Resentment at being forced to do something

One of the things which I have noticed during the recent debates about the behaviour of the local authorities in both Birmingham and Suffolk is that the people commenting on the Internet lists are very angry. Actually, they are not just angry about the doorstepping by local authority officers; some of them seem to be in a permanent state of fury! This is curious, because I thoroughly enjoyed being a home educator and I was happy for most of the time. Educating my child was a source of great joy to me and this joy permeated my entire life. It was great; like a constant high!

Now I am quite prepared to believe that some of these angry parents have had problems with their local authority. A lot of us have problems with our local authority, although not always about home education. Rowing with the council is one of those things that have become a leitmotif of the age; rubbish collections, streetlights, education, petty rules, parking regulations, the list is endless. Home educators are certainly not alone in getting pissed off with their local authority. Most of us manage to keep these disagreements in perspective. However irritable I get on the telephone with the council, I can usually chuckle about it in the evening with my wife. One feels that this is probably not the case with the angry people one encounters on HE-UK and BRAG!

I could not help but notice that when I posted about Suffolk, one of those commenting had a laid back and rational view of the matter. By an odd coincidence, this person was somebody, like me, who has chosen to be a home educator. The great majority of those who are becoming angry on a regular basis have not chosen to home educate; they say that they have been forced to do it. This cannot help but give them a rather different perspective from somebody who embraced the idea enthusiastically from the day of the child's birth and always intended to do it. We all of us get a little tetchy when we are made to do something. It stops being fun if we have been compelled to undertake an activity or task. iIwonder if this could be at the root of the terrible anger which I come across, not only on the lists, but here on my own blog.

All parents get upset and angry if something is harming their child; whether it is a bully at school, failure to provide sufficient support for a special educational need or simply something which causes the child unhappiness. Many home educators have felt compelled to undertake the education of their children, not because they are keen on home education, but because they feel that this is the only way to rescue the child from misery. This decision to de-register the child from school is often the culmination of increasingly fraught and bitter arguments with the school and the local authority. This does not, from the beginning, tend to create a foundation for cordial relations with the local authority, whom many such parents blame for their child's unhappiness. Parents like this are already angry with their local authority before they start to home educate. This does not bode well for the future. On top of this is the fact that although they may not begrudge the child the home education, they are at the same time keenly aware that this is not something which they have really chosen freely. They sent the child to school at four or five like everybody else and now they have had to adopt a new and strange lifestyle. Their family and neighbours might disapprove, they have less money and freedom than they had when the kid was in school; it would be surprising if some of them did not get a little angry about this new situation.

I have noticed that those who chose to educate their own child seem to be more relaxed and good natured about it than many of those who felt that they have been forced into it. This is not to be wondered at. I have also noticed that those growing angriest about the local authorities are often those who have had fights with their own local authorities before having to take their children out of school. It is not hard to see that they are projecting a lot of their anger onto the local authority in Suffolk or Birmingham. I would be curious to hear of parents whose children have never attended school who are able to generate the same levels of anger as those who already have a history of fighting with their own council.

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Doorstepping in Suffolk

I have been trying, not for the first time, to try and make sense of what is happening in the world of home education by putting myself in the place of the participants and thinking how I would feel and act. In Suffolk, at least one parent has received a letter from the local authority, saying that because they have not seen the home educated child for five years, they wish to pop round and assure themselves that the child is still physically alive and well and in the county. There have been predictable howls of outrage about this.

Let me first try and put myself in the place of the parent and see what I would do in a similar situation. This should not be hard. I was never overenthusiastic about having apparatchiks from local government poking into my affairs. I am still not. It should not be difficult for me to put myself in this person's place, because exactly the same thing happened to me when I was home educating. The local authority told me that I had been living and home educating in their county for years and that they wouldn't mind seeing the kid, just to make sure everything was OK.

The first thing to say at once is that I found this irritating. I knew the child was safe, well and receiving a far better education that she was ever likely to get at the local maintained school. What the Devil business was it of these people? Judging by what has been said on the lists, this was not the initial reaction of the parent to whom Suffolk sent a letter. Apparently the family were 'traumatised'. This sounds a bit rummy to me. What on earth is going on in their house that they would be traumatised at the prospect of a knock on the door from a local authority officer? Their child was apparently in tears. Now call me Mr Oldfashioned, but if I got a letter through the post that I thought might upset my child, I would not even mention it to her. Why would I? I'm the adult, it is for me to tackle things like that. What would I actually do in such a circumstance? To begin with of course, the bit about the unannounced visit is just designed to encourage the family to engage with their local authority. I might allow such a person into my home; I might not, depending upon how I was feeling that day. I would be inclined to ring Suffolk County Council and say something to the following effect;

'I have your letter and quite honestly it's a bit of a sauce. There's no point at all in your coming round at random like that, because you won't get into the house or see my child. If you want to meet her and see that she is alive and well, then I don't mind arranging to meet you in the library. What about next Thursday lunchtime? I don't mind doing this once in a while, although it's a great nuisance. If you pester me too much though, I shall make such a fuss to MPs and so on that you will think that you would better have stuck your head in a hornets' nest'.

Everybody is now happy. The parent and his family are freed from the fear of an unannounced knock on the door and the local authority are able to satisfy themselves that the child is alive and well.

Looking at the matter now from the point of view of Suffolk; it is possible to have some sympathy for them. Some home education advisors employed by local authorities behave as though they are running semi-autonomous fiefdoms. They play their cards close to their chests and often nobody actually sees their files and records from one year to the next. When somebody moves on or dies without handing on the caseload with plenty of notice, it can be discovered that everything is in a terrible state and it is impossible to know who has been seen and who not or even who is still being home educated. The last thing any local authority wants is for it to come to light that some kid in their area has died or is being cruelly mistreated without their knowing about it. It looks lousy when that sort of thing turns up in the papers. The easiest thing would be to trawl through the jumbled up files and then physically visit every one of those families just to make sure that they are still in the local authority area. Again, a very similar thing happened to me when a new officer started work in Essex and wanted to visit every family on the books, even though I had just allowed a visit six months earlier.

It strikes me that with a little bit of give and take, it should be possible to resolve these difficulties without recourse to the Human Rights Act!

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He was one as well!

Many years ago, I used to spend a lot of time in the company of homosexuals. Hardly surprising, since I was hanging round the Gay Liberation Front, who at that time had a commune in Penge. Something which I noticed was that a certain type of 'gay' person, usually the camp, theatrical ones who sprinkled their conversation with Polari, constantly claimed that many famous people were or had been homosexual. They would say, 'That Henry Cooper; he's gay. Well known fact' or 'Everybody in theatre knows about Sean Connery'. Something which I soon noticed was that nearly all the people to whom they referred were actually not homosexuals at all. If it wasn't that, it would be the Ancient Greeks. They would rave on about how enlightened that society was, where men could commit sodomy at the drop of a hat and nobody would think twice about it.

I have been reminded of all this while glancing through the newly revamped Home Education UK website. There is a section on it called 'Famous People'. Now I am assuming that these are supposed to be not just famous people, but famous people who were actually home educated. Just as with my 'gay' friends, I cannot help but notice that half the people here were no more home educated than I was. Charles Dickens, for example. Unless you count a spell working in a warehouse when he was a small child, there is no possible way that Dickens could be described as home educated. Is working in a warehouse an acceptable form of home education? No wonder the local authorities in places like Suffolk are getting a bit edgy these days! Franklin Roosevelt? Went to boarding school. The Wright brothers? Attended both elementary and high school, although truanted a bit and were once suspended.

I am not going to go through the entire list of names, except to say that the great majority are dubious. Joan of Arc? How many village girls in France five hundred years ago did go to school? As I say, this all reminds me very much of a tiny minority group claiming that loads of famous people shared their own peculiarity. I would be curious to see a list of people who were genuinely home educated by choice. Oh yes, I almost forgot. Davy Crocket. I wonder how many schools there were around when he was growing up on the wild frontier?

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Implications of higher estimates for the number of home educated children in this country

Different people make different guesses about the number of electively home educated children in this country. These guesses though, remain just that. Paula Rothermel a few years ago produced a figure of almost half a million, the York Consulting research suggested perhaps a twentieth of that. When Graham Badman put forward the figure of a possible eighty thousand, some claimed that this was a wild exaggeration.

The reason that the estimates vary so greatly is that different people are trying to prove different things. Since nobody has the least idea of the numbers, nobody can really argue with the guesses. If a home education organisation wishes to demonstrate that home education is hardly worth bothering about, they might suggest that only thirty thousand or so are involved. If on the other hand, somebody wishes to portray it as an unstoppable, mass movement, then the claim might be made that the numbers exceed a hundred thousand. Those calling for increased regulation of home education use the same tricks.

Mike Fortune-Wood now claims that his research suggests that the true number of home educated children in this country is eighty thousand. Let us take that number and see where it leads us. York Consulting found that the average number of home educated children per family was 1.4. This would suggest that there are somewhere in the region of a hundred thousand parents of home educated children in the country. (This is based upon the blatantly heteronormative assumption that each child will have two parents and if I offend any families living in seaside resorts on the south coast where this may not be the case, I can only apologise.)

Not all parents of home educated children are in favour of home education. We know that some mothers have difficulties with ex-partners over this question. Even with parents who remain together, one or the other can be against the practice. So when working out what percentage of parents of home educated children are in favour of this aspect or other, I think it wise to take all the parents into account when making our calculations. After all, when responding to those conducting research, it is quite common for both parents to submit separate responses.

A fairly large Internet list like the Badman Review Action Group has about seven hundred and fifty members. Not all those who belong are actually home educating parents. There are quite a few people like me and Ali Edgely who do not have a child aged between five and sixteen being educated out of school. I would guess that about a third of the members are like that. The remaining five hundred would mean that for all the anger and noise generate on such a list, it represents the interests of just 0.5% of home educating parents. Hardly representative! When they conducted a survey to see who was opposed to compulsory registration, eighty nine people voted against the idea. Even if we assume that all were home educating parents, this tells us the views of fewer than 0.1 of home educating parents in this country.

Even the biggest groups, Education Otherwise for instance, have only three thousand members or so. Again, not all these are home educating parents. If they were, then this group would represent the interests of just 3% of home educating parents in this country. Realistically, this is more like to be 2%, as many members are not genuine home educators. The implications for the legitimacy of these organisations is greatly diluted, the larger the estimated numbers of home educated children. Try looking at the responses sent to the Badman review and the subsequent select committee hearing and then calculating by removing about a third, sent by people who were not home educating parents, and then expressing the remaining numbers as a percentage of a hundred thousand. They are pitifully small in number and hardly able to claim anything at all about the average home educating parents.

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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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Public opinion

One of the difficulties which everybody has with home educating parents is that there seems to be a far higher proportion of crackpots and cranks among them than is the case with the general population. In other words, if you were to take a group of home educating parents and set them alongside a group of people who sent their kids to school, the home educating ones would contain more peculiar individuals than average. This is not necessarily a bad thing of course. Weird and atypical people sometimes produce great inventions, write fantastic poetry or have radical idea which revolutionise human thought. These are the exceptions. Most weird people are just.... well, weird!

I suppose that when 99.9% of the population do something as a matter of routine, then the odd 0.1% are bound by definition to be out of step with society. This would be the case whether it was being prepared to accept blood transfusions, living in flats and houses rather than caravans or sending your children to school. What happens though is that very often these people forget how peculiar their behaviour is, because they gravitate to other people who share their peculiarities. Jehovah's Witnesses hang out with other Witnesses, travellers cluster together and home educators frequently join groups and online communities full of other strange people who don't send their kids to school. Often, friends and relatives stop mentioning that it is really odd not to send their children to school like everybody else and so after a while, they regard it as perfectly normal.

The difficulty arises when those with these unusual notions come into contact with ordinary people. The family whose child desperately needs a blood transfusion to save her life, for instance. It is crystal clear to the hospital staff that this is a vital procedure. They hand the form to the parents as a matter of routine, only to find that they refuse to sign it on the grounds that the Bible forbids this common practice. For anybody but Witnesses, this is barking mad and demonstrates a callous disregard for the child's life. In the same way, teachers and local authority officers take it for granted that children should be taught. They come up against a parent who assures them that this is quite unnecessary and that they are opposed to the practice on principle. Small wonder that they think the parent is showing an irresponsible attitude to her daughter's welfare and future life prospects.

This is not to say that either the Jehovah's Witness or the home educating parent are actually wrongheaded and negligent of their children's welfare; only that ordinary people who are not members of the group, cult, call it what you will, believe this strongly to be the case. If it were only doctors or teachers who felt this way, then one could perhaps dismiss this as professionals prejudice. Unfortunately, it is not. For the man or woman in the street too, the idea of refusing either blood transfusions or teaching for a child is almost criminally negligent.

It is this problem that many home educators must confront, although many seem unable or unwilling to do so. The fact that their way of life is seen by many as bizarre and running counter to their children's best interests. Any debating position which fails to take this into account is pretty pointless, because ultimately it is the mores of society which tend to become codified into law. Until the man on the Clapham omnibus is persuaded that schools and teaching are not necessary for children's development, then home education will always be at hazard of regulation or suppression.

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Other reasons for professionals to badger home educating parents

I recently wrote a bout the unitary authority in Poole and their attempts to doorstep parents in order to catch sight of their home educated children. I expressed the view that no matter how annoying and intrusive such actions were, they were almost certainly motivated ultimately by concern for the children's welfare. Of course, this was a little optimistic. I tend to assume that most people have good will and good intentions. While leafing through the transcript of the select committee hearing on Graham Badman's review of elective home education and the Children, Schools and Families Bill; I came across this gem. Peter Traves of the Association of Directors of Children's Services is speaking about the reasons for anxiety among some education professionals around home education. He said:

'If something happens to a child in terms of any of those five outcomes,
we are held directly to account. This is not some kind of button
counting. We have seen recently what happens to directors of children's
services when things go seriously wrong. It is not only a case of sacking;
it is public humiliation. It is a very serious matter.'

This was presumably a reference to the treatment of Sharon Shoesmith, former Director of Children's Services for the London Borough of Haringey. Ms Shoesmith was peremptorily sacked following the case of Baby P, the little boy killed in the appalling circumstances. Of course, a toddler having his back broken by sadistic maniacs is also a 'very serious matter', although not apparently in the same league as the public humiliation and loss of pension of a Director of Children's Services. In short, Traves is expressing here a fear that some professionals will lose their jobs if a home educated child comes to harm. This is very revealing.

There is also a nagging fear at the back of the minds of some local authorities that an adult who was home educated will pursue a legal claim against them in later life on the grounds that the education which he received from his parents was inadequate. If the local authority were supposed to be monitoring the education, it is not inconceivable that they could be held liable.

Both these things could provide reasons for lcoal authority officers to make a nuisance of themselves, quite apart from the more obvious motive of the welfare of the children involved.

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