The testosterone factor in home education

One of the things which one noticed during most of the recent history of home education, is that it was dominated by women. This was perhaps only natural; anything to do with raising children has always been viewed as a naturally feminine matter. Men were few and far between on the British home educating scene until the beginning  of the present  century. At about this time, men like Ian Dowty and Mike Fortune-Wood began to become well-known in some home educating circles. Contemporaneously and possibly coincidentally, this was the very time that serious confrontation also became a notable feature of the home education in this country. Before that time, the default setting for parents was allowing local authority officers to visit their homes, speak to their children and look through the child’s work.  From roughly 2000 onwards, a trend developed strongly in some quarters which was opposed to local authorities having anything much to do with home educating families. A mood of bellicosity and confrontation began to replace the generally easy-going relationships which had previously characterised  home education.

Commenting here a few days ago, somebody hinted that there might be a direct causal link between certain men becoming involved in home education and the air of tension and confrontation which we now see. This is an interesting hypothesis. Women who worked in nursing during the 1970s and 1980s noticed very clearly the effect of men getting mixed up in what was before that an almost exclusively female domain. For one thing, they tend to take over and for another, the whole atmosphere of the profession changed subtly. Where women tend often to work cooperatively, avoiding conflict where possible; men simply thrive upon confrontation and argument. I wonder if something along these lines could be at work in home education? One of the largest internet lists is run by a man; Mike Fortune-Wood’s HE-UK list. This list has  been enormously active and the posters tremendously aggressive at various times, such as in 2009, during the Badman business. A lot of campaigning was loosely coordinated here. Mike Fortune-Wood encourages this list to be in opposition to any cooperation with local authorities, by banning those whose views do not agree with his own hard line and imposing moderation on others, to prevent more moderate voices from being heard. In other words, he shapes it in his own, masculine, image.  Ian Dowty’s influence has also been towards opposition to local authorities, rather than consensus. Being a barrister has given him a lot of clout in this respect.

This is only a tentative idea, but a rather interesting one. Relations between home educators and local authorities can be pretty delicate at times and I have yet to encounter any situation which is improved by the addition of half a bucket of testosterone. The more cynical among my readers might even be prompted to speculate upon the extent that I too might perhaps be a part of this syndrome, if it exists.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Home education

I have heard from one or two readers this morning,  who feel that they have been left behind by the recent discussion here about the APPG on home education. Perhaps I should give a little background. There are dozens of informal groups at parliament, where MPs, peers  and members of various charities, special-interest groups and so on get together to discuss anything from football and farming to brass bands. Or, in this case, home education. Although such groups have no real, official status, they can exert a certain amount of power especially when they are led by the Chair of the relevant select committee.  Graham Stuart, for those who didn’t know. 

Because MPs and peers are usually busy, the actual running of the groups is often delegated to a secretariat; a few people who arrange meetings, issue invitations, take minutes and sometimes act as gatekeepers. These individuals can really shape the APPG in their own image. In the case of the APPG on home education, these gatekeepers are Fiona Nicholson and Jane Lowe.  Now immediately, some people can see a problem with that; or really two problems. The first is of course that nobody elected these two people to that role. It looks to some as though Fiona and Jane simply had the sharpest elbows and were shrewd enough at intriguing to get themselves into this position. The second problem that some have, is even bigger. It is that Fiona Nicholson and Jane Lowe share something in common with the present writer. (And no, for those who have been reading the awful things that Maire Stafford and her cronies have been saying about me, it is not that we all dye our hair!) The fact is that any new legislation or changes in regulations will not affect Fiona and Jane, because they are no longer home educators. It will be recalled that when I was invited to give evidence to the select committee in 2009, a great fuss was made about this and it was thought that the fact that my daughter was no longer being educated at home should have been enough to disqualify me from expressing an opinion on the subject. The same thing is now being said about Fiona Nicholson and Jane Lowe.

Some current home educators have another difficulty,  as far as Fiona Nicholson is concerned.  In 2009, she and a few friends, such as Ian Dowty, submitted this document during the Badman enquiry.  


http://www.educationotherwise.net/attachments/article/151/Prospectus%20For%20Improving%20Support%20to%20Home%20Educating%20Families%200409.pdf


Among other things, it recommended:


4. Recommendation: that the DCSF Elective Home Education Team should 
work with home education support organisations to set up a national 
Committee for Home Education, remit to include contributing to 
Government policy initiatives related to home education, contributing to 
Impact Assessments and making recommendations related to Home 
Education policy. 

This national committee was to have a far-ranging but rather vague role and relationship to the government. It was not unnaturally assumed that Fiona visualised herself as heading this committee, which was to some sort of Quango. This belief was strengthened when she gave evidence to the Children, Schools and Families select committee on October 14th 2009. I was also giving evidence that day and one thing which struck me very powerfully was Fiona’s inability to say whether or not she approved of compulsory registration for home educators. Barry Sheerman, the Chair, pressed her repeatedly on this point, but she waffled on for some time, finally saying:

I am not taking a position on whether I think it would be a good or bad thing

Call me an old cynic, but the construction which I put upon that was that Fiona was in favour of registration, but reluctant to say so out loud, in case it alienated too many other home educators. 

In short, there are those who are suspicious of Fiona Nicholson’s  involvement in the APPG, because rather than being a home educating parent, she now has a commercial interest in the subject and is apparently being paid by at least one local authority to give advice. Incidentally, the APPG apparently has a website, about which few seem aware. If there really is such a thing, one guesses that it was set up by Fiona’s son Theo, who is something of a whiz about computer and internet related matters.

I must make one final point, which is that on a personal level, I am very much a fan of Fiona’s. She is an enthusiast for both the Molesworth and William books and I never knew anybody who enjoyed those books to be otherwise than fundamentally sound!

Prevailing ideology; the closely interwoven connections of home educators and their organisations

Commenting here last night, somebody accused me of quoting a person on, ‘the extreme edge’ of the home educating community and then representing her ideas to be a significant strand in the world of British home education. This is a fair point, although it leads me to suppose that the person making it knows little about the situation today among home educators in this country.

When something like the Badman Report happens or attempts are made to abolish flexi-schooling, there is at once  the appearance of protests by large numbers of individuals and also various unrelated organisations and groups. We hear, for example,  that Home Education UK says something about the new proposals, as does the Centre for Personalised Education, Action on Rights for Children,  and  Education Otherwise, along with individuals like Roland Meighan,   psychologist Paula Rothermel,  barrister Ian Dowty and businesswoman  Alison Sauer. What most people do not apparently realise is that  all these groups and people are almost incestuously interconnected and share a common ideology. If I might be permitted the use of a vernacular, if somewhat vulgar expression; they all piss in the same pot. It would take too long to detail all the ways that these people, and of course Leslie Barson, are associated with each other. I’ll point out some of the major links though.

The Educational Heretics Press, a small publishing company run by Roland Meighan is one nexus in the world of British home education. They also run a charity called the Centre for Personalised Education.  The Educational Heretics Press published Jan Fortune-Wood's early books, one of which was co-authored with Terri Dowty; wife of barrister Ian Dowty. The Dowtys were both directors of a rather mysterious limited company whose registered office is their home in Leytonstone; Action on Rights for Children or ARCH.   Jan Fortune-Wood’s former husband, Mike Fortune-Wood, runs the Home Education UK website and Yahoo list HE-UK; an internet support group for home educating parents. The Centre for Personalised Education is a registered charity and for some time, they were paying Mike Fortune-Wood to undertake research and write a report on home education in this country. One of the trustees of this charity is Alison Sauer.

There is nothing sinister about any of this, except it will have been noticed that these various people often try to  pretend that they do not have anything to do with each other. For instance, when Alison Sauer was trying to persuade MP Graham Stuart to help her introduce her own guidelines on home education, many people denied that they knew anything about it. Mike Fortune-Wood was one of these who categorically stated that he had no dealings with Alison Sauer over the guidelines, even though this was a complete lie and he was reading the drafts and offering her advice all through the process.

Leslie Barson is one of these people who is known to an awful lot of the others. She is a chum of Paula Rothermel and was until two years ago a trustee of Education Otherwise.  Paula Rothermel is a mate of Mike Fortune-Woods, they are on first name terms and he allows her to  be a member of the HE-UK list. More than one member of that list has been surprised to receive an unexpected email from Dr Rothermel, who reads all that is posted on the list. I think that this is what passes for her research in the field these days! Needless to say, Mike Fortune-Wood does not tell parents that their posts are being scrutinised by a non-home educating psychologist in this way.  Ian Dowty is another friend of Mike Fortune-Wood's and they are both chums of Roland Meighan. 

I think it would be fair to say that those parents who join internet groups about home education or read almost any book on the subject, will have come into contact with the prevailing ideology of this network. Briefly, this may be stated as being opposed to compulsory education, in favour of child-centred or autonomous education and very strongly against oversight of home education by the state. To suggest that Leslie Barson somehow holds extreme views about this is absurd; this is the mainstream ideology of  all the influential groups and individuals in British home education today.

Ian Dowty's legal opinion on flexi-schooling

I thought that readers might be interested to hear what Ian Dowty has to say on the subject of flexi-schooling. As readers probably know, he is a lawyer whose own son gained a place at Oxford after being home educated. This is a message that he sent to Alison Sauer;

 Flexi-schooling is legally possible (apparently), but the bottom-line is that it's at the discretion of a school's head who can start it or stop it at any time. You can't make any head do it, whether they "refuse" for good or bad or policy (whether local or central) reasons. That would be the case even if "or otherwise" included flexi-schooling, which is about as far as you can go, surely? If I've missed something, let me know and I'll gladly reconsider.

In my view it is better by far to leave the legal position alone and to win hearts and minds over to flexi-schooling with solid examples of how it works and the projects/schools based on it. If you want to make it something a parent can insist on, it seems to me that you have to address the problem that it might deprive a place to a child whose parents want full-time school. Alternatively you could perhaps argue that it could alleviate the problem of a shortage of places if 2 parents wanting flexi-schooling shared a school place.

You might want to point out to the DfE that its latest guidance issued on 22nd March seems to be wrong where it says " Pupils should be marked absent from school during periods when they are receiving home education." Since they are absent with leave of the head they cannot be "absent" and should not be marked as such - s444(3) Education Act 1996 makes it clear that "The child shall not be taken to have failed to attend regularly at the school by reason of his absence from the school— (a) with leave". If a child is marked as absent, the LA can use the register as evidence in court that the child is not attending regularly and this might give rise to an erroneous prosecution of a child who is actually deemed by s444(3) not to be absent. They ought to leave the law alone too :)

Home educated children and the 'broad and balanced curriculum'

Regular readers will know that I am something of a connoisseur of hypocrisy among home educators. Not that I believe there to be more hypocrisy among them than the general population, but rather that some of the more prominent among them tend to be very po-faced and sanctimonious and so the hypocrisy is all the more entertaining.


A few days ago on the television news, Robert Goddard of ATL, a teaching union, said this:



`All evidence suggests that whilst some young people that are home educated do get a broad and balanced curriculum, there's a lot of evidence that suggests that quite a few of them don't. We feel that registration and monitoring of that provision will help towards all young people getting those skills and knowledge that they need to excel in life’



Inevitably, some home educators promptly went mad and accused him of a ‘slur’ against home educating parents. What evidence did he have that quite a few home educated children were not getting a broad and balanced curriculum?

Well of course, anybody who took part in the Graham Badman enquiry and the associated fuss will know full well that an awful lot of home educators were and are bitterly opposed to giving their children a ‘broad and balanced curriculum’. They have a visceral dislike of any curriculum; especially one which is broad and balanced. The concept of broad and balanced curriculum was regularly denounced on home educating blogs, forums and lists as a coercive tool, one which right-thinking home educators should reject. Here are Alan Thomas and Harriet Patterson explaining why they don’t think it is necessary for home educated children. See section 5 of the following:



http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmchilsch/memo/elehomed/me1602.htm




Last year, the Department for Education website said this about home education:



'parents do not have to follow the National Curriculum. However, parents should deliver a broad and balanced curriculum'


This caused such anger among many home educators that Fiona Nicholson got together with Ian Dowty to try and make them remove it. The very idea, that home educating parents should be delivering a broad and balanced curriculum! It was outrageous!

And so a few years down the line, after having fought vociferously for their right not to provide their children with a broad and balanced curriculum, somebody from one of the teaching unions notices this and remarks upon it. He is at once attacked. How dare he suggest that quite a few home educated children are not receiving a broad and balanced curriculum? Why, it is a thing beloved of home educators, all of whom do their very best to ensure that their children receive such a curriculum.

This is such a monumentally awful piece of barefaced hypocrisy, that it goes straight into the Simon Webb Hall of Hypocrisy Fame. Indeed, I think that it will be a strong contender for the Seth Pecksniff Memorial Prize for Arrant Hypocrisy. Seriously, has anybody ever heard a better example of the doublethink which goes on in the world of British home education?

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...'

Anti-democratic activity in Birmingham

A couple of days ago I wrote about my concerns for democracy when it comes to home educators and their dealings with government, both central and local. My problems centre around the home educators and their allies rather than the local authorities and Parliament. A meeting was scheduled on October 12th for home educating parents in Birmingham to meet with the local authority officers who deal with elective home education in the city. This meeting was to be completely open, with any home educators at all welcome. The council were even laying on creche facilities for children, so that all parents could take part. Education Otherwise became involved in the business and began inviting various people from outside Birmingham. Mike Fortune-Wood from Wales, for instance, Fiona Nicholson from Sheffield and Ian Dowty from London. This changed the whole emphasis of the thing. From a meeting to discuss local issues, it began to turn into something like a national conference!

I have, as is my habit, been ringing people up and asking a lot of questions about this and the impression which I gained is that the local authority officers in Birmingham were not very happy about this attempt to bring outsiders into the meeting in this way. They originally thought that it would be just a discussion between local parents and council employees. Here is the email sent by Birmingham about the meeting before anybody mentioned bringing a barrister from London:

Please see below the final venue and agenda for the meeting on the 12th of
October.

The meeting is being held at the Council Offices, Margaret Street between
10am and 11.30 am.

Agenda;
1. Introduction
2. Issues raised by Home Educating parents
3. Response by LA officers
4. Actions to take forward

The following people will be attending;

Jason Lowther (Policy Director)
John Smail (Assistant Director, Integrated Services for Young People and
Family Support)
Michael Innocenti (Acting Head of Pupil Connect)

Gary Carruthers (Elective Home Education Advisor)
Carl Kirland (Elective Home Education Advisor)
Marie Murphy (Elective Home Education Advisor)
Alex Mroczkowski (Special Educational Needs Assessment Service)


As you know Leisure Services will be hosting a session for any delegates'
children who wish to take part and it is important that they have final
numbers
by next Tuesday (5th).

As can be plainly seen, this is an open meeting; they just want an indication of the numbers. The EHE advisors had told all the families with whom they worked about this meeting and a large turnout was expected. Gary Carruthers, one of the EHE advisors in Birmingham, said;

'I had invited over a dozen non-affilliated families myself as well as Education Everywhere. I also asked those I'd invited to ask others they thought may be interested in taking part. Jason had invited other home educators.'

No doubt that this is open to all local parents. Dozens of families have been invited; the local authority are expecting this to be a big and open event. At some stage of the proceedings, local home educating parents who wished to attend were told by the local Education Otherwise representative that it had suddenly become a small, invitation only affair and that they would not be allowed to attend. It is unclear why this should have been. Local authority officers told me that they were uneasy about the possibility of having a lot of people from outside Birmingham coming to the meeting. There has been so much bad publicity about Birmingham recently that it was feared that a newspaper reporter might attend. They also could not see why they should be providing facilities for the children of parents who did not even live in Birmingham! A fair point really. The end result of all this was truly surreal. At the meeting were people from Wales and Sheffield who were supposedly looking after home educators interests, even though they were neither home educating parents nor residents of Birmingham. Home educating parents from Birmingham who wished to attend were told that they could not do so. It would be three weeks before they were even told what had been said at the meeting.

I cannot tell readers just what a lousy example of democracy this episode is. Local home educators wishing to attend a meeting about home education in their city are barred, but members of national organisations who are not themselves home educating parents are allowed in. I have never heard anything like it in my life! This could have been a brilliant example of grassroots democracy, with ordinary parents dealing directly with the officials from Birmingham City Council. Instead, it was hijacked by people from large organisations and the ordinary parents were squeezed out.

This is a perfect illustration of why local home educating groups are the democratic way forward. The reason for the presence of people like Mike Fortune-Wood, Fiona Nicholson and Ian Dowty was very simple and had little to do with the difficulties of the parents in Birmingham; many of whom had specific concerns which they wished to raise with local authority officers and which they were prevented from doing because the meeting had become an exclusive one for 'important' people from big organisations. Education Otherwise and Home education UK feel that other local authorities are looking to Birmingham for a lead when it comes to monitoring elective home education. They are therefore anxious to change what Birmingham are doing before their methods are widely adopted. One can see this point of view, but the way they went about it meant that local home educators were sidelined and ignored in their own area. This was disgraceful and the very antithesis of democracy. It must always be borne in mind that nobody has ever voted for people like Mike Fortune-Wood or Ian Dowty, whereas the parents in Birmingham are actually voters and therefore have a direct stake in what is happening in the city. These people were the only ones who had any business at all at the meeting on October 12th.