Tuesday 13 April 2010

Conservative ideas about schools

I have been reading with great interest the manifesto of the Conservative Party. I realise that the preceding sentence must sound grotesque in the extreme; after all, what sort of freak would read any manifesto with great interest, let alone one from the Tories? Never the less, there were one or two parts that might be of help to home educators.

The Conservatives are promising to make it easier for charities, religions and even groups of parents to set up their own schools. Now I have written before about the 'Free Schools' of the early nineteen seventies. This was essentially home education under a different name. Parents whose children had been withdrawn from school or expelled, would band together and register themselves as schools. Sometimes they would acquire premises, such as an old, semi-derelict building. On other occasions, the 'school' would be set up in a few spare rooms in somebody's house.

These 'schools' were all very free and easy and mostly based upon Summerhill. Although a few were set up by teachers, there was in general little attempt to teach much. the children decided for themselves what, if anything, they studied. With the huge amount of red tape which currently chokes so many new enterprises, I would not have thought this sort of thing practical these days. However, if it is a manifesto pledge, then there is at least some chance of holding the Tories to it if they get in on May 6th.

Of course, the whole thing might be so bound up with rules and regulations, a requirement to be inspected by Ofsted for example or follow the National Curriculum, that it would not suit home educators. On the other hand, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that some of the groups of home educating parents who are already running educational activities might be able to convert them into a registered school with a little ingenuity. I suppose that i am thinking here of the long term future, because although the Children, Schools and Families Bill has gone, the intention to put home education on a more businesslike footing has not gone away. I wonder whether or not home educators might not be well advised to lay plans for making themselves into some sort of scheme which could, at a pinch, lokk enough like a school to satisfy any critics.

9 comments:

  1. Personally I think that anyone wanting to register a school needs their head examining. Politics aside, it is clear that existing schools are beset by regulation on every side, and of course the moves of the Govt in recent years has both increased such regulations and also already made more "non schools" into schools (eg the rules which made Tyndale Academy" a school by reducing the number of hours in the definition of "full time".)
    Reading the Ofsted reports of various small schools shows how they get picked up for all sorts of issues, many of which are extremely expensive to put right.

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  2. much easy just to home educate! no silly rules or any one from the council poking they nose in then.LOL and of course now that we have defeated uncle Balls/DCSF we can do what we like the councils are now much weaker great news Simon Julie? LOL

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  3. I used to think your theory about how autonomous education works was way off - the one where children just absorb information without direct input from an adult. But apparently your idea may have more merit than I thought. Maybe we've been facilitating our children too much!

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/7585505/Teaching-Inspiring-British-children-Slumdog-style.html

    "In what became known as the Hole in the Wall project, Mitra simply knocked through a wall in his Delhi office and installed a computer with an internet connection for the local slum children to discover. To his delight he found that they soon became fully fledged autodidacts, teaching themselves English, maths and other subjects."

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  4. testing, testing...

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  5. No testing here LOL

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  6. LOL, very funny!

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  7. or home visits LOL

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  8. An American take on Simon's Independent article, Autonomous Education in the UK

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  9. We won so it does not matter what old Webb thinks his mates Balls?DCSF and uncle Badman lost the bill and they throw everything they had behind geting ot passed but failed LOL i bet that hurt!

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