Are local authorities acting unlawfully when they monitor home education on a regular basis?

One of the most irritating features of home education in this country is the tendency of parents to latch on to random and fairly obscure words and phrases, incorporating them in every letter they write to their council or submission made to a select committee. ‘Conflate’ is one such word, ‘purposive’ is another; as in ‘learning by purposive conversation‘. Combined with the use of odd Latin expressions, I think that the hope is that this will lend their writing a veneer of erudition. Sadly, it has the opposite effect!

Without doubt, the most popular and overused expression in recent years has been ‘ultra vires’. These Latin words simply means beyond one’s powers and are generally used in connection with statutory bodies such as local authorities or government departments. For home educators, this phrase is most often used about the routine monitoring of home education. This is on the increase in some areas; the county of Lincolnshire and city of Nottingham, for example. The claim is made that these local authorities are accordingly acting in an unlawful manner and exceeding their powers. Let us see if this might be true.

The basis for many of the claims made about local authorities overstepping the mark with home education are founded upon a couple of lines in the 2007 guidelines on home education. They say:



2.7 Local authorities have no statutory duties in relation to monitoring the quality of home education on a routine  
      basis.



There are three points to consider here. First, local authorities go beyond their statutory duties all the time and mostly people are glad about this. The statutory duties are the absolute bare minimum that an authority must undertake. If they do not do these things, then they are in breach of the law and Council Tax payers or the government can call them to account. Doing more than this bare minimum though is what most of us expect from our council. If my council has a statutory duty to run at least one library and then instead opens three or four, I am not going to complain about this. If they have a duty to empty my bin at least once a fortnight, I shall not be taking them to a judicial review if they want to collect my rubbish more frequently than this. They are not acting unlawfully by doing more than their statutory duty.

In other words, the fact that they may have no statutory duties in relation to monitoring home education on a regular basis does not mean that they cannot or should not do this. It is just one of those extra things that they might choose to do which goes beyond the absolute minimum that they are obliged to do by law.

The second point to consider is that it is in any case debatable whether or not such a duty exists in law. The law is unclear on this point and many local authorities take a different view of it than that held by home educating parents. Before instituting a policy of this sort, local authorities always take extensive legal advice, knowing as they do that home educators are a touchy bunch. I rang up  Lincolnshire and Nottingham and they both confirmed that they have taken the advice of barristers on this question before sending out the letters to which some home educating parents object. What it essentially boils down to is this. The legal department at these  local authorities believe one thing and have been confirmed in their belief by consultation with experts in the law relating to education. A handful of parents believe that they have a better understanding of the law, chiefly because of what they have read on various internet lists to which they belong. It will be interesting to see which side are right!

The third point is even simpler. Let us assume that local authorities do not have a right to monitor the quality of home education on a regular basis. In other words, let us concede everything that the most militant home educators assert so forcefully. Let us even grant that such actions on the part of local authorities would be unlawful. None of this makes the least difference. The aim of yearly checks has nothing to do with the quality of home education; they are intended simply and solely to establish that an education is actually still taking place. They have no reference at all to the quality of the thing; they just want evidence that the child is in fact being educated. The passage of time can have the effect of altering what would be a suitable education for a child and the fact that the local authority was satisfied that a child of five was receiving a suitable education tells them nothing at all about that same child at twelve or fourteen.

Local authorities are not acting unlawfully in checking each year that children who are not at school are receiving an education. It may not be strictly part of their duties to do this, but as I remarked above, we are usually pleased when our council does more than they have to! I am not at all sure that those home educating parents who have learnt all the law they know from just reading blogs and home educating forums really do know more than the Borough Solicitors in various places. The way to settle the matter would of course be to seek a judicial review and I understand that two people are currently attempting this in Lincolnshire. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Finita, la commedia

I dare say that loyal readers were made anxious a couple of weeks ago when I announced that Nikki Harper, ably assisted by Maire Stafford and Mike Fortune-Wood, was trying to have me arrested for a criminal offence. This supposed offence was poking fun at her on this blog. When she contacted the Lincolnshire police on July 11th, she did not put it in quite that way of course. Instead, she suggested that she was a victim of harassment, contrary to the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. It was a brave and inexpensive attempt to get at me, once she had discovered that bringing an action against me for libel would have ruined her financially.

I have gained a great deal of pleasure from this whole affair. It is the first time in sixty odd years that I have been accused of a crime and so it was a novel and interesting experience for that reason  alone. Even better was the discovery that Nikki Harper was every bit as excitable and verbose when speaking to a police officer as she was when complaining to Lincolnshire County Council about a circular letter which she received from them. The police file on Mrs Harper’s views and opinions about me and my blog is extensive, because of course she was unable to keep to the point without bringing astrology and spiritualism into the matter. One is reminded of Mr Dick from David Copperfield, who, it will be recalled, was unable to write anything with introducing King Charles’ head into the case.

When first Mrs Harper told them that this was a case of online harassment, the police assumed that I had been sending her abusive or threatening communications via email. Either that or pestering her family and friends by contacting them and saying things about her.  When, after some time, it merged that what had actually happened was that she had blogged unpleasantly about me and I her and that she had been coming onto my blog and rowing with me via the comments, they rather lost interest. It might be annoying for somebody to tease you on a blog; it is not a criminal offence.

I wonder if anybody can guess what advice the police gave Mrs Harper, if she wished to avoid becoming distressed and upset by me and my blog in the future? Yes, they told her that the best thing she could do was to avoid contacting me or having any further communications at all with me. They also suggested that if I had been telling lies about her, she might pursue a civil remedy. Case closed.

As a matter of interest, one of the things that this well known astrologer was irritated about was what she described as ’malicious tagging’ in my posts here. She told me in a comment here  that she objected to this. On July 6th, for example, she asked me, ’ What are your reasons for tagging this post with "Ashby Spiritualist Church"?’ She went on to suggest that this was part of a smear campaign against her. Talk of a 'smear campaign' leads one to suppose of course that she had no connection with the 'church'. The problem is that when you are writing for the Huffington Post about home education and introduce yourself there as an astrologer, that does rather bring the subject into the debate. When you are using your articles there to promote a book aimed at dragging  young people into this mad belief system and getting them to subscribe to this nonsense, that too makes your views on both  astrology and what is described as, 'mind, body, spirit',  a fair matter of comment. As for the Ashby Spiritualist Church, the linking of which with her name Mrs Harper views as a 'smear campaign'; she is being less than candid. Here she is promoting and advertising it in a tweet from March 1st this year:



http://en.twitter.com/SpiritOdyssey/status/175181439803994112





You can hardly demonstrate your involvement with the place one minute and then the next go racing  off to the police and say that you are being criminally harassed because somebody has  linked  your name to it on a blog!

Anyway, this will mercifully be the last mention here of Nikki Harper; a matter of some relief to us all. As long as she follows the advice of the police and avoids coming here or communicating with me, I see no reason why there should be any further contact between us. I am sure that this will be a great relief to her as well as me. She is currently in the process of trying to take Lincolnshire County Council to a judicial review for what she sees as their unlawful policies. This is proving harder than expected and will,  I think,  be enough to keep her out of mischief and away from here for the foreseeable future.

More than meets the eye...

Honestly, there’s no pleasing some people! In April, Nikki Harper became annoyed with her local authority because of their new policy on home education. She embarked upon a crusade to force them to alter their course, which included Freedom of Information Requests, long letters to various councillors and local authority officers and blogging an astonishing five thousand words in just three days about the subject. I assumed that there was more to this than met the eye and that there had perhaps been some previous friction between the Harpers and Lincolnshire County Council. Somebody commenting here on the post about Trivialising the Holocaust said, ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much’. I thought so too and then put a comment to the effect that nobody writes five thousand words like that after receiving a routine letter and that there was more to this than we were being told.

Nikki Harper then posted a comment here a few days ago, claiming that this comment suggested that there might be something sinister and that the hint was that this related to her family. Since I had not meant anything of the sort, I re-read what I had written and decided that if looked at from a certain perspective, it could be taken like that. I accordingly removed the comment, because I did not think it fair to leave something like that which might be capable of that construction.

Lo and behold, today Nikki Harper feels that this is a sign that I feel guilty about the original comment. Let me make this as plain as I possibly can. I think that there is more to her dispute with Lincolnshire County Council than meets the eye. I do not think that this has anything to do with her family. I believe it is because she is the sort of demented character who is always falling out with people; whether it her council, me or members of the management of the spiritualist church in Scunthorpe. I suspect that she has rowed with her local authority before and this is why she is so furious with them now.

I tried to smooth things over by removing a comment which was ambiguous, but I can see that when dealing with such a person, this is a bad mistake; she takes such actions as signs of weakness and guilt. I hope that this will be the last time I have to write about this wretched woman and I am tempted to contact Lincolnshire County Council and tell them that they have my sympathy!

Home education in the Huffington Post

I have more than once been reproved here for suggesting that an awful lot of home educators are a bit loopy. Specifically, I have speculated from time to time whether there might be some sort of association between strange belief systems and the decision to home educate. Nonsense, I am told; this is purely an artefact of the internet , which is swarming with mad people. This is true, but it is an unfortunate fact of life that home educators who get into the public eye do tend to be a pretty rum bunch.


The latest such person is of course Nikki Harper, who now has a blog on the Huffington Post. Her latest post may be seen here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/nikki-harper/7-lessons-i-teach_b_1622031.html

Now this all conjures up a very unflattering image of home education in the minds of those who know little about it. How the heart sinks to note that it is written by an astrologer who is, ‘passionate about teen spirituality’.  Like most people, I have not the remotest idea what is meant by this. The blog post itself practically invites anybody with no knowledge of home education to ridicule the whole business.

The title alone tells one a great deal about a particular strand in British home education. If, when my daughter was thirteen, I had written a piece about the ‘seven lessons I teach’, I might perhaps have listed lessons like mathematics, English language, English literature, history, physics, chemistry and biology. Obviously, I would have hoped that she would also learn things like honesty, self-reliance and compassion, but these are not really things that one can teach. The best we can do is model them for our children and hope that we are providing a good example. Parents of children at school do this as well and to hint otherwise is merely to alienate the 99% of parents who do send their children to school. Hardly a good thing for a home educator to set out to do!

The main problem with the piece is that it is based not upon how schools really are, but upon how they used to be or how somebody who has no dealings with schools thinks they might be. According to the author, modern British schools teach subjects like confusion and indifference, but parents whose children actually attended school know that this is a lot of nonsense. Schools no more teach confusion than, say for example, home educating parents who lead their child to believe in crystal healing and raising the dead. Some schools teach confusion, as do some parents, both home educating and otherwise. Schools certainly do not hold some sort of monopoly on teaching it to children!

Consider just one of the contentions made about schools in this article; that, ‘A schooled child will learn facts’. If only this were true! This pedagogic approach, a Gradgrindian insistance on 'facts alone',  is contrasted with the author's own methods, which emphasise context and overall understanding.  As anybody at all familiar with modern schools will know only too well, a lot of the time is taken up not with learning facts but with all the paraphernalia of modern educational theory such as collaborative learning, investigative skills, empathy and so on. These techniques long ago replaced the acquisition of facts and figures by themselves. In fact much of what Mrs Harper sees as being a precious part of home education  is a standard feature of British schools.  I have written about this lack of objective teaching of facts in schools before, here for example in the Daily Telegraph;

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/3337822/But-how-did-Romeo-feel.html

Mrs Harper evidently believes that children studying history at school these days are still  sitting down in rows copying out the dates of the Battle of Trafalgar and the Charge of the Light Brigade. Alas no; nothing could be further from the truth! It is this ignorance of how schools actually are which make this piece an easy and inviting target for those who do not like or approve of home education.

As for the idea that one would have to teach a child insubordination, because otherwise she might learn to obey authority without question; has this woman ever actually  met any teenagers? Has she really met a teenager who has learned the lesson of obeying authority without question? Where is this strange being? I would like to talk to the parents of such a weird and atypical teenager so I could find out where I went wrong. My own teenage daughter never needed any lessons in insubordination nor, I suspect, do most teenagers! The very last thing most parents need to teach their teenage offspring is to challenge authority and ask questions; it is coded into the very DNA of teenagers and always has been. If she is genuinely having to teach her teenaged daughter to challenge authority and encourage her to ask questions, then there is something very odd going on.

All this is hardly a brilliant advertisement for home education; written as it is by  a home educating parent who knows nothing about modern schools  and thinks that teenagers need to be carefully coached in how to reject adult authority and question why they should do as they are told. The overall impression is of somebody who is perhaps not as in touch with the real world as she could be. Given her line of work  this is of course hardly surprising,  but it does not really encourage people to listen seriously to what she has to say about education.

Trivialising the Holocaust

One of the most awful consequences of Graham Badman’s enquiry into home educating was that quite a few home educating parents began quoting Pastor Niemoller; the anti-Nazi church leader who was imprisoned in a concentration camp for years. I am sure that we are all familiar with what he said, which is often phrased in the form of a poem, ‘First they came for the…’ More particularly, reference is made to the Jews,


Then they came for the Jews,
And I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

That anybody could be so hideously crass as to compare the extermination of six million Jews with receiving a circular from the council defies all belief and yet it is still happening. The latest example is on a blog about home education and it may be found here:

http://secondaryathome.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/but-if-youve-got-nothing-to-hide/#comments


The author of the blog, Nikki Harper, was, like all home educators known to Lincolnshire County Council, sent a letter outlining their new policy and it was this which prompted her to compare her suffering to that of Pastor Niemoller and the Jews who died in the Holocaust. It is little wonder that many local authorities regard home educating parents askance when this sort of nonsense is common. Of course, she is not the first home educator to compare herself to Pastor Niemoller, nor I suspect will she be the last. I urge home educating parents to consider how offensive this sort of thing is to Jews and how monumentally tacky it appears to those who are not.

A black mark for Lincolnshire County Council

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!