Just ask!

I have been looking lately at the facebook pages and twitter feeds of various angry and discontented home educators. Much of their annoyance is directed currently not at local authorities, but rather towards the All-Party Parliamentary Group for home education. We have seen comments posted here, expressing these same feelings. 

Now there are, it seems to me, two entirely different points to consider. The first is that the people who now form the secretariat of that group were not elected to the post. This is a perfectly fair matter to debate and I have mentioned it here. The second point is that some people are now complaining that they have all sorts of questions that they wish to ask of the APPG, but that these remain unanswered.  Hints are made that Fiona Nicholson and Jane Lowe are blocking their enquiries and that Graham Stuart  won’t answer their questions. I have seen quite a few exchanges on facebook saying this kind of thing. The only problem is, none of these people will say, even when chatting to their mates on the internet, just what it is that they wish to know! Generally speaking, when people wish to find out about things like this, a straightforward question will receive an answer. I have always found it so and we saw Anne who comments here, using the same strategy successfully a few days ago.

I know that Graham Stuart comes on this blog and so does Fiona Nicholson. Here is what I suggest. Those who have any sort of question to ask the APPG, why not put it on the comments here? Tell us what it is that you would know and then I strongly suspect that somebody else commenting, will be able to answer. If the answer is not forthcoming in a day or two, then I will ask the relevant people in the APPG and, if need be, badger them until I find out. There’s no point in a whispering campaign, whereby people are complaining that they are being shut out and not told what they wish to know, unless a chance is given for others to answer the questions. So let’s all just explain clearly what it is that we wish to know of the APPG and that might be the best way to bring forth the information.

A self-fulfilling prophecy

We saw yesterday that many of the more well-known individuals and organisations connected with home education in this country are known to each other and share a common ideology. There is no harm in this, as long as everybody knows it and takes it into account when listening to what is being said. The danger comes when  new home educating parents who know nothing of this, begin to research the subject online.  Because not only do these people share an ideology, they also have an alarming propensity to lie their heads off when once they are mounted on their hobby horse. This can have catastrophic consequences for the unwary parent. Let me give an example.

Here are three quotations by two people, both of them prominent in the world of British home education;

There is an increasing tendency for welfare officers and social workers to become involved with home-educating families from the outset

I have heard examples of parents discussing the wisdom of taking a child to an emergency ward when they know that a visit will be noted and passed on to the social services

 Experience suggests that parents known to authorities do come under undue pressure to return  children to  school  and this pressure  sometimes  extends to maliciously contacting social services to put further pressure on the parents to ‘cooperate’.  


The first of these statements is by Paula Rothermel and the other two by Mike Fortune-Wood. Rothermel’s appeared in an academic journal and Fortune-Wood’s are to be found on his website; Home Education UK. There are two things to observe here. The first is that these statements are wholly false. There is no local authority in the United Kingdom which involves social workers with home educating families from the start, Casualty Departments do not routinely contact social services when a child is treated and local authorities do not maliciously contact social services, simply to force a child to return to school. This is the first point. The second is that any new home educator scouring the internet for information about home education would be very likely to stumble across pernicious nonsense of this sort and not realise that the man in Wales running the largest home education website in the country is on first name terms with the psychologist in Switzerland who wrote in the academic journal. They certainly would not know that she was reading any comments which the parent posted  on the private internet list connected with the Home Education UK site. In other words, they might think that all this mischievous stuff about social workers originated from two entirely separate sources and was therefore more likely to be true.

Now an anecdote to illustrate the harm that what one might describe as the mainstream home education scene in this country can wreak on the lives of home educating  families. A home educating parent who spent a lot of her time on the internet and believed implicitly the old wives' tales being peddled by the likes of Paula Rothermel and Mike Fortune-Wood, had occasion to take her six year old daughter to hospital. It was  technically an emergency, although one involving a fairly trifling injury. Because she had made the most strenuous efforts to avoid being known to her local authority and had been led to believe that social workers were limbs of Satan and would force her to send her child to school if they heard about her,  she drove to a hospital in another  part of the city. Not only that, she gave a false name and address.  Possibly, she had read what Mike Fortune-Wood had written about this; although I don’t know that for certain. What I do know is that she was fanatically keen to remain, ‘under the radar’ as home educators call it.  Her story unraveled and she then openly admitted her real identity and the child was treated. She thought no more about it, until two social workers turned up on her doorstep the next day. Yes, she not only become known to her local authority, but also became embroiled with social services. This was nothing to do with home education. Had she just gone to her local  hospital and given her proper name, nobody would have cared. Her misfortune was a direct result of reading the kind of malicious rubbish which I quoted above.

Through the looking-glass; a look at the mad world of the Fortune-Woods

I have had one or two things to say over the last few weeks about those in the British home educating scene who manufacture scare stories and spread alarming rumours. Of course, no mention of this subject would be complete without a look at the stuff that Mike Fortune-Wood and his former wife have turned out. I have been browsing on the Home Education UK website and thought that I might just  publish some of the things to be found there. It provides a fascinating glimpse into an alternative universe; a world such as few of us have seen.

Lots of home educating families feel nervous about being out in the daytime and lots of  children never go out 'just in case'. Imagine if you could be routinely be stopped in the  street by policemen checking up on whether you should be in work and suspecting that  you might be committing a crime just because you were going to a bookshop on a  weekday morning. 

Is it really true that a lot of home educating families feel nervous about being out in the daytime? Apart, obviously, from the crossover group of families who are both home educators and also vampires.  And who are these, ‘lots of children’ who never go out, ‘just in case’? Have any readers yet met a home educated child who never goes out, 'just in case'?  One hardly likes to ask, 'In case of what?'  Are we to understand that these unfortunate children never leave their homes at all? That doesn't sound like a healthy model of home education!  Presumably, if they never go out,  those children won’t be worried about the curfews which are about to be imposed on them, which will make it illegal for children  to be on the streets at all, apart from, ‘the twilight world between 3 and 9PM’ What, you haven’t heard about this? You really ought to check the Home Education UK website more often! The Fortune-Woods have the facts about the new law;


A new education act is being planned which would make it illegal for children of compulsory  school age to be in a public place during school hours without good reason. This legislation is  primarily aimed at excluded children who are perceived as being a public menace but will affect other children such as those being home educated. Home educators can expect  problems similar to those experienced with anti truancy legislation which has been a nuisance for HE families almost since the day it was introduced. It largely depends of course upon the wording of the bill and how local police, who still have  difficulty understanding the nature of home education and how it works, interpret it. At worst  it could effectively make HE children prisoners in their homes from 9 till 3. Given that children in some areas are already under curfew after around 9pm that means that children  are only allowed out in the twilight world between 3 and 9 pm. 

And then there are those idiots who have contact with their local authority…

Many parents, having made the decision to home educate, are aware that other home educators  have  had their  decision  in  some  way  “second  guessed”.  This  leads  many  home  educators to actively  avoid  any  contact with  education  authorities, fearful that LAs will  assess the parents’ decision to deregister their child against the national policy of ensuring that all children are in school. Experience suggests that parents known to authorities do come under undue pressure to return  children to  school  and this pressure  sometimes  extends to maliciously contacting social services to put further pressure on the parents to ‘cooperate’.  


And what about those parents whose children need to be taken to the Casualty Department at the local hospital? Don't they know what is likely to happen? The fools!

I have heard examples of parents discussing the wisdom of taking a child to an emergency ward when they know that a visit will be noted and passed on to the social services

Is this true? Do Casualty Departments generally pass on details of children seen there to social services? Or does this only happen with children educated at home? We need to know a little more about this, I think.

Remember the old Connexions service? You might, like me have found them to be pretty useless, but I bet you didn’t know this about them:

Not since Germany's Third Reich has the state systematically gathered information about  parents by using their children - it is truly reminiscent of "1984" …the introduction of the electronic Connexions card for young people, with its overtones of Hitler Youth reporting on their parents

It easy to laugh at lunacy such as this, but that would, I think, be a mistake. Home Education UK and its associated support group, the HE-UK Yahoo list, is one of the biggest  British home educating sites on the internet. For thousands of home educating parents, this is, heaven help them, their first contact with the wider world of home education.  Once there, many of them  get sucked into this delusional world-view and believe that these paranoiac ravings are what home education is all about.  No wonder there is so much friction between home educators and local authorities with poison like this being poured in the ears of parents.

The public and private faces of some prominent members of the British home education movement

I shall be going off for the weekend tomorrow and as a consequence, will not be able to sort through and publish any comments here for a few days. As I am sure readers are aware, since I began this blog in 2009, comments have always been unmoderated; anybody  could come here and say anything at all that they wished. No chance of anybody being barred, censored or any of that nonsense. This all changed in May.

Those who wondered why I singled out Jai Daniels-Freestone for mention a few days ago, might not know that she was one of a group of people who were last year being very rude about me and planning to cause mischief.  I had annoyed a number of fairly well known home educators by discussing their plans publicly. They then decided to try and close down this blog; not wishing their activities to be exposed to the light of day. Some members continued  intermittent, guerrilla warfare against the blog and then in May this year, hit upon two new tactics, both of which meant that I had to start moderating comments. One of these was to arrange for an industrial level of spamming here. It was running, at its peak at over two hundred posts a day and I simply didn’t have the time to keep deleting them. These were well designed to slip through the spam filter. I have seen an exchange where a few of those who don’t like free speech when it comes to home education, revel in the disruption that they managed to cause by this means. 

At the same time that the large-scale spamming began, I received a letter threatening to sue me for libel. The woman   who sent this letter, an official representative  of Education Otherwise, was really quite cunning. Her objections were not so much in respect of what I was saying, but concerned rather  the comments here; over which I had no control. I was inclined to ignore the thing, but my wife insisted that I should reply and then delete the comments to which objection had been made. This was because it was being hinted  that an attempt would be made to try and ruin us by making us homeless.  Although I thought personally that the letter was a nonsense, whenever people claim that their solicitors are Carter-Ruck it is almost invariably a bluff,  I thought it best to prevent people being able to make comments freely any more. Once again, the easiest was of doing this was by beginning to moderate what was said here.

In short, a number of people in the home education movement who constantly bang on about freedom, liberty and all sorts of other high sounding notions, were annoyed that this blog was a forum where anybody could come and debate freely about home education. Those who have put me in the position where I have felt compelled to stop having open comments here are  really enemies of free speech.  Until this business erupted, I have never blocked anybody, exercised censorship or tried to control in any way at all what was said here.  This incident shows us a the great disparity between the liberal and freedom-loving public face of some home educators and their private actions, which are designed to prevent free discussion. I might remind readers of the attempts by another well known home educator in North Wales to have me arrested last year; again, because he didn’t like the idea of a free forum for the discussion of home education. Some of these people really will stick at nothing and I shall be examining possible motives for wishing to maintain such secrecy, when I return.  That somebody representing Education Otherwise should engage in tactics of this kind raises in my mind a question mark over that organisation too. One expects sharp practice from Home Education UK, but when Education Otherwise is mixed up in these games, it is curious.

Home Education UK tidies up its act (a bit)

I was pleased to observe that Mike Fortune-Wood revamped the home page of his site, Home Education UK, yesterday, in response to some of my criticisms here. This is encouraging, but more needs to be done!   I cannot help noticing that Lord Brougham is still featured prominently. The quotation by him on the home page suggests that  Lord Brougham did not approve of  compulsory education and was in some way a supporter of home education. This is preposterous. I drew attention to the fact that he actually attempted to introduce a public education act in 1837 which would have paved the way for universal schooling. It would, if passed, have been similar to the 1870, Forster Act. Lord Brougham said at the time:

‘ some legislative effort must at length be made to remove from this country the opprobrium of having done less for the education of the people than any of the more civilized nations on earth’


He later became an even more fierce advocate of the importance of schooling; particularly for the working classes.  In 1858, he said;

‘There is an absolute necessity for changing, in important  respects, the method of educating female children, not only in  the humbler but the better part of the working classes. They   must be taught things which are of use to them in after life. A good system of rewards, the judicious application of prizes,  the due encouragement to successful teachers of common  things, and a steady determination in the patrons of such  schools to enforce the most useful teaching in the first instance’


Enforcing 'useful teaching' in schools? This does not exactly sound like a ringing endorsement of home education in general, let alone autonomous learning,  and I hope that Mike Fortune-Wood will now seen the light and  remove  all reference to Lord Brougham from the site.

 Next week, we shall examine a few of the people whom this site claims were home educated, starting with Frank Whittle; inventor of the jet engine; who began school at the age of five and left at the same statutory age as everybody else. Until then, readers might like to consider for themselves the extent to which the Wright brothers might properly be considered to have been home educated.

Home Education UK; a site full of half truths and lies

I have in the past advanced the hypothesis that many home education organisations in this country cause more trouble than they are worth.  Today, I want to look at the first such organisation that any parents researching home education in this country are likely to stumble across. Google ‘home education’ and the first non-commercial hit to come up is Home Education UK. Since most parents considering home education will probably begin by finding out about it on the internet;  this site is likely to be the first source of information which they encounter.

      There is something slightly terrifying about the Home Education UK website. It is a mixture of lies, half truths and very misleading statements. That it would be the first place that a prospective home educator might find ‘information’ goes a good way towards explaining why relations between a lot of new home educators and their local authorities are so poisonous. I will limit myself today to looking at just the first page of this site. Every page  of the thing cries out for analysis, but I really don’t have the time to do a thorough job. Here is the first page that any new parent,  hoping to home educate, will come across:

http://www.home-education.org.uk/

The first paragraph makes it clear that it is the law of the UK that is being referred to as far as home education is concerned. The second paragraph makes a statement which is, to all intents and purposes, a deliberate falsehood;

‘the law expresses the right to home educate as a parental right’

The law actually says of course that parents must cause their children to receive a suitable, full-time education.  This is not ‘expressing the right to home educate as a parental right’ at all; it is laying a duty upon parents. Those who cannot be bothered to look up the actual wording of the law are therefore at once deceived into seeing home education in terms of rights and not duties. I hope that readers will see  what an untruthful statement this is and how it is calculated to mislead parents from the very beginning?
     Another untruthful statement is made alongside this, that:

‘In law the right to an education is unique in that it is an obligatory right, it is a right that may neither be denied or refused’

This is not true. Young children who are not deemed to have Gillick Competence’, have the right to medical treatment; a right which is exercised on their behalf by either their parents of the courts. A child of five has the right to education and medical treatment; neither of which may in general be declined. 

     The next paragraph makes the suggestion that there are 60,000 home educated children in this country. Since we know that only 20,000 children are known to local authorities, this would mean that there are twice as many children who are unknown. This is unlikely and no grounds are given for believing such a thing.

     The final paragraph is a quotation from Lord Brougham, who was Lord Chancellor in this country in 1834. He speaks disparagingly of compulsory education.  Why we would care to read the views of a man who presided over the courts of this country  at a time when  gay sex carried the death penalty and the law allowed men to beat and rape their wives, is something of a mystery! Perhaps his opposition to compulsory education  washes away such minor points. It is worth noting in any case that in 1837, this same man introduced a bill to establish schools for ordinary children in this country and felt by that time  that universal schooling was the best thing in the world.

     Two more points strike one about this opening page of the first site that anybody researching home education on the internet will come across. The first is the bizarre colours; with yellow text on brown and maroon backgrounds. It puts one in mind of David Icke! The second is that this site is subsidised by no fewer than seventeen commercial companies. 

     Any parent who knows nothing about home education and visits the Home Education UK site will be fed a series of falsehoods and half truths of such a nature as to set them at once upon the wrong path. Those who swallow the initial lie that the law in this country describes home education as a ‘parental right’ will already be working from a distorted perspective and everything else on this site will serve only to deepen their confusion.

Stupendous hypocrisy, possibly combined with racism, on the part of Education Otherwise, Home Education UK, Action for Home Education and various other major home education organisations in the United Kingdom.

I was accused yesterday of not expressing my views openly and it is to be hoped that the title of this post clears that up. As I said a couple of days ago, I was talking to a local authority officer who was irritated about the suggestion being made by some home educators that there was something racist about the attempts to get more Gypsy and Roma children into school. She asked me if I could see the difference between this and the line that the big home education groups took about Victoria Climbie a few years ago. I could not and when I asked about the subject here, nobody could give a plain answer. Let me explain why this is at best dreadful hypocrisy and at worst out and out racism.

     Let us begin with what is practically an article of faith at the large home education support organisations and that is that just because a child is not at school, that does not mean that she is not receiving an education. I am sure that we have all read of the outraged cries from home educating parents when their children get mixed in with those who are ‘missing from education’. Surely, parents should be innocent until proven guilty? We ought to assume that parents and carers are providing children with a suitable education, unless there is definite evidence to the contrary. So far, so good; nothing controversial here, I fancy.

      With some groups in society; these assumptions are reversed.  As readers know, there was a huge fuss when organisations such as the NSPCC said that Victoria Climbie was home educated. Education Otherwise, Home Education UK and so on all went mad and asserted that this was not the case. Why were they so sure that this child was not being home educated? We will allow Mike Fortune-Wood of Home Education UK to explain. His is the standard explanation for believing that Victoria Climbie was not a home educated child. Be prepared though for a shock:

http://www.home-education.org.uk/articles/article-victoria-climbie.pdf


Have we all read it?  We know that the child was not receiving an education because;

‘the reason that Victoria was not attending school was that there was a failure to provide sufficient school places in her locality. Both the LEA and Social Services knew of her existence and her lack of education’

How do we know that she was lacking an education? Because of course, she was not at school! Incidentally, it is not true that she could not get a school place; her carer did not apply for one. Now we know that Mike Fortune-Wood, Education Otherwise and other groups are all in favour of children not attending school. We know that they believe passionately that the fact that a child is not in school does not mean that the child is lacking an education. Except perhaps, as in this case, when we are talking about working class, black foreigners.

     Perhaps I am wrong? Let us imagine  that we are talking now of a white, Welsh family. Does anybody think for a moment that Mike Fortune-Wood or Education Otherwise would say something along the lines of, ‘The local authority knew that this child was lacking an education because she was not at school’? Hard to believe, no? The only conclusion which I can reach is that either these organisations are guilty of massive hypocrisy about this or that they have one set of assumptions for white, British families and a completely different set for black foreigners. These two cases are not, of course, mutually exclusive!

     The suggestion was advanced here yesterday that Victoria Climbie was not being home educated because her main carer did not say that she was. What this means is that a woman whose first language is Senoufo and second language is French, should be judged because she might not be familiar with an English expression such as ‘home education’. Sounds as though those special rules for foreigners are coming into play again!

     There is a widely held assumption among many British home educators that a child, particularly a young child, should be able to receive an informal education at home. In some countries, schooling and formal education do not start until the age of seven or eight. Victoria Climbie was eight. The idea that a child of this age should be regarded as ‘lacking an education’,  as Mike Fortune-Wood puts it, simply because she is not at school is not one that I feel is commonly held among British home educators. Out of interest, how many readers feel that an eight year-old who is not at school should be treated as ‘lacking an education’? What, nobody?  Here’s an easier question then. How many of you think that the children of black foreigners should be assumed to be lacking an education if they are not at school? Ah, that’s better! Nice to see that so many of you are in agreement with Mike Fortune-Wood and Education Otherwise about this. 

A Home Education UK 'briefing paper' on the Welsh proposals

It will have been rightly guessed by some readers that I would not long be able to stay away from the subject of the proposed Welsh legislation which will introduce compulsory monitoring of home education in the principality. I have been shocked over the last few days to read some of the arguments being put forward against this idea. If it is necessary to engage in deceit and spread falsehoods in order to oppose the plans; what does this say about the strength of the arguments being put forward?


Those opposing the Welsh proposals have been producing a series of so-called ‘briefing papers’. Essentially, these are no more than the opinions of various home educators who do not approve of registration and monitoring and hope to persuade others to share their views. There are two types of such papers. One kind is directed at professionals working in the field of education and is intended to show that home educated children are not at increased risk of abuse and actually do better academically than children in school. The other sort hope to  work up support from other groups such as Christians, by playing to their prejudices. Today, I want to look at a typical example of the first type; that designed to deceive teachers, social workers and other professionals.

This example is taken from the Home Education UK website:



http://www.home-education.org.uk/articles/wc/wc-he-outcomes.pdf
 




I have no idea of the author; perhaps it was Mike Fortune-Wood himself. The paper begins by suggesting that Welsh schools are not in general brilliant, which is true. Then it looks at American research which it is claimed shows that home educated children do very well; better in fact than those at school. There is much wrong with this section, but since I do not think that the American scene can really be compared with this country, we shall let that pass. It is when the author writes of British evidence that he reveals his true motives. and these are not precisely open and honest.  I do not have time to go into the whole thing, but a few particularly awful instances should suffice. Here is a quotation from the thing:



Although little research is available in the UK there is no reason to believe that the

results for children here would be any different and research that has been

undertaken supports that view. A 2002 study of 419 EHE families in the UK found:

‘The results show that 64% of the home‐educated Reception aged children scored over 75% on their PIPS Baseline Assessments as opposed to 5.1% of children nationally.





Either the author has not read the actual research or is deliberately setting out to mislead. In fact the PIPS Assessments relate not to 419 families but 35. What do readers think? Has the author of this supposedly careful and pseudo-academic paper read the research which he is quoting? If not, it casts doubt upon the value of the other figures which he adduces in defence of his argument. If he has read the research, then he is trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes and hope that they will not spot the inflation of the figures relating to the PIPS Assessments. Neither case exactly encourages confidence!

The indications are that this was a deliberately misleading. I say this, because a few lines later, we find this claim:



A Wiltshire based home education support group has kept records of children in the group since 2002. They found that the 52 older children involved had achieved 199 formal qualifications in 50 subjects with 69% of those qualifications being GCSE or IGCSE, 13% were A levels and others in Tertiary or performance. 50% of those qualifications were taken under the age of 16 years. 33% of those students achieving performing arts qualifications were awarded distinctions and 96% of other grades

were at A* ‐C.



I think that readers here will agree that the intention is to suggest that a longitudinal study has been made of a cohort from one home education group? Note that ‘records’ have been kept of ‘children in the group’. Let us be plain about this. We are being asked to believe that the figures for examination results are all from one group of children; those who attended a home educating support group in Wiltshire.  This simply cannot be a mistake; it must be a calculated falsehood, because the author gives the source for his claim. Here it is;



http://www.nwilts-he.org.uk/he_exams_wiki/index.php/Exam_results





Presumably, he banked on nobody bothering to check the references. This is an open page, where anybody from the United Kingdom may send any exam result which they claim a home educated child has achieved. Nobody checks, the things are all done anonymously and then added to the total. Far from this showing that 52 members of a single home educating support group did brilliantly academically, it merely suggests that a load of random people emailed this site from anywhere in the world and their claims were placed there without any sort of checking. Of course this group of 52 children had good academic results; only those who had gained qualifications were intended to be included on it!

There is far more wrong with this paper than just these two examples. The whole thing is an absolute horror. I am curious, for instance,  about the 10 young people with 49 A levels between them. Eton only manage an average of four A levels per pupil; according to this a home educating group in Wales is averaging around five a head. More research needed here!

Breeding hobgoblins

A few weeks ago a parent emailed me to say how much she enjoyed this blog. She said that she had unsubscribed from the HE-UK list because she had, after reading the messages there, started laying in bed at night worrying that her children were going to be taken into care! I can see her point. Reading some of the HE Internet lists and blogs, one does tend to come across a lot of scary stuff. It's enough to give anybody insomnia. Stories of parents having their children taken from them because they are home educating, social services interfering with families, oppressive actions by local authorities, the threat of having children removed for interrogation if this piece of legislation or that is passed, a 'war' on home education; the list of scare stories is endless. I have over the last year or two been put in mind many times of what the American journalist H. L. Mencken said:

'the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous of being led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.'

This is essentially what has been happening with home educating parents; a small group of people have been whipping up fears and threatening them with all sorts of dangers; dangers from which they alone can rescue them. Consider for a moment the Badman review of elective home education. I have no idea at all how the ordinary home educator might have reacted to the news that somebody was to look at the practice of home education and check if anything needed to change. We will never know, because before anybody had a chance to think about the thing, national home education groups told them what they should be thinking and feeling. On January 19th, 2009, the announcement was made that the review was to take place. That very same day, the BBC reported this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7838783.stm


'Home educators are angry'. Well of course, it was a little early to say, a few hours after the review had been launched, how the eighty thousand or so parents of home educated children in this country felt about it. What this headline really means is not that any parents actually are angry, but rather that a few people in a national organisation think that they should be angry. This is an attempt to shape and mould the opinion of home educating parents; to put the wind up them before they even have a chance to think about what is happening. It was pretty successful as well, as subsequent events showed.

Mind you, many parents seem only to happy to believe any sort of nonsense that anybody says about home education and the supposed threats to its existence. It looks to me as though a lot of them enjoy being scared about various nonexistent crises which menace their very way of life. In other words, people running Education Otherwise, Home Education UK and so on are certainly working hard to alarm parents, but they find no shortage of dupes and credulous fools willing to gape open mouthed at the ridiculous stories they peddle. Perhaps its like going to the cinema to watch a horror film; maybe these people enjoy being scared!

Let us look at another example of how the leaders of national HE groups and ordinary parents get together to enjoy a good scare. On September 19th this year one of the HE Internet lists to which I belong carried a story that the Metropolitan Police were treating home education and co-sleeping as risk factors in child abuse. It took me a day or two to track down the truth, talking to various people in the Met and speaking to the author of the piece which was causing concern. This was the Child Risk Assessment Matrix or CRAM for short. When I posted the results of my conversations, people expressed irritation. What did it have to do with me? Why was I interfering? It was as though they wanted to believe this foolishness and were annoyed that somebody had allayed their fears. Enter stage left Mike Fortune-Wood, the home educating parents' fearless champion. He wasn't convinced and was determined to get to the bottom of the matter! Talking to people indeed, I must be a gullible fool! He had made a Freedom of Information request to the Metropolitan Police and my word, he meant to find out the truth about this. Cheers of approval and relief that he was on the case. This was on September 20th. Freedom of Information requests must be complied with within twenty days and yet here we are, forty five days later and no news. My suspicion is that people like Mike Fortune-Wood and various others at Education Otherwise don't really want to reassure people about these imaginary threats. They are pleased, because it makes them indispensable. A similar scenario developed with the idea of weighing and measuring home educated children in Wales and Oldham. There is a panic, I find out what is going on, people are reluctant to be reassured and others claim to be making FoI requests. Then silence. The conclusion I draw is that many people want to be alarmed and see me as being a bit of a spoilsport for throwing cold water on their fantasies. What is interesting is that I often find that people from EO and other groups have actually been there before me and spoken to the same people. However, when they learn that there is nothing to worry about, they keep the news to themselves. Why would they do that, I wonder?

There are many motives for becoming well known as a champion of home educators. The obvious one is financial, hence the use of the term 'rent seekers', which we are seeing applied to those who are talking about home education to Graham Stuart. I do not myself believe that this is the primary reason for these people trying to maintain a sense of anxiety among home educators. I think it far more likely that it is the desire to feel important and have a chance of busy-bodying around; the same motive which caused people to descend upon Birmingham last month. I am irresistibly reminded of Rabbit in the Winnie the Pooh books. It will be remembered that he liked to boss people about and be the one organising things. Here is an extract from one of the books and it seems to me to describe perfectly how people like Ian Dowty, Fiona Nicholson and Mike Fortune-Wood probably feel. Just substitute mentally one of the above names for Rabbit when you read it and you will see what I mean:

'It was going to be one of Rabbit's busy days. As soon as he woke up he felt important, as if everything depended on him. It was just the day for organising something, or for Writing a Notice Signed Rabbit...'