sessions for local authorities and advised them soundly upon the law. They then go off and draw up procedures whish he has advised against and said were not lawful. A similar thing could very easily take place with these present discussions unless they have written minutes of meetings and a clear and unambiguous mandate.

I said in yesterday's post, 'Betsy Anderson, an American lawyer is not directly involved, but gives the odd bit of advice.' This is perfectly true. Without going into any details, Betsy Anderson has suffered something of a disaster which has effectively rendered her homeless. She according has little time to concern herself with these guidelines. She has not had any contact with Alison Sauer for months. Nevertheless, some of those involved with the guidelines have asked her opinion on specific points which are troubling them and she has replied. This is all that I meant and I am happy to clarify this.

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A problem with the new guidelines.....

As I am sure most readers are aware, a small group of home educators and former home educators are currently putting together guidelines on home education which, it is hoped, will be adopted by the Department for Children. These may replace the 2007 guidelines which at the moment tell local authorities how they should behave towards home educators. There is of course a little more to it than this. There has also been some talk of including something drawn up by this group in a forthcoming White Paper on education. This raises the possibility that some of what they are doing could eventually find its way onto the statute book. There is a problem at the heart of this whole process, a problem which is now becoming apparent to others. It is this. When Graham Badman was given the job of looking at elective home education in this country and making any recommendations for change that he found to be necessary, there was an announcement to the press. It was on the BBC news, in the newspapers and so on. The reaction of Education Otherwise and other groups was also in the newspapers. It was a public affair. That has very definitely not been the case with the present 'consultation'.

The situation currently is that a small group of unknown people are formulating some sort of document, at whose nature we can only guess. The only member of this group whose name we know is of course Tania Berlow. Judging by the way that she is weighing into the debate, it is a fair guess that Ali Edgley is also involved in the business. She of course has not been a home educating parent for some years now. Alison Sauer is also connected with the thing, as is Imran Shah. Betsy Anderson, an American lawyer is not directly involved, but gives the odd bit of advice. What's wrong with this picture? What is wrong is that unless one were to join up to various Internet lists and make a deliberate effort to find out about this, nobody would even know that it was happening. Most of those Internet lists have only a few hundred members, which means that the vast majority of the eighty thousand or so home educating parents in this country have absolutely no idea at all that this is happening. Which of course means that even when the guidelines have been written and others are invited to contribute, the overwhelming majority of home educators simply will not hear about them. Tania Berlow's chosen list for discussing all this is the Badman Review Action Group, which only has about seven hundred members, not all of whom are home educating parents.

With the Badman review of elective home education, we knew who instigated the thing; the Secretary of State for Education, Ed Balls. We knew the terms of reference for the enquiry. Everybody who wished was free to contact Graham Badman and contribute their views. It was a transparent and open democratic process. This is very far from being the case here. Who instigated the present 'consultation'? What are the terms of reference? Is the aim simply to produce new guidelines and if so, will these definitely replace the 2007 guidelines? Have the Department for Education asked for this to be done or is it simply a private project of Graham Stuart's? What is all this about putting stuff in a White Paper? Why are we not given the names of those working on the guidelines? Who chose them? Why was no announcement made that this was happening and why has it been necessary to engage in detective work to find out about the thing? Is this an official activity and if so, who authorised it?

Until we know a good deal more about what is going on with these secret negotiations with Graham Stuart and the Department for Education, I think that home educating parents are right to feel a little wary about this. When the document is finished and others are invited for their views, how will this be done? Will an attempt be made to publicise the chance to contribute, publicised beyond a casual message on a small Internet list? Here is something which could affect every home educator in the country, now and for years to come. That it is being conducted on the quiet, with every bit of information having to be extracted by guesswork and cloak and dagger means, is absolutely incredible. It is time that this was opened up by means of a public announcement; telling all home educators who is involved, what is being done, what is planned to be done and how they can become involved themselves. Of considerable concern is the fact that some of those involved are not themselves home educating parents. They are, in effect, drawing up rules which will not affect them in the least. For many parents, this is unacceptable. At the very least, anybody concerned in this should be a genuine home educator.

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More about Education Otherwise

Somebody yesterday wanted to know a little more about the background to Education Otherwise's current problems. I thought that I would post a brief outline, particularly as some people elsewhere seem to be getting a little worked up.

In early 2007, there was something of an upheaval among the trustees of Education Otherwise. On February 10th that year, eleven trustees resigned and eight new ones were appointed in their place. One of these new trustees was a woman called Joanna Cynthia Berry. Up until that time, Education Otherwise had always filed their accounts and annual return promptly with the Charity Commission. Since that time, they never have done so. The latest accounts, for the year ended June 30th 2009, were finally filed on September 17th this year. This was very late. The annual return for that year has still not been filed and the Charity Commission are getting quite tetchy about this. The annual return is simply a document detailing any changes in trustees over the last year. It can be done online with a few clicks of the mouse and the only reason that I can see for the failure to submit it is that EO are not sure who to put down as currently being trustees. They have a very high turnover of trustees due to internal wrangles and some people resign almost as soon as they have been appointed. Some, like Fiona Nicholson, are in and out like Jack-in-the-boxes. She was appointed as a trustee on February 15th 2008, resigned three weeks later on March 6th and less than a week later was appointed again! Companies House have also had to put the frighteners on EO in order to get the information which is legally required to be supplied to them.

There was a good deal of controversy about one of the trustees appointed in 2007, Jo Berry who was mentioned above. There was an unfortunate incident in her domestic life and the suggestion was made that she was perhaps not the best person to assume responsibility for child protection for the charity. Certainly, the fact that she was a trustee caused raised eyebrows in some local authorities. At one point, there was a threat of legal action against former members of Education Otherwise for things which were said concerning her. Quite a few people thought that her continued presence as a trustee made Education Otherwise look as though it had a cavalier attitude towards child protection. Another suggestion being made was that the new trustees were behaving in a vindictive fashion and forcing out of the organisation people who had served it loyally for years.

At the end of 2008, two members of Education Otherwise requested a list of members. This was part of another bout on infighting in the organisation. Because EO is a limited company as well as being a charity, they were legally obliged to provide this information, but refused to do so. Instead, they became embroiled in a court action to prevent the release of the names of the Signed Up Members of the company. This row continued after Graham Badman had started his review of elective home education and the whole business of safeguarding and the possible abuse of home educated children was a major issue. Education Otherwise then decided that one of the reasons that they would not release the list of members names was that many parents were home educating because of child abuse. They said, in a submission to the court that they would not allow anybody to see the list of members because:

' one reason for this is that individuals who home educate their children comprise a significant proportion of individuals who were abused as children, this often being the motivating factor in that individual deciding to home educate their child.'

It was, to say the least of it, unfortunate that this became known just as Badman was asking about child abuse among home educators! Some people thought that this, combined with the controversy over Jo Berry, gave an odd and undesirable impression of EO to the outside world.

The latest attempt to hold an Annual General Meeting and get the accounts approved was held last Saturday, November 6th. It was a bit of a flop, because few trustees turned up. Another AGM is to be attempted this Saturday in Oxford. Supposedly, Jo Berry is going to stand down as a trustee at this meeting. People on some lists have made much of the fact that the accounts have been very late for the third year running and that the annual return has yet to be made to the Charity Commission. It is now about seven months late. I do not personally attach much importance to this. Many charities are slack about filing their annual returns. There seems to be a suspicion that the court case cost a lot more than has been thought and that this is why the accounts took so long to prepare. A figure running into tens of thousands of pounds for lawyers fees has been mentioned, but until the accounts can be examined, this is only rumour.

There are two main reasons why charities have difficulty getting their accounts done on time. these are (a.) useless and incompetent trustees and (b.) some sort of funny business going on. My own view is that the probable explanation lies in a bunch of people managing to seize control of EO in 2007/2008 and not altogether realising just what was entailed in running the company. I believe that inefficiency lies at the heart of the matter rather than crookedness.

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Education Otherwise

Most readers will probably be aware by now that the Annual General Meeting of Education Otherwise was held in Oxford on Saturday. Because not enough people turned up, it was adjourned. Only four of the thirteen trustees of the charity turned up, which is very odd. I don't intend to go into all the ins and outs of the troubles which have beset the organisation over the last few years, but the bottom line is that many think that EO has reached the end of the line and that when the AGM is reconvened this coming Saturday, it is possible that it might simply mean that it will be to wind up the charity. The question is, would this matter to most home educators? Whom would it affect?

Like many home educating parents, I joined Education Otherwise at one stage. And, again like so many others, I allowed my subscription to lapse after a year. I couldn't see what I was getting from the thing, nor how my money was being used to help other home educators. There are currently four or five thousand members and it would be interesting to know how many of these have only joined for a year or so. I think that this is probably very common and that there is a relatively small core membership which belongs to EO for years on end. Many local authorities push Education Otherwise to parents who de-register their kids from school and it appears on the websites of an awful lot of councils. For many people outside the world of home education too, Education Otherwise is synonymous with home education in this country. The claim is frequently made that EO have succeeded in making home education an acceptable alternative to schooling for British children and that without their efforts over the years, parents in this country would face a much harder time from their local authorities. Is this true?

Section 36 of the 1944 education Act laid down that parents must cause their children to receive a suitable education, 'either by regular attendance at school or otherwise'. This was included as a nod to those, like the Royal family, who traditionally engaged governesses and tutors for their children rather than sending them to school. Without this section, the prospect would have been raised of the Truancy Officer banging on the door of Buckingham Palace! It was to be ten years or so before an 'ordinary' parent thought to take advantage of this loophole and not send her children to school. In 1952, Joy baker took this step and spent the next nine years fighting against Norfolk County Council to secure this right. During the seventies and eighties there were other key cases which secured the ground for other parents who wished to educate their children at home and defined what is meant by a 'suitable' and 'efficient' education; Harrison & Harrison v Stevenson (1981) QB (DC) 729/81, Phillips v Brown (1980) Divisional Court June 20th and of course R v Secretary of State for education, ex Parte Talmud Torah Machzikei Hadass School Trust.

Now while it is true that one of these cases, Harrison & Harrison v Stevenson, involved Iris Harrison, who was a founder member of Education Otherwise in 1977, she and her husband fought and won the case pretty well single-handedly. In other words, all the key cases of precedent which have established the legality of home education have had nothing at all to do with Education Otherwise or any other organisation. Throughout the seventies and eighties, parents were starting to home educate their children and fought to ensure that local authorities did not prevent them from doing so. This would have happened with or without the existence of Education Otherwise.

Still, there must be other good things about EO. They provide a lot of information to parents on their website and through newsletters, don't they? This of course is quite true, but in the modern world almost completely irrelevant. In the eighties, when key court cases were being heard such as that of the Harrisons, it was necessary to spread the news of judgements like the one at Worcester by means of letters and telephone calls. Unless you belonged to Education Otherwise, you might simply not have heard about Iris Harrison's triumph at the Crown Court; it was not widely reported. Similarly, the legal position, relevant parts of the 1944 Education Act and so on, were not freely available. A parent living in a remote rural area might have needed to travel to London to track down such documents and pay for photo-copies. These days, the case is altogether different.

The Internet alone has probably made groups like Education Otherwise unnecessary. All the information one could possibly require on anything at all to do with home education, anywhere in the world, is freely available at the click of a mouse. One can join groups and lists, chat on forums, arrange to meet other parents; it really is not necessary to join formally any organisation at all. There are plenty of people who are happy to provide information and advice without paying an annual subscription.

In short, it seems to me that the world has moved on somewhat since 1977 when Education Otherwise was founded. They may once have made a contribution to the struggle of parents to establish their legal right to educate their children at home, but this would probably have happened anyway, even if Education Otherwise never existed. It is always sad when an old newspaper, comic, chain of shops and so on folds up. Still, the sadness does not usually last long and I suspect that in ten years time Education Otherwise will be fondly remembered as an historical curiosity rather than being an active and vibrant part of the twenty first century home educating community.

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