Home Education Heretic

Home educators in a panic...again

2012-01-23T00:42:00.000-08:00

I sometimes despair of the home education scene in this country. Many parents, particularly those who belong to internet lists and forums seem to be prone to running round like headless chickens at any available opportunity. Once again, my unwelcome views on the latest of these flaps are being censored on the EO support list and so I thought that I ought to reassure those who are genuinely worried and want the facts.

The latest fear centres around a consultation on what the government call raising the participation age and the rest of us think of as raising the school leaving age. As part of this, there is an intention to define just how many hours constitute a full time education. This has nothing to do with home education, but is to prevent unscrupulous employers from pretending to run apprenticeships and just getting teenagers to work full time.

How does this affect home educators? Well, it doesn't; not in the least. The consultation document makes this perfectly clear, when it says:

'it is at the discretion of the home educator as to what form that education takes'

and

We do not want to set regulations for home education that do not exist pre-16'

In other words, the situation for home educated seventeen and eighteen year olds will not change. Still, what about the whole business of defining full time education? Could that affect home educating parents? Hardly. The favoured figure for the minimum number of hours of education spread over the whole year is five hundred and thirty four hours. Since home education takes place every day, this would mean less than an hour and a half a day!

In spite of the fact that there is nothing to worry about, threads are appearing on various lists marked 'urgent'. Why do people do this? I very pleasantly drew attention to what is actually said in the RPA consulation and my message was not posted, on the grounds that this is 'meta' discussion. This is absurd. Those wishing to spread panic and alarm are allowed to voice their views; it is only when I quoted from the actual document that the discussion apparently became 'meta'. In other words and as usual, facts are not welcome in the debate!

I have remarked before that there seems to be something of a cottage industry in raising fears of this sort and pretending to be working to protect home educating parents from supposed new threats. When I have the time, I shall post more about this.

Exploding a myth

2012-01-02T07:04:00.000-08:00

It will perhaps surprise nobody to hear that I have once again managed to piss people off on a home education forum. I have to say that on this occasion, I was genuinely trying to help vulnerable parents and reassure them that they should stop worrying. This came about because the thesis was advanced that some local authorities in England and Wales bully and badger home educating parents into either abandoning home education or altering the form or content of it so that it more closely resembles a school type model. One person referred to parents being made ’to jump through hoops’ and forced to teach reading in a structured way. This sort of thing is usually done under the threat that a School Attendance Order will be issued, the parent prosecuted and the child returned to school if the parent does not do as the local authority officer requires. So far, so good; I don’t think that anybody here could disagree that this sort of thing happens. I then went on to suggest that it was astronomically rare for home educating parents to be issued with SAOs and then prosecuted for not obeying them, convicted in court and forced to send their children to school. Indeed, I expressed doubts as to this ever happening at all; upon which, a number of people became very angry.

The best way of seeing just how rare this process is, is to look at the figures. Let us begin with two local authorities who are famous for taking what some describe as ’ultra vires’ actions; Staffordshire and Birmingham, for instance.
Here is a Freedom of Information request made to Birmingham about the number of SAOs that they issued in one particular year;

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ehe_department_suitable_educatio_4
　
It will be observed that no SAOs at all were issued. Freedom of Information requests on this subject have been made to every local authority in England and Wales and the picture is same across the entire country; most never issue SAOs. Some issued one or two, but these were hardly ever to home educators. Staffordshire, for example has issued one School Attendance Order in the last five years, although not to a home educating family. See here:
　
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ehe_related_statutory_attendance
　
Most of the tiny number of SAOs which have been issued over the last few years have not been to home educators. Of those which were, only a few reached the stage of prosecution. I can find not a single case where a local authority has issued a School Attendance Order to a home educating family, prosecuted them in court and then managed to secure a conviction and force them as a result to return their child to school.

I found this to be very reassuring for home educating parents. Knowing that this favourite threat of local authorities is an empty one which can generally be disregarded should allow home educating parents to form a more equal partnership with local authorities; one which is not founded upon fear and threats. Of course, not everybody seeks such a healthy relationship with their LA and some parents might be happy to be bossed about by petty bureaucrats. This is fine; I was not trying to bully anybody into changing how they deal with local authorities; merely pointing out that there is more than one way.

Actually, I thought that digging around might perhaps uncover one or two cases of home educating children forced back into school by their parents having been prosecuted for disobeying a School Attendance Order. In fact, I have not been able to come up with one case of this happening. May I ask, does anybody know of a case where a home educating parent has been served with a School Attendance Order, prosecuted for breaching it and as a result been convicted in court and forced to return their child to school? If so, could we just be told the name of the local authority? Since this is the only way that a home educating child can really be forced back to school by a local authority, it would be interesting to know if it ever happens. Is this some sort of urban myth? Can anybody give a real example?

There is one final point. One can readily see why local authority officers would maintain the fiction that they might issue an SAO to home educating parents, take them to court and force them to return their children to school. This suggestion would be very distressing to many parents and they might well back down under the very threat and do as they are told in order to avoid it. What puzzles me is why some home educating parents themselves seem so keen to buy into this myth and help local authorities to keep the pretence going. This seems to me to be a psychological question, rather than a legal one!

Warning! This post contains emails which according to EO will harm home educators..

2011-11-14T00:04:00.000-08:00

Like an alcoholic who is able either to abstain completely or when once he touches a drop goes on a mad bender; I seem to be posting here once again. This must stop! One would think that I would by now realise that it is impossible to debate anything in a rational way with some of those on the main home education lists and I am slightly irritated with myself that I have even been trying.

Just to remind readers, my trouble on the EO list began when somebody posted a message complaining about attempts by local authorities to suppress debate of home education. She went on to say that censorship should be challenged in any form; a sentiment I agree with wholeheartedly. My response to this was a brief message which I shall share with you all in a minute. Before that, I must say that I am relieved that EO admit now that they have actually been blocking my messages. Some people were talking slyly of conspiracy theories, as though the whole business was my being paranoid! Why have my messages been moderated or censored? One of the moderators explains that it was because,

’ I am not, however, personally happy to allow goading, rudeness or debate which would appear to be designed to harm home educators.’

Rudeness! Harming other home educators! Well of course, this is fair enough. If I have been rude or harming other parents, of course I should be prevented. (I am tempted to ask how I am harming them? By exposing them to opinions which differ slightly from their own? Yes, I suppose that could be pretty harmful, but only if one were a sheep or bigot!) Anyway, here is the message which I sent. Readers may judge for themselves just how rude or harmful it was. It begins with a quotation from the post to which I was replying:
　
'Censorship can come in many forms but it is usually recognisable for what it is and should be challenged accordingly.'

Fascinating idea, as though local authorities and newspapers somehow have a monopoly on this unsavoury practice! Many forums and lists for home educators operate censorship quite shamelessly, blocking posts which do not agree with the views of the moderators. Others simply chuck off those who are too vociferous in what the list owners feel to be the wrong cause. Witness how Tania Berlow was banned from HE Forums last year.

I am opposed to censorship, but let us admit that it takes place among home educators as much as it does anywhere else.

Simon.’

Just how harmful could this have been to other home educators? I emailed the moderators when I was told that this had been blocked. Perhaps this was when I began to be rude. Here is what I said:

‘Dear Shoshanna,
I cannot help making one or two points in response to your email. You say, ‘My personal feeling is that the EO group is the wrong place to have this debate’. I find this curious. Yesterday a message was posted complaining about censorship and the stifling of open debate on the subject of home education. Among other things the poster talked of, ’ the reluctance by many LA's keep an open debate’ and also said, ’ Censorship can come in many forms but it is usually recognisable for what it is and should be challenged accordingly’

Here is somebody who evidently wishes to start a debate about censorship relating to home education. You did not block or remove this message and so I must assume that you feel that this EO group is actually the right place for such a debate. When I point out that censorship around home education does not only happen in local authorities and newspapers, but is also undertaken by some home educators’ groups themselves, you apparently decide that this is no longer a topic which should be discussed on the list.

The result of this is, as I have said, to slant debates and give a false impression. The people coming on here seeking support and advice will be allowed to read that local authorities operate censorship and that is a bad thing, but will not be allowed to learn that home education groups do precisely the same thing. Do you really find nothing bizarre about somebody starting a debate on the EO list about censorship and the first person to respond to this being censored himself? I am sure that if you have any sense of the ridiculous, you will grasp this point!

Simon.’

Nothing rude or harmful here either! That this is actually censorship is clear from the way that while not being allowed to read my actual messages, those on the EO list are being told that they are rude and harmful. This is untrue and suggests strongly that those saying such things are not acting in good faith. Believe me, this is not moderation at all but censorship. Refusing to let others read something and then telling them that this is because it would harm them to do so is one of the oldest justifications for censorship. It has never cut any ice with me.

I have also, by the way, recieved an email headed:

　Message not approved: Moderating question
From: catalonia13 Add to Contacts
To: simon

From this, I take it that the posts which I sent to BRAG containing statistics have actually been rejected, rather than just falling victim to a technical glitch.

Censorship in the world of British home education

2011-11-12T23:55:00.000-08:00

There are probably those who will be horrified to see that I am posting here again. ‘Oh no’ they cry in dismay, ‘We thought we’d seen the back of that idiot!’ Well, not quite. I stopped blogging here regularly because I had too much going on in my life to be able to keep this blog. I hoped instead to keep in touch on various home education lists and forums; posting from time to time there as some subject cropped up which interested me. This is no longer possible.

Let us start on the Badman Review Action Group list, where a lively debate has been taking place about the merits or otherwise of GCSEs for home educated children. This is a hot topic, because some parents want state funding for these examinations for their children who are not at school. Others think that this would be inviting official interference in home educating. The opinion was expressed there that employers no longer value these qualifications and I responded by posting some statistics about how employers actually viewed GCSEs. As a result, I was described as a ‘pillock’ and ‘pathetic troll’, to say nothing of being told that I was ‘spewing nonsense’. Presumably the moderators were having a doze! They soon woke up on the evening of November 6th when I posted some more figures. This post vanished without a trace. Another was delayed for five hours. The next morning, people were enquiring as to the source of the statistics which I had posted, as well as asking a few other questions. I sent five messages, each going courteously through all the points which had been raised. Four of these vanished; one was posted eleven hours later. It was plain that I was being prevented from introducing facts and figures into the debate.

I drew attention to this on the EO list to which I belong. This provoked a response from one of the moderators on BRAG who put a message up on the EO list. I replied on the list on the morning of the November 12th. My reply has apparently fallen into the same black hole as my messages on BRAG! That this was not a technical glitch was confirmed when I posted a reply to the concerns raised by somebody else on the EO list. This person was worried about the stifling of debate and called for us all to challenge censorship around home education. True, her concerns were that this was happening with local authorities and newspapers, which is quite true, but I thought that I would point out that it also happens with home education groups. I as sent a message saying that the EO moderators had rejected my message because they did not think that the EO list was the right place for such a debate.

There is something deliciously ironic about somebody quite properly raising concerns about censorship, as was done by the poster on November 11th and that the first person to respond to this message is himself censored. If this sort of thing were limited only to the EO list and BRAG or if I were the only person affected, perhaps this would not be so important. These games are going on all over the home education Internet scene in this country though, especially on the larger forums and lists. The HE-UK list if famous for chucking people off who irritate the owner by their heterodox views and Tania Berlow was thrown off the Home Education Forums site for saying the wrong things. This was particularly unfortunate. I don’t agree with Tania about much, but she did a lot of work during the Badman Review, gathering statistics and so on.

There is something a little bizarre about the sight of people who are very keen on proclaiming the rights of the individual and then engaging in censorship.

My work here is done…

2011-08-19T23:56:00.000-07:00

Well folks, this really is the final post I shall be making here. I have been thinking lately about the different ideas that home educators have about education. There are certainly plenty like me who cram their children for exams and whose greatest wish is that their kids get a place at a Russell Group university, but there are also many who regard that sort of carry on as not only not being the best kind of education, but in a sense being the very antithesis of true education. They are of course perfectly right, at least up to a point. Let me explain why I think this and why I nevertheless went ahead with my plans.

Now I certainly think that children should be given a body of basic knowledge so that they can make sense of the modern world. I think that this should be chosen by their parents and handed down to them; this is a curriculum. As far as GCSEs and A levels go though, useful as they are in persuading others that a child has been ’educated’, I have enormous reservations. The knowledge required for these qualifications is mind-numbingly detailed and prescriptive and any sort of independent thought is not only not required but can actually prove dangerous to the passing of the examination. This is definitely not my idea of education! To give an example, twice in her life my daughter has been compelled to study the Schlieffen Plan in World War I in order to pass first IGCSE and then A level history. There are recognised and accepted reasons why the Schlieffen Plan failed. When she was studying for the IGCSE at the age of thirteen, Simone came up with another very plausible reason for its lack of success. If I had been concerned purely with education, I would have been delighted with this and encouraged her to think further about the matter; as it was, I was horrified. To pass the exam with flying colours entails putting down the points that the examiner is looking for. They check these off against a list and anything not on that list is simply ignored. And so to my eternal shame, I stamped at once on the new ideas my daughter was generating, because they might have harmed her success in gaining an A* in the examination! There is something utterly bizarre about a type of education which actually discourages children from thinking for themselves and I freely accept this.

Still, my daughter passed the right exams and this has worked well for now. Fortunately of course, her ability to think independently has not been at all harmed by this weird method of getting on academically. I saw this very clearly when she took the Thinking Skills Assessment, which is part of the process of applying for places at some courses at Oxford. I would imagine that many home educated children would shine at this and it probably explains how Ian Dowty’s son was accepted for law despite having not GCSEs or A levels. He would have taken a similar, but slightly different admission test. Here is an example of a question from the TSA:

There is a proposal to change our passports from the present, rather imposing, book-type
documents to small plastic cards, a proposal which should be rejected. The cards are
seen as having many advantages. For example, they will be easier to fit into people's
pockets, something which will become more important as other countries move towards
compulsory identity cards. But this supposed advantage of smaller size is actually a
disadvantage. It is the very fact that passports cannot be slipped into a holidaymaker's
pocket (and from there into the sand on the beach) that makes us take special care of
them. It is, after all, a very important document.
Which one of the following best expresses the main conclusion of the above argument?
A The advantages of the smaller passports are fewer than people think.
B The proposals to replace our passports with plastic cards should be rejected.
C The importance of passports will diminish if they are small plastic cards.
D People will take less care of passports which are small plastic cards.
E The proposal to change our type of passports should be looked at more
carefully.

This is not the sort of examination for which one can prepare; it depends entirely on having the kind of mind able to extract the salient points from an argument. The conversational learning style favoured by many home educating parents means that their children are probably used to discussing the news and have in effect been trained to spot the weak points in arguments and so on. I am guessing that many home educated children would achieve well at such tests as these. This type of education, in rhetoric and logic, is to my mind of infinitely greater value than just stuffing the kid's head full of a lot of nonsense that he will forget as soon as the exam season is over. Teaching my child how to think was really the main thrust of my educational technique.

I have for purely pragmatic reasons, been forced to pursue a style of education over the years which was not ideal. Society requires GCSEs and A levels and the child without them is handicapped. One cannot readily demonstrate to a university or potential employer that a young person has been ’educated’ without those vital pieces of paper. This is unfortunate. However, it is how society is currently constituted. I might fight against society myself and disregard its mores, but I had no right to use my own child to fight this battle. Which is of course why we did all those examinations.

Anyway, I shall not be posting here again, although I will of course reply to sensible comments. I shall leave this blog up as a resource for those who might stumble across it in the future. I think that the comments give a very good counter to the views which I have expressed and so in general, the thing is pretty balanced. As I have said before, if anybody wishes to contact me for any reason at all, they are free to do so, using the email adress on the right.

The solution to a minor mystery

2011-08-18T14:23:00.000-07:00

Some while ago, a survey of the educational background of MPs revealed that one of them had been home educated. Nobody seemed to know who this was, but I can now tell readers that it is Nicola Blackwood:

http://www.nicolablackwood.com/about-nicola

Those attending the All Party Parliamentary Group on home education on September 6th could do worse than approach her.

Completely shameless...

2011-08-18T09:03:00.000-07:00

I am quite shameless where my daughter is concerned. Here is a bit from the college website with a short video clip of Simone at the bottom. My only excuse for this is that after a final post tomorrow, I shall be gone for good!

http://www.harlow-college.ac.uk/cms_/index.php/news/1398-a-level-results-2011.html

In which it is shown that home education can deliver at least as good an academic result as that likely to be gained at school

2011-08-18T02:11:00.000-07:00

When first I told people that I would not be sending my daughter to school, there were many negative reactions. These ranged from predictions that she would be unable to get a job or go to university, to the fear that she would grow up introverted and weird. None of these things have happened. I have not mentioned it before here, although others have referred to it, but my daughter has a place at Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics; otherwise known as PPE. Her A level results this morning were as hoped and so she is now assured of starting at Oxford in a month or so.

To my mind, the place at Oxford is not so much an endorsement of my teaching as a recommendation for home education in general. I am far too irritable and impatient to be a good teacher and gaining a place in this way at university was my daughter’s doing, rather than a tribute to my teaching skills. I honestly believe that any family prepared to put in the work and make all the necessary arrangements could do exactly the same as we have done. This proves, to me at least, that home education can be better than any school, even the most prestigious independent ones. Nobody needs qualifications themselves to undertake it, nor do they need much in the way of prior knowledge. All that is needed is the determination to push on with the project and not to be discouraged by anybody else’s opinions. I lost count of the number of people over the years who claimed that it was impossible to study science at home or take GCSEs in history without expert, professional teaching. These people are quite wrong. Anybody can teach their child any subject in the world, even if they know nothing at all about it to begin with. Parents and children learn together.

I suppose that the reason that I am putting posting this, apart from the natural parental pride in my child, is this. I doubt that the fact that a home educated child has secured a place at Oxford University is likely to become widely known. As far as anybody knows, this is the first time that a child who was completely home educated during the statutory ages from five to sixteen has been offered a place at Oxford in recent years. I would like this to become known among other home educators, not as a personal advertisement for my own methods but simply to show other parents that the thing is possible. I firmly believe that any home educating parent could do at least as well as I have managed in this field. Many of them will be able to do better. Home education is perfect for one-to-one tuition and the chances of getting good grades in GCSEs and so on is much higher with this type of education.

Incidentally, I am aware that for some home educating parents, all this is an irrelevance. I do not wish to engage any more in sterile and pointless debates about whether we should or should not teach our children without their initiating the process. The fact is that most parents hope that their children will do well academically. I am making the point here that home educating parents are ideally placed to ensure that their children do do well in GCSEs, A levels, university admissions and so on. Not attending school between the ages of five and sixteen is not only no bar to such achievements, but actually makes them more likely and far easier to attain.

Possible disadvantage with home education which may actually be an advantage

2011-08-16T02:36:00.000-07:00

I have never found any disadvantage in home education as far as education itself is concerned. Nor have I ever observed lack of socialisation causing my daughter any problems. One thing that has bothered me over the years is that children like this, who have been the centre of their parents’ lives in a more personal way than those who are sent to school, might come to believe themselves to be more special and important than is actually the case. In other words they might, at worst, grow into spoiled brats and at best grow up thinking that they are frightfully clever/talented/important. I have certainly noticed that my own daughter acts as though she knows more than other people and that her views and opinions are more likely to be correct than anybody else’s. Of course, part of this is adolescence in general and might not be all that different from schooled teenagers. It is something that I have been aware of though and tried actively to discourage. It has not helped that newspapers and radio stations contact her for her views on various things; The Guardian are ringing her tomorrow to ask what she thinks about A levels!

What struck me a few weeks ago is that this mindset might not necessarily be a bad thing. Often, we tend to listen to those who appear to know what they are talking about and confident people have their views taken into account in a way that the more hesitant and timid among us do not. This was brought home to me forcefully when my daughter got a job for the summer. Not for her of course the waitressing or baby-sitting that the daughters of our friends fall back upon for pocket money. She has instead been engaged as the marketing assistant for an ICT company in the city. She is now running their twitter, face book and so on, as well as revamping their email newsletters, ad campaigns and various other things about which I know little. I was slightly staggered that a high profile company should give a job like this to a 17 year-old who has never worked anywhere before. As far as I can make out, she got it by sheer cheek and horrifying confidence. In other words, her feeling that she is clever and important paid off and she was able to persuade others to buy into her own valuation of herself. For a reticent person like me, this kind of thing is hard to understand. Nevertheless, it seems to work and I am reluctantly compelled to conclude that a teenager thinking and acting as though she is clever and talented might not be something to discourage after all. Perhaps what I have always thought of as one of the bad points of home education might instead be one of its strengths!

Some good news for home educators

2011-08-14T22:43:00.000-07:00

Many readers will be pleased to hear that I am in the process of winding down this blog, with a view to ending it completely in a fortnight or so. There are two main reasons for this. The first is simply that when my daughter goes off to university in the autumn, I can hardly claim to be a home educator in any way at all. It would be a bit much if I were then to continue writing about the subject and making handy suggestions as to what the government or local authorities should do with regard to home education! It will really be no affair of mine at all from the end of September and so this seems a neat point at which to end my association with the whole business.

There is another reason why I cannot really spend any more time on this blog. I am now churning out books at an industrial rate; another four will be hitting the bookshelves in the next six months. I simply don’t have time any more for expressing my views on or indeed taking any further interest in home education. I shall have a few parting thoughts over the coming days, but after that I am afraid that that will be it. Obviously, my email address is on here and I am quite happy to correspond with anybody on the subject or offer any help or advice which anybody needs.

Interesting piece from The Guardian

2011-08-13T00:16:00.000-07:00

My views on education have not in the past been universally applauded and so I thought that it might be a treat for readers to see what I have to say upon another subject. Here is a piece of mine from today's Guardian. I need hardly add that this excellent book is available from all good bookshops!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2011/aug/12/londons-ancient-history

The teaching of reading without the use of phonics

2011-08-12T00:23:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I wrote a little about the use of synthetic phonics in schools and suggested that it was a more or less perfect way of teaching reading. Some commented, apparently believing that I was saying that this was the only method which should be used. In particular, several people raised the problem of children with hearing difficulties; those with glue ear were mentioned. For these children, who may be unable properly to distinguish between speech sounds such as 'b' and 'p' or 'g' and 'k', other methods are needed. I have put below some of my own writing on this subject. I have written a good deal about this and so have just put a few pages here. If it is well received, I might put some more up tomorrow. If not, I shall simply drop the topic.

With the possible exception of walking and talking, it is the most vital skill that any child growing up in a modern, industrial society will ever acquire. The ability to read fluently is absolutely crucial to every aspect of future educational attainment. Sadly, a large proportion of children and young people never master reading. In Britain, 20% of children leave primary school at the age of eleven still remaining functionally illiterate after six years of full time education. Even worse than this, the reading ability of a sizable percentage of children actually declines during their time at secondary school. This is the case in over a third of our schools! Many leave school at sixteen less able to read than they were at the age of eleven. As adults, many of these children will struggle for the rest of their lives with decoding the printed word. This has a catastrophic effect upon their prospects. It need not be this way.

The problem is essentially that learning to read is being left too late. By the time that children start school at the age of four or five, their brains are already far less receptive to the learning of new skills than they would have been at two or three. The ideal age for picking up the art of reading is probably at the same time that they begin to speak; that is to say around twelve months or so. We shall see later why this should be. Another problem is that the method used to teach reading in British schools , synthetic phonics, makes the whole process vastly more complicated than it need be. In fact learning to read can and should be as easy and natural for a young child as learning to speak.

At this point, some readers are probably scratching their heads and saying, "But you have to teach reading. Nobody teaches babies to speak; it just happens!" Well, yes........and no. It is of course perfectly true that we do not sit our babies down for "Talking Lessons". Never the less, we are in fact teaching them and by the very same method that can be used in order to teach them to read.

Before we look at the teaching of reading, let us look for a moment at the "teaching" of talking. When we listen to people speaking in ordinary situations, it is all but impossible to tell where one word ends and another begins. People do not, for example, say, "I am going to go to the shop". They say instead, "I'mgonnergototheshop". Words are slurred together, cut off, mangled and abbreviated until they all run together in a string of sounds. How on earth can a baby make sense of this string of noises? The answer is that she doesn't. She does not have to.

There is a particular style of speaking to infants which has been called "Motherese". The pitch of the voice is raised, the tempo is slowed and key words are stressed slightly, emphasised so that they stand out from the rest. Something like this perhaps, "Can you see the dog? Look, the dog is sitting up. What a nice little dog." Any attempt on the baby's part to reproduce the sound of the emphasised word is met with immediate reward, praise is lavished upon her. She need only make the initial sound and say, "Duh" and her mother will smile broadly and say, "That's right" Clever girl. Yes it's a dog." In effect, the mother is teaching her child how to speak! She models the word she is teaching and then reinforces her child's efforts at saying it herself.

The printed word, like spoken language, is usually presented in a vast jumble of incomprehensible components, only instead of hearing a cacophony of weird noises, the baby sees a forest of black squiggles. Look at any page of a book or newspaper and you will soon see the problem. Just as with so-called "Motherese", the trick is to present individual words so that they may be learnt entire.

Parents are the best people to teach their children to talk, so too are they the best people by far to teach their own children to read. It is not a difficult task, far from it.
The Nature of Language

Before we look at the teaching of reading, it is probably worth stopping to think a little about what language actually is. Once we have done this, we shall be better placed to understand just what is happening when a child learns to read, because of course reading is really just a way of using language.

Broadly speaking, language is the ability to use and understand symbols for thinking and communicating. This covers everything from writing a birthday card to reading War and Peace, from reminding one's self about the important appointment that afternoon to formulating the theory of relativity. What do we mean by symbols? Nothing more than something which stands for or represents something else. Spoken words are symbols, as of course are letters and numbers printed on a page. Pictures are a kind of symbol too and so are toys. Acting or pretending are also symbolic. We shall see in a little while why this is important. For now, all we need to remember is that reading and speaking both entail using symbols; things that stand for other things.

We tend to take it for granted that children operate on the same level of symbolic understanding as we do, but it is not so. Just as they must learn to read words and decode their meaning, so too they have to learn to "read" pictures and toys.

Consider the simple case of a photograph of an orange. We of course see a splodge of orange printers ink on a page and identify it at once with the sweet, slightly tart citrus fruit that we have to peel. To a baby though, all this is nothing more than a patche of colour. It certainly doesn't represent anything. Similarly, we see a toy car and recognise at once its symbolic nature. Although it is small, light and garishly coloured, we know very well that it is meant to represent the large metal object that takes us to work. Again, this is far from obvious to babies.

It has been said that a child's play is his work. That being so, toys are the tools of his trade. Their importance in the development of the growing child's understanding of the concept of symbols cannot be overstated. It is only by such activities as the use of a toy car and the growing realisation that it in some strange way represents Mummy's big car that the baby becomes familiar with the whole idea of one thing standing for another. Since this peculiar notion underpins not only reading, but also speaking and listening, we must make sure that the baby acquires a sound background in the use of symbols. The reason for this is that the interpretation of two dimensional symbols, whether pictures, numbers or words, is the culmination of much mental effort on the child's part. To achieve this breakthrough in symbolic understanding requires a great deal of spadework beforehand. We shall look later at what this might entail.

Learning to read

Let's return now to the subject of reading. There are basically two ways to teach reading. There is the complicated way and the easy method. The complicated way involves studying a lot of strange words and alien ideas such as morphemes and phonemes, blending and sequencing, synthetic phonics and whole language teaching. No need to panic at this point, because we shall be using the easy, and incidentally far more effective, method.

Most traditional techniques for the teaching of reading involve breaking the word down into little pieces and then building it up again. Most of us have some vague idea that the alphabet is the basis of reading and that children must first learn this and try somehow to combine the letters into words. This is the difficult way and it is quite unnecessary. Consider the following sentence;

The little dog ran across the road to his owner.

When you read this sentence, did you laboriously sound out the letters and so decode the meaning of the words? When you read "dog", did you say to yourself, "Duh...oh...guh..spells dog"? I am guessing that nobody who read this did anything of the kind! Instead, we glance at the word as a whole and simply see "dog". We don't even need to know the letters of the alphabet in order to read the word, much less sound it out. It wouldn't really have helped you to do that any way with three of the words in that simple sentence. Look at "the" and try and sound it out. Tuh....huh..eh..spells the. Or how about howaboutruh...oh...ah...duh...spells road. Or even oh...wuh...ne..eh..ruh..spells owner.
I'm sure that you are getting the idea. We actually read words as wholes. We don't split them up into little pieces to decipher their meaning. We teach children to do this when they are learning to read so that they will have what teachers call "word attack" skills to decode unfamiliar words which they encounter. It is a good aim, but unfortunately it has the effect of making the whole business seem very hard for many small children. Most importantly of all, it is completely unnecessary..

So if we do not actually break words down into little bits when we read, what do we actually do? It is very simple; we look for familiar shapes. We really read by spotting the shapes of words, based largely upon the ascenders and descenders which they contain. This will be the only technical jargon used in the whole of this course and it really is impossible to avoid discussing ascenders and descenders. What are they? Simply the bits of letters which stick up above the rest of the word, in the case of ascenders or hang down below, on the case of descenders. For instance, in the word'

dog

there is an ascender in the letter "d" and a descender in the letter "g". These bits jutting out give words a characteristic shape or pattern. If we look at a few words in the light of this, we will soon see that they most of them have distinctive shapes;

ball, aeroplane, cat, it, and, the, tree

The individual letters which they contain need not concern us and there is certainly no reason at all to tax a small child with untangling these letters and then trying to remember their names, sounds or correct position in the word! How can we be sure that this is what we are doing when we read? Very easily as it happens. If we actually read by looking at the letters and then understanding the words, then the following lines should not be any more difficult to read than the ones which go before. ThE lEtTeRs ArE hErE fOr AlL tO sEe BuT tHE WoRdS tHeMsElVeS aRe NoT aLwAyS iMmEdIaTeLy ApPaReNt. I am pretty sure that even the most fluent readers will have had to slow down in order to make sense of the last sentence. This is purely and simply because the words do not have their usual and characteristic shapes. After all, they contain exactly the same letters as they normally do. Let's look at another example. Here is a passage which specifically leaves out all the letters without ascenders and descenders;

I thxxk thxt xxxt pxxplx xxll bx xblx tx xxxd thxx xlthxxgh x lxt xf lxttxxx xxx xxxxxxg.

Now compare the above sentence, still fairly easy to read because it includes all the ascenders and descenders which give the words their familiar pattern, with this;

xn xxis xassaxe axx xxe xexxers wxicx xux oux axove xxe xine or xexow ix xave xeen xefx oux, maxinx ix mucx xarxer xo reax.

(In this passage all the letters which jut out above the line or below it have been left out, making it much harder to read).

Home educated prodigies

2011-08-11T00:33:00.000-07:00

The history of home education is littered with cases of supposedly brilliant children whose parents were convinced that they would be world champions in some area or another. Sometimes the chosen field is physical; tennis or gymnastics. In other cases it is intellectual; mathematics or chess, for example. Below is a recent piece from The Washington Post about this sort of thing:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/home-schooling-for-child-athletes-raises-questions-large-and-small/2011/08/05/gIQASWDR4I_story_1.html

I do not think personally that children under the age of fourteen or so are really able to make informed choices about this sort of thing. It often looks as though the parents are fulfilling some need of their own in these experiments. Sometimes, matters seem to turn out well enough, as with the Williams sisters and their tennis. On other occasions, the child’s life seems to have been blighted by the pressure of living up to parental expectations. There is also the unfortunate fact that 99% of children whose parents believe them to be geniuses at tennis, gymnastics, mathematics or chess, turn out after adolescence to be nothing of the sort. This can be very dispiriting for both parent and child. It can also be damaging for the child’s future life. In addition to the loss of self-esteem, having to accustom one’s self to the notion that one is not after all a world champion, there is all the time which has been spent on that one chosen activity to the detriment of the child’s general education.

Home education does seem to be a fertile breeding ground for unbalanced childhoods of this type. Not that they are very common of course, simply that such odd upbringings are possible with home educated children in a way that school would not generally allow. I wonder what the long term prospects are for home educated children who have been raised in this way? I have recently been re-reading Joan Freeman’s book; Gifted Children Growing Up. For those about whom she writes, all of whom went to school, the eventual outcomes seemed to be pretty good. These were children who were objectively very bright. I would be intrigued to know whether the sometimes feverish atmosphere in the homes of the home educated gifted child produces radically different outcomes. Does anybody know of any research on this?

An historical perspective on 'the state as parent'

2011-08-10T00:20:00.000-07:00

A recurring theme in the debate on monitoring of home education is that parents have responsibility for their children and that if we allow local authorities to become too much involved then, it is claimed, we will find the ‘state as parent’ creeping into our society. It is instructive in this context to look at just how local authorities became involved in family life in the first place.

As readers are probably aware, I used to write extensively for magazines such as True Detective and Murder Most Foul Quarterly (Yes, there really is a such a periodical). No normal person buys these things; they cater for the sicko market. At one time I wrote a series on the so-called ’Baby Farmers’ of late Victorian Britain. These were women who for a small lump sum would offer to look after unwanted babies and small children, taking good care of them or finding them decent foster homes. It was really a murderous scam, whereby having taken the money, the women would then either starve the baby to death or sedate it heavily with laudanum until it died of opium poisoning. Some of these characters disposed of hundreds of babies in this way for money. During the late 19th century, foster care and adoption were completely unregulated and when attempts were made through measures such as the 1898 Infant Life Protection Act to introduce monitoring and control over the practice of fostering. There was an outcry from many quarters. The state was trying to intervene in family life and what parents did with their children was their business, not the police or local authority’s. Precisely similar arguments were put forward when compulsory education was introduced and also when the practice of parents essentially selling their small children as apprentices to chimney sweeps and so on was stopped. The age of consent for most of the Victorian Era was twelve; it was only raised to sixteen after it became widely known that poor parents were selling their pre-pubescent daughters to brothels in order to cater for the paedophile market. Once again, there was outrage at what was seen as an unwarrantable intrusion into family life by the state. It was up to parents what arrangements they made for their children; it was no business at all of anybody else.

Now I am not of course suggesting that any home educators are selling their sons to chimney sweeps or their daughters to brothels! I am simply pointing out that local authority involvement with family life began for very good reasons and that those who objected so vociferously to this trend in Victoria’s reign are now generally accepted to have been wrong. It is from this historical perspective that I find myself a little uneasy when once again we hear the cry that we must preserve parents’ rights and not allow the state to take over the role of parent. In every case in the past where this slogan has been used, history shows those using it to have been wrong-headed and wholly mistaken. I wonder what the view will be in a century of those who now use this rationale for fighting against local authority interference in the lives of their families?

The extra responsibilities of home educating parents

2011-08-08T23:52:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about home education is that you can pretty well claim responsibility for the good things which your child achieves. I don’t just mean academically, but also when their character turns out well. After all, they have been with you for most of the time and so have picked up your ideas on justice and compassion, kindness and respect for the natural world. We can all feel proud about such traits when we observe them in our children. There is a downside to this though. If we accept that we are largely answerable for the good points in our kids, then it follows naturally that we are often to blame for the bad parts as well. Well it should follow, but many home educating parents seem anxious to evade this responsibility.

Let us look at a few practical, real-life examples from my own daughter. She has many sterling qualities, but there are also less attractive aspects of her personality. For instance, she is arrogant and self-opinionated. She swears like a trooper and her knowledge of geography is lamentable. I always assumed that this sort of thing was connected with spending so much time in my company as a child. I focused on science when teaching her and therefore neglected geography. I am a famously hard swearer and am know to be arrogant. Judging by some people’s comments yesterday though, perhaps I am off the hook! Take my daughter’s lack of geographical knowledge. Maybe it is not down to poor teaching on my part. Perhaps there is a psychological block to her learning about the capital cities and principle exports of foreign countries? Could this be geographobia? Or might it be a neurological deficit? I am thinking geographexia. And what about all that swearing? I have always thought it is because as a small girl she spent so much time with a foul-mouthed man, but there could be another explanation. Coprolalia can be a symptom of some psychological disturbances or what about Tourette’s?

I wonder if readers can see yet where I am going with this? Yesterday, I discussed reading and advanced the radical idea that when children do not learn to read, it is generally because they have not been taught or have been taught poorly. Just as with my daughter’s lack of geography, I thought that there would be a link between the level and quality of teaching and the child’s skills and abilities in this particular area. It seems though that some parents do not accept this link. They hunt instead for obscure syndromes which might provide another reason for their children’s difficulties. Here is the way that I look at such claims. Mt daughter’s propensity for swearing may have a neurological basis. If I wanted to claim this, I would need to have hard evidence from psychiatrists, brain scans and so on. It would not really be enough if I were to suggest that her use of bad language or lack of geographical knowledge were caused by a physical disorder of her brain. In the same way, for those who comment here about their children’s supposed neurological disorders I must ask how many have evidence of an organic problem? Several people commented, hinting that their child’s reading difficulties were caused by something other than poor or absent teaching. Have these children had PET scans? Who has come up with the diagnosis? Nine times out of ten, the simplest explanation is the correct one. If a child lacks geographical knowledge or easy facility in literacy; the most likely reason is related to teaching. Only when this has definitely been excluded should we reach for other and rarer causes.

An enduring myth among home educators

2011-08-08T00:06:00.000-07:00

We all kid ourselves that we behave rationally and make our choices based upon common sense and logic. Sometimes this is true; often it is not. Our decisions are frequently a product of an accumulation of our prejudices and preconceived ideas which generate reflex actions rather than considered and well ordered thoughts. Somebody mentions the death penalty and we say automatically. ‘Oh, I don’t approve of that’. It may be twenty or thirty years since we actually thought the matter through logically and calmly, but it is so much easier to have a set of opinions and beliefs that we can simply repeat like mantras for any debate which arises.

I am like this just as much as anybody else. Take the question of the teaching of reading, for example. I taught my own child by using the Look and Say method, sometimes known as whole word teaching. I used flashcards, built up a sight vocabulary and so on. Now of course, this worked brilliantly; my child could read numbers and individual words at fifteen months and was reading fluently by two years and three months. The fact that I chose this method has less to do with making a careful study of the evidence and then following where it led and more to do with the fact that I have been familiar with Fred Schonell’s books for forty years and his was the first method of learning to read which I ever encountered. Using this method was a reflex action which entailed little conscious thought. There are better and more effective ways to teach reading. Take synthetic phonics, for instance.

One of the most popular and comforting myths to be found on the British home educating scene is that no method of learning to read is any better than another. According to this idea, 20% of children will struggle with the process, no matter what system is adopted. There is accordingly little point in worrying about the business and if your child is one of that 20%, then pushing him to hard will only create stress and be counter-productive. This old wives’ tale is passed around and used as justification for the autonomous learning of reading; whereby the child himself sets the pace for the learning of reading and is essentially in control of the whole business. Not surprisingly, this results in some children being unable to read until their teenage years. It need not be this way. An Ofsted report published last year showed that in some schools, all children are reading by six. This includes children with special needs and those for whom English is not their first language. These schools use synthetic phonics and they have found that when used systematically and effectively it works every time and that all children learn to read. The report may be found here:

http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/reading-six-how-best-schools-do-it

What is interesting about the work with this method of teaching reading is that schools using synthetic phonics intelligently find that there is no such thing as dyslexia; all the children learn to read at the expected age. This suggests strongly that failure to learn to read is due to poor teaching rather than any specific disorder in the child herself. In other words, if children fail to read, then their teachers are at fault. This has profound implications for home education, because we are our children’s teachers. It is hard to escape the conclusion that if our children do not learn to read at six or seven, then this is because the education being offered is somehow defective. This report makes sobering reading, not least for somebody like me; who has always championed Look and Say. If a child of twelve is not reading, it is almost certainly because he has not been taught to read properly.

All this puts advocates of autonomous education in rather a tricky situation. The justification for not undertaking formal instruction in the teaching of reading is that no method is perfect and that 20% or so of children will always have difficulties. The evidence from across the country seems to indicate that this is not true and that any child can be taught to read by six or seven. One must now ask what reason any home educating parents could have for failing to teach their children this useful skill, given that we know that it can be done quickly and effectively at a very early age without any trauma to the child? Ideology alone is not sufficiently good reason for holding back on the teaching of reading.

The roots of confrontation between local authorities and home educators

2011-08-07T00:14:00.000-07:00

There seems to be pretty general agreement that there is more tension between a number of home educating parents and their local authorities than was once the case. A few days ago, somebody here suggested that this was largely due to the Badman review. This is an interesting idea. There are it seems to me two main ways of looking at the situation today. On the one hand is the perspective that aggressive local authorities, acting in many cases beyond the letter of the law, have provoked peaceful and good natured home educators into becoming militant and uncooperative. By this reading of the matter, the groups of people fighting against any new laws or regulations simply represent the will of the people; they are working on behalf of the majority of home educating parents. Another view would be that those agitating so furiously against supposed local authority infringement of their ’rights’ are a small core of malcontents and trouble makers who are always arguing with various authority figures about anything at all; from fluoridation of drinking water to the vaccination of children, from the export of powdered baby milk to less economically developed nations to building nuclear power stations.

A recent debate on one of the larger Internet lists devoted to home education shed a little light upon which of these two cases is more likely to be correct. It will be recalled that during the Badman review and the framing of Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill, one of the proposals which caused the greatest anger was the idea that local authority officers should have a right of entry to the homes of those educating their own children. Of course this idea was really a non-starter; the legal complications of the thing would have tied up the British courts for years to come. It was used as a rallying cry by those who rejected the whole idea of receiving visits from their local authority. Now many local authorities have never insisted anyway on making visits of this kind and have always been content to accept written evidence of the education being provided for a child. Essex, my own local authority, are like this. This never struck me as a big deal, but of course there are those who feel strongly about it.

One might think that with authorities who simply request a written report about a home educated child’s education, that even the most militant parent would feel that there was no cause for confrontation. No visits being asked for; all they want is some idea of what is going on. A couple of days ago, I mentioned the facetious idea that the owner of one of the largest home education lists put forward, for sending a pig’s heart to the local authority. This was of course a joke, but the background to the suggestion is revealing. Somebody posting on this list had been asked by her local authority to provide an account of her child’s education. One might have thought that after all the fuss and bitter opposition to receiving visits, that this would have been welcomed as a good thing. You would be wrong to think that. This request caused a well known figure in home educating circles to suggest sending as much irrelevant material as possible, simply in order to make the whole business more awkward and troublesome for the local authority. Others seconded this, agreeing that they did not want to make the process easy for the local authority and that the more awkawrdly they reacted, the better this was for their purposes. This was bloody-mindedness on an epic scale.

It looks to an objective observer as though even where their demands are fully met and home educating parents are given the option of sending in a written report, rather than being expected to allow a local authority officer into their home, some activists will still try to create a confrontation. I have a strong suspicion that even if all local authorities accepted reports and did not even ask for visits, then the next campaign would be to refuse to provide any account at all of the child’s education, on the grounds that it is no business at all of the local authority. This attitude, and I can see it emerging clearly now as a strand in British home education, suggests that much of the more militant section of the British home education scene actually wants confrontation and conflict. Even when their demands are met, they will come up with fresh grievances. We are seeing the first stirrings of this with the anger over a council’s request for a written report; we shall be seeing more of this in the future. The more reasonable and accommodating become local authorities, the more unreasonable will become the demands of some home educators.

Peer pressure in the world of British home education

2011-08-05T23:58:00.000-07:00

Nobody knows how many children in this country are educated at home; nor are we likely to find out in the future. One estimate widely bandied about during the Badman review was 80,000. In a book published last year, Mike Fortune-Wood argued for a figure of 150,000. Let us split the difference and assume that perhaps as many as 115,000 are being educated out of school. Some families contain more than one child and so this might give us roughly 200,000 parents of home educated children in this country. The vast majority of these parents do not belong either to groups which meet physically nor to forums, lists and online support groups. Obviously, a list which boasts 1000 members really represents only 0.5% of British home educators. Since only about 50 members post regularly, the views expressed even on a list such as this are only those of a tiny minority of home educating parents. The same applies to groups of home educating parents who meet in libraries, church halls and so on; they are very much a minority of home educating parents taken as a whole.

Commenting here yesterday, somebody said:

‘ Some of us need the services of the LA, especially those with children with SEND. However on some lists they daren't speak out and say that they are involved with the LA in that way for fear of being attacked.’

It is of course not only on Internet lists and forums that people are nervous of speaking out in favour of visits; the same thing happens at groups which meet. Somebody else commenting, said:

‘ I know, it can be a real pain when you want a visit and people try to talk you out of it.’

All clubs and societies have various unwritten rules to which members are assumed to subscribe. For those belonging to the larger home education lists and forums, one of these is that members are expected to be in opposition to local authority involvement in home education. Those who feel differently are often ridiculed and accused of making life difficult for other parents. An argument frequently advanced is that if some home educating parents accept visits, then the local authority will expect everybody to have them. Parents who have amicable dealings with their local authority are thus represented as traitors and fifth columnists whose actions have an adverse effect on other home educators. This conformity of views is enforced by anti-local authority parents forming impromptu pecking parties and bullying others until they stop expressing their own views. Sometimes, the dissenters are removed by the list owner in order to create the illusion of unanimity. This happened recently on the HE-UK list when a member asked for one person to try and make her posts a little clearer. The owner of the HE-UK list is famous for chucking off people who speak out in favour of either visits from the local authority or even for structured teaching of children.

The result of all this is that many home educating parents feel under pressure to pay lip-service to principles to which they do not subscribe. This enables those with extremist views on the subject of home education to make out that theirs are really the mainstream opinions of British home educators. We have seen a lot of this ’tail wagging the dog’ type activity on the home education scene in this country. Most home educating parents simply get on with the business of educating their children as best they can. An awful lot of them come to some accommodation with their local authority about visits or annual reports and relations are more or less good natured on both sides. When an organisation claims to represent home educating parents and their interests, we must bear in mind that even if it is a fairly large groups by home education standards, one containing say 2000 members, this is still only 1% or so of the parents of home educated children. It is unfortunate that sometimes, as in the case of visits from local authorities, this tiny minority seeks to shape the opinions and actions of others by cold shouldering and bullying those who express what are seen as unorthodox views on the subject.

Of pig's hearts

2011-08-05T00:25:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, I posted a fairly long piece here about teaching science at home. Nobody commented all day, which prompted one person to ask in the evening, ‘is discussing actual education less popular than some other topics?’ Very perceptive! I have noticed that there is a great difference between parents who actually get on and educate their children and those who belong to organisations and Internet groups concerned with home education. I tended to associate with the first group; individuals who were passionately committed to their children’s education. Most of these did not really have time to spare for belonging to online ’communities’ of other home educators. They might sometimes have joined a list or forum to find something out, but it was not a lifestyle. I might also observe that these people, like me, regarded monitoring by the local authority as one of life’s minor irritations; something which they could cheerfully do without, but which was not really all that important.

Now you might easily suppose that most home educating parents were like this; primarily concerned with education and ensuring that their children learn at least enough to prepare them for adult life. You would be wrong. There is far more interest on the larger lists and forums in working out ingenious ways to frustrate attempts by the local authority to find out about the education being provided for children. In fact one of the people who worked on the guidelines for local authorities prepared by Alison Sauer is currently incensed at the very idea that a ’suitable education’ might be defined as one which prepares a child for adult life. What the purpose of a child’s education, other than this, could possibly be is something of a mystery to me. To give readers a flavour of the sort of discussions which occupy most of the time on the main home education lists, I might mention a debate which is currently taking place about the best way to make life difficult for local authority officers who are not insisting on visits, but are instead happy to accept written reports. The list owner put forward the idea of deluging them with all sorts of paperwork and seeing how inconvenient parents are able to make the whole process of sending in an annual report. He also made the facetious suggestion that a parent should send a pig’s heart to the officer requesting information about her child’s education. This might well raise a chuckle in north Wales, where the person proposing this lives. Working as I do in the inner London borough of Hackney, I found this apparently humorous notion stupendously offensive. Perhaps this is because there are so many Muslims and Jews working for the local authority, that even a joke about sending one of them a pig’s heart would be liable to result in disciplinary proceedings. As I say, things are probably a little different the further one gets from the capital.

It is perhaps this mindset, of people more interested in making their own and other people’s lives difficult, which explains the lack of interest in discussing education per se. When there are so many amusing schemes to be discussed for getting one over on local authority officers, why would one wish to waste time thinking about the boring idea of teaching science?

A black mark for Lincolnshire County Council

2011-08-04T00:02:00.000-07:00

I had the misfortune to be in Lincolnshire over the weekend. For those unfamiliar with this ghastly part of the country, it provides a glimpse of Britain before the Industrial Revolution; peopled as it is in the main by half-witted agricultural workers. My wife’s family live there and so we have to visit the county pretty regularly. Mind you, they live in Grimsby, which is positively cosmopolitan and sophisticated compared with the little hamlets one finds tucked away between the potato fields. Most of the inhabitants of these places look like inbred mutants who might have wandered off the set of The Hills have Eyes. Still, enough about my daughter’s family. While we were there, I looked in on a family I know who teach their own children. I don’t really mind this myth that I never meet real-life home educators, as long as people realise that it is a complete nonsense. I was given a copy of a letter which they recently received. Blogger won’t let me put pictures here at the moment and so I shall have to type it out. It says:

Dear Mrs. XXXX,
We are doing a review of children electively home educated from XXX, to ascertain if sufficient support is being provided to yourselves and child/ren from Lincolnshire County Council. It is also important that we understand that the educational provision your child is receiving is an appropriate and comprehensive one.
In order to undertake this review we have agreed that an Education Welfare Officer will visit you at a time convenient to yourself. It would be helpful if you are in agreement, that this officer talk to your child to hear from her first hand how they are finding the education provided, and whether there is anything else we need to assist them in providing additional support services.
It is also important that we understand whether there are any additional needs in relation to your child and whether we can provide any assistance.
I am sure that you will find these visits helpful to your family.

Seldom have I seen such a horror! If somebody wished to check on the education which I was providing for a child, the very least I might require is that the people doing the checking were themselves educated to a reasonably high standard. This is manifestly not the case here; the letter being written by somebody unable to express herself in ordinary, plain English. This communication is couched in what I call ‘ill-educated formal’. This is a style of writing beloved of the barely literate, who use odd constructions which they fondly imagine deceives readers into believing that the letter has been penned by an educated and intelligent person! Almost unbelievably, the above letter was signed by the Assistant Director of Children's Services! Let us look at this monstrosity in a little detail.

It begins ‘Dear Mrs. XXX’ and then goes on to refer to ‘yourselves’. This is of course an illicit concordance between the singular ‘Mrs. XXX’ and plural ‘yourselves’. The same solecism occurs a few lines down with ‘your child’, singular, and ‘how they are finding’, plural. Awful basic grammatical error, which alone suggests that the writer has not been educated beyond primary school. And why on earth talk of support being provided to ‘yourselves’? The correct word here is ‘you’; not ‘to ascertain if sufficient support is being provided to yourselves’, but rather ‘to ascertain if sufficient support is being provided to you’. The use of ‘yourself’ instead of ‘you’ is of course another turn of phrase popular with the illiterate and inarticulate. This is also to be found a few lines later, ’ at a time convenient to yourself’. Why not simply, ’at a convenient time’?

The second sentence begins, ‘It is also important that we ..’ In order to use the word ‘also’ in this way, it must first have been show that a previous item was important. This was not even hinted at during mention of the review of electively home educated children. On another note, one is tempted to ask to whom all this is important. Important for the child? The parent? Lincolnshire County Council? It is heartening, if a little surprising, that Lincolnshire will be talking to these children to find out, ‘how they are finding the education provided, and whether there is anything else we need to assist them in providing additional support services‘. Are only home educated children to be favoured in this way, or will the local authority be speaking to children at their schools to see how they are finding their education and whether there are any additional services which they could do with?

All in all, I do not think that this letter would encourage me to engage with Lincolnshire County Council. It is semi-literate and incoherent; not at all a good advertisement for an education department!

The advantages of studying science at home

2011-08-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

I have noticed over the years that although a fair number of teachers will concede that parents might be able to impart the basics of literacy and numeracy to their own children, there is a pretty general assumption that secondary education is beyond the ability of the average mother or father. Baroness Deech touched upon this last year, when she gave as a knock-down argument against home education, that it would not be possible to teach chemistry in this way. During the course of the weekend I met a retired teacher who does not know me and he said precisely the same when he heard that my daughter had been taught at home, ’Well you couldn’t teach chemistry or physics at home, could you?’ The pleasure of casually mentioning my daughter’s A* IGCSEs in both these subjects!

As a matter of fact, teaching chemistry at home is actually better for a child. Pupils at school learn in a rote fashion, with very little genuine experimentation. Any experiments which are conducted have to be done in a set way, with a predetermined outcome which the teacher will judge as correct or not. This is not really science at all and it certainly does not encourage the growth of general thinking and problem solving in a child. Nor does it enable the child properly to get to grips with the underlying principles of the subject. This is where home education scores highly. Take for example the test for the presence of protein, using the biuret reagent. School textbooks state unequivocally that this is made from a mixture of potassium hydroxide and copper sulphate. If protein is present, the solution changes from blue to violet. Now I would be hard pressed to know where I might obtain potassium hydroxide locally! Common sense tells us though that this should not be necessary. In fact when my daughter was twelve and we were doing biology, this problem arose. I asked her what she thought might act as an adequate substitute for potassium hydroxide and she at once suggested sodium hydroxide. Obvious, really; having studied the periodic table, she knew that potassium and sodium share many qualities. And of course sodium hydroxide is none other than caustic soda; available from any high street chemist's shop. By tackling problems such as these, a natural consequence of doing science in a domestic setting rather than a well equipped laboratory, my daughter was able to work out solutions to chemical problems that no textbook would ever pose. Instead of mechanically following a set of instructions, even the carrying out of the biuret test became a series of little problems in both chemistry and real life. We discovered, for instance, that the cheapest way to obtain copper sulphate was from a garden centre; thus learning its role as a fungicide.

The sterile procedures carried out in schools cannot match the ingenuity needed to conduct scientific experiments in the kitchen. Bunsen burners are of course useful as a readily controlled source of heat, but spirit lamps, candles and the gas cooker can all be substituted with greater or lesser success. Julie Webb wrote about this over twenty years ago in Children Learning at Home. She found that studying science at home presented no handicap at all academically.

As with all professionals, teachers like to pretend that what they are doing is fantastically clever and that a lay person attempting to do the same thing will result in disaster. Solicitors and doctors behave in just the same way; so for that matter do electricians, plumbers and garage mechanics. In all these cases, the people involved are really protecting their own interests, rather than those of the customer. They do not want ordinary people to do these jobs for themselves, because it would do them out of work. Teachers are no different. They are well aware that what they are doing is not really so very complicated and that any fool can teach chemistry in the kitchen of a council flat just as easily as they are able to do with a well resourced laboratory.

The ingenuity needed to study science subjects at GCSE level at home is part of the learning experience for the child. Instead of having the whole thing laid out and arranged for them as happens at school, they need to work with their parents to find solutions. This typically involves ringing an expert, visiting a museum or just using their common sense. I have not the slightest doubt that the underlying grasp of the principles of chemistry acquired in this way is far stronger and more deeply rooted than the superficial, spoon-fed approach which is so prevalent now in modern schools.

In which I confess to having been in error

2011-08-01T23:42:00.000-07:00

Never let it be said that I am a man who refuses to admit when he has been wrong. I have been musing lately about my daughter and coming to the reluctant conclusion that I have been mistaken in an opinion which I have several times expressed warmly on this blog. Let me explain.

I posted a link yesterday to a couple of pieces which my daughter wrote for The Guardian. Somebody then drew attention to her blog. In fact my daughter is well known in some quarters, as two recent examples will show. She had lined up an internship over the summer in a magazine. It fell through and she felt that she had been shabbily treated. I was hardly aware of this; it just seemed to me the sort of thing which happens in the life of any seventeen year-old. Imagine my surprise, when the next thing I knew was that she was up at Westminster and contacted me, telling me to turn on the Parliament channel. I did so and saw a Conservative MP asking the following of the Business Secretary:

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debate/?id=2011-07-07a.1662.3

I was more than a little staggered to find that the Early Day Motion had been signed by MPs like Glenda Jackson!

Last Wednesday we were having tea, when the BBC World Service rang her on quite another matter. They wished her to take part in a live debate about young people. For some reason, they regard her as being the voice of youth; the BBC have rung her before, asking for her views on this or that aspect of modern society. Readers are now probably asking themselves where all this is leading. Why on earth, they are wondering, is he droning on about his wretched daughter in this way? A fair point indeed. I have several times expressed doubts as to the number of home educated children who go on to become professionals such as doctors, engineers or lawyers. I have suggested that if there were such adults around, surely they would have spoken out during the debates last year regarding Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill. It occurred to me a few days ago though, that despite the fact that my daughter is pretty well known in various ways, the fact that she didn’t attend school for a single day never seems to come up or be mentioned. Last year she was part of Ed Balls leadership campaign; working in his office and meeting him socially as well. Incredibly, she never once thought to mention to him that she had been educated at home.

Actually, I think that my daughter should tell people about her home education sometimes, if only as a riposte to those who claim that home educated children end up shy, lacking in confidence and with a social skills deficit. But there, we cannot dictate what our teenage children do and say. The point is that if there is one home educated young person charging around the world and being noticed in this way without letting on that she was taught at home; there are probably others as well. I think that I was wrong to assume that home educated solicitors and vets would necessarily stand up and be counted when the subject of home education is being debated publicly. There now, I hope that readers will relish this moment; it is seldom enough that I concede that I have been mistaken. Make the most of it, for it is not likely to happen again in a hurry!

Like father, like daughter...

2011-08-01T03:32:00.001-07:00

It struck me that those who enjoy reading my own pieces might well find it a pleasure to have some more of the family's writing to look at. Here are a couple of short articles by my daughter, whose ability to irritate people seems to be second only to my own:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/webb-simone

More about parents of children on the autistic spectrum

2011-07-31T23:56:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I posted a piece which seemed to me to be pretty sympathetic and uncontroversial. In it, I mentioned that the parents of children on the autistic spectrum had for many decades, at least since 1943, been noticed frequently to be a little strange and somewhat different from other parents. I speculated that this might be due not so much to their also having autistic features or mental illnesses, both popular current ideas, but rather to their experiences as parents of a child who is outwardly ‘normal’ but who behaves bizarrely. As a result, I was called ‘callous’ and accused of ‘ignorant idiocy’.

While I have been away, I have been exchanging emails with professionals in this particular field and last night did a quick trawl of the literature. As I suspected, this was not a new idea and was in fact the most reasonable explanation of what many who work with such families have long observed. One person commenting on the original piece clamed that over 70% of children on the autistic spectrum have a parent who is also on the spectrum. I could not find any reference to this and would be glad to hear more about this idea. I have in front of me volume 15 of Developmental Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry, published by Sage in the USA and written by Laura Schreibman. It is a standard work on the subject of autism. On page 51, we find the following, apropos of the etiology of the disorder:

It has been widely demonstrated that a child’s behaviour has effects on the behaviour of the caretakers (e.g. Bell 1968, 1971; Yarrow Waxler & Scott, 1971). It is certainly reasonable to assume that any lack of social responsiveness evidenced by the parents might be a reaction to the lack of social behaviour, excessive tantrums and bizarre behaviour of their autistic children (e.g. Rimland, 1964; Rutter, 1968; Schopler & Reichler, 1971).

I found other references to this phenomenon but, as I have remarked before, this is a personal blog and not an academic journal and I do not think it necessary to reference these posts too extensively! It is enough to say that this was not some weird idea of mine but is part of mainstream thinking on this subject.

I think that rather than taking issue with what I specifically said about this matter, those objecting wished to close down any discussion about the origin and etiology of the syndrome. This does not strike me as being at all a good idea. I mentioned the old idea that parents were solely responsible for their children’s autism. It is careful research which exploded this notion. I really don’t see that it would be a good idea now to stop any further debate or research on the subject. I have seen this sort of thing happen before with autism. Some years ago, it was noticed that a greatly disproportionate number of African and Caribbean children were presenting with autistic features. In one London borough where I worked, this group represented around 40% of the population and yet about 80% of the children on the autistic spectrum were black. This was such a hot potato politically, that nobody would discuss it and this delayed research, with bad consequences for the families concerned. Suppressing facts and trying to prevent discussion of these things is seldom a good idea and almost inevitably harms the kids themselves in the long run. The more that we discover about this disorder and its causes, the better.

This topic is important for home educators, because autism seems to be commoner among home educated children than in the wider school population. When we find that one particular group has higher incidences of autism, whether it is Nigerians or home educating families; it is of interest. I cannot see that exploration of this could be a bad thing.

The 'joy' of late reading

2011-07-28T14:00:00.000-07:00

Those readers whom I succeeded in irritating yesterday will be glad to hear that I am going to be away for a few days and that they will not be exposed to my unpleasant views for a while. It beats me why these types carry on reading my blog if it annoys them as much as all that! Before I go, I must mention that I have been looking through some back issues of the home education magazine produced by Mike Fortune-Wood. One article caught my eye in particular. It was by his wife Jan and was called The Joy of Late Reading. I did not think much of it, but it started me thinking about the frequency with which those who have themselves had reading difficulties might be reluctant to teach their kids to read. Mike Fortune-Wood himself of course had great difficulties in this field and so too did a number of other parents who are keen on not getting their children to read at the same age as everybody else.

Could there be a connection between the satisfaction and pleasure that parents gained from reading as children and their attitude to teaching the skill to their own kids? Could it be that those who struggled to learn to read might have a bad feeling about the whole thing and not wish for their own children to suffer in the same way? This seems quite plausible. Of course, phrasing it like this would not sound very noble; ‘I didn’t enjoy learning to read and so don’t really value it. As a result, I am not bothered about teaching it to my kid, he probably won’t like it much either’. Better by far to trick it out as a high principled educational philosophy, thus making a virtue out of what is essentially a weakness.

Parents of children on the autistic spectrum

2011-07-27T23:48:00.000-07:00

This post is not restricted to home educating parents, but is about something which a number of people have noticed. Until a few decades ago, disorders such as schizophrenia and autism were thought of as being produced by strange parents. Leo Kanner, the man who first defined autism in the 1940s, came up with the idea of the so-called ‘Refrigerator Mother’, whose emotional coldness produce autism in her child. The fathers too were supposed to be remote and not join in their children’s lives properly. These ideas are now discredited and we know that both schizophrenia and autism have a genetic component and are essentially neurological problems, rather than a result of bad parenting.

And yet, it has been observed again and again that the parents, particularly the mothers, of autistic children are often a bit odd. They typically present as a little abrupt and not empathetic; slightly disconnected, in fact. Now all this goes very much against the prevailing paradigm and so tends to be ignored. When the subject does come up for discussion, it is assumed that because autism can be passed down through families genetically, perhaps these parents are themselves on the autistic spectrum. There is another possibility and it is an idea about which I would like to hear readers’ opinions. The main emotion towards them encountered by the parents of a child in a wheelchair will be compassion and pity. Irritating, yes, but quite understandable; people feel sorry for a mother whose kid is crippled. The main emotion which many mothers of children on the autistic spectrum come across in others can be hostility and disapproval. This is because their children look normal but apparently behave badly. They are often seen as lax and careless parents, unwilling to tackle their child’s supposed naughtiness. This difference in experience must have some effect upon the parents.

The idea which some of those with whom I have worked came up was that this experience of constantly feeling embarrassed about your child might after a few years result in mothers become a little harder and disregarding what others felt and said. In other words, any perceived oddness in such mothers would be a long term reaction to how they are treated by others, particularly other parents who do not understand autism. I have certainly seen one case of a mother who, I knew both before and after having an autistic child, but since this sample could hardly be smaller, (N=1!), I do not feel able to advance it as evidence. Do readers have any thoughts on this? Have others found the parents of children on the autistic spectrum as being a little strange? If so, can anybody come up with an explanation?

Two people withdraw from the home educating ‘community’

2011-07-27T00:01:00.000-07:00

I was a little surprised to see Mike Fortune-Wood announce that Tania Berlow has withdrawn from the home educating community. How does one actually do that? By not home educating any more? By no longer posting on the Badman Review Action Group list? Ali Edgeley, her best friend, clarified matters later by explaining that Tania would no longer be commenting on message boards, lists, forums and so on. She has apparently ’suffered’ from people saying horrible things about her over the Alison Sauer guidelines business. I have to say that this strikes me as absurd. There has not been any shortage of people saying horrid things about me over the last couple of years, but I would not say that I have ’suffered’ as a result! People need to get a sense of perspective.

I must express my unbounded joy at the news that the awful Alison Edgeley will also be withdrawing from the ‘home educating community’. People have in the past been a little sniffy about my commenting on home education, on the grounds that I technically stopped when my daughter turned sixteen in the summer of 2009. What then shall we say about Ali Edgeley, who hoofed her kids back into school when she started up a business in 2007? Three years after she had stopped home educating, she was still pestering the London Borough of Islington with communications like this:

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/27702/response/67948/attach/html/3/306585%20Anti%20Badman%20Campaign.doc.html

Both woman are active on the Internet in other capacities than as home educators. Ali Edgeley posts as tinpanali and Tania as both Alex Panzeca and catbythetail. Some of the things that both Ali and Tania get up to and say elsewhere, tends to confirm strongly some of my remarks about the general strangeness of many well known figures in the world of home education!

Indigo Children

2011-07-25T23:32:00.000-07:00

I have written before of a tendency among British home educators to embrace crackpot beliefs and unconventional ways of thinking. These typically range from homeopathy to the New World Order. Over the last few months, I have been told of another such loopy idea which has apparently become very popular in some quarters. This is the idea of the so-called Indigo Children. Now I have of course heard of the Indigo Children, but was not aware that it was flourishing in this country. Like so many other weird belief systems, it started in the USA. Put briefly, the idea is this. Some children who have been diagnosed as or exhibit the signs of having an attention deficit or being hyperactive, are really very special and misunderstood by the rest of the world. Far from having special educational needs, they are really the forerunners of a new kind of human. This is curious, because others have observed that many home educating parents have the idea that their children are very talented and empathetic; although in ways which cannot be measured by conventional means.

Indigo Children have a number of characteristics. They behave as though they are very special and important. They are intolerant of authority and do not react well to being told what to do. They are amazingly sensitive and talented, but not in ways that schools recognise. They will not submit to the ‘ritualised behaviour of society’; in practice, this means that they refuse to wait their turn in queues and so on. Many of them have been diagnosed as having ADHD.

Now all this is very interesting. There are two possible explanations for conduct of this sort. One is that these kids have been sent to the Earth by a higher power to lead us all into the Age of Aquarius or something of the sort. In other words, they are truly special, but our blinkered eyes are unable to recognise how important and special they are. The second possibility is that these are spoilt brats who have been indulged by their parents and allowed to get away with murder and that when they start school and find that they are not the centre of the universe, they take the news badly!

I have been given the names of a number of parents who are well known on the British home educating scene who, it is claimed, believe that their children are Indigo. I have no idea whether any of this is true, but it does seem to tie in neatly with a lot of what I have observed. Quite a few of the home educated children in this country have been diagnosed with special needs of one sort or another. In America, this is the group from whom the majority of the Indigo Children are drawn. Many British home educators do seem to think that their children are fantastically sensitive and have all sorts of abilities which conventional education has failed to recognise. The very idea of their taking GCSEs like all the other kids is absurd; they are far too special for such mundane things as examinations.

I am wondering if any readers have heard about this at all? As I say, I am not claiming that this it is actually the case that the Indigo Children business has taken a hold among British home educators; merely that I have been told by several people that this is the case.

How normal are home educators?

2011-07-25T00:14:00.000-07:00

About eleven years ago, a school of thought emerged in this family that my home educated daughter should start seeing more children of her own age. Of course there were those at Woodcraft Folk, ballet lessons, church and so on, but it was still felt that she needed to spend more time playing with other kids and less being experimented on by her father like an educational guinea pig. As a result, I joined Education Otherwise and the Home Education Advisory Service. I received lists of names, addresses and telephone numbers of other members of these organisations in the country and contacted about a dozen, attempting to broaden my child’s social circle.

Interestingly, this was at roughly the same time that Paula Rothermel was doing her research and since 95% of her subjects belonged to Education Otherwise, it is fair to assume that our random dozen were pretty similar to the types that she was working with at that time. Now I am sometimes reproached for suggesting that home educators tend to be a bit odd. The thesis advanced by my critics is that home education is simply an educational choice and says nothing at all about the parent making it. Some people send their kids to one maintained school and some to another. Some parents choose an independent school and others decide to educate their children at home. One cannot generalise about home educators any more than one can about those who send their children to school. I cannot agree with this hypothesis. For one thing, my common sense tells me that the vast majority of parents who have problems with their child’s school, sort out those problems or at the most move the child to another school. Similarly, those who wish for a better education for their four year-old either attend church to get him into a church school, move house to a better area, enage a tutor for a couple of evenings each week or persuade a relative to pay the fees at an independent school. Almost by definition, those who choose not to send their children to school at all are extremely atypical.

Now I have nothing against odd people. After all most people, even my close friends and family, regard me as being a bit mad myself and they may well be right. I doubt if anybody was at all surprised when I chose not to send my young daughter to school; it was exactly the sort of thing that I would do. Is this the case with the average home educator? I have known many in the past, some in connection with my work. It has been suggested here that those whom I have met are likely to be unusual and not at all typical of home educators. Let’s look at those whom I met after joining EO and HEAS. I can tell readers at once that all these parents were strange and not at all like the average parent of a school aged child whom one meets all the time socially. The first whom we visited may have been an extreme case, but she set the tone for the rest of our experiences with home educating parents living in West Essex and North London at that time. I never actually met the daughter. She was so shy that she would not come downstairs. She communicating by speaking to her parents from upstairs, where she always retreated whenever there were visitors. The first time we went to the house with my daughter, none of us actually met the child. My daughter did not want to go upstairs alone, because she thought the house was creepy. She was right! The mother was like a wraith and very nervous and peculiar. The family did not eat or drink anything warm. All food and drinks were cold. The child’s health was apparently very poor, possibly as a consequence of this. On later visits, my daughter did go upstairs, but was not very keen on going to the house.

Other parents were not as weird as this, but I certainly noticed some common trends. Some of the parents belonged to more than one of these categories. There were those with a touch of religious mania, some who were bitterly opposed to all authority, others who had had bad experiences themselves at school and also some who were very protective of their child and seemingly obsessed with her safety or welfare. I formed the impression that the decision to home educate had in many cases stemmed from their characters, rather than from the ostensible circumstances which had led to home education. What I mean by this is that the things they talked about would not have caused an ordinary parent to decide to take their kid out of school. Of course, this was precisely the same with me. On a rational level, my decision to home educate was prompted by purely educational considerations and has proved a great success. However, it was my own past experiences which primed me in that direction and the explanation about education was to some extent a rationalisation; an excuse , if you will.

How does this tie in with local authorities and their desire to visit families and investigate the situation in their homes? Quite a few of these parents were probably known to the schools as being weird individuals. In some cases, their behaviour and conversation would have set alarm bells ringing in any normal person as soon as one met them. Me, I am very broadminded and being pretty strange myself, am less apt to make judgements of this sort. Nevertheless, I can see where there would have been concerns about these children and their parents.

I am curious to know whether readers honestly maintain that the average home educator is not a little peculiar? Is it really the case that the only difference between home educating parents and the average parent of a child at school is that one sends their child to school and the other does not? Hands on hearts now, how many people here educated their children at home for the following reasons: religious convictions, desire to protect the child, opposition to authority or as a result of bad feelings experienced yourself as a child at school? And now, for how many of your was it a purely educational decision?

Home educated children on the autistic spectrum

2011-07-23T00:12:00.000-07:00

Anybody pushing a child around in a wheelchair may expect generally to receive favourable treatment from the public. People make allowances, move aside and are tolerant of odd behaviour from the person in the wheelchair. It is clear that a disability is involved and so passers-by wish to appear accepting and compassionate. How very different is the attitude encountered if one is with a child who looks like a little angel but who is prone to snatching things away from other children and pushing them over if they object. The indignant looks which parents or carers receive, particularly if they are trying to extinguish such behaviour by not reacting to it when exhibited by the child in question. The kid may have a disability every bit as real as the child in the wheelchair, but of course autism does not show in the same way. The challenging behaviour is perceived as aggression or sheer naughtiness. An unspoken assumption is that it is being tacitly condoned by the adult caring for the child, especially as I say if the adult reacts calmly to the apparently bad behaviour of the child. Other parents will mutter to each other, ’Little thug! And his mother didn’t say a word to him, didn’t even tell him off!’ Useless to explain that shouting at a child on the autistic spectrum will just make everything ten times worse.

One can see why parents who have to endure this sort of thing every day might get a little ratty with those who do not understand the special difficulties which their children have. One can quite understand why they might get irritated when a local authority officer offers well-meaning but foolish advice for dealing with a syndrome about which she so obviously knows nothing at all. To that extent, one can see why some home educating parents of children on the autistic spectrum resolutely refuse to have any dealings with their local authority. There is however another side to this; one which many home educating parents don’t see.

Living with a an autistic child can be an absolute nightmare. In addition to the autistic features, the child might be hyperactive, need little sleep and have a variety of extremely odd habits. One child might have an obsession with collecting shoes and throwing them out of the window. Just imagine that, if you live on the tenth floor of a tower block and are cooking a meal. Your baby is asleep and you realise that your non-verbal eight year-old has managed to get a window open and throw everybody’s shoes out! What do you do? Do you wake the baby and make a family trip downstairs to collect the shoes? The lift is out of order again, so this is no slight adventure. Although you know he can’t help it, won’t you get the tiniest bit irritated at this sudden emergency caused by your child? Or suppose that your daughter has an obsession with laying bottles on their side, because seeing them standing upright makes her distressed? There you are, just getting ready to watch Eastenders and you discover that she has laid a large bottle of cooking oil on its side and the kitchen floor is now awash with the stuff. Ready to snap yet? Of course, some parents do snap. They hit their children or lock them up out of the way in their room. I have seen an autistic child’s bedroom with a padlock fixed to the outside to keep the kid from wandering in the night. For some of these parents, having the child at school all day is the only thing keeping them from going mad themselves. And on top of this, they also need respite care as often as they can get it at weekends.

Children like this are at a greater risk of being hit by their parents. I am not talking about a measured smack, either. I am talking of all the frustration and grief boiling over until the parents beats the child. This sort of thing happens and is a hazard to children with certain syndromes. If a parent who is just about coping were then to have this difficult child with her all day, it is a racing certainty that she would snap at some point. This is not to say that they do not love their children, but nobody who has not spent time with such children can have the remotest idea of the pressures that are at work. A result of this is that when the parent of such a child announces that she is rejecting all future help and will from now on be spending twenty four hours a day with her child; alarm bells start ringing.

I have spent a good part of my life working with both children and adults with various problems and used to foster a five year-old kid with Heller’s Syndrome; a type of late onset autism. By the end of the weekend, I was almost at my wits end. Often, the fears and behaviours of children and young people on the autistic spectrum are not at all accessible to reason. One cannot sometimes explain to them that there is nothing to be afraid of on an escalator going down to a tube station. They might simply go mad with panic and claw and bite until you take them out of the station. Or it might be something else entirely that causes problems. I know that I could not spend twenty four hours a day with some of the children with whom I have worked and I know also that their parents too would be unable to do so. This is one reason why local authority officers are sometimes a little concerned about a decision to home educate such a child. Some parents here have expressed annoyance at the ignorance of these people, but in a sense, the more that they know, the more that they are likely to be uneasy about the idea of home education.

How to attract unfavourable attention from your local authority

2011-07-22T00:26:00.000-07:00

Some readers probably feel that they are not yet proper home educators, because they are still on quite amicable terms with their local authority. There is really no need for this, as putting people’s backs up is a fairly straightforward business. It is not hard to draw attention to yourself and make your local authority think that there is something fishy going on. Let’s see the best way to go about this.

Some parents welcome visits from their local authority as a chance to talk over concerns and ask questions about their child’s education. They would ideally like to see their EHE contact more often than once a year. These people are what we call traitors and fifth columnists. Always keep an eye out for such characters on the lists and forums and be sure to denounce them, saying that they are making the lives of genuine home educators a lot harder, by encouraging local authorities to expect visits as a matter of routine. Remember, any professionals who ask questions about the fact that your child is not at school are not really motivated by concern about your child’s welfare or education. Be sure to brush off any questions and remind those asking them of the legal situation. A few friendly words might reassure the person and the matter will end there; that’s not what the true home educator wants at all. Best of all, refuse brusquely to answer any question at a hospital, clinic, GP’s surgery or anywhere else. Become upset and angry if anybody asks the most casual and innocent question about your child’s non-attendance at school.

The fun really begins when having aroused the liveliest suspicions in the minds of concerned professionals about just what is going on with your kid, you then get a letter from the local authority. Typically, this will be couched ina chatty and friendly way, asking if it would be possible for somebody to pop round for a chat. There are Quislings and collaborators who give in to this sort of approach, which is in reality little short of fascism. Do not be one of them. Instead, contact all the Internet lists to which you belong and send an agonised appeal into cyberspace, announcing that you are being hounded and pursued. Explain that your child is so sensitive that he is likely to have a nervous breakdown if any unfamiliar adult enters the home. With luck, you will find other like-minded individuals who will help you to compose a really snotty letter to the local authority. This will achieve the double purpose of both putting their backs up and also leading them to suppose that you have something to hide. The stage is now set for confrontation and you may look forward to an increasingly fraught atmosphere. It would be no bad thing if your child were to pick up on this atmosphere and become distressed himself. Here’s a handy tip. Why not tell him that the bad guys are trying to force him to go to school? If this does not distress him, then why not hint that some people might want to take him away from his mother altogether? His inevitable anxiety will then provide you with yet another grievance. This strategy is particulary effective for children who are on the autistic spectrum.

It is not hard to spend years at daggers drawn with your local authority and the more fighting you manage with them, the more you will know that you are not one of those supine wretches who sell out at the first opportunity to the forces of the state. They may prefer a pleasant relationship with their local authority with a good natured hour once a year to chat things over; you are made of sterner stuff. If you ever have the nagging feeling at the back of your mind that you have turned into a a quarrelsome crackpot who argues for the sake of it, just spend some time on Home Ed Forums or HE-UK. You will soon be reassured that this behaviour is perfectly normal for a good home educator!

Changing paradigms

2011-07-21T00:23:00.000-07:00

Much of science is based upon sets of ideas which are generally accepted and which provide good explanations for how the world works. These theories are not dogma; they change when overwhelming evidence emerges which renders them no long viable. We then move from one paradigm to another, say from a Newtonian view of the universe to one in accordance with Einstein’s ideas. Let us look at a couple of ideas which fit in perfectly with modern paradigms; one in the field of medicine and one in education.

In medicine, we believe that smoking cigarettes tends to shorten lives by bringing about lung cancer, heart disease and various other illnesses. The link is not obvious, because these disorders typically take decades to emerge and so we only found out for sure when a lot of people’s medical histories were checked. This does not mean that every smoker will die young, nor that no non-smoker will die of lung cancer. Somebody who lives to a ripe old age while being a heavy smoker does so in spite of, not because of the habit. In education, there is a definite link between high quality, structured and compulsory teaching from a young age and future academic achievement. There is a similar link between the early acquisition of literacy and later academic history. Again, the link is not at once apparent because these consequences also take years to appear. As with cigarettes and lung cancer; there are exceptions. Some people might end up going to university without having been taught methodically. These people are, like the old man who smokes eighty a day with no apparent ill effects, exceptions. They have achieved academic success not because of, but in spite of, the educational treatment which they have received or failed to receive.

Every so often, somebody comes along with ideas which challenge prevailing paradigms. When this happens, the onus if very much upon those with the new ideas to demonstrate that these ideas provide a better explanation for the world than those currently being used. Some people today claim that HIV is not caused by AIDS. Others believe that smoking does not cause lung cancer. There are also those who believe that structured teaching tends to prevent academic achievement rather than promote it. Beliefs such as these are not rational or scientific. I do not propose to reference this article, this is after all a personal blog rather than an academic journal, but the evidence is overwhelmingly against any of the above ideas. Because there is no proper evidence to support either the belief that smoking does not cause lung cancer or the notion that structured and compulsory teaching does not tend to produce good academic results, those championing such things fall back on anecdotal evidence and deny the very need for properly conducted research. We see this with crank cures for cancer, where belief and faith are more important than objective research into the efficacy of what is being claimed. We see it too in some strands of home education, where anecdotal evidence is all and the necessity for research is similarly denied.

What is wrong with anecdotal evidence? Well, I had an elderly relative with a very heavy tobacco habit who lived to old age with no apparent ill effects. I also know somebody whose daughter was a life-long non-smoker and yet died of lung cancer. These cases are freaks; they do not cause me to doubt that smoking is strongly associated with lung cancer. We similarly hear of cases where children have been denied regular and systematic teaching and have then gone on to university. These people too are freakish exceptions. They have succeeded despite, rather than because of, their childhoods. We have good reason to think that this is so. First, because of the fierce opposition among those who embrace such unorthodox educational methods to any sort of objective examination of what they are doing. We know it secondly because the same few cases are paraded over and over again to prove that this type of education works. It has all the appearance of a crank cure for cancer, where most of the patients die, but the few survivors are paraded endlessly to prove that the treatment is effective. This has more in common with the sale of snake oil in the old-time West than with any modern education theory!

When it is claimed that a prevailing paradigm is faulty, and this applies to celestial mechanics, medicine, education or anything else, the onus is upon those making the claim to provide the evidence which backs up their belief. There would be nothing wrong with my claiming that Einstein was quite wrong about relativity and if I came up with a theory which made predictions which could be tested and checked, then people might even listen to me. Simply asserting that something is so, will not do. Nor will producing a half dozen cases and suggesting that these are good reason to abandon all that we currently believe to be true about medicine or education. The ball is in the court of those who espouse a new paradigm of education and if they wish to be taken seriously, they should make their case. It is this which lies at the heart of demands for monitoring and inspection: that a group of people are operating in a way which runs counter to all that we think we know about education. Most teachers and other professionals in the field think that these methods will cause harm to the development of young children and that is why they wish to intervene.

Funding college places for home educated children

2011-07-20T03:07:00.000-07:00

Graham Stuart and Nick Gibb do a double act and reveal that local authorities can allow home educated children to attend college and then claim the cost back from central government:

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2011-07-18a.66262.h&s=home+education#g66262.r0

On the idea of home educators inspecting the educational provision of other home educators

2011-07-20T02:12:00.000-07:00

I have written before about the so-called ‘Tasmanian Model’. In that Australian state, home educators work with the government to inspect and monitor home education. It seems to work well enough and I think that it would be a good scheme in this country. There are problems though and the appointment of two home educators in Wigan has underlined that a good deal would need to change before this notion would be universally applauded by other home educators here. For one thing, there is the fact that these people will inherit a framework which is already immensely irritating to many home educating parents. Take this bit from Wigan’s policy on Children Missing from Education:

'The Children Act 2004, places a duty on all agencies to work
together to promote the welfare of children and to share
information. This principle underpins this policy and there is an
expectation that all agencies will work together to ensure children
are safely on school rolls.
1.4 There is now considerable research available which identifies the
reason for children and young people being ‘missing from school’.
The most common reasons include:
· failing to be registered at a school at age 5'

We observe the phrase ‘children are safely on school rolls’. Does that mean that children not on school rolls are automatically in danger? As for the idea that a reason for children missing school is that their parents do not send them to school at five, well this is so but blindingly obvious. Children miss school because they are not sent to school!

When we were stopped by a truancy patrol when my daughter was eight and had never been to school, I was fairly OK with the business. This was because the people asking the questions were what I would regard as professional busybodies. Imagine though that after not having sent my daughter to school at the age of five, there was a knock on the door and a home educator stood there. He tells me that it has been noticed that I am not sending my child to school and wants to know why. I might give a home educator shorter shrift than I would a run of the mill local authority officer. Why? Because he ought to know better.

Now consider the following passage, also from Wigan’s CME policy.

'4.6 If a school learns of a school aged pupil without a school place
(e.g. a sibling or friend of a current pupil etc) the school must
inform the LA of the child / young person. This can be done via
the dedicated e mail address www. cme@wigan.gov.uk, by
telephone or in writing to the EWS Admin Team located at Wigan
Investment Centre, Waterside Drive, Wigan WN3 5BA. Tel:
01942 705405 Fax: 01942 705408'

Some of this home educating parent's work will entail knocking on doors following reports of this sort from teachers who have noticed that one of their pupils has a friend who does not appear to be attending school. Would this not make some home educators feel a little uneasy, to find themselves acting on information of this sort from schools?

I think that this whole thing could work and is definitely an improvement, but will need a sea-change in thinking. If home educators are going to be checking up on other home educators in this way, then all policies will need to be revised accordingly. I find this quite an exciting development and will be interested to see if other local authorities try it out.

More about Wigan and their new approach to home education

2011-07-19T14:53:00.001-07:00

Here is the job description for the new post of inspecting home education in Wigan. The new people will be starting work in September.

http://www.wigan.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/BD63268F-9E26-44A3-8D59-3EC2EE6FFF4E/0/SLA2April2011.pdf

A certain amount of anger is building over the fact that any home educator should feel able to follow this specification. Some of the points mentioned in passing, about the supposed duties of the local authority, are controversial. Many home educators believe that councils do not possess the duties outlined here. As a result, the home educating parents who have now been appointed to this post are being viewed by some as little better than Quislings.

A number of other local authorities have expressed interest in the whole notion of the 'Tasmanian Model', where home educators themselves carry out inspections and assess the suitability of provision. Personally, I think that this might be a way forward, but judging by initial reactions to the situation in Wigan, it might just create more ill feeling. At any rate, Wigan are blazing a trail and it seems possible that other local authorities will try the same idea out. Here are the minutes of the meeting at which the decision was made to allow home educators to apply for the job of monitoring the educational provision of other parents:

http://www.wigan.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/A4FCD015-BC13-4249-BC1D-206506046652/0/MeetingNotes_Updates.pdf

Wigan appoints home educating parents to monitor home education

2011-07-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

It looks as though Wigan has decided to adopt the so-called 'Tasmanian Model' of monitoring home education. They have appointed two parents who are themselves home educators and who will be inspecting the provision of other parents. This is in sharp contrast to the usual sort of person doing this job, who is typically a former teacher. The fun and recriminations have already begun and we shall have to see how this new scheme actually works in practice.

Here is how Wigan, a town in Greater Manchester, went about finding somebody to do the job for them:

http://www.wigan.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/BD24787B-61A0-4ED8-9F76-59891A4AFCCE/0/SLALetter.pdf

In the interests of lively debate, I thought that readers might care to know that Wigan feels that:

' we have a duty to ask for evidence that a suitable education is being
provided.'

I seem to recollect that some parents do not believe this to be true...

Associating with other home educators

2011-07-18T23:39:00.000-07:00

Something which has been said of me in the past, and the same idea cropped up yesterday, was that I have not had much to do with other home educators and base my opinions mainly on what I read on Internet lists and forums. This notion says little about me and my life, but a great deal about the attitudes of those making the suggestion. I think that what people who make such assertions are really saying is that there is an Education Otherwise group which meets in North London and a strong home educating scene in Colchester. Because I have not been a member of either set; I cannot have met many home educating parents in real life. This shows a very strange and distorted perspective of home education.

It is true that there are quite a number of groups for home educating parents and that thousands of people belong to them. It is also the case that many more home educators simply get on with the business of home educating without joining groups or making any effort to seek out other home educating parents. I am one such person. Nevertheless, one way and another, I have still come across many home educators while teaching my daughter. Some of these were parents with whom I had professional dealings. This sample were not really typical of anything other than dysfunctional families in Inner London and may perhaps be disregarded for our purposes. How else does somebody who avoids groups get to meet home educators? Well, one bumps into them at meetings of the National Association for Gifted Children, to give one example. We used to belong to this and there is no shortage of home educators at some events and activities. One meets other parents with ‘school age’ children out and about locally and soon realises that these children too are home educated. We have got to know people in this way. A couple of our friends were so impressed with what they saw of my daughter’s experience that they tried it for themselves. This did not work out too well, although one persevered for a year before admitting defeat. Belonging to HEAS and Education Otherwise provided lists of individual parents who could be telephoned and arrangements made to meet up. Many of these parents too did not attend meetings. Finally, because my daughter and I have the habit of appearing in newspapers both local and national, some parents approach me in the street and reveal that they have just taken their children out of school and seek my advice.

Without knowing how many home educated children there are in the country and also knowing the number that attend groups intended exclusively for home educated children, one cannot make any confident statements about the matter, but I strongly suspect that the majority of home educators do not belong to groups. I think that most home educating parents simply plough their own furrow, neither seeking out nor avoiding other home educators. In other words, I think that I am pretty typical in this respect. The great thing about home education is that it is a collection of individuals of all sorts, linked only by the practice of home education. There are of course trends and distinct strands, but there is no such thing as a typical home educator. I might have something in common with other church goers or people who read Sartre and Camus. In the same way, I might have something in common with another person who does not send her child to school. However just because I share one interest with a person, church-going or home edcucting, does not mean that this is somebody with whom I will get on. We may well have very little else to connect us. I never thought of home edcuation as being in any way a defining chracteristic of mine. It was simply what I did and there was no reason why it should provide any sort of link to or common ground with others. For some parents though, it was more like a hobby or shred interest, something like birdwatching ot supporting a particular football team. These people joined together into clubs to meet others who shared their enthusiasm for the pursuit. This is fine, but it is not how I ever worked. I suspect that those who accuse me of not having met many home edcuators in real life belong to this group of people.

The exclusivity of some home educators

2011-07-18T00:27:00.000-07:00

I am, as is generally known, a great enthusiasm for home education. Properly conducted, it can deliver at least as good education that offered by any school, independent or maintained. That for me is all that there is to the matter. I do not think that home educated children are special in any way, nor that they should stick to ‘their own kind’ in any way. For some parents though, there is a pleasing sense of exclusivity about being home educators. There are those who do not even like their kids to play with children who attend school, lest they are contaminated; tempted from the path of righteousness and end up wishing to attend school themselves! It is their duty, as these parents see it, to keep their children from following the broad, primrose path to destruction which schools represent and the best way to do this is to make sure that they only associate with other home educating families.

On one of the home education lists recently, a mother who is about to withdraw her child from school posted that she was feeling nervous about the decision; as well she might. Luckily, her child’s school was well disposed to the whole business and there was every prospect that her kid would be able to maintain friendly relations with those children with whom she had been attending school. Many dedicated home educators must have shook their heads in dismay at this point, wondering what could have possessed this woman even to consider such a course of action. Somebody decided to set her straight, saying:

‘we see other families almost every day) get-togethers with
other HE families and your daughter will thrive.(If you just spend time
socialising with families whose children are in school, your daughter will
very likely conclude that school is where all the really interesting stuff
happens).’

Now the fact is that over 99% of children go to school. If you wish for your child to grow up normally and be able to relate to other young people of her age, she needs to know what is going on in school and be able to talk about it with her peers. It is definitely the case though that with some home educators, they feel that their way of education is somehow more virtuous and enlightened that school. Their children are special and spending too much time with ordinary children might have the effect of making them less so. They might even, horror of horrors, want to go to school themselves if they see too much of schooled children. I don’t see this air of being special and somehow separate from others as being at all healthy for a child. It is likely to breed snobbishness and make them look down on others and regard themselves as being specially favoured in some sense.

When I read the comment which I quote above, it put me in mind of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I know a few home educators who are also Witnesses and their children feel doubly set apart from the ordinary world; saved in two senses. Perhaps the fact that the woman who made the comment is a fanatically devout Catholic has some bearing on the matter, maybe she is used to thinking of herself and her family as being specially blessed in some way. I have certainly encountered this perception among other home educating parents; a cult-like satisfaction about being on the right side against a generally corrupt world. Perhaps it ties in with what I wrote a few weeks ago about conspiracy theories. Maybe some home educators feel that they are right in a far deeper sense than the purely educational.

For me, the tremendous thing about home education was that it was an effective method of educating my child. I think that were I to have ended up feeling that she should not have been spending too much time with ordinary children who were at school, then I should perhaps have taken a wrong turn somewhere. I wonder if readers have come across this attitude themselves? I have an idea that it is far from uncommon, particularly among the more militant and well organised home educators.

The ‘private worlds of independent reading’

2011-07-16T23:48:00.000-07:00

Allie, who comments here fairly regularly, used the above phrase during a recent discussion on the desirability or not of getting children to read earlier rather than later. I found this very interesting. Much of the debate among home educators when it comes to reading, seems to centre around the academic advantages or not of reading at the same age as children generally do at school. I remember the owner of one of the major home educating lists remarking that he could not think why a child of seven would ‘need’ to be able to read. Alan Thomas evidently has the same attitude, talking in his books of the way that reading is necessary in schools to engage with the primary curriculum, but that this is not needed at home. He goes on to say, using a particularly ghastly piece of jargon:

‘Children may not perceive a need to read if they are busy with other things and have adults or children around who are willing to fulfil their literacy needs’

I have not the remotest idea what is meant by fulfilling ‘literacy needs’, unless he means people reading to a child. The very use of the expression ’literacy needs’ makes the thing sound like something tiresome which can be done of somebody else’s behalf to save them the trouble.

The fact of the matter is that listening to somebody read a story is a completely different experience from being immersed in a book yourself. One only has to watch a child who is deep in a book and then compare him with a child having a story read to him to see the difference. And both are vastly different from watching television or going to the cinema. These are not slightly altered versions of the same thing; they are completely different activities. The main reason that I got my daughter to read as early as possible was not so that she could engage with a primary curriculum! It was so that she could share in what is to me the greatest pleasure in my life. Reading is for me not a means to an end, although it is of course a very useful skill if you wish to get on in life. It is an end in itself; an activity, pastime or passion for which there is simply no substitute. I love the film of Gone With the Wind, but watching it is altogether separate from reading the book.

There is also a great difference between mechanical reading of the kind that we use when looking at the instructions on a can of soup and the sustained reading that we use when losing ourselves in a novel. It is rather like those three dimensional pictures which were popular a few years ago, which initially look like a random collection of dots. If you stare in the right way, they resolve themselves into solid images. This is what true reading is like. One stares at the page of little black squiggles and after a while they too resolve themselves into images and pictures. This experience is for me, far more gripping than gawping at the television or listening to somebody reading a story on the wireless. It was this that I wished my daughters to share and it was for this that I wished reading to become second nature to them from a very early age.

Talking of somebody fulfilling ‘literacy needs’ is so completely beside the point, that it makes me wonder whether or not people like Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison are even thinking about the same thing as me when they write about children reading!

Modern schools

2011-07-15T23:53:00.000-07:00

I don’t know whether anybody else watched the recent BBC programme which installed cameras in a primary school classroom and filmed what went on for a week or so. It may be seen here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b012ltz9/Classroom_Secrets/

Obviously, some of the children were more badly behaved than others, but it was the overall, chaotic nature of the lessons which was the really shocking revelation; at least for those unfamiliar with modern classrooms. One can well understand why children on the autistic spectrum might have difficulties in such places, but even for those with no problems, the experience hardly looks educative. I particularly liked the school’s strategy for helping the children who did not want to learn. They put next to these children, a child who did want to learn and wished to work quietly. Needless to say, the result was then two children not learning, as the disruptive child prevented the one who wanted to learn from getting on with his work!

I cannot imagine who in their senses could possibly imagine that this noisy bedlam would be a better environment for a child to learn than a quiet home. And mark you, this school is rated ’good’ by Ofsted! This programmes was the best recommendation for home education which I have seen in years.

Evading visits from the local authority

2011-07-15T00:13:00.000-07:00

On several home education lists, parents still seem to be working hard to prevent local authority officers from visiting their homes to talk about home education. You might think that most parents would relish the opportunity to capture such a person for an hour or so and tell her about home education, but apparently some people are not eager to do this. I know that I have covered this before, but I am still wholly at a loss to see what all the fuss is about here.

Just to remind readers, I never made any effort to notify our local authority of the fact that my daughter was not at school. Haringey were vaguely aware of this, but were too lazy and inefficient to do anything about it. When we moved to Essex, I thought of telling them, but did not get round to it. It was not until my daughter was eight that we ran into a truancy patrol and because I was not particularly bothered about it, I gave them our address. Why would I have been anxious to avoid a visit? In my case it was because I was too busy with teaching my daughter to waste time on such nonsense. Some parents evidently have other motives. Let’s look at some of the objections which people raise and see if we can make any sense of this business. I certainly had better things to be doing than entertaining a local authority officer for an hour, but the reluctance to allow visits seems to go a good deal beyond this with some people.

One of the main objections to having a visit is that the person assessing the educational provision might make various judgements about the family and their lifestyle, based not upon purely educational criteria but upon their personal prejudices. Remember that a lot of these people are former teachers and so likely to be in favour of school. This is of course quite true and I am sure that it happens a lot. The question is, so what? We all pass judgements on other people’s homes all the time. Our own house is pleasingly casual and Bohemian; our friend’s place is a filthy hovel. It is hard to avoid making subjective value judgements of this sort and I don’t see why local authority officers would be any different. Another reason for not letting these people in is that they may try to persuade us to send our children to school. They might ask loaded questions to the kids and then claim that the children really want to go to school, but that we have brainwashed them into being home educated. Again, this may well happen; again, so what?

I have to say that I did not encounter anything of this sort in Essex. All the people I actually met were pleasant and ineffective enough, one of them had home educated for a time herself and spent most of the time telling me how her daughter was bullied at school. I am trying to work out what I would have done if any of them had tried to tell me that my daughter would have been better off at school. It would not much have bothered me, really. Likewise if they thought that our house was too clean or dirty, tidy or untidy. The reason for this indifference is that none of that would find its way into the report anyway. If any of them thought, as they might well have done, that our home was dirty and untidy and I was a very strict parent who expected fanatically high standards of behaviour and academic achievement from my daughter, then they would have been perfectly entitled to their opinions. Their only official concern was that my child was receiving a suitable education and their personal views of me did not really matter.

I can quite understand why somebody would object to some particular individual entering their home. I did myself with one of the ’inspectors’ and discouraged him from coming here. It is this general principle which I cannot quite grasp. A visit from an EWO or home education ’inspector’ is a chance to advertise home education and try to persuade others that it is a good thing. I can’t say that I cared much on a personal level what these people thought of me, but it was certainly an opportunity to show that home education was better than what they were offering at the local schools. I used to gen up on the figures relating to the schools in the area and point out how they were falling down on the job. I was able to explain in great detail precisely why I was not about to send my child to one of those places.

Ultimately, the local authority officers who come to a home educating home are only concerned with education. They might very well disagree with autonomous education or think that your child would be better off in school; that’s only to be expected. Their views cannot really harm anybody though. Local authorities are desperately keen to avoid issuing School Attendance Orders and having issued them are even more reluctant to prosecute. It seems to me that what most people are worried about here is not the prospect that their child will be forced back to school. They are rather fretting about a purely social matter; that somebody will secretly disapprove of their lifestyle and the choices which they have made for their children.

Why do you think it's important to have 'properly conducted research'?

2011-07-14T00:36:00.000-07:00

Every so often, somebody commenting on here will say something so fat-headed as to make me reel back in disbelief. Such a comment was made yesterday; I quote it above. Two contentions are regularly made about the informal learning of reading. One is that it does not handicap a child educationally if he or she learns to read much later than is usual in school. The other is that having once learnt to read, the child soon catches up with contemporaries who have been reading for seven or eight years. Both these assertions are counter-intuitive.

A child of twelve who only at that age begins to read, has of course been absorbing a huge amount of information in many other ways throughout his life. This comes from conversation, television, the Internet, real-life experiences and so on. This is of course also the case with the child who began to read a decade earlier at the age of two. However, in addition to all the information gathered by the same methods as the ’late’ reader, the child who learnt to read at two has had the advantage of being able to get information by means of another channel; that of the printed word. So as well as learning through conversation, television and the other methods we talked of above, the child who began to read at two has also spent ten years reading newspapers, books and magazines. One feels instinctively that this additional means of finding things out would give the early reader an educational edge on his illiterate peer, but we are assured that this is not the case. Why not?

When we are asked to accept a proposition which seems to run counter to common sense in this way, it is quite reasonable to ask for evidence which backs up the assertion being made. In this case there is none. Similarly, if one has two children of fourteen, one of whom has been practising the violin for twelve years, since the age of two and the other who only began playing eighteen months ago, one feels instinctively that all else being equal, the one who has been playing for a dozen years is likely to be more skilful. We are assured that this is not the case. Again, this is a strange claim and one which requires something other than people assuring us that it is true.

A few individual cases where this sort of thing may have happened do not really constitute any sort of evidence. The children concerned might be exceptionally intelligent and able to overcome the handicap of not receiving formal teaching in reading. What we need is a fairly large cohort of children, the development of most of whom confirms this hypothesis. It may be true that illiterate twelve year olds somehow gather as much information from the world around them as those who can read, but this is likely to be a compensation for a disadvantage which has been imposed upon them by the lack of teaching; much in the same way that the other senses of a blind person are sharpened to replace sight. It is suggested that this is actually a good thing for the child, but we are singularly lacking in any evidence to show that this is the case! Is a fourteen year-old boy who only began reading eighteen months ago really as good and fluent a reader as a child who began to read at two? It sounds improbable in the extreme, but if we can see a couple of hundred tests conducted on such children and compare them with tests upon a group of early readers, I am quite prepared to believe that it may be so. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and when claims such as this are being made which are in opposition to what most of us would regard as common sense, it is quite reasonable to ask why anybody should subscribe to the theories being offered.

The lack of properly conducted research on home education

2011-07-13T00:10:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this Blog will be aware that I frequently bemoan the fact that there is no properly conducted research on home education in this country. That which has been undertaken is either lamentably poor in construction, like that of Paula Rothermel or centres around grotesquely small, self-selected samples, as in the case of Alan Thomas. While re-reading Thomas’ books recently, it occurred to me that what I would describe as ’proper’ research never will be carried out on home educating families. It might be literally impossible.

When one has millions of children all being taught in very similar ways to learn roughly the same things, as is the case with the maintained sector in Britain, then one only needs to take a couple of hundred pupils at random to get a flavour of the process. Two hundred kids drawn at random from a variety of schools in one part of the country are likely to be pretty much the same in their attainments and knowledge as a couple of hundred drawn from elsewhere. This is not at all the case with home educated children. In the group of children from state schools, most will be of broadly similar achievement. There will be outliers; children who are doing very much better or a good deal worse than average, but these will be exceptions and will not skew the overall picture. The problem is with home education is that any sample group is likely to consist of nothing but outliers!

For instance there are quite a number of home educating parents like me; slave drivers who expect their kids to be reading at two and to have mastered calculus by the age of eleven. (Both perfectly true, I regret to say). There are also those whose children are unable to read at twelve and can barely write their own name at fourteen. Both these types of children would be very much the exception in state schools. There would be few of them and one could disregard their achievements as being wildly atypical. In the crazy world of home education though, these children are not so much rarities as archetypes! In other words, whereas in an average school one would have look hard for a child able to read at two, it is not at all uncommon among a certain type of home educator. In the same way, a boy who cannot read at twelve is unusual in schools but not among home educated children.

The point which I am making here is that because there is no standardised curriculum and indeed in many cases no curriculum at all, it is probably not possible to find a ‘typical’ home educated child. Some such children would, if compared with schooled children, present as being very much advanced. Others would appear to be far behind, at least when compared to children of the same age at school. What we lack and are never likely to have, is a reference group of average home educated children with whom other home educated children may be compared. Such a group almost certainly does not exist.

Request for large home educating family

2011-07-12T02:28:00.000-07:00

I have had a request from a television producer who is looking for a home edcuating family with a lot of children. She wants one with at least seven or eight kids and may be contacted here:

I’m working on a Channel 4 documentary about big families. We have a couple of families that are home educators and we would like to find other families who might do the same. We are looking for families with 10 or more children.

Do you know of any? Your help would be most appreciated.

Best Wishes

Jane Hosking

Senior Development Producer

Lion Television

0208 846 2123

Alan Thomas and How Children Learn at Home

2011-07-12T00:35:00.000-07:00

Many home educators are very sensitive about any criticism of the ideologues whose writings underpin their chosen lifestyle and educational methods. I mentioned a few days ago that AS Neill was brought up in Scotland and believed that children should be free to have a sex life; I was promptly accused by one person commenting here of ‘slandering’ him! Many of the more outlandish beliefs and practices of British home educators are justified by them on the grounds of supposed research. Often, claims are made about the academic attainments of home educated children or the acceptability of not teaching them to read formally. These claims are usually supported by reference to the work of Paula Rothermel and Alan Thomas. I have dealt with Rothermel’s research in the past. Time now to look in a little detail at that of Alan Thomas.

A popular belief among those who think that children are able to acquire literacy informally is that although they may be later than school children in learning to read, it does not matter because they will soon catch up when they do start. The only research which supports this contention is that of Alan Thomas. Let us look at what he said. The chapter on reading in the book which he co-authored with Harriet Pattison contains the clearest account of his work in this field (How Children Learn at Home, Thomas and Pattison, Continuum 2007).

The chapter in question, chapter 8 of the book, begins unexceptionally enough by suggesting that there are various ways of teaching reading and that no single method has been found to be the best in all cases. The authors then go on to say that home educating parents are very flexible at moving from one method to another as seems best. This is a little misleading and obviously put in to lull any professionals reading the book into a state of quiescence. The thrust of the rest of the chapter is not that various methods are successful, but that success may be achieved by using no method at all and just relying upon the child to teach herself. On page 94, Thomas and Pattison claim that ’Resistance to being taught and late reading both featured in earlier research’. They mean of course Thomas own research in 1998. Talking of parents teaching their children to read, Thomas and Pattison say:

’the outcome of parents’ best efforts in this direction was rarely successful. Children frequently resisted any form of structured teaching..’

They go on to describe how parents gave up on the whole thing. This is very strange. For almost the whole of recorded history, children have been taught to read by their parents. In early 19th Century America, a time when there were few schools, the practice was universal. It was said by a contemporary observer that a child unable to read was, ’as rare as the appearance of a comet’. Many home educating parents today teach their children to read, as do many other parents. I was taught to read by my own parents before starting school. The idea that children commonly resist the teaching of reading is not borne out either by history, any research or common experience. Perhaps the fact that Thomas’ sample here, the twenty six families about whom he is writing in this book, were handpicked and dedicated autonomous educators has some bearing on the matter? At any rate, there is something clearly odd and atypical about these parents if their children are proving so resistant to being taught to read.

After acknowledging that not teaching children to read means that they are likely not to read until later than those who have been taught, which is perhaps not entirely surprising, Thomas says this:

‘Not only does late reading at home appear to hold no knock on educational disadvantage but it also seems to have no long-term consequences for reading ability’

It is this assertion which has been eagerly seized upon by parents who refuse to teach their children to read. It is of course absolute nonsense. Thomas does not define what he means by ’educational disadvantage’. Nor does he explain how it might be measured, nor by whom the decision was made that it was not present in any of these children. How on earth does he know that there was no ’educational disadvantage’? We are not told; it is sheer waffle. Similarly, his remark about long-term reading ability. Where are his data for making this claim? Were the kids tested? Did he rely upon the parents’ information? Again, we are not told. This much quoted statement may accordingly be ignored.

On page 100 he tries to revive the tired old notion of reading readiness, citing a number of factors which must supposedly be present before a child can learn to read. It is a daunting list, including recognising and being able to name letters, being able to distinguish different sounds in speech and many other things. The implication is that some children will not acquire all this supposedly vital knowledge until a later age. Again, this is nonsense. A child of eighteen months does not need to know the letters of the alphabet, let alone be able to name them, in order to see the word ’cat’ and read it. We do not spell out words letter by letter in that way. One only has to look at Chinese ideograms to see that it is possible to learn to read without synthetic phonics!

The problem with Alan Thomas’ work is that it has been seized upon and his ideas followed slavishly by people who do not really understand what they are doing. This is dangerous, although to be fair to Thomas, it is not really his fault. There are many excellent books available on the subject of learning to read; How Children learn at Home is not one of them.

Reactions to my home educating

2011-07-11T00:29:00.000-07:00

When first it became apparent to my friends and professional acquaintances that I had no intention of sending my daughter to school when she was four or five, there was a general feeling that the experiment would soon fail. As she grew older and started becoming obnoxious, as schoolchildren so often do, I would surely find that spending so much time with the child would drive me mad. Or just wait until she hit puberty! Then I would find the whole thing intolerable, with my daughter screaming abuse at me and refusing point-blank to do as I asked. Even if I could stick at it, what of the poor child’s future? She would have no GCSEs, no prospect of going into higher education, no friends, no social skills. A pretty bleak prospect, all in all!

Of course, a dozen or so years down the road and none of these gloomy predictions have proved to be anything near the mark. The reaction has now changed to one of sourness and my being told that I have been ‘lucky’. Lucky that I have avoided the adolescent rows that nearly all our friends have endured from their children, lucky that my daughter studied hard and did well in her exams, lucky that she has a place at a good university, lucky that she does not lie to us, steal from us, smoke dope; the list is endless. Of course ’luck’ does not really enter into the matter at all. I thought that a lot of the problems of childhood and adolescence are caused by allowing other children to become the dominant influence, rather than the family. I do not think that most schools are up to the job of teaching effectively and so avoided them. These are not questions of luck, I made a series of what seemed to me to be rational choices. Like most home educating parents, we had to make considerable sacrifices to achieve our object. Both of us could only work part-time, which meant a greatly reduced income. I certainly had less freedom than most of the fathers whom I knew. Still, the rewards were also correspondingly greater as well, so I don’t think that I have got the raw end of the deal. Most of those who predicted disaster for my own daughter, view their own adolescent daughters with despair and there seem to be terrible breaches between them and their children.

All in all, the whole home educating enterprise has been a huge success for our family and I shall in a way be sorry to see it end in the autumn. However, all good things come to an end and I shall have plenty with which to occupy myself in the coming years. Which brings me neatly to another point. I observe that some people seem dismayed at the amount that I am writing on this blog. Why this should be, I really could not say; nobody is, after all, compelled to come here and read what I have to say. Indeed, judging by the apoplexy which my views evidently provoke in others, it would perhaps be best if some of my readers gave this place a wide berth! Others seem concerned that I am spending too much time replying to comments here. One hardly knows how to answer such a criticism. It seems to me only courteous that if somebody has taken the trouble to respond to what I have said, then I should listen to their criticism and reply. The fact is, I write tens of thousands of words each week and a few hundred expended on this blog and the other one which I write is neither here nor there among all the other writing in which I am engage. Like many people, I constantly flick back and forth while writing between google, my blogs, the news, spotify and a dozen other places. I suppose that the only remedy which I am able to suggest for those who either dislike my views or are anxious about how frequently I express those views, is not to come here so often themselves. Reading what I have to say does not seem to be a pleasant experience for some and their continued presence here strikes me as being more than a little perverse. Resist the temptation to read this blog, you guys. You know you will feel all the better for abstaining from this pernicious habit!

The new biological determinism

2011-07-10T00:49:00.000-07:00

I tentatively suggested yesterday that some developmental problems in childhood might not be entirely biological in origin. It says something about the modern world that the very idea was greeted by some with anger and disbelief! Why should this be? The answer is historical.

Fifty years ago, practically any mental or development problem was thought to be a consequence of the environment. Autistic children became that way because of remote and unaffectionate parents. Schizophrenia was produced by bad family dynamics. Reading problems were caused by poor teaching, badly behaved children had not received any discipline and all other childhood disorders could generally be traced back to the mother’s actions or lack of action. In the wider field, homosexuality was a result of too much motherly love and alcoholics were weak people who lacked self control. This then was the prevailing paradigm until a few decades ago.

Then it was discovered that certain disorders and syndromes were associated with a distinctive arrangement of genes. The pendulum swung right away from social and psychological explanations for the things mentioned above and we found a genetic cause for practically everything; even stealing and rape were thought initially to have a genetic ’cause’. Obviously, this ’hard’ version of genetic causation is absurd. To give an example from my own life; both my parents were alcoholics, as are my brother and sister. I was myself a little too fond of alcohol and so thirty years ago, I stopped drinking. No doubt in anybody’s mind that if anyone carries the alcoholic gene, it’s me! Now if I went down to the off licence this afternoon and bought a bottle of whiskey and got drunk; would that be caused by my genes? Of course not, it would be my own idiocy to blame. Even when genes give a certain predisposition, there is plenty of leeway for individual choice and the effect of the environment. So too with childhood disorders.

Commenting here yesterday, somebody said apropos of a certain childhood syndrome:

‘Or shall we accept that research is showing that some peoples brains are wired differently and respond to stimuli differently.’

Well of course we shall accept that! It is without doubt true. However it does not explain anything at all. When the baby is born, this wiring is not really in place. The neurones are all there and they are getting ready to make the connections. It is quite true that in the case of children with ADHD or dyslexia the wiring is sometimes, although not always, a little different. How did this come to be? Was it a predetermined response to the genetic instructions or was it caused by the first years of life and the lifestyle of the developing infant? Or, which is far more likely, was it a subtle combination of both? Might it be that the newborn baby had a slight inclination in a certain direction, an inclination which the early environment might bring out and allow to flourish?

The difficulty in accepting that everything, from Heller’s Syndrome to dyslexia, is caused by biological factors is that the families of children presenting with certain disorders do often seem to have certain characteristics. Of course, this does not mean that the families have caused the problem in the first place. Children who are very poor readers often have parents who are semi-literate. Is this environment or heredity? Hard to say. Perhaps the parents have a genetic tendency to dyslexia and it is this which makes them poor readers. They might simply have passed this genetic disorder on to their child. On the other hand, perhaps not having good role models for reading has had a bad effect on the growing child and not taught him the value of literacy.

One thing is clear to me and that is that this is not a popular line of enquiry! Vox populi, vox dei! I shall accordingly drop this particular musing and return to the more practical and vastly less controversial topic of home education. We are as parents eager to take the credit for all the good aspects of our children's characters and often try to unload the less desirable traits onto the influence of others. Sometimes the blame can be laid at the door of fellow schoolchildren who have led them astray, but genetics allows us to lay responsibility for certain parts of our child's behaviour on long dead relatives! It's not Jimmy's fault or mine; his grandfather must have given him the poor reading/hyperactive/bad behaviour/night owl/alcoholic gene.

Early childhood experiences and their possible role in the creation of childhood disorders such as ADHD and so on

2011-07-09T00:19:00.000-07:00

I wrote briefly yesterday about the hugely dysfunctional families with which I worked some years ago. The children of these families all had various problems and these were caused, or at the very least greatly exacerbated, by the way that they were raised. It was not until I had been thinking about the common factors in these families that I noticed an eerie similarity to the way that some home educators recommend that children be treated in childhood.

A lot of the things which afflict children, ranging from dyslexia to ADHD, are not random bolts from the blue. These syndromes are all too often associated with common factors in early childhood. Take ADHD, for example. The impulsiveness, sleep disturbances and other features of attention deficit are often noted in children who have no sort of consistent parental discipline in their lives. It is also connected with kids who do not have regular and age appropriate bedtimes. In other words, if a child’s wishes are never thwarted and he is allowed to do what he likes; he is far more likely to grow up displaying low levels of ability to control his behaviour and more liable to grow angry if his immediate wishes are frustrated. If his internal body clock has not been properly set by regular bedtimes, then he might end up being frantically active at midnight and very sleepy during school the next day. This is one example; there are many others. The way that parents raise their children has an impact upon the type of disorders with which they later present. A chaotic and disorganised lifestyle is often coupled with problems like ADHD.

Of course the trend these days is to pretend that children’s problems are like illnesses which have struck for no apparent reason; certainly nothing to do with parenting. Anybody who works with kids knows that this is nonsense. Now the sort of chaotic families with whom I worked would allow their children to stay up to all hours. This was part of their lifestyle. They would go visiting friends until one or two in the morning and took the kids with them. The result would be that the kids would not get enough sleep and their body rhythms would become screwed up. They would always be tired during the day, but wide awake at night. Even at home, the concept of ’bedtime’ was unknown. They would sit up with their parents until they fell asleep on the sofa and then be put to bed when the parents themselves went to bed, perhaps at two in the morning. Discipline was frequently non-existent. The child ate on demand, was very often allowed to do anything at all, as long as it did not irritate the parents.

It is not hard to see how this kind of lifestyle caused problems when the child began school. The kid would be unable to follow instructions and sit still for story time. Nobody had ever made him sit still quietly; of course he would have trouble starting now. He would fall asleep during lessons and be unable to obey simple requests. If he couldn’t get his way, he would scream and become aggressive. Many of these kids were diagnosed with ADHD as a consequence.

The treatment to which these children were subjected had no underlying ideological rationale. Their parents simply carried on their own lives and left the children to their own devices; expecting them to fit in with the parents’ lives. It is odd though how similar themes emerge in some home educated children. Some home educating parents refuse to enforce a bedtime. They allow their children to decide what they should do, when and what they should eat. There is minimal or wholly non-existent discipline and structure. One cannot help but wonder whether the high number of home educated children with special educational needs of the ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia type could be a by-product of certain kinds of parenting. In other words, do they end up being home educated because certain syndromes strike their children at random or are the disorders themselves precipitated by the style of upbringing? I shall explore this thesis further over the next few days.

Testing children at two

2011-07-08T00:09:00.000-07:00

It is an unfortunate fact of life that one can always rely upon some of the more vociferous home educating types to oppose anything sensible and support any crackpot idea going the rounds. Some of them seem to have a positively uncanny knack for attacking any initiative likely to benefit children. This is particularly so with things concerning very young children. The so-called ’nappy curriculum’ and the recent announcement that children will be ‘tested’ at two to see how they are doing, being good examples of this tendency.

So why is a it a good idea to check how children are developing when they are two? What possible business of the state’s is it, if my two year-old boy is ’playing nicely’ with other children? This is statism gone mad! Well no, not really. Apart from the obvious advantages to small children of picking up very early any signs of Autistic Spectrum Disorder, language delay, hearing loss and so on; there are other reasons for this move. These are the need to protect the weak and vulnerable in society. Not just the children who are being tested in this way, but also those whom they may later encounter in life. Let me explain.

Twenty years ago, I helped run a support group in East London for mothers with babies and small children. These were parents who were not coping and wanted support. There was a psychologist, a Community Psychiatric Nurse, a social worker and me. The mothers went off for a discussion led by the social worker and CPN, while the rest of us, which included some creche workers, organised activities for the children. (This is of course how why it was possible for me to take my baby to work with me from the age of three weeks old!)

It was often possible to predict fairly accurately what would become of these children when they grew up. This is depressing, but quite true. I have subsequently heard of how these children ended up in their early twenties; I still have a lot of dealings in the area. For instance, one boy of three was ferociously angry and aggressive with all females. He would kick and punch his mother, who did not resist, simply saying feebly: ’Oh, Jadon, don’t’ (His name was not really Jadon, by the way). Jadon would target any little girls in the group, rushing at them and knocking them over. He would spit at women and lash out at them. I was the only man working in this project and consequently the only person there whom he respected or would allow to have anything to do with him. We need not go into the reasons for his behaviour, which was not really his fault. He had witnessed his mother being beaten by various men, for one thing. The point about Jadon is that we all knew perfectly well that unless drastic action was taken, he would go on to be abusive to girls in later life. The mother stopped coming and we lost track of her. A couple of years ago, when he was twenty one, Jadon was convicted of a particularly brutal rape. Nobody who knew him as a three year-old was the least bit surprised.

This is the sort of thing which make it a really good idea to see how children are behaving socially at two; one can often tell how they will then be behaving at twenty two. For many of us, the measure of a good society is the extent to which it protects and looks out for the interests of its weaker members. Too give another reason why it is good to identify children who are unable to play appropriately and interact well with other children at the age of two, one need only look at schools. It only takes one or two disruptive children who are unable to sit down and listen to a story being read, to make teaching in a primary school class very difficult. If in addition to being unable to sit down, these children wander round the room physically attacking other children, then all teaching will become impossible. The teacher and any assistants will simply have to focus on these disruptive children and the quiet and well behaved kids who want to learn, will end up being ignored. This happens a lot. This means that other children’s education is damaged, which is not fair, unless we spot these children early on and take steps to help them. One can often identify these children too at the age of two.

I have an idea that many of those home educating parents who object to identifying children of this sort early on, come from nice homes and find it impossible to imagine the sorts of things about which I have been talking. Believe me, it is possible to spot children who will lead chaotic, disorganised lives very early and it is sometimes possible to do something about it.

Respecting childhood autonomy

2011-07-06T23:21:00.000-07:00

I explained yesterday that one of the most beloved figures in British home education was a raving lunatic who publicly advocated small children being able to work down coal mines, drive cars on public roads and have sex with any adult they cared to. I pointed out that these views made him very popular with the more thoughtful type of paedophile; the kind of man who seeks justification for his depravity. As a result of this, I was told by one person commenting that I had sunk to a new low! The most curious comment was by Elizabeth, who felt that my post was ‘beyond the pale’. She went on to say that ‘It would not be taking a child seriously to stand by and watch while they make a bad choice‘. In other words, if her child makes a sensible and wholesome choice, she allows it. If the choice is bad, she will seek to prevent the child from exercising this choice. How this differs in any way from conventional parenting, I have no idea.

At any rate, the general view seemed to be that no parent would follow Holt‘s advice on matters relating to sex. Let us assume for the moment that this is true. If parents who advocate childhood autonomy would not go as far as to allow their child to choose to go to bed with an adult, how far would they be prepared to go down the road of childhood autonomy? An apparently innocuous example which several parents have mentioned on this blog is the question of teeth cleaning. I have seen this topic crop up elsewhere on home education blogs, forums and lists. Let us then take it that some home educating parents who allow their children autonomy do not compel them to clean their teeth. This is of course not in the same league as allowing them to have sex with adults, is it? Indeed it is not; it can be worse.

Like most adults, I was forced to clean my teeth twice a day as a child. I did not always want to, but this made no difference. Many children, particularly two and three year-olds dislike teeth cleaning and parents almost invariably ride roughshod over these objections. Not some home educating parents though. They believe that children should be allowed to ‘choose’ not to undergo teeth cleaning if they are strongly opposed to the practice.

When I reach for the toothbrush last thing at night, it is not because I have been thinking about dental hygiene and the latest research on caries. It is rather a conditioned reflex. I have been trained, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, to clean my teeth before I get into bed. This is what parents generally do with their kids around teeth cleaning. They make the child get into a fixed routine of doing the thing every night until it becomes a part of the child’s innermost being. Eventually, the child will internalise the procedure and feel guilty if he fails to clean his teeth regularly. This is excellent. The results of neglecting teeth cleaning can extend far beyond a few cavities in the baby teeth. Only recently, a piece of research was published which suggested that regular teeth cleaning is associated with enhanced female fertility:

http://acovi.com/bad-dental-hygiene-can-affect-fertility/226077/

There is also a well established link between heart disease and poor oral hygiene. This is quite apart from the obvious danger that decayed teeth can lead to abscesses in the gums and below teeth. This can bring about blood poisoning and every year, people in this country die from such things.

A three year-old child is quite unable to make an informed choice about the long term implications of failing to maintain healthy teeth and gums. He is unlikely to be concerned about fertility or heart disease. All he cares about is the momentary irritation of the sensation of the tooth brush tickling his gums. Establishing a routine of dental hygiene is vital in early childhood and must become second nature to the child. Only then will he be sure to maintain the practice into adult life. It must become a conditioned reflex, a Pavlovian response to getting ready for bed at night.

Failure to instil the teeth cleaning habit in small children, while being done on the grounds of respecting their ‘rights’ and autonomy, runs the risk of shortening their lives and impairing their fertility. This is dangerously irresponsible. This is one example of respecting the autonomy of the child which we all know is currently practiced by some home educators. There are others, equally damaging to their child’s future physical and mental heath. The failure to set the developing child’s body clock correctly for a diurnal life, caused by not insisting on regular bedtimes, for example. Under the guise of being liberal and right-on, these parents are harming their children and laying up problems for their future. Holt’s ideas about all this are monstrously wrong and following any of his advice is likely to harm children. Chuck out How Children fail and destroy any copies you come across of Escape from Childhood! The man was a dangerous crank.

The ultimate autonomy

2011-07-06T00:30:00.000-07:00

No suggestion made during Graham Badman’s review of elective home education caused more anger than the idea that home educated children might be at increased risk of sexual abuse than those at school. Why do professionals suspect this? There are probably two main reasons. First, home educated children often seem closer to their parents than those at school. Antagonism between parents and children, common with school children and which typically reaches a climax during adolescence, is thought to be normal. When people see a teenager getting on amicably with her father, they think it is a bit creepy! One only has to look at the clip on Youtube of me and my then fourteen year-old daughter, when it was hinted that there was something unnatural about a girl of that age who seemed to be happy in her father’s company!

There is another reason why some professionals are uneasy about home education, which has to do with its ideological basis. Two of the big influences on British home education are AS Neill, who ran Summerhill school and John Holt, an American teacher. Both had strange ideas about children and sex. Neill believed that children should be free to have sex whenever they wanted to and without restriction. This was part of his school’s ethos and probably a reaction to his Scottish upbringing during the late 19th Century. John Holt is something else and since he is so popular with home educators, his ideas are still influential. He is actually very popular and influential with another minority group, which I only found out last week.

I was talking to a friend of mine who is involved in child protection; it does not matter in what capacity. She is quite interested in and not in the least hostile towards home education. During a conversation, I happened to mention John Holt’s name and she wrinkled up her nose. ’Oh, you mean the paedophile’s best friend’, she said. I was a little puzzled about this. I know the views which Holt expresses in books like Escape from Childhood, but this was the first I had heard of paedophilia. She showed me some sites advocating paedophilia. These were not pornography sites, but places where adults argue the theoretical basis for their being able to enjoy sexual relations with children. I will not provide links; I dare say that those interested enough will be able to find them. She then showed me John Holt’s name scattered about on these awful sites. Militant paedophiles seem to have adopted him as their guru! His writings provide, just as they do for home education, justification for the practice of paedophilia. This is, to say the least of it, unfortunate.

Now I don’t know whether any readers here are aware of Escape from Childhood, but I have a copy in front of me. It is not the best known of Holt’s work. In it, he says that not only should children not be compelled to attend school, but that they should also be free to have sex with adults if they wish. He explains the reasoning behind this; I don’t personally find it convincing. And yet here is a rather alarming thing. There are essentially two types of autonomous home educator in this country. One type imposes the normal rules of childhood upon children, with the proviso that education is the child’s choice and that the kid is free to choose what and when she learns. In the more extreme form, that advocated by the Taking Children Seriously movement for instance, the child has complete freedom to choose everything. There are no bedtimes, the child is not made to clean his teeth, wear clothes, get up in the morning. If he wishes, he can eat nothing but sugar. Children are completely masters of their own lives. We have had people on here supporting this type of lifestyle.

The problem is that if you give children that degree of autonomy, then it is only a short step to giving them the freedoms which John Holt supports. That is to say the ability to choose to go to bed with anybody of any age. Holt does not see why a nine year-old girl should not have sex with a forty year old man and this too is the logical extension of the arguments advanced by some militant autonomous educators. Now I have no reason to suppose that any of them actually put John Holt’s advice into practice, but the very fact that one of home education's favourite writers is also the darling of the more articulate paedophiles might be enough to raise eyebrows. When people start following his advice on childhood autonomy, you have to ask yourself how far they are prepared to go along the road which he advocates. I have an idea that Holt’s popularity with both home educators and paedophiles might be the cause of some of the child abuse notions which have in the past gone the rounds.

The need for more doctrinal diversity

2011-07-05T12:25:00.001-07:00

I cannot help but notice that a number of people commenting here lately subscribe to the doctrine of predestination. Don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are Calvinists, but there do seem to be more than an average number here. Mind, there are Calvinists and Calvinists. I have noticed that the further north they come from, the stricter they tend to be about condemning others to perdition. It is to be hoped that those commenting on here have been living in the south long enough to soften their views on matters such as unconditional election and reprobation!

If this trend continues, I might have to start a recruiting drive for Arminians, but I am hoping that matters will not reach this point. Can any non-Calvinists on here now declare themselves? I have an idea that C is a Christian, but we know nothing yet of her theological stance. She seems a reasonable and enlightened woman and I have great hopes that she will turn out to be a Universalist of some sort.

Home education

2011-07-05T00:36:00.000-07:00

I sometimes find listening to the debates of home educators in this country rather like the conversations at the Mad Hatter’s tea party; incomprehensible and lacking in all logic and coherence. Take the exchange yesterday on one of the home education support lists. A woman whose home educated son plays the cornet, wishes him to take music examinations. There were three main suggestions. Two of these were that the mother should contact a school or use a private teacher. The third was from a man who felt that taking examinations in music were unnecessary. This is all very strange.

I am not at all musical, to say the least of it. Nevertheless, I thought that music should be part of a balanced education and felt that it was worth my daughter learning to play a few musical instruments. I accordingly taught her the recorder, piano and guitar. My only knowledge of all this was that I could read music; an ability which anybody could teach themselves in a week or so. I certainly cannot play the guitar or recorder! I mean literally cannot play a single note on either instrument. This does not matter at all. In the end, my daughter dropped the recorder and went on to get Grade 5 at classical guitar and Grade 2 at piano. This was easy enough. One can send off to the ABRSM for the syllabus and then buy the music for the pieces for the examinations. It is also possible to buy a CD of the pieces being played, so that one knows how they should sound. Scales will need to be learned as well, but this is just donkey work and rote learning. No musical ability is required. Anybody can teach any musical instrument at all without any prior knowledge or experience.

Why then all the talk of schools or private teachers? Surely the beauty of home education is that the parents take control of the process and wrest it away from professionals? This minor exchange on a list which has over one and a half thousand members seems to me to shed some light upon the state of home education, at least in Britain. As soon as something slightly out of the run-of-the-mill crops up, the natural impulse seems to be to turn to a professional, rather than to tackle it one’s self. I have been thinking a lot about this business this morning, wondering what it says about the mindset of many home educators. Have they been indoctrinated into believing that anything in the way of formal education must be conducted by a qualified teacher? If so, why are they home educating?

The Deuchars family; an apology

2011-07-05T00:09:00.000-07:00

It was hardly possible to move here yesterday for all the Deuchars of various ages milling around the place. They had come here because I had mentioned the Open University in connection with home education and then stayed to denounce me because I had said that their family had a Christian background; a wholly unacceptable suggestion that both were at pains to deny. One quite sees their point. In much of the British home educating scene, ’Christian home educator’ is more or less synonymous with child-beating religious fundamentalist. I am happy to acquit the family of the damaging allegation that they have a Christian background, which both mother and daughter seemed at pains to deny!

I have in the past been curious to know whether or not Shena Deuchars used the ACE materials and as somebody else raised the subject yesterday, thought it worth adding my own two pennorth. This too provoked irritation, not only on the part of the mother, but also her daughter Katherine who zoomed in at once to abuse me, even ticking me off for not using their church’s full name. Sometimes, people from the United Reformed Church, which was formed in 1972 from an amalgamation of the Congregational Church with the Presbyterians, are referred to, both by themselves and others, as being ’United Reform’ for short. Katherine thought that this was gibberish, although it is not uncommon to hear Methodists, for example, say of somebody, ’Yes, he’s United Reform’, in the same way that one might say ’He’s C of E’. They mean by this to signify that the person is a member of the United Reform Church.

I can see that in future I shall have to be very careful what I say about any matter which might be thought to touch upon the Deuchars, mother and daughter both! No more mention of the Open University, for instance; talk of the OU being thought in Swindon to be a coded attack on their family. It would also be wise perhaps to avoid saying anything further about Christianity, Exeter, law, proof reading or copy editing; one cannot be too careful in avoiding the causing of inadvertent offence. I reserve my own opinionated teenage daughter as an ultimate deterrent; only unleashing her if the situation calls for a devastating response. I can see that others have a lower threshold for going nuclear in this way!

Academic success for the home educated child

2011-07-03T23:59:00.000-07:00

As is well known, I am a great believer in the efficacy of home education. That is why I did not send my daughter to school for a single day. I found the whole process enormous fun, but also very hard work. In all the cases which I have personally encountered, home educated children have succeeded academically only with the input of a huge amount of teaching and encouragement from their parents. It is alleged though, that all this effort may be quite unnecessary. Some parents apparently restrict their role to that of facilitator. The child learns to read without much work on the part of the parents, then goes on to ask to study at the Open University and ends up at a real university; the whole enterprise driven by the child’s desire to learn. In this scenario, the parent only helps when specifically requested and hardly does any teaching at all and that only when the child asks to be taught. It is an enticing vision and could in theory save much trouble and anxiety on the part of home educating parents!

Something which I have observed about both home educating parents known to me and also to the parents of children at school known to me, is that the more that they are involved with their child’s education, the better the child does academically. Another thing that I have noticed is that the harder they have worked, the more that they are prone to deny that they have put any particular effort into the business of their child’s education. I have seen teenagers do marvellously well at sixth form and go on to a Russell Group university and heard the parents express surprise and tell all their friends that they do not understand how the kid managed it. From their accounts, you would think that the child was lazy and that the parents themselves had never bothered overmuch with involving themselves in the matter and yet, here it is; the child is off to the London School of Economics. All this with no hard work on the part of either parent or child. Of course it is all nonsense. These parents have conveniently forgotten the tutors that they paid for every week, the summer schools they arranged, the arguments with the child in which they forbade the kid to go out at weekends and made him stay in and revise instead, the music lessons, the attending church for ten years to get the child into the right school, the appeals when the place was turned down, the letters to teachers; all the paraphernalia of the parent who wants her child to get on.

Why do parents airbrush all this from their family history? There are two reasons. First, nobody likes a pushy parent and it looks a bit sad when a mother is so desperately anxious for her child to succeed. Secondly, the less effort put in by both parents and child, the cleverer the kid appears to be. Nobody went to any trouble and hey, he got to the LSE anyway. Must be a genius!

If the children that end up at good universities are those whose parents put in the most effort, the ones who fail academically often have parents who do not involve themselves in the education and just let the kid get on with it. Most schools see this a lot. Is this the case with home education as well as school? It is hard to say. I know that quite a few home educating parents start off with the idea that Jimmy will organise his own studying and that left to his own devices he will learn not only to read but also pick up calculus and eventually beg his parents to let him study physics with the OU. I have no idea how often this actually happens, but there are certainly quite a few parents who realise in dismay that at the age of fourteen, their son can barely write his own name and has no intention of doing anything much other than cruising the net all day. Some of these parents regret their chosen educational approach and wish that they had organised the child’s education more methodically. I have no idea what the proportions are between these two groups. That is to say, I do not know how many go on to shine academically after being given charge of their own learning and how many just slump in front of a television of computer screen. Judging by my experiences with schooled children, the prognosis for home educated children whose parents push them is likely to be better than those who give them unlimited choice, but it could well be argued that home education and school are so radically different as to make such comparisons meaningless.

Manipulative local authority officers and others

2011-07-02T23:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, somebody commented here pointing out that local authority officers might try and manipulate children into saying that that they would rather be at school. This was thought to be a particular danger if the child were allowed to speak alone to such people.

As far as local authority officers asking loaded questions and trying to manoeuvre a child into saying that he wishes to go to school rather than be home educated; of course this happens. It is however only half the story. Local authorities may do this, but so too do parents. Some do it when their children express the desire to stay at home and not go to school. They say things like, ‘Wouldn’t you miss your friends if you were at home with me all day?’ Home educating parents do the same sort of thing to keep their children with them. A child might say that he wishes to go back to school and his mother will say, ‘Oh, don’t you like being with me any more?’ Local authorities are not the only people capable of asking trick questions!

It is not uncommon to see home educating mothers posting on the lists and forums, saying that their children have asked to go to school. Other members of the lists suggest helpful little bits of emotional blackmail and other tricks the parent can try to dissuade their kids from pursuing this reckless course of action. Not one person ever posts the correct answer for these mothers, which is: ‘Let the bloody child go to school if he wants, you selfish witch!’

Children’s rights: Part 2

2011-07-01T23:48:00.000-07:00

In response to the piece on children's rights which I posted the day before yesterday, somebody commented as follows:

‘ How do you feel about the right my children have to choose what and when to learn? Do you think it should be removed?’

This is an excellent point, although not at all straightforward. My answer is that I do not believe that it should be removed, but enhanced. There are two main points to consider in responding to this. The first of these, the extent to which young children are capable of making informed decisions about the education and medical treatment which they wish to receive, I have covered many times in the past. I wish today to look instead at the question of how we are to know what home educated children are actually choosing. We know of course that in some extreme cases, home educating parents do not respect the choices that their children make. One can hardly believe that Theresa Riggi’s children would choose to be hacked to death. What though of the run-of the-mill home educating family? How may we be sure that the children in such families are choosing what happens to them? Of course, we cannot really conduct a survey and so must be restricted to speculating and examining anecdotal evidence.

When my daughter was little, many people tried to persuade her that she should go to school. For instance, her grandparents told her that it was against the law for her not to go to school, a boy at Sunday School said that she would never get a job when she grew up unless she went to school and one teenager claimed that I would be sent to prison if I did not send her to school! I was always happy for people to express such views and allowed my daughter to deal with the matter as she felt best. There were two reasons for this. First, these opinions made her think about the whole not going to school thing, which was good. Secondly, it gave her a chance to deal with ill informed individuals who were saying things which might upset her; something she is bound to encounter in later life! For the same reason, I always left her alone with the local authority officer who visited each year and I arranged for her to give her views to Graham Badman when he was investigating home education. She had far more to say to Graham Badman than I did.

So far, so good. My daughter was exposed to many people who opposed home education in principle and in most cases, I was not present. This is good. It means that from an early age she was forced to confront the choices she made and ask herself if they really were her choices. At any stage, she could have been swayed by others and have chosen to go to school. I mentioned Graham Badman above. I want to consider how some other home educating parents reacted when their children wished to give their views to him. As part of his review, Badman visited a number of groups running for home educated children. One of these was in Kent and it was connected with Ann Newstead, who at the time was a trustee of Education Otherwise and was there during the scene I describe below.

Graham Badman arrived at the group with his minder from the DfCSF and spoke to the parents, many of whom expressed strong opinions about what their children wanted. At one point, he wandered off while his sidekick was harangued by the parents. It was then noticed that he was asking the views of the children themselves. Horrors, there was no telling what the kids would say to him! In fact he was asking them about how they viewed home education. One child said that she wanted to be a vet and Badman asked whether she had any idea about what qualifications she would need to fulfil this ambition. Everything was very amicable and the children were enjoying being given the chance to express their own views. This ended as soon as some parents saw what was happening. They charged up and ’rescued’ their children. The kids were given the impression that they had narrowly escaped being grabbed by the child-catcher and the overall feeling generated was that this was some sort of stranger danger. So agitated were the parents, that a couple of the children became upset. They did not know what was happening or what they had done wrong. That was the end of Badman actually being able to listen to the views of any home educated children that day; it was made clear to him that the children’s views should be transmitted by the parents and not taken directly from the kids themselves.

This was not an isolated example and whether or not it led to the recommendation in Badman’s report that local authority officers should be allowed to speak alone to children, I don’t know. Does anybody see the nature of the problem here? The person who commented a few days ago asked whether I thought her children should be free to choose how they learn. The difficulty is that she is the one who is telling us about her children’s choices; not her children themselves. Quite a few parents are determined not to allow any local authority officer to visit their homes. Those who do seem reluctant to allow their children to speak alone to such people. I cannot for the life of me see why. I dare say that some of these EHE advisors are opposed to home education and perhaps one or two would try to argue with a child and advise them against home education. So what? Why would any parent object to that? I simply don’t get this. When my daughter told me that her grandmother, the woman in the library, person at church, boy at Woodcraft Folk and so on had criticised home education, I would ask her what she thought about their opinions. What did I know; perhaps she secretly wanted to go to school?

And so in answer to the comment with which I began this piece, I think that up to a point children should be able to choose the content and style of their education. Establishing that they, rather than their parents, have chosen this is likely to prove tricky. As long as so many home educating parents are anxious to prevent their children speaking unguardedly to others about home education, one cannot but have the sneaking suspicion that the education being provided has more to do with an adult’s ideological beliefs, rather than her child’s informed choice.

Meanwhile, down in Somerset...

2011-06-30T23:38:00.000-07:00

It is no particular secret that British home educators are prone to squabbling among themselves; this happens at both a national and local level. On the national level, there is a constant struggle to be the top dog organisation for home educators. Education Otherwise has held the crown for so many years that others sometimes despair of supplanting it. Every so often, discontented members split off and found their own projects; the Home Education Advisory Service for example or Home Education UK. HE-UK, under the personal control of Mike Fortune-Wood certainly has pretensions to become the leading home education group in the country. The owner of this particular organisation often predicts the imminent downfall of Education Otherwise, but this never actually seems to happen. There are other contenders for the leadership of British home educators. Home Education Forums is one of these. They are so ambitious, that last year they had the cheek to approach Mike Fortune-Wood and suggested that since they were so clearly the market leaders these days, HE-UK should sell them their brand so that they could take over it themselves. Mike Fortune-Wood was singularly unimpressed by this proposal!

This factionalism is also evident at a local level; just look at Somerset. Now before we go any further, and going off at a slight tangent, I have to say that I find something more than a little odd about grown up women who use little-girl names for each other. I have two old friends called Jennifer and Rebecca. I have know them both for many years, but even so if I took the liberty of addressing them as Jenny, Becki or Becks; I strongly suspect that I would get a thick ear. Not so among the home educating parents of Somerset, most of whom seem to be known by endearing little diminutives like Linny and Ali or Tans and Jacs. Yuk! Is this hideously twee or what? Having mentioned Ali, otherwise known as the charming and delightful Alison Edgeley, I cannot help making an observation. When I gave evidence at the select committee in October 2009, there was an outcry because I was no longer apparently a home educator; my daughter having turned sixteen two months earlier. Home education was said no longer to be any of my business. What then shall we say of Alison Edgeley, who hoofed her own children back to school five years ago because they were getting in the way of a new business which she was trying to launch? Five years down the line and she is still mixed up in home education; posting on forums and lists and even making a nuisance of herself anonymously on here.

Now the Somerset home educators are forever falling out with each other and flying at each other throats in a rage. (Metaphorically, you understand. I don’t mean to suggest that the citizens of Frome are having to dodge round furious catfights in the street between brawling home educators!) They exchange angry and tearful telephone calls and emails; constantly falling out and then making up again with hugs and kisses. Last year, Tania Berlow and Jacquie Cox were jointly submitting evidence to Parliament, but today they are at daggers drawn over who is actually teacher’s pet. Both are upset because each thought that she was Alison Sauer’s favourite. This has caused both of them to make spiteful and bitchy comments , not only about each other, but also about various friends and supporters. Linny for instance, a chum of Jacs‘, was so upset by Tans that Jacs had to comfort her with tea and cake.

One of the things about the this bunch that should act as a warning sign to all right-thinking people is that they all of them make a fetish of their honesty, integrity and, most significantly, their ability to speak plainly. Now I have often met men and women who announced that they were outspoken and told it as it was. Men who proclaim, ’I’m John Blunt; I call a spade a spade and don’t have any time for pussyfooting around’. Without exception, such characters turn out to be rude, insulting and abrasive. I have to say that, judging by what I have so far seen, the home educating Linnys , Alis, Tans and Jacs of Somerset seem to fit perfectly into this pattern!

Children’s rights

2011-06-29T23:13:00.000-07:00

We looked yesterday at New World Order ideology. Today, I wish to consider one aspect of this theory and how it has permeated, one might almost say contaminated, British home education and those connected with it in any capacity.

In the early 1970s, I was very heavily involved in the Children’s Rights movement in this country. For some of us who went to school during the fifties and were teenagers in the sixties, the helplessness of children was an absolute scandal. They could be beaten without any legal redress by parents and teachers and any adult who wished could strike them a passing blow with impunity. It was not uncommon for park keepers or even bus conductors to hit children and they had no legal remedy. In many ways, their position was almost that of slaves in the eighteenth century. Gradually, this changed and a good thing too. One area where these changes are currently being opposed in Britain is in the field of home education.

I mentioned yesterday that one of the big things with American home educators was ’parental rights’. This means, among other things, the right of parents to hit their children whenever they want. This is an important issue in the USA. Another aspect is the right of parents to allow their children to carry and use firearms. Both these ’rights’ would be under threat if America ratified the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child. The USA and Somalia are the only countries in the world which have not ratified this treaty. Home educators in America, of which there could be as many as two million, are among the most vociferous opponents of the UNCRC.

This attitude has crossed the Atlantic and is now prevalent among British home educators as well. Perhaps it has something to do with the Internet and the ease with which crazy ideas are able to travel the world so readily these days. At any rate, British home educators are also very keen now on their ’rights’. Parental ’right’ to home educate has become a big thing on the home education scene here. I have quite a different perspective on this and I rather think that my own viewpoint was more common twenty years ago than it is now. It is based upon the idea of children’s rights, which has, as I mentioned above, been very important to me for forty years or so. When my daughter was little, she had the right to the best possible education which I was capable of providing for her. If I was able to provide the best education at home, then I had a duty to do this; no matter what sacrifices this entailed my making. If on the other hand, I was unable or unwilling to provide a decent education at home and a local school could give her a better education, then my duty was to send her there. Where ’parental rights’ entered into all this, I really could not say. This was my duty.

Reading the 2007 guidelines for local authorities on home education is very revealing. A child’s right to education is mentioned only once in this document, but the parents’ right to home educate rates five mentions. Interesting, no? Government pronouncements on home education these days always talk of parents’ ‘right to home educate’. I suppose that this is in keeping with the spirit of the age. We are all very concerned now that nobody’s rights are infringed and if we fail to acknowledge the parental right to home educate, then who knows? Perhaps they will be bringing a case against us under the Human Rights Act? This is a disgustingly craven way for the government to behave. The reason that they are so keen to emphasise parents’ supposed rights in this matter is that it is the parents, as adults, who will cause trouble. They are the people who must be fawned around and placated. You will notice that there is ten times more talk of parents’ right to home educate whenever anybody is talking about this subject, than there is of children’s rights to education. This is awful and it is a definite step backwards, as least as far as children’s rights are concerned.

As I say, this kind of thinking has drifted over here from the USA. It is popular with both right wing Christians and New World Order nuts; both of whom are over-represented on the American home educating scene. I am horrified to see British parents adopting this reactionary viewpoint and look forward to the day when a more progressive stand is taken on the matter and children’s rights move to the centre of the debate on home education, where they belong.

My association with Tania Berlow.

2011-06-29T05:57:00.000-07:00

You know it’s a bad sign when somebody starts putting up your old emails on the Internet... The person who has done this, goes on to say:

‘Are you refusing to take my name out of this equation because you're now labouring under the misapprehension that I repeated something you said to me 9 months ago’

Step forward, Tania Berlow of Somerset. Now it has never been a secret that I have had dealings in the past with Tania Berlow. However, Jacquie Cox has drawn attention to this recently and now Tania herself has started to publish my old emails. I know the home educating world only too well and I can see where this is leading. I recollect vividly the stories which were being circulated a few years ago that Graham Badman was related to me or a colleague or something. If I don’t act quickly now, then by next week I dare say people will be saying that Tania Berlow is my sister or wife! Before we go any further, here is the email which I sent to Tania last year, sympathising for some trouble she was having:

‘I was sorry to read about your having trouble with the police and social workers. I doubt that any father would pull a stroke of this sort, however acrimonious the divorce. I think that you are on the way to becoming even more disliked in some circles than me! It just shows how fickle home educators can be. Yesterday you were the darling of the anti-Badman crusade and today a traitor; It reminds me of the Wheel of Fortune in tarot. I hope that you are not letting this get you down too much. I was myself a little taken aback at some of the attacks which I have received over the last year or so, but these days I just find them amusing. I am sure that this will come to you to. I do not agree with you on some major points, but I have no doubt that you mean well. Good luck with everything. I am happy to ring and chat some time, but I rather suspect that you are too busy for this at the moment. Simon '‘

Now I can’t se anything objectionable about that, but Tania says that:

‘I reprint it to show others that you have no compunction in making an association to CW and myself and implying that I lack judgement, would 'fall' for someone like CW and that somehow I have sympathy with the NWO ideology’

Does anybody else put that construction upon this? The fact is, I had some contact with Tania last year, because she emailed me and asked me to telephone her. I did so and am able to report that she is every bit as verbose in her private capacity as she is when making written submissions to select committees and so on. I don’t remember that we discussed much of importance; a lot of it was personal stuff. At one point she asked me to publicise in this blog some company which was providing distance learning for home educated children, but that is the only thing I recall clearly. We also exchanged a few emails, which will also no doubt soon be surfacing.

The root of Tania’s annoyance seems to be that she thinks that I was suggesting in a recent post that she had had dealings with Christopher Warren. If I gave that impression, it was unintentional. I meant to convey that some home educators like her, Alison Sauer and Kelly Green were more likely to be taken in by rogues of that sort if they represented themselves as home educators. When she says that she had no knowledge of this man before March this year, I have no reason to doubt her word. She also desires me to say that she has no sympathy with or leanings towards New World Order theories, but there I am in a somewhat tricky position. I formed quite a different view during our telephone conversations, although I might have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.

It is to be hoped that this clears up any confusion, but knowing the British home education scene, I am inclined to doubt it. I am just waiting for the Simon Webb/Tania Berlow conspiracy theories to start!

The New World Order and home educators.

2011-06-29T00:10:00.000-07:00

The New World Order is a conspiracy theory which holds that a world government is emerging which is for the time being operating in secret. For some, this means a group such as the Illuminati, for others the United Nations is the villain of the piece. The New World order has been a popular idea with some home educators in the USA for years. They are fighting hard to prevent America ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child becausethey fear that this removes parental rights and makes the state the child’s first parent. It is all part of a sinister plot by the UN to take away their parental rights. Sound familiar to anybody?

I have watched over the last few years as some of the concepts in the New World Order nonsense find their way into the British home education scene. There is a sub-division of N W O theories which concerns mass surveillance. One observes that opposition to ID cards and ContactPoint was very strong on the home education lists and forums and that opting out of the SCR, which I mentioned yesterday, is also being advocated by some. An essential part of belief in the New World Order is that everything is linked together and few things happen for obvious reasons. New law proposed which would introduce monitoring of home education? Well for most of us this was a, possibly, misguided attempt on the part of some politicians to protect children. You blind fools! It is the tentacles of the world government trying to replace you as parents and substitute the state! Government encourages vaccinations? Ha, it’s another trick of the military-industrial complex, who are working hand in glove with Big Pharma. Summary Care Records? Another manifestation of mass surveillance; ContactPoint under another name. Obscure document vanishes from the DfE site for a few days? Ha, they're trying to conceal something. In this world, nothing ever happens by accident or chance. even computer and IT glitches become part of a plot to deprive them of their 'rights'.

Now of course not all home educators think this way. In fact I am guessing that they are a tiny minority. The problem is that quite a few of the more influential ones do subscribe to these ideas. I am talking here about the prolific posters on forums and the owners of lists. Some of these people represent themselves as speaking on behalf of home educators in general and are often listened to seriously by those outside the home educating community. I am not going to name names here, but I can assure readers that I have had conversations with a number of well known people on the home education scene and been surprised and dismayed at how often some part of the New World Order mythology seems to crop up. One or two explicitly subscribe to the ideas, the rest half believe a lot of the theory.

All this sounds quite funny and pretty harmless, but it is not. For one thing, the terminology of the New Word Order conspiracy theorists has a way of filtering down until everybody uses it. The concept of parental ’rights’ for instance; as in the ’right’ to home educate. This derives from the whole American idea of ’rights’ being usurped by the federal government or UN. The difficulty is that once people have this way of looking at things, then they will see others with the same paranoid worldview as being friends and allies in the struggle against the UN/statist governments/the Illuminati and so on. This can make for some very odd bedfellows, which is why some pretty dubious characters end up being welcomed by home educators.

Moderating this blog

2011-06-28T05:57:00.000-07:00

After two years when people have been able to say anything they wish, the time has finally come to introduce some limits on what appears here. Let me explain. When people set out on a course of action which they know will affect many others, changing the law for instance, then these people put themselves in the public domain. It is fair to question their motives and examine their fitness to be involved in changing the law. This was the case with Graham Badman, Ed Balls and some of the witnesses who gave evidence at the select committee in October 2009. Precisely the same situation now exists with those people who have declared themselves to be engaged in a project to change the law in this country as it relates to home education. Just as in the case of Graham Badman, it is quite reasonable to ask why they are doing this and what, if anything, they hope to get out of it. I am sure that we all remember the suggestions that Graham Badman stood to gain financially from Schedule 1 of the CSF Bill due to his connection with two companies.

By writing newspaper articles and a book about home education, I have to some extent put myself in the same position. People are accordingly free to criticise and insult me if they wish and this blog provides a vehicle for them to do so. The case of people commenting here is somewhat different. I am happy for anybody to heap as much abuse on me as they wish; I have decided to put a stop to it when it is directed against people who are simply commenting here. This is starting to look to me like an attempt to drive some people off here and stop them from posting comments. I am not going to allow bullying of that sort. When people say things on the comments page like: ’Your personal stuff is safe with me’, this sounds like a threat to reveal private information. Similarly, the announcement of an impending birth has traditionally been the prerogative of the parents, rather than some random person commenting on a blog.

To sum up, anybody can say anything they like about me or question the motives of anybody trying to change the law or introduce new restrictions on home education. That is quite right and proper. No more sniping at other people for their comments though.

Summary Care Records

2011-06-27T23:50:00.000-07:00

One can usually hazard a pretty accurate guess as to the line which home educating activists will be taking on many contemporary issues; from ID cards to vaccinations. It made it, I suppose, inevitable that controversy should arise in the home educating community about the introduction of Summary Care Records, knows as SCRs for short. These are a short account of the most important bits in your medical record that a doctor treating you would need to know. Allergies to penicillin, blood group, history of diabetes, that sort of thing. As things stand, if you were to be knocked unconscious in a road accident, there could be a considerable delay in finding who your doctor was and getting access to the sort of information which could save your life. This will speed things up and allow a doctor treating you to find the important stuff out straight away.

There are various things to remember about Summary Care Records. They are completely voluntary. Your doctor will write to you and explain how you can opt out if you do not want to be in the scheme. You can also have notes added to the SCR yourself, if you think that they are misleading. You will be able to view your own SCR online and see what the doctors have put in there and you can also see your child’s SCR, unless she has Gillick Competency, in which case she can view her own record.

Needless to say, there has been a rush of home educating parents who have opted their children out from this scheme, although I cannot quite see why. It seems to me to be very irresponsible and suggest an adherence to dogma at the expense of their child's future welfare. The SCR only contains the bare bones of a person’s medical history; not chapter and verse. There seems to be an anxiety about the information in an SCR being hacked, but so what? I would be happy for my own allergies to become public knowledge!

The real reason that home educators oppose things like the SCR is that there is a visceral distrust of professionals among many such people. Anybody trained to work with children, whether a teacher or doctor, is often viewed with suspicion as the kind of person who would try to prevent home education if at all possible. In other words, this is more paranoia than any rational concern. I am simply counting down and waiting for the explosion from militant home educators to this news:

http://www.cypnow.co.uk/Social_Care/article/1077177/GMC-guidance-urges-doctors-act-child-abuse-concerns/

What do you want to bet that we will be hearing from home educating parents who claim that they will now stop visiting doctors and hospitals entirely when their child is injured or sick?

Georgie Eden

2011-06-27T05:46:00.000-07:00

Well, well, everything now seems to be coming together about the operations of Alison Sauer and her friends. I think that I have a pretty good picture of how it has all been working, although Jacquie Cox has certainly produced a few surprising rabbits from the hat! Mind you, she may not be a completely reliable and objective witness herself. For example, she claims that only she and Alison Sauer were involved in the EHE guidelines; Alison writing them and she, Jacquie, doing the proof reading. This would mean that Rainbow-Leaf Lovejoy is not telling the truth when she claims that it was her doing the proof reading. I do not know either of these two women well enough to judge who is telling the truth about this.

Last year I had quite a few dealings with Tania Berlow, at her instigation. She sent me her telephone number and urged me several times to get in touch. It now appears that this was all being reported back to Jacquie Cox and Alison Sauer, which I did not realise. This means that I no longer feel any need to maintain confidentiality about anything Tania told me and I shall be going into this at a later date. Something which is interesting is that Alison Sauer apparently assigned a man who goes by the name of Georgie Eden to keep an eye on Tania and persuade her not to shoot her mouth off too much. I have never in all my life heard anything like this! These people may not have been engaged in a conspiracy, but the were certainly playing at secret agents a lot. So who is Georgie Eden, another close chum of Alison’s? There are clues.

Georgie Eden posted a bit on various lists, including the Badman review Action Group in November 2010. It is fairly clear that this person is not English. For example, he writes Ofsted as OFFsted. This suggests that he has only been given the name of the organisation over the telephone and is rendering it phonetically. I have actually never seen a literate English person write Ofsted like this. He talks of parents obtaining, ’ 'fast alleviation and
redress'. This is pure American legal jargon, which made me suspect at first that it was really Betsy Anderson. Georgie Eden also uses the word ‘tools’ to describe actions and strategies and refers to ‘home education facilitators’. Of course, Kelly Green uses both these expressions. On balance, I am guessing that Georgie Eden is American. Could it be somebody fairly well known, like Pat Faranga? I have an idea that this information too is heading for the public domain pretty soon!

What is very clear to me is that even when she had been fully informed about Christopher Warren’s background, Alison Sauer was still happy to keep in touch with him. She was apparently so keen to slag me off that she was prepared to ignore the fact that her correspondent was an abusive man who at the age of forty, seduced a fifteen year-old girl. This does not inspire confidence in somebody who is trying to alter the law relating to home edcuation in this country.

My dealings with Christopher Warren

2011-06-26T23:36:00.000-07:00

I said the day before yesterday that I had had no email conversations with Christopher Warren, apart from the comments which I posted on BRAG and a request which I sent him to remove my name from his site. After checking through all my old emails (!), I now find that I actually sent him the following in March:

Simon Webb's Smear Campaign
From: simon webb Add to Contacts
To: homeeducators206@gmail.com

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Mr Warren,
I read with interest your piece about me. I answer your points in my latest post on Home Education Heretic; you may care to glance at it. I am planning to write a post about you and your website, but I have run into a difficulty and would like to give you the chance to clear it up. As far as I can understand, you were at Oxford from 1999 until 2002. However on your site, you say that you have been living in Sweden for thirteen years. Obviously, both cannot be true and perhaps I am getting muddled up myself here! If you could let me know when you actually were at Oxford and when you moved to Sweden, it would be very helpful in putting together the piece which I am planning. Thanks a lot.

Simon Webb.

I received no reply to this and only sent it because I wanted to give him the chance to set the record straight and make sure that I said nothing inaccurate about him. His response was evidently to get in touch with Alison Sauer at once. This rather suggests that they were on a friendly footing at least until three months ago.

Deleting posts

2011-06-26T23:20:00.000-07:00

Comments made on blogs run by blogger are prone to being deleted at random or moved without warning to a section marked spam. This is a problem which affects not just this blog, but any run via blogger. My daughter keeps her own blog on wordpress and assures me that blogger is notorious for these problems. Home educators, living as they do in a world where nothing happens by coincidence and everything is part of some overarching plot against them, simply do not seem to get this! I have only ever deleted one person's comments from this blog and that was Peter Williams. He started posting literally every couple of minutes with single lines suggesting that my daughter and I should eat horse shit and so on. Apart from that, I have never bothered who says what here.

I did not ask blogger to install a spam filter; they did it all blogs. Sometimes I forget for days at a time to check this thing and see what is caught there. This is because I have a life apart from this blog and am actually quite busy at the moment. Somebody yesterday became angry about this and threatened to start her own blog if I did not sort the problem out. I can only advise anybody who wishes to do this to go right ahead. I do not censor anything here and am not answerable for blogger's activities with spam.

What is curious is that this happens on all blogs run with blogger and yet I have never seen any accusations elsewhere that it is anything other than a technical glitch. Why do home educators always seem to assume malign intent on the part of others towards them?

A final word about Christopher Warren and home educators

2011-06-26T23:12:00.000-07:00

If there is a stick anywhere about, one can as a general rule expect many home educators to catch hold of the wrong end of it. After the post which I published recently about Christopher Warren, some people commenting here seem to think that I am suggesting that there is something sinister about his connection with Alison Sauer and Kelly Green; some kind of conspiracy perhaps. I was hinting at nothing of the sort. Let me state the case as clearly as I am able and see whether or not people grasp the nature of the problem.

Some home educators feel beleagured and under threat from governments and local authorities. As a result, they adopt an attitude that all home educators should stick together for self-protection. When somebody steps forward and says, ‘I’m a home educator, trust me’; why then, they tend to do just that.

Alison Sauer, Kelly Green, Tania Berlow and a number of others all have a broadly similar outlook on home education. They encourage each other in these beliefs and make common cause with others who say that they feel the same way. When a dangerous, religious maniac with a predilection for under-age girls gets in touch with people like this, their first instinct is often not to ask themselves who on earth this man is or to examine his background. It is instead to welcome him with open arms as a fellow persecuted home educator. This was what happened in Alison Sauer's and Kelly Green's case certainly. When the man concerned is alleged to be a predatory paedophile who operates via the Internet to find lonely and vulnerable women with young daughters; this can cause problems and possibly expose children to danger. Warren is holed up in compound in Sweden with a number of ’wives’. It is widely believed that he recruits new members to this strange commune on the Internet. Accepting that somebody is OK simply because he says that he is a home educator is incredibly dangerous. Publicly endorsing a man like this, as Karen Rodgers did, or naming him alongside other genuine home educators on a blog, as Kelly Green did by publicly thanking him for his help, is reckless and irresponsible.

There are quite a few vulnerable single mothers reading the Badman Review Action Group, the Kelly Green and Gold blog and so on. If they see somebody like Christopher Warren being publicly associated with home education, praised and applauded by high profile home educators; then it has the effect of making some people think that he must be OK and trustworthy. They feel that he is in the same category as Alison Sauer, Kelly green and Karen Rodgers; just one more person fighting hard for the fundamental freedom to home educate.

My contention is that only in home educating circles would such a man find it so easy to be accepted and endorsed. I have sent his details to a few friends who work with children in both the statutory and voluntary circle. All were horrified at the thought of such a person being associated with any movement or group involving children. There are clearly many questions to be answered about Warren and his activities and yet as far as some home educators are concerned, the fact that he is, or claims to be, a home educator trumps any such worries. By definition, he must be OK; he’s a home educator! As I remarked in a previous post, this is a disaster waiting to happen. If well known home educators are prepared to cosy up to such a man as this and ignore the warning signs; who else are they playing footsy with? And yet even after I drew attention to these matters on the Badman Review Action Group, the anger was directed against me. People were agitating for my removal from the list for telling people about Warren and the kind of person he is. Their way of dealing with the problem was to allow Warren to keep posting and even publish a link to his website.

My concern is, as I said a few days ago, that there are other people like this lurking in the world of home education. Those who have been friendly with Christopher Warren are obviously blind to the dangers and take any plausible rogue at face value, just as long as he utters the magic words: ‘I’m a home educator’. Terrible attitude, terrible danger for children.

Caring and creative children

2011-06-26T00:20:00.000-07:00

Many of our friends have children who have not done brilliantly at school from an academic viewpoint. I have noticed that this is, at least according to their parents, because they are sensitive and talented in various areas and so unable to knuckle down to study like all the other kids. None of these children are home educated and yet I have noticed the same attitude appearing frequently on the home education lists and forums; my kid may not have a bunch of GCSEs, but boy is he creative/compassionate/caring/sensitive/talented/concerned. It is almost as though they regard these things as being a consolation prize for failing to pass all those GCSEs and A levels!

As I say, none of the parents I am thinking about here in my personal life are home educators and it is odd that they should have such a similar mindset to many of the home educating parents one encounters on the Internet. I think that this might be more a matter of background and class, rather than schooled or home educated. I have noticed that when the children of working class people I know muff up their GCSEs, their parents usually attribute it to their children’s laziness or lack of intelligence; this never happens with middle class parents. For them, it is because the child is too artistic or musical, loves animals so much or was too busy doing voluntary work. I don’t believe that middle class parents ever have lazy or stupid children; these traits are definitely confined to the working classes.

Now of course I value characteristics such as altruism, honesty and compassion very highly in my daughters. I regard a good ethical system as being at least as important as a grounding in academic subjects. I did not send my daughter to school for two main reasons and both were equally important. One was religious; I wanted her to grow up knowing the Lord and following his wishes as revealed in various scriptures. The other was that I did not trust the local maintained schools to provide an adequate education. An education without a moral code is a terrible thing. Almost as bad as religion which is not backed up by scientific knowledge! I would have been dismayed had my daughter not grown up to be honest and caring, but I certainly did not regard this as a substitute for having academic qualifications. Quite a few people have commented here telling me how wonderfully kind and caring their children are and hinting that this is more important than the kids knowing how a nuclear power station works or understanding the nitrogen cycle. I cannot quite agree with this point of view. Compassion and caring for the environment which are not backed by solid facts can easily be misplaced. There is no point getting involved with campaigns to stop the export of powered baby milk to less economically developed nations unless you know the facts and figures. Similarly, one cannot be opposed to nuclear power unless one fully grasps the difference between ionising radiation and all other types of electro-magnetic radiation.

I am fascinated by the fact that so many parents on the lists and forums speak of their children in precisely the same way as the parents whom I know whose children did attend school. Do more middle class people hang out on these places? Do some of them choose to home educate because they already suspect that their children will not do well at school and are lining up an alibi? Are the main ideologies of British home education shaped by parents whose children are not academic anyway? Could this be why there is often an implied disdain for GCSEs and SATs tests? Do I detect the faint tang of sour grapes in the air? There is no doubt that there is a strong trend of anti-school feeling in the home education scene in this country. I shall explore this idea in another post later this week, because I am sure that there must be a rational explanation for it.

Christopher Warren and the British home education scene

2011-06-25T00:03:00.000-07:00

Back in March, a man called Christopher Warren posted on the Badman Review Action Group. I raised a few questions about the suitability of such a person being on that list and people got so angry that there was talk of chucking me off. I left, having drawn attention to the dangers of becoming mixed up with such a character. Here are a few links about Christopher Warren:

http://www.nccg.info/fastfacts.html

http://www.nccg.info/jannicke.html

http://www.nccg.info/memberindex.html

Of course, this might all be lies, although there is a great deal about Warren and his cult, the New Covenant Church of God on the Internet. By his own account, he is a very odd man. See his official site here:

http://www.nccg.org/warren.html

Gay readers will perhaps be surprised to learn that they are possessed by demons! I have suspected for some time that this awful man was involved with helping Alison Sauer draw up the new EHE guidelines. If true, the very presence of such a person anywhere near the things is enough to contaminate them and make them unacceptable to anybody who feels strongly about child abuse; which I am guessing includes most of us. Just what is his involvement in the business?

Much of the activity in the British home education scene is shaped and guided by a small number of people. One sees their names crop up again and again, both on lists and forums, in letters to newspapers and at Parliament. Alison Sauer is of course one of these people. She is advised by and has had many telephone conversations about the new guidelines with, Kelly Green in Canada. This American woman got Alison to write an introduction for her book. She runs a blog called Kelly Green and Gold. Apart from Alison Sauer, Kelly Green is in touch with other home educators in this country whose names will be familiar to many. People like Tania Berlow, for instance. Reading her blog enables one to work out who has been involved in drawing up the EHE guidelines. On December 30th last year, you will see this on Kelly Green’s blog:

‘I want to thank Pat Farenga, Alison Sauer, Tania Berlow, Diane Varty, Leaf Lovejoy, Grit of grit's day, and many other correspondents for helping me shape’

Pat Faranga is nothing to do with the case, she thanks him because he gave a glowing recommendation to her book. Alison Sauer, Tania Berlow and Leaf Lovejoy though have all been involved in drawing up the EHE guidelines. This is interesting. But wait, what’s missing from this picture boys and girls? The above quotation is not as it was first posted by Kelly Green. She actually included somebody else in her thanks and then removed his name after I drew attention to him in March. Fortunately, her original post was archived. Try this. Google CCM Warren and Diane Varty and see what comes up. You will find this:

‘ I want to thank Pat Farenga, CCM Warren, Alison Sauer, Tania Berlow, Diane Varty, Grit of grit's day, and many other correspondents for helping me shape my’

See what’s happened here? She has taken one member of the group working on the guidelines out and replace it with another. Out goes Christopher Warren and in comes Leaf Lovejoy. Interesting, no?

I have know about this for some time, but it was only yesterday when Jacquie Cox who also worked on the EHE guidelines confirmed it, that I knew for sure that Warren had been involved in the thing. The question which British home educators need to ask is this. Are they happy to see a dangerous madman like Christopher Warren working at the heart of a project which, if successful, will affect every home educating parent in the country? What does it say about Alison Sauer, the motivating force behind the thing, that she is happy to accept advice and guidance from this man? There are many other questions, but I think that I shall put them into another post, because this one is getting a little too long. I urge readers to look into this for themselves and not to take my word for anything. Check out the New Covenant Church of God, see what you can find out about Christopher Warren and the allegations surrounding him about under-age girls and then ask whether this person should be involved at all with home education in this country. What impression does this give those critical of home education about the sort of people that home educators are prepared to consort with?

Waiting for a home educating abuse ring to emerge in this country

2011-06-23T23:42:00.000-07:00

I mentioned yesterday that home educators in this country often tend to have a particular mindset, whereby they will enthusiastically embrace evidence of the good effects of home education and ignore anything at all negative. This can be very dangerous, because it is frequently combined with a dislike and mistrust of ‘professionals’; be they teachers, social workers, doctors or anybody else whose job entails their caring about the welfare of children. Anybody who is, or claims to be a home educator is almost by definition in the right and social workers and teachers are always presumed to be wrong, whatever they are saying about children being educated at home. The dangers this pose should be fairly plain and obvious to an objective observer.

Any parent posting messages on any of the home educating support lists and forums in this country about a problem they are experiencing, are sure of the uncritical support of those on the lists. Other members seldom ask just why the social workers are knocking on a family's door or how social services became involved in the first place. It is enough that this is a home educating parent and one of us! Of course she is being persecuted. This same unquestioning acceptance of anybody who claims to be a home educator is extended to complete maniacs, such as Christopher Warren, the English cult leader in Sweden. He has faced allegations of raping children and runs a bizarre religious commune, having a number of ’wives’, some of them barely of the age of consent, but because he is a home educator, he must be OK. When he posted on the Badman Review Action Group, I asked a few questions. This was enough to make people agitate for my removal from the list and I so left. How dare I question a home educator in this way? This odious man managed to persuade others on the list that he was an innocent victim of government persecution and so Karen Rodgers, well known on other lists as well, endorsed him and his site. Free Sweden Net now bears the following from Karen:

"Great website and really scary content. Sweden is so often held up here as an example of an enlightened modern country. What an irony!" (KR, United Kingdom, 1 March 2011)

On other occasions, right wing American groups who believe in beating their children regularly and allowing them to carry guns, have also been endorsed by British home educators. Anybody from abroad who posts on any British list because their children are not at school and social services are concerned, can be sure of finding support on either BRAG or HE-UK.

The danger is that this willingness, on the one hand to believe no ill of anybody who says he is a home educator and on the other to mistrust teachers and social workers, will produce a situation where children who are not at school will end up being abused and their abusers actually will be protected by other home educators. The belief is, though not explicitly stated, that if social services are chasing a home educating parent, then they are the villains and the parent is the victim. This is not at all how I see it. We have in the past seen cases in Education Otherwise of this sort of thing happening. I strongly suspect that sooner or later, this attitude will create the ideal circumstances for some unscrupulous person to set up as a home educator and abuse not only his own children but other peoples’ as well. The hatred and mistrust felt towards professionals, combined with the sympathy felt towards all home educating parents makes this inevitable. The only way that such a situation could be avoided would be if home educators started being a little less hostile towards teachers and social workers and somewhat more searching about the motives of other parents. I don’t expect this to happen and so sooner or later, some charismatic fellow like Christopher Warren will become prominent in home educating circles here with disastrous results.

More about dead children, particularly black ones.

2011-06-22T23:19:00.000-07:00

We looked yesterday at the emotive argument often used by home educators, that of the bullied child who had been educated at home and then forced back to school with tragic consequences. We found, as I had suspected, that nobody knows of a single case of a home educated child being forced back to school, let alone of one who subsequently suffered any harm as a result.
Of course, home educators are not the only ones who wheel out suffering children to bolster their arguments. During the select committee hearings in 2009, I was astounded to hear the present Children’s Commissioner, Maggie Atkinson, offer her reasons for supporting Schedule 1 of the CSF Bill. She said;

‘I would give you two words, and they are the first and second names of the child who died — Khyra Ishaq’

Khyra Ishaq was of course not only a sweet looking little girl, she was also dead and black; a winning combination if ever I heard one for a debate of this sort! Those who are worried about children being at home with their parents have a history of using dead kids in this way. Some of the legislation which many home educators feel is against their best interests was introduced in the wake of Victoria Climbie’s death. The reports about this actually had a picture of Victoria printed on the cover; perhaps the most flagrant example of using a dead kid to make one’s point when fighting or supporting new laws. Another photogenic, little black girl; how cool is that? And what's more, she's dead. Ha, let's see anybody disagree with the measures we propose now! Those who used Khyra Ishaq and Victoria Climbie in this way were clearly not familiar with the old adage that hard cases make bad law!

The problem is that both sides in these debates seem to be working from a blinkered perspective. Home educators claim quite correctly that some children are bullied so badly at school that they are driven to despair and suffer horribly. They go on to assert that home education offers a refuge to such children and removes them from the bullies. This is to ignore the fact that a huge amount of bullying also takes place in the home and that for some children, school can itself act as a refuge from bullying and abuse. Those opposed to home education are able to point to the occasional case of a child being educated at home who has suffered bullying, abuse or even died at the hands of her parents. They too ignore an important fact; that almost all child victims of domestic abuse and murder are registered pupils at schools.

Using dead children can be a pretty good knock-down debating point, whether you are discussing the merits of exporting powdered baby milk to less economically developed countries, mass vaccinations or the building of a nuclear power station. A debate about home education is the perfect excuse to bring in the dead children and blame your opponents for their deaths. As somebody pointed out yesterday, I have myself been guilty of this! On home educating lists, we often see mention of ’bullycide’ and the figure of sixteen deaths a year from bullying. I tried to track down the source of this figure a few years ago and could get no further than a registered charity which was making a good income from bullying and refused to tell me how they calculated this often mentioned statistic. The problem is that on both sides of the home educating debate are entrenched interests and people who are absolutely convinced that they are right. Neither side begins by examining the evidence and then seeing where it might lead and what the implications are. Instead, they start by believing either that home education is good and right or that it is dangerous and wrong. They then set out to gather evidence to support of this predetermined position. One can always find children who have been bullied at school and then been home educated. Similarly, one can always find other children who have been mistreated at home and who view school as a sanctuary. It is true that every so often a child who is being educated at home in this country is tortured or murdered, but then far more children at school suffer in this way.

It would be nice if a group of home educators and a bunch of social workers, teachers and other professionals could get together and examine all the available evidence in a neutral and dispassionate way, seeing where it might lead. They might possibly discover that they have more in common than either side has suspected. I don’t really expect this to happen any time soon; but it is an interesting idea! Of course, this is pretty much what was supposed to have happened at the select committee hearings in October 2009, but I have to say it did not really work that way. All parties were only interested in furthering their own special interests; not in discovering new truths.

Blood on our hands!

2011-06-21T23:56:00.000-07:00

During the recent debate about the idea of a twenty day ‘cooling off’ period before a deregistered child’s name was removed from the school roll, one of the stock mythic characters of home education was brought into action once more. This is the bullied child who is forced back to school and then suffers harm either from his persecutors at school or because, unable to bear the agony of school any longer, he kills himself.

Now I am not at the best of times over-keen on claims of this sort, that some action or other will end up costing the lives of innocent children. There is something a little distasteful about resorting to this tactic; effective as propaganda though it may be. It has the effect, doubtless intended, of making those on the other side of the argument look like cruel and heartless wretches who do not care about the suffering of little children, but it does not tell us anything at all about the facts of the matter. Bringing in this hypothetical character simply stifles rational debate and makes people a little uneasy about pressing their points too vigorously, lest they seem unfeeling and callous towards this poor child. Home educators in this country are very fond of using this image, that of the suicidal, home educated child who dies because of some new piece of legislation or other. This imaginary child was brought into play a great deal during the campaign against Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill last year and inevitably I too was named as one of those who would be responsible for the deaths of these children. The following comes from the Dare to Know blog:

'Wednesday, March 17, 2010
To all supporters of Schedule 1
...of the CSF bill, Deech, Soley, Badman, Ed Balls, Simon Webb, whoever you may be. Be very aware that by forcing children, either because of some administrative error on the part of parents, or because an ignorant LA officer says so and without any chance to offer a defence in court, back into school, you will almost certainly have blood on your hands'

Strong words indeed! It was this sort of thing, talk of bloodshed and so on, which resulted in the Department for Children, Schools and Families declining to answer any further Freedom of Information requests about the Badman Report, not as somebody suggested here the other day, because of a spoof blog.

What I am trying to establish currently is whether a case of this sort has ever happened in the real world. That is to say a child who has been deregistered from school in this country being forced back into school by a local authority and then suffering harm as a consequence. Is this a real hazard or merely a piece of emotive propaganda used by some home educators whenever anybody suggests changing the law? Let’s face it, School Attendance Orders are raring than rocking-horse shit. When did anybody ever hear of any home educated child being forced to return to school as a result of an SAO being issued? I have been researching hard, trying to identify a single case of this happening and so far I have drawn a blank. I have found plenty of claims that it has happened, but no solid information at all. This is strange, because you would think that such a child would have become a cause celebre of the home educating world. Before I can move on and find a case of a child suffering harm as a result of being forced back to school, I must first find a case of a child who has been made to return to school after having been home educated. Does anybody know of such a child? Does such a person actually exist?

My feeling is that the unfortunate home educated child who is forced back to school and then bullied to death is a figment of some home educators’ imaginations. That being the case, it is pretty shameless of them to trot out this figure every time somebody talks of a change in some minor regulation. It is in any case a pretty primitive argument. Whenever somebody disagrees with home educators about the need for a change in the status quo, they are asked rhetorically:

’Do you want children to die? Do you want their blood on your hands? Because that’s what will happen if you press ahead with this!’

There is still some mileage left in this hoary old myth, as we saw when the Department for Education backed down over the twenty days business recently, but I can’t help wondering when somebody will call time on this strategy. It is wearing a bit thin. In the meantime, can anybody help me to discover any home educated child who has been forced back to school by a local authority or the courts? Does such a child really exist in Britain? The search has been on now for over a month and I am growing increasingly sceptical about the existence of a kid like this! Come on you militant home educators, help me out here. Somebody must know of a verifiable case of this sort!

Parents can’t hope to achieve as much as a school

2011-06-21T00:35:00.000-07:00

One of the regular objections made by teachers and other professions in the field of education to the idea of home education is that one or two untrained people cannot replicate all that modern schools provide. This is quite true of course; they can’t. How could I ever have found the time for the endless risk assessments and drawing up of policy documents? There were no CRB checks, no Ofsted inspections. We had no cleaners in the evening to straighten the place up and prepare it for the next day, nor did we hold regular staff meetings or arrange Inset days. We had no staff room, no proper facilities for sport, no laboratories, the child was left unsupervised for long periods of time because we did not arrange a supply teacher to cover my absences due to shopping and so on. From a school point of view; the enterprise was a disaster waiting to happen.
I posted a link a short while ago to a family who live round the corner from me in Buckhurst Hill. This mother is doing A levels with her kids very successfully. She used to be an opera singer. Others with no background at all in education do GCSEs. The whole notion that one needs a school to do these things is of course nonsense.

The one thing which I have a slight doubt about is how the personality of home educated children turns out after spending so much time in adult, rather than children’s company. This factor is pretty much the same whether the education has been structured or unstructured. The less time that children have spent at school, the more likely they are to present as a little strange and atypical, at least compared with other young people who have attended school. Those who are deregistered at the age of twelve or thirteen seem OK, but I have to say that young people who have never been to school often come across as a bit odd. Not necessarily a bad ’odd’, but odd none the less. They speak differently, dress differently, often have their hair done differently; they are just a bit…different. This is not of course a bad thing in itself, just something I have noticed.

Alison Sauer and Education Otherwise; a correction

2011-06-20T10:29:00.000-07:00

Last week, Shena Deuchars of Education Otherwise was very keen to distance the organisation from Alison Sauer, after somebody commented here that she used to work for EO. Shena said, very definitely in response to this idea:

‘"But Alison Sauer did once hold a position within the EO organisation, until recently wasn't it?"

No, she did not. I have phoned her this afternoon to ask. I am assured that she has never been an LC, a trustee or a volunteer in any capacity.'

Now of course, I know perfectly well that Alison Sauer has in the past represented Education Otherwise at national level. I am sure that others also know this. Just look at this piece from The Scotsman:

http://news.scotsman.com/education/Home-educators-failing-children.2470084.jp

I love the dogmatic way that she paints home education in her own image!

‘If you are a professional teacher you don’t know what you are talking about when it comes to home education. We don’t do any teaching. Our philosophy is self-directed learning’

Don’t you just adore that ‘we’ don’t do any teaching? 'Our' philosophy is self-directed learning. Is that official EO policy that she is expounding here? I wonder why Education Otherwise are so keen to disown her now?

Protecting our children and close friends

2011-06-19T23:55:00.000-07:00

I have long thought that the online home educating community has many similarities to those groups who believe that there are alien spaceships at Area 51 or that a secret cabal rules the world. For these people, there are no coincidences. If a document disappears briefly from the Department for Education website; it can only be because a sinister cover-up is in progress. They often like to see themselves as fighting against dark forces which would otherwise destroy them and their families; nobly resisting statist efforts to force their conformity. Home education for these people is not just about educating their children at home, it is part of a whole ideology and world-view. Because they like to play at being secret agents or resistance fighters in this way, many of them hide their true identities and adopt a nom de guerre. Apart from anything else, calling yourself ‘Firebird’ is far more romantic than being just plain Ruth O’Hare!

Now there is no particular harm in this as long as one is just using this anonymity to comment on lists and forums. One can be ruder than one would if using a real name; we see this all the time on this blog. It is when people begin to be engaged in activities which might have a grave effect upon others that this secrecy or anonymity becomes a little bit of a problem. On the blog to which I gave a link the other day, the one about the new EHE guidelines, the author suggested something quite extraordinary. This was that Alison Sauer did not wish to be identified as the author of these guidelines so as to protect her child and friends. Of all the possible excuses for anonymity, this seems to me to be the feeblest. I know something about this, because with the possible exception of Graham Badman, I doubt whether anybody in the British home educating scene has been as insulted and abused as I! (Just try googling my name along with ‘home education’ and you will see what I mean).

Now I might have occasionally pointed out some of the more fruity things which people said about me during the Badman business to my daughter. We would have a laugh about them. My wife did not find it funny and so I would not show her any of it. As for my friends, most of them did not even know about the abuse that was being heaped upon me. How would they, unless I told them? I am really intrigued about this idea that one could put together a document which might have very serious effects for tens of thousands of families and then feel able to conceal one’s name on the grounds that one was protecting children, family and friends. Protecting them from what, for heaven’s sake? I have written newspaper articles, kept a blog and written an entire book on the subject of home education; all without causing any harm to my family and friends. Everything I have written on the subject has my name attached to it. Perhaps somebody could tell me what harm they are actually afraid will befall them if their real name becomes associated with their views on home education?

In Alison Sauer’s case, the idea that she is a private person who shrinks from attracting the attention of others is particularly grotesque. Somebody speculated in a comment that the blog to which I referred earlier is actually Alison Sauer’s work. They are probably right. She and her husband are history buffs and Alison belongs to a 17th century re-enactment society. She regularly dresses up in historical costumes and there are images of her like this all over the Internet. If this has not caused her daughter to die of embarrassment, then I doubt that any harm would be caused by putting her name to the EHE guidelines!

The Ofsted report on home education

2011-06-18T23:59:00.000-07:00

Just to remind readers, Ofsted did conduct a survey about home education at the end of 2009 and beginning of last year. the report may be found here:

http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/Ofsted-home/Publications-and-research/Browse-all-by/Documents-by-type/Thematic-reports/Local-authorities-and-home-education

Some of the topics which have been discussed on this blog are mentioned in this report, such as special needs and off-rolling.

Counteracting sexism when home educating a daughter

2011-06-18T23:51:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about educating a girl at home is that one has the opportunity to work vigorously against society’s attempts to prevent her from achieving her full potential, both physically and mentally. There are those who believe that we live in a post-feminist world, where the major battles against sexism and male chauvinism have been won and that only extremists would continue to moan on about sexism. People expressing this view are generally either men or Daily Mail readers.

The indoctrination of females and crippling of their abilities begins from birth. Of course one can work against this in the home, but most girls end up spending a lot of their time in state institutions from the age of two or three and this means that they start learning from a very early age that society’s views about sex and gender are radically different from those which they have encountered at home. By the age of eleven, when they start secondary school, this process has been operating for eight or nine years.
Watch any science or maths class at an ordinary mixed comprehensive. By this time, the girls know their place. The girl who is bright and knows the answers will have learnt to do one of two things. She will either keep her mouth shut, for fear that the boys in the class and some of the girls, will make mocking reference to he supposed intelligence. This can be as subtle as boys exchanging glances and rolling their eyes when she answers the teacher’s questions or as crude as outright bullying. Or she might accept her role as freak and nerd and decide that being a loner is the price she must pay for excelling academically. This discrimination against bright girls is a separate thing from the general sneering which goes on in many schools at those who want to learn. The commonest strategy that girls adopt in the face of this sort of thing is to stop answering questions and pretend that they don’t know and have no interest in the subject. Unfortunately, this pretence can become the real thing if acted often enough.

A similar thing happens with the physical strength of girls. It is often said that girls are not as strong as boys because they are smaller and therefore have smaller muscles. This would be true if we all used our muscles at 100% capability, but few people other than Olympic athletes do this. A girl’s muscles are proportionate to her body, which means that she can support her body weight by her muscles every bit as well as a boy. This means that in the gym, climbing trees and so on, there is no reason at all for girls to do any less well than boys. Any apparent lack in strength is more psychological than physical. This too results from early education. The girl learns at school that it is not quite the thing to be able to climb higher up a tree than boys and so she does not do it. Very early on in their lives, schoolgirls learn to flatter males and avoid bruising their fragile egos by outdoing them either intellectually or physically. When my daughter was fourteen, I was running the church youth club. She regularly outdid the boys of her age at physical activities, including tree climbing and this caused some little unpleasantness. The reaction of the other girls was interesting. They obviously thought it bad form for her to show the boys up in this way and couldn’t see why a girl would do this. They were already in the habit of flattering the boys and pretending to be weaker and more stupid than they already were.

Home education for girls means that when the child encounters this sort of thing, she will see it as a foolish aberration, not a way that she should try and behave. In other words, it is quite possible when home educating, to raise a child free of sexism; a child who will attempt to do her best, whether or not it upsets any males in the vicinity!

Home educating in India

2011-06-18T23:18:00.000-07:00

http://www.hindustantimes.com/School-is-an-artificial-social-environment/Article1-711142.aspx

A new blog about the EHE guidelines

2011-06-18T01:55:00.000-07:00

Somebody has started a blog about the new EHE guidelines for local authorities. It may be found here:

http://morethanoneside.blogspot.com/p/about-this-blog-there-are-two-sides-to.html

One problem glares out at one immediately; it is not possible to post comments. The author claims that he has disabled the comments facility because he does not ‘wish to spend my time moderating a volatile debate’ This is ridiculous. Lord knows that there are enough volatile debates on this blog, but I don’t have to spend my time moderating them! Why would I even bother doing that? People can say what they want about my opinions and if I feel like it I will join in and debate on equal terms with them. I suspect that the real reason that this man does not allow comments is because he does not like to be contradicted. This presents a problem. Without cutting and pasting his rather long posts onto here, it will not really be possible to offer a detailed, point by point critique. My own posts tend to be rather short and are intended more as a starting point for discussion.
However, a few points do stand out and are worth mentioning. He suggests that one of the reasons that Alison Sauer might be so shy of admitting authorship of the EHE guidelines is to protect her children and family. This sounds grotesque. Tania Berlow, Jacquie Cox and Rainbow-Leaf Lovejoy have publicly talked of their involvement. I doubt that their children are at risk as a result. I know that things get a little heated in the home educating community, but I wouldn’t think that anybody is going to kidnap Alison’s children or torch her house over this!

The author of the new blog asks rhetorically:

‘One test for success for new guidelines, therefore, will be whether they will lead to greater clarity for both local authorities and home educators. Will they outline not only what local authorities should do, what their duties actually are, but also what they must NOT do?’

I have already pointed out that the suggestion for data sharing between local authorities which is put forward in the new guidelines has no basis in law and seems to be a pet idea of whoever wrote the guidelines. There are a number of similar examples where the guidelines reference not current law, but possible future legislation.

‘ the current round of speculation about Mr. Stuart’s proposals seems rather a waste of energy.’

Run that one past me again. In what sense are these ‘Mr Stuart’s proposals’? Did he have a hand in writing them? We need to be told more about this if that was the case.
I have pointed out one or two things, but the best thing for readers to do is read this blog for themselves. If and when it is possible to post comments, I shall go on there and go through the thing point by point, but I am reluctant simply to reproduce it all here and without doing that it would be unfair to offer any detailed criticism.

Who actually produced the new guidelines on elective home education?

2011-06-17T00:10:00.000-07:00

One of the most curious and disturbing things about the new EHE guidelines is that not one person has so far come forward and admitted to having written any part of them. This is odd. Even Alison Sauer will not confirm that she wrote a single word of this document. Since this might have an enormous effect on how local authorities deal with home educating parents in the future and in view of the controversial nature of the sections on special needs, perhaps it might be worth trying to work out who was involved in the thing.
We know that one member of the team who produced the guidelines was a woman called Rainbow-Leaf Lovejoy. (Stop sniggering at the back; that’s her real name. I have an idea that she is known to Allie who comments here pretty regularly).Tania Berlow was also mixed up in the business, but to what extent is unknown. A woman called Jacqui also worked on the guidelines although, according to her own account, only to find out what was going on.

The secrecy surrounding the guidelines is not accidental. I have been contacted by a number of people who emailed Graham Stuart MP about their concerns. He passed their details on to Alison Sauer, who then got in touch with them. Several people were invited to become involved, but it was made plain that the whole thing was top secret and that they must agree not to tell anybody that they were involved or reveal the names of any others who they got to hear of who were working on the guidelines. This secrecy is alarming, considering that this is a project which might affect many thousands of parents.

I think it is almost certain that Kelly Green, an American living in Canada who writes a blog called Kelly Green and Gold, was also a member of this group. The problem here is that she is a very ignorant woman who claimed on her blog that Graham Badman was a civil servant at the Department for Children, Schools and Families and that I was an adviser to the Department. She knows nothing about British law and I cannot really see how she became involved in the matter. Alison Sauer’s husband Ralph helped to produce an earlier document about the so-called ultra vires practices of some local authorities and so it is possible that he was also involved with the guidelines.

I am very puzzled as to why Alison does not simply release the final draft of the EHE guidelines. She commented on here, telling us that the version at which everybody is currently looking is not the final one, but I don’t know why she does not simply let us see the one which she sent to Graham Stuart. I have a suspicion that when this does emerge, there will be even more irritation and outright anger than was caused by the draft which is currently in the public domain. Otherwise, why not simply show it to us?

Home educators set out, very much against their own best interests, to alienate the Open University.

2011-06-16T00:00:00.000-07:00

I have for several years entertained the suspicion that home educators are the most quarrelsome and disagreeable special interest group in this country. I am increasingly inclined to believe that some of them must be quite literally stark, raving mad.

The Open University has been a very good thing for home educated children in this country. It has enabled them to gain access to places at universities such as Oxford and Exeter, which might otherwise have been denied them. The OU is one of the most progressive and enlightened universities and given how helpful they have been to home educators and their children, you might think that the news that they are thinking of running a course to teach people about home education would be greeted with pleasure. You would? Why, you gullible fool! Don’t you realise that the OU are all part of the military/industrial complex, in the pocket of Big Pharma, part of the New World Order and probably controlled by the Illuminati? Who funds them? Central government of course and they are heavily involved with orthodox educationalists. What sort of course would they run on home education?

The first angry and suspicious emails have already begun arriving at the Open University and unless I am very much mistaken in my understanding of British home educators, this small trickle will soon become a mighty flood; thus persuading the OU that many home educating parents in this country are completely off their heads.
What are the objections to the Open University teaching about home education, say as part of a course about education and childhood development? Where shall we start? For one thing, they might not let home educators check what sort of things they will be saying before they start the course. This is of course perfectly true. When the OU run a course on Comparative Religion, they will certainly ask leaders of various faiths for their views, but will not allow them to vet the materials used. This is because the OU is independent. Imagine if the only things they were allowed to teach about Islam were those things approved by various Imams. Their impartiality would be shot to pieces at a stroke.

Another problem seems to be that local government officers might take such a course and then think that they know as much about home education as parents. It does not bear thinking about! Suppose that home educating parents wanted to go on the course and did not have the money to afford it? This would mean that the OU was discriminating in favour of professionals and against parents. Perhaps the maddest objection of all is one being promoted by a former head teacher, who fears that such a course might become compulsory for any parent who wished to educate her child. This would mean that a de facto register of home educators would be started and those who were too poor to afford the course would not be allowed to be home educators! You see what might happen? Home education in this country would be restricted to the wealthy. And all because the Open University went blindly ahead and began to teach a unit about it. As one person puts it:

'this would be a very dangerous step towards needing some sort of licence to home educate, and an agreed/prescribed method of doing it.'

All this is so completely loopy that I feel like putting my head in my hands and groaning. At the moment many home educating parents enjoy excellent relations with the Open University. I have a suspicion that this why they are considering running a unit about home education; because they have seen what a good thing it is. They wish to show people that it is a rising trend and that it is something worth learning about. Whether they will still be feeling so amiably disposed towards home educators after they have been on the receiving end of one of the home educating community’s famous campaigns, remains to be seen.

Radio play about home education

2011-06-14T23:46:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow on Radio 4 at 2.15, the BBC are broadcasting a dramatised account of the home edcuation of the Polgar sisters. Their father Laszlo is rather a cult figure among some home educators, having faced enormous difficulties in educating his daughters. If any parents in 21st century Britain think that there are problems in home educating their kids, they should have tried it behind the Iron Curtain in the 1970s. This programme contains an interview with the Polgar girls' mother and father.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011vhdc

On the fringe

2011-06-14T23:39:00.000-07:00

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!

School-aged children attending college

2011-06-13T23:44:00.000-07:00

I recently bumped into a father who I have not seen for over a year or so. He and his family live some way from here in a village. His son was always bullied at primary school for being, shall we say, not as masculine as the average boy. The problem intensified when the kid started secondary school and so he deregistered him and began to home educate. It didn’t really work out, because however dreadful school was, at least the boy was mixing with other children. He missed this when he started spending all his time with his parents. They carried on for a couple of years until they managed to persuade the local authority, Essex, to allow the child to attend college part-time. This was the last I heard of the family until the other day.

The college placement fell through very quickly. There were a number of other fourteen and fifteen year-old boys at the college and they were a pretty rough bunch. They made this boy’s life a misery and because the college was really geared to the needs of sixteen to eighteen year-olds and not schoolchildren, the policy on bullying was pretty feeble. After one term, it was back to home education; which did not really suit either parents or child.

One of the problems with arranging college places for fourteen to sixteen year-olds, something which many home educating parents see as a solution to their problems, is that the sort of teenager of this age who usually fetches up at an FE college is a very different kettle of fish from the average home educated child. Home educated children have sometimes been withdrawn from school because they are vulnerable or the victims of bullying; the fourteen year-olds offered places at college are often the bullies themselves who have now been excluded from school. This can create problems for a sensitive child who is found a place at college. Our local college has a group of younger teenagers and they are all studying vocational subjects; mainly motor car mechanics. I see them at lunchtimes and they look and behave like the kids in Lord of the Flies. Heaven help a vulnerable or delicate child of the same age who was attending college with these characters!

I have myself remarked that it is unnatural for children at school all to be lumped into a group of the same age, but of course this does provide a measure of protection for them. The fourteen year-old girls spend all their lessons with fourteen year-old boys. This can serve to prevent the more mature of them from getting up to much mischief or being exploited by older boys. Most of the students in an FE college will be in the sixteen to eighteen year-old bracket. Some will be nineteen and one or two will be twenty or twenty one. Mixing freely with boys this age could present a hazard to a vulnerable girl of fourteen attending a college.

I am not really sure why so many home educating parents seem to be keen on the idea of college for their young teenagers. This subject often comes up on Internet lists and forums and the impression sometimes seems to be that local authorities are being unreasonable when they will not fund places for fourteen or fifteen year-olds who have been home educated. It might be more that those working for the local authority can see the pitfalls of this sort of thing more clearly and are trying to protect the children. If anybody wishes for their fourteen year-old child to receive education in a formal setting, rather than being educated at home, there exists a large network of purpose built institutions, staffed by trained professionals. All children are guaranteed free education at such places and there is sure to be one near most homes. They are called schools.

A final, but exceedingly serious, problem with the new EHE guidelines produced by Sauer Consultancy Ltd

2011-06-13T00:01:00.000-07:00

I have over the last few days pointed out one or two difficulties which are likely to arise with the new guidelines which have been produced by Alison Sauer. Still, perhaps they won’t be adopted in the end? Even so, a considerable amount of damage has already been done. Influential MPs such as Graham Stuart, Chair of the CSF select committee, and Lord Lucas have learned a lot about home education from their dealings with Alison Sauer. They evidently believe that she has given them an objective view of home education in Britain and they have now passed her views on to Nick Gibb, the Schools Minister. The thing is, they have been given a weird and distorted view of home education and unless somebody sets them straight, the home educating community in this country could be heading for trouble.

I want to look today at how Alison Sauer thinks that home education works in this country. She explains that it is a spectrum with autonomous or child-led education at one end. This is fair enough, although there might be a problem with her understanding of this concept. Still, it is true that some home educators call themselves ’autonomous’ or 'child-led’; it is a genuine trend in British home education. At the other end of the spectrum is, according to these guidelines, ’school-at-home’. Now I have never in my life heard anybody say that they are a ’school-at-home’ educator. That's because this is a pejorative expression coined not by those who follow a structured education, but by unstructured educators who wish to be derogatory about structured home education. Many structured home educating parents are really irritated by being described as doing ’school-at-home’. To use this phrase to describe home educators who actually teach is a little offensive. Has anybody ever heard of a home educator who says, ’We do school at home’?

According to Alison, such parents use a curriculum to cater for the whole of their children’s education. Has anybody ever met such a parent? Even more bizarrely, she claims that such families:

‘maintain a clear distinction between education and leisure, and often keep the school rhythm of terms and holidays’

This is such nonsense that it made me laugh out loud! Has anybody here ever heard a structured home educating parent say, ’No more education for Jimmy for the next few weeks; the local schools broke up for Easter yesterday’?

I can imagine that at this point some autonomous educators are chortling with glee at the idea of structured education being misrepresented in this way. Perhaps before they fall off their chairs laughing, they should read Alison’s description of autonomous education, where they will learn that ’learning takes place without teaching’

The strange ideas contained in this document may well have been accepted by people like Graham Stuart and very possibly Nick Gibb as being the standard model of home education in this country. It is not; it is one person’s idea on the subject. When that person believes that, ‘A Local Authority is responsible for any child of compulsory school age that has been brought to their attention as having, or probably having, special educational needs’, you are in serious trouble. Even if these guidelines end up in the bin, the damage has been done and some in parliament have now a strange and distorted view of what home education in this country is actually about.

Social ineptness and awkwardness considered as a possible cause, rather than consequence of home education.

2011-06-12T00:13:00.000-07:00

Those who followed the comments on the recent article in The Independent about some Hollywood starlet’s decision not to send her children to school, will have noticed an old and familiar accusation being made; that home educated children grow up to be weird loners, unable to interact normally with others.

Now before we go any further, I have to say that I have no evidence at all that this is so; I simply have not met enough adults who were educated at home to form an opinion. I have met one strange person who did not go to school, but the overwhelming majority of people who present as odd or unable to get along in society did go to school. So I am not putting it forward as an hypothesis that a greater proportion of adults who were home educated are actually socially inept. This is however what is commonly asserted by those who disapprove of home education.

Having got that out of the way, a home educating mother with children on the autistic spectrum contacted me recently, wondering if I could float this idea on the Blog; the possibility that if we meet such adults who were home educated, it might be that they were home educated because they already had difficulties in being with groups of people and that this behaviour could simply linger on into adulthood. She had noticed that the Ofsted survey of home education which was released last year showed a large proportion of home educated children with special educational needs. Other surveys have revealed the same thing and judging by anecdotal evidence, many such children are on the autistic spectrum.

Might it be possible that if a large number of children with autistic features or traits are removed from school because they have difficulties coping with large group situations, then these children might retain this aspect of their characters as teenagers and adults? If so, then any social awkwardness or dislike of group settings, would not have been caused by their being home educated at all. It is rather that this bit of their characters caused their parents to home educate them in the first place. In short, we would be in danger of muddling up cause and effect.

As I say, neither I nor the mother with whom I exchanged emails are asserting that this is so; merely wondering whether this might provide a possible explanation for those strange adults that people who are opposed to home education seem to meet so often. Of course another and to my mind more likely explanation is that those people who claim to encounter so many strange home educated adults are not telling the truth about this anyway and could just be inventing the idea to prove a debating point. The fellow commenting on the Independent article, for instance, claimed to have met four socially awkward adults who had been home educated. I find it unlikely that anybody unconnected with home education would have met four people in the course of everyday life who had been educated at home; it is after only less than 1% of the population. That they would all have been noticeably strange seems to me improbable.

The new EHE guidelines and special needs

2011-06-10T23:23:00.000-07:00

Although we are told that the version of Alison Sauer’s new guidelines for local authorities now circulating is not the final one, I have been assured that the section on SEN is unchanged in the final draft which Graham Stuart now has. This was confirmed when somebody helpfully sent me some notes and handouts from a training session run by Sauer Consultancy Ltd for a local authority in the north of England.

My jaw dropped when I read what Alison wished to remind local authorities about in the new guidelines and I am not sure that the implications are yet clear to most parents. She says on page 20:

A Local Authority is responsible for any child of compulsory school age that ‘has been brought to their attention as having (or probably having) special educational needs.
Where such a child comes to the attention of the Local Authority, the Local Authority has a duty to establish whether the child has SENs that are not currently being met.

Now this, although surprising to many home educating parents of children with special needs, is perfectly true. If you are home educating a child and somebody rings up your local authority and says that she believes your child to be dyslectic or have Asperger’s, then the Local Authority have a legal duty to assess your child and see if you are providing for these needs; which may or may not exist. This is a power of which very few LAs are really aware or ever consider exercising. Most home educators are glad about this; they do not want their local authority knocking on the door to ask questions and carry out assessments unless they the parents invite them to do so. This section from the 1996 Education Act makes the situation clear. It is s321 (3):

(1) A local education authority shall exercise their powers with a view to securing that, of
the children for whom they are responsible, they identify those to whom subsection (2)
below applies.
(2) This subsection applies to a child if—
(a) he has special educational needs, and
(b) it is necessary for the authority to determine the special educational provision
which any learning difficulty he may have calls for.
(3) For the purposes of this Part a local education authority are responsible for a child if
he is in their area and—

.....................................
(d) he is not a registered pupil at a school but is not under the age of two or over
compulsory school age and has been brought to their attention as having (or
probably having) special educational needs.

Now the question is, why on earth would Alison Sauer wish to remind local authorities that they are responsible in this way for all home educated children who have, or might appear to have , special educational needs? Do most home educating parents of such children really want their local authorities to assume responsibility in this way for their children? Or have they taken their kids from school precisely because they no longer wish the local authority to be responsible in this way, because they wish to take over that responsibility themselves? I wonder if anybody can imagine the effect that reading the bits quoted above would have upon an overly zealous Educational Welfare Officer investigating a home educated child whom she thought might have special needs? After all, the local authority is responsible for this child and has a duty in law to check that his needs are being met.

I must emphasise that this part of the act is not only concerned with statemented children, but with any child, whether or not at school, who somebody tells the council might have special needs. As I say, few local authorities currently assume this duty, but they still have it legally. The question is, why on earth would anybody involved with home education wish to remind them about this and urge them to start knocking on the doors of all home educated children with special needs so that they can take over responsibility in this way? The 2007 guidelines for local authorities, by comparison, limited themselves to a few words about children with statements and said nothing at all about this general duty. Are the new guidelines an improvement in this respect?

A problem with the EHE guidelines

2011-06-10T05:33:00.000-07:00

Alison Sauer tell us that the version of the EHE guidelines to which I have posted a link here is not the final version which was sent to the Chair of the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee. Nevertheless, it must still give us an insight into Alison’s thought processes and one particular point leaps out when we read it. As far as one is able to understand, these guidelines are intended to advise local authorities on the law regarding home education. They are supposed to stop LAs from making up the law as they go along. It is reasonable then to assume that when these guideline say that such a thing must be done or may not be done, that this is in reference to the legal situation. Unless this is the case, then the things are pointless.

On page 14, we find a section headed Second Opinion. This relates to the situation where a local authority has doubts as to whether a suitable education is being provided to a child. It says:

If at any stage the parents disagree with the Local Authority’s decision that there are serious concerns, then they may ask for a second opinion. This must come from an EHE officer who deals with home educators in another Local Authority area.

Observe, this opinion must come from such an officer. Now local authorities do not generally pass cases around to each other in this way. Why on earth should a local government officer in Somerset start assessing a kid living in Yorkshire? However, if these guidelines are to be believed, then they will be legally required to do so in the future. They must do it; this is after all a guide to the law on home education. There are only two possibilities here. Either this document is not a guide to the legal duties of local authorities at all and is just a list of things which Alison Sauer would like to see local authorities doing; in which case the thing is a complete nonsense. Or, and this is alarming, it contains guidance to some future legislation which will indeed impose a duty on local authorities to swap information in this way. These are the only two possible constructions one may put upon page 14 of this paper and I for one am very curious to know which is the correct one!

The new EHE guidelines

2011-06-09T23:43:00.000-07:00

The guidelines which Alison Sauer produced may be found here:

http://www.box.net/shared/6lk1826muy

The new EHE guidelines for local authorities

2011-06-09T23:18:00.000-07:00

When Alison Sauer began writing extensive new guidance for local authorities, telling them how they should deal with home educating parents, it was not hard to foresee that it would all end in tears. For one thing, she had no clear mandate to undertake this work on behalf of other home educators and for another, there was an obvious conflict of interest in that she runs a company which trains local authorities in how to deal with home educating parents. In other words, the whole thing looked to many like a job creation scheme for the Sauer Consultancy; the company which she and her husband Ralph set up. A further complication which raised eyebrows was that the job of writing these guidelines had not been put out to tender, but apparently awarded to the Sauer Consultancy under a nod and a wink from the chair of a Commons select committee.
Something which has raised the liveliest suspicions about those involved in this project is that it has all been done on the quiet, with Alison Sauer refusing even to confirm that she is involved in the business at all. This is frankly odd. The story went round that various people were helping with this, including Tania Berlow, who said last year:

I am the only person who has stuck their head above the parapet and has said publicly that I have become one of many who are now inputting into a draft process which will be opened to all HErs once it is drafted.

The allegation is now being made that Alison Sauer alone wrote these guidelines single-handedly and ignored anybody else’s suggestions.
The Sauer Consultancy does not just advise local authorities on home education, but covers a wide range of ’cultural services’, whatever they might be! They provide:

Project Management
Export and Cultural Consultancy
Tenders and Contract Management
Training in Tenders and Contract Management

Their clients include private companies both in this country and abroad; it is not some little outfit just concerned with home education. Just why a commercial enterprise like this was given the job of writing new guidelines for local authorities is something of a mystery. Were any other companies approached and offered the job? Will the Sauer Consultancy benefit if the guidelines are adopted, for example by training local authorities in their application and interpretation? Did Graham Stuart, Chair of the relevant Commons select committee, offer this commission officially or is it just some private project of his? What is his connection, if any, with the Sauer Consultancy? Until these questions are answered, I think that we might all be a little cautious of the new EHE guidelines, regardless of their actual content. The conflict of interest when a business is asked in this way to produce statutory guidelines regarding a field of work in which it is involved is enough to raise cause grave concern.

There is one final problem, one which nobody seems yet to have noticed. The Children Schools and Families Bill 2009 was examined by the Commons Children Schools and Families select committee. This was an impartial examination of the parts of the bill which worried home educators. I know; I was one of the witnesses who gave evidence to the select committee. The job of the select committee is to examine such things. What will happen if questions are asked about these new guidelines? Suppose that some sections of the home educating community cuts up rough about them as they did with the Badman report? The Children, Schools and Families select committee can hardly be expected now to view the matter objectively, because its Chair, Graham Stuart, was intimately involved with producing them in the first place. He could hardly offer an impartial opinion on something for which he was himself responsible. quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

An even more structured home educator than me...

2011-06-09T14:45:00.000-07:00

This family live near me and make me feel like a real slacker. They even do A levels at home, which is something I frankly could not face. Compared with them, I am a radical unschooler!

http://www.yellowad.co.uk/news.cfm?id=21260&headline=Home%20schooling%20success

Good things and bad things about home educating

2011-06-08T22:44:00.000-07:00

Good Things
Your kid won’t have nits all the time
You won’t have to make yourself hoarse every morning shouting, ‘It’s gone eight o’clock’ at a sleeping teenager.
Your child will retain the ability to pronounce medial and terminal ‘t’s and not replace them as a matter of course with glottal stops.
You can enter your child for whatever combination of GCSEs you both want.
You don’t have to make yourself presentable for the school run every day.
Your daughter or son can continue playing with dolls or toy cars, without feeling that they must stop at a certain age lest their friends think them babyish.
Your child will not have to rub shoulders with children called Brandon, Jadon, Taylor, Tyler, Kylie and Paige.

Bad Things
Despite what you tell the LA, your kid will not have a very extensive social life. He will become out of touch with what other kids find important.
Unless you get your arse into gear, he will end up with no qualifications at all.
Your family and friends will think that you are weird.
The only people who will approve and be your friends are other home educating parents, many of whom genuinely are weird. (Unlike you).
Your kid may not have to hang out with children called Chantelle, but you will find now that she is likely to be knocking around with people called Andromeda and Sky.

You will spend hours on the computer, like some kid obsessed with facebook. You run the risk of sitting up until two every morning commenting angrily on forums and blogs.

Short BBC piece about home education

2011-06-08T05:57:00.000-07:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-13681216

Unreasonable behaviour by local authorities

2011-06-07T23:27:00.000-07:00

One of the difficulties we face when trying to get some idea of a local authority's behaviour towards home educating families is that we often only hear second hand about the situation. The case may indeed be exactly as presented by the irate parent to a local group or on an Internet list, or there may be a good deal more to it than meets the eye. So I want to try an experiment.

Quite a few home educating parents come on this Blog each day and so I am hoping that we can hear some first hand examples of unreasonable behaviour by local authorities. In other words, cases where the person commenting feels that she has been badly treated by the LA and is prepared to answer intrusive questions about the circumstances in order that we might build up a rounded picture of what has happened. It would help if we could be given the name of the local authority as well. This will enable us all to get some idea of how things are working in a local authority which has supposedly behaved badly towards a home educator.

I want to try this, because in many of the cases which I see on Internet lists, I have an idea that things might not be precisely as advertised. So here is the opportunity for everybody to talk about the worst local authorities and what they have done which is unacceptable. No holds barred, guys; you can name names and give dates and see if others on here can shed any light on these LAs.

Why children might reject an adult-led educational approach; part 2

2011-06-06T23:21:00.000-07:00

Somebody commented yesterday on the thread about the above topic, putting forward an interesting hypothesis. She suggested that some parents are natural teachers, while others are born facilitators. Children too come in different types; some are naturally autonomous learners and others are predisposed to being taught. I am not at all sure what to make of this idea.

To begin with of course, this is just a form of biological determinism. I cannot teach little Mary because her predetermined character is such that she will not respond well to being taught. Or perhaps; I can't teach GCSE physics, because I am biologically a facilitator and not a natural teacher. I am bound to say that on the face of it, this strikes me as being a pretty strange way of looking at the case. If I make a poor job of accomplishing some task, whether it is teaching physics or fixing a car, I tend to assume that the fault lies in me and not in the car or the child. If there are natural born teachers, then I suppose that there must also be natural born mechanics, natural born electricians and natural born architects as well. This is a weird concept and one with which I have difficulties. Do these biological predispositions have a gender bias? Are women more likely to be facilitators and men teachers?

How would we know if this idea held true for children, that their rejection of teaching ws an inbuilt feature of their character rather than just a result of bad teaching which has put them off being taught? I suppose we would need to do some research involving identical twins separated at birth. Does anybody have any actual evidence for this idea? I am not rejecting the notion out of hand, but it seems to be to be inherently implausible and something of a cop-out for poor quality teaching. I say this, because I have frequently heard teachers advance the same argument when their pupils are failing. They say things like 'What can you expect from that family?' or 'Oh the kids from that estate are all the same!' In other words, they too attribute the fact that their pupils are not thriving academically not to their own shortcomings as teachers but to this same biological determinism. Some kids are born to fail at school. Can this be true?

Home educated or missing from education?

2011-06-05T23:38:00.000-07:00

There is currently considerable disquiet on one of the home education Internet lists about the case of an apparently home educating mother in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. She has been referred, under circumstances which remain obscure, to social services. The assumption is that the referral was prompted by her home educating, rather than any other concern. Of course, without knowing a good deal more about the family than the mother chooses to reveal to an Internet forum, it is impossible to know what is really going on here. Let us assume for a moment though that the case is as presented and that somebody in Barking and Dagenham's education department has tipped off social services about the home education and raised it as a concern. What are we to make of this? I know a little about the situation in this borough because, as I have mentioned in the past, my wife works there in a role which brings her into contact with many exceedingly dysfunctional families with young children. I would not say from what I have heard that home education is very common in this East London borough, but what is not at all rare is parents not sending their children to school, which is an entirely different matter. A number of parents drift into the habit of not sending their kids to school regularly because they have chaotic and disorganised lifestyles. They stay up late, take their children out visiting with them until one or two in the morning and then neither the kids or the parents wake up in time for school the next day. If this happens a few times and nobody takes any firm action, some parents simply stop sending their children entirely after a while. The school sometimes colludes with this and it has been known for schools to hint that if parents were to tell them that they were moving, that it would then be possible for the school to remove the child's name from the register. This suits the school, who don't want a load of fuss and extra paperwork and also the parent who does not want to have to get up early to take the kid to school. Truancy reflects badly on the school as well as the parents and most schools like to avoid having too much truancy. It suggestes that there is something wrong with their school and if a way can be found to remove a persistent truant from the register, many will jump at the chance.

Of course this is not home education at all; it is a child missing from education. However, without looking into such families a little and visiting the home, talking to the child and so on, it is impossible to gauge the true state of affairs. Children from this sort of home background often are at risk in one way and another. The mother might be in the habit of leaving the kid at home while she goes out in the evenings; I also know of several cases like this where the mother was on the game or using drugs.

In a number of local authority areas now, a child not at school is being regarded as being, prima facie, at risk. This is not a desirable state of affairs and yet a very understandable reaction among those who wish to protect the interests of vulnerable children. Often, a single home visit is enough to filter this sort of family our from genuine home educators.

Parents like this are not the only ones who fail to send their children to school. There are a lot of foreigners living in Barking and Dagenham these days, particularly Albanians, and some of these families do not want their children to attend school. There are various reasons for this, none of which involve home education and this is another group who cause concern. I am not really at all surprised that the mother who has posted about being referred to social services has had a visit of this sort. The aim is always child protection and there is no sinister agenda which entails the persecution of real home educators. The goal is simply to check that this is a home educating parent and not one of the other categories of parents who simply do not send their kids to school.

Suppose my child rejects adult-led education, what do I do then as a home educating parent?

2011-06-03T23:41:00.000-07:00

Somebody commenting here asked the above question a couple of times. I did not respond, because the question itself seems to me to be manifestly absurd. If the child rejects adult-led education, then you are doing something wrong. The child's best interests are not served by abandoning all attempts to direct the course of the education if this happens, but by asking yourself how you can improve the education which you are providing. Let's look at a practical example to see what I mean by this.

I am not a great fan of the idea of the global warming scare. The temperature of the planet has always fluctuated and the ice caps have grown and melted over time. However, if children are going to learn about this hypothesis, they should at least understand what it is they are being invited to believe. What most of them seem to believe, as a result of poor teaching in schools, is that the ice at the north pole will melt and that this will have the effect of raising sea levels and flooding coastal areas elsewhere in the world. They believe this because they are taught ineffectively by ignorant people who don't really understand the subject themselves. This is poor quality adult-led education as delivered in schools.

So, let's have a science lesson. Your child has not asked for a science lesson, but you feel she should have one anyway. Gosh, I hope she doesn't reject my adult-led learning! The reason that children cannot be expected to understand the mechanics of global warming and climate change is that they have had no direct experience of ice caps and tropical oceans. The thing is so far removed from their everyday life that it is pure abstraction. Tell your child that you are going to make some polar ice melt and ask them to guess what will happen. They don't need to do anything. You are not asking them to open a book or pick up a pen; just watch you make a fool of yourself. Take a large glass jug and fill it with water. Then put in a handful of ice cubes. This is our ocean and ice cap. Mark the level of the water on the side of the jug and ask your kid what will happen to the water level when the ice melts. Will it go up, down or remain the same. Der! it will go up of course. Why is my mother wasting my time asking silly questions? Of course, the water level remains the same. If your child shows any interest in why this should be, you can explain the mechanism involved and they will then see that if all the ice at the north pole melted, it would make no difference at all to sea levels.

Now you can demonstrate the real mechanism which could be implicated in rising sea levels. Fill the jug with boiling water and again mark the level. Ask your child what will happen as the water cools. The level falls. Explain that hot water takes up more space than cold water and that if the sea level did rise as a result of global warming it would be as a result of this thermal expansion and nothing to do with melting ice. If you are lucky, he will ask why hot things take up more space than cold things. This gives you a chance to explain that all matter is made up of little particles that are jiggling about. The more they jiggle about, the more room they need. Heat is just the molecules jiggling about more and more, thus needing more room.

You can go on to do things like put a glass of earth and a glass of water on a sunny windowsill and see which heats up more quickly and which retains the heat more effectively. This has implications for the whole global warming business. You can put a large glass bowl upside down on a sunny lawn and then see how dramatically the temperature inside will rise. You have demonstrated the greenhouse effect.

None of this science requires your child to ask any initial questions; you have chosen to teach science today, not her. If it is done in a lively way as a series of games, I cannot imagine any child free of pathological abnormalities of mind who would not be interested in watching what you are doing. They have all heard about global warming and are worried about the ice melting and the implications for polar bears; of course they will be interested. You can also grab their attention by explaining that everything they are hearing about the melting of the ice caps is quite wrong and this can start a wider discussion about the extent to which they should trust newspapers and textbooks. For the child who has been put off learning by a school, this will really catch his attention.

The above science lesson is suitable for any child over the age of eight or nine. I simply cannot imagine a child who would not gain something from it, always provided that you do not present it in terms of; 'Now we are going to learn science'. As part of a series of games in the kitchen, the kid will not even think of the word 'science'; it is just something really interesting that his mother is showing him. And it allows him to steal a march on his schooled friends by telling them that they have been taught a pack of nonsense in their lessons!

From The Independent today

2011-06-03T02:31:00.000-07:00

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/schools-are-so-bad-my-children-stay-at-home-says-jolie-2292492.html

The 'school model' and home education.

2011-06-02T23:51:00.000-07:00

Somebody commented here yesterday, saying:

'The school model is adult-led education. Your approach was parent-led education. How was your approach so different from the school model?'

Frankly, I cannot decide whether or not this was a serious question or simply something said with the intention of trying to irritate me. The logic is in any case atrocious. By the same reasoning, we could ask, 'What is the difference between Dotheboys Hall, Wackford Squeers' school in Nicholas Nickleby, and a Steiner school?' After all, they are both examples of adult led education. Just look at what the Steiner Waldorf fellowship in this country suggests for secondary education:

In Maths, they study Number Patterns, including Permutations and Combinations, Conic Sections and Trigonometry.
Science Main Lessons include:-
Biology – human physiology and anatomy, human physiology and embryology and botany and cell biology;
Chemistry – organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, chemistry of the elements;
Physics – transport, power, Newtonian mechanics

To illustrate properly the difference between my own methods and those of a school, I shall have to give an anecdote. I hope that this blog is not degenerating into something like a John Holt book with all these personal anecdotes!

When my daughter was nine, we looked at Pythagoras' Theorum; the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides. All this means of course is that if you draw a right angled triangle and then construct squares on all three sides, then the area of the square on the longest side opposite the right angle, which is called the hypotenuse, is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares on the other two sides. The classic way of demonstrating this is to draw a triangle with sides of three, four and five units and then construct squares on the sides which are then divided into grids. The large one will contain twenty five squares, the others will have sixteen and nine squares. Sixteen and nine add up to twenty five. Ecco; you have demonstrated Pythagoras.

My daughter had two questions about this. Why is this the case and why squares? Why not triangles or semi-circles? I mean really, what a ridiculous question! Of course it's squares. Remember the theorum; 'the sum of the squares'. Why waste time on such an idiotic question? Except of course that this was such an intriguing idea that we did waste time on it. In fact we spent the rest of the day looking into this question. I dare say that mathematicians among my readers will laugh at this; it will be pretty obvious to them. It wasn't to me or my daughter and we started constructing equilateral triangles upon the sides of a right angled triangle and found that the rule held good. Then we did semi circles and regular hexagons. The same thing. This was all fascinating and the syllabus was abandoned as we delved deeper and deeper into the matter. This shows one difference between parent led education and adult led education in a school. For us, the syllabus was a servant. It served as a guide for what we would look at; not some monster that we obeyed slavishly.

The difference between our use of the syllabus and how it was regarded in schools was brought home to me when I tried to discuss what had happened with a friend of ours who is actually a maths teacher in a secondary school. I asked her if she knew about this, which she didn't. Nor was she the least bit interested. Why should she be; she wasn't going to teach it to the kids, it wasn't in the syllabus; what would be the point? I asked her a few questions and she became annoyed. The gist of her argument was as follows. There wasn't time for 'messing about like that', as she put it. It was enough that the kids could memorise Pythagoras' Theorum. That was all they needed to know, not the whys or hows of the thing. Her job was to teach them certain things and it was hard enough to teach them about the squares on the hypotenuse, never mind muddling them up by telling them about semi-circles and hexagons. Why would she even do such a thing?

This in short is the difference between a syllabus as used by the home educator and as used in a school. For one, it is a useful tool which can generate ideas for learning about and investigating the world. It is a springboard for education. As used in schools, it is quite the opposite; a straitjacket which stifles investigation and inhibits learning. If there are readers who really cannot see the difference between one type of adult led learning and another, then I am sorry. To me, it is self-evident.