When social workers call on home educating families

In a recent  comment on this blog, somebody drew attention to this link, which appeared on the Education Otherwise support group list. Here it is:

http://ccpexposed.wordpress.com/category/kids-for-profit/


This was posted in connection with the idea that social workers might visit home educating parents. Scroll down and you will see mention of fathers killing their children, rather than let social workers take them away.  For those who don’t know about this particular conspiracy theory, the notion is that stealing children from families and then placing them for adoption is a money-making racket run by various businesses, in conjunction with corrupt and venial local authorities. This is said to be especially  dangerous for home educating parents, as social workers might be more inclined to seize their children and such parents should therefore fight tooth and nail to prevent social services from gaining access to their children. I have to say that in my experience, whenever social workers take an interest in a home educating family, they invariably have good reason. Still, maybe that’s just me! I’m going to look at a real case today and then let readers judge for themselves. It involves the children of a home educating mother being snatched by police and social workers and then held for over eight months in foster homes. I know something of this case, because it took place in the London Borough of Hackney, where I lived and worked for many years.  I will use the real names of those involved, because the parents have put all the information into the public domain and also so that readers can check what I am saying for themselves.

Here is what happened. On January 29th this year, a home education group was meeting in Springfield Park in Hackney. The police and social workers turned up and took away an eleven year-old boy called Guy Freeman-Pow and his nine year-old sister Mia.  They were then sent to foster homes. The rumour, quite correct in fact, was that this action had been precipitated by something which the boy had posted on his Facebook page. There was no suggestion that the children had been neglected or ill-treated, nor that their education was defective.  At subsequent court hearings, it was decided that the children should not be returned to their mother. She commissioned a report from Alan Thomas, the well known expert on home education. The report may be seen here:

https://www.facebook.com/LindaPow1391/posts/3329728659073


The judge at the hearing in July this year, refused even to look at this report.

This then is the case as it has been circulating in certain circles; a terrible indictment of social services and the tendency of local authorities to snatch children on the most trivial pretexts. What justification could there be for a nine year-old girl to be seized like this and put into a foster home?  This is the sort of case that those of us interested in such things see all the time on internet lists about home education  and this is all that most people on such groups will ever know about it. Let’s look now in detail at the background. Readers who are prudish or of a sensitive disposition, may wish to go no further. You have been warned!

The children’s mother, Linda Pow, says that  she is, ‘ Fighting to get my children back from being stolen by police and social services for supporting my partner Michael J Freeman in the ipornographerbooks.com.’  To begin with, her partner’s  name is not always  Michael J Freeman, but we will return to this point later. He certainly goes under this name currently and so let’s see what he does. Here is a book  called Forbidden Passion, written by this man:

https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Michael_J_Freeman_Forbidden_Passion?id=CWXCWRpoNxQC


Hmmm. It shows a young person tricked out as a schoolgirl and we can see right up her skirt; her knickers are showing. You will observe that the mother of the children taken by social workers endorses this book and has apparently read it. Well, we shouldn’t judge a book by the cover alone! Let’s have a look inside:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CWXCWRpoNxQC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=forbidden+passion+michael+J+freeman&source=bl&ots=Lorbg9Wy4K&sig=ufgOfe1DfohqxRPFYu9ndyrcY2M&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ZpJuUqmnMc_e7Aab3oD4Dw&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=forbidden%20passion%20michael%20J%20freeman&f=false

On Page 1, our eyes fall at once upon the sentence, ‘He wanted to fuck a real schoolgirl now and have sex with her.’  This isn’t too promising. By Page 2, the protagonist has met a real schoolgirl and is talking of, ‘shooting his sperm all over her face’.  Well, I think we have seen enough of that book. Those who actually read the section on offer will soon find that the small part which I have quoted is relatively inoffensive.   Still, Michael J Freeman has written many others. Perhaps this was not typical of his oeuvre. Here is his Amazon page:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Michael-J.-Freeman/e/B001K8WIMY/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1382978231&sr=1-2-ent


Let’s have a look at a few other books of his. The Honey Trap is about a man sent to prison for producing child pornography.  The Nonce is about a man sent to prison for having sex with an underage girl. What else do we have?  The Abduction tells the story of an eight year-old girl who is abducted by a gang of paedophiles. Let's have a look at,  The Pervert. Ah, this is about a man who meets an underage prostitute via the internet. I think perhaps that readers are  beginning to get the idea! The recurring leitmotif in these stories is prison and underage sex. The author of these stories is the father of the children who were taken into care in Hackney. Before they were taken away by social workers, they were dividing their time between this country and Italy, where Michael J Freeman lives. I wonder if any readers with nine year-old daughters would care for them to spend much time in the company of a man who writes about fucking schoolgirls and shooting sperm in their faces? No? You prudes! 

This is not however the full story, not by a long chalk. Michael J Freeman is really Michael Muldoon. He has a string of convictions dating back sixty years, when at the age of fourteen he was arrested for  carrying a firearm. He was a pornographer in the 1960s and in December 1969, was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. He stabbed a man eighty nine times and then dumped the corpse in Epping Forest.  Yes, you did read that right; eighty nine stab wounds.  After his release, he started to deal in pornography again and was sent back to prison. He was also charged in connection with a film of naked children, which led to a trial  under both the Obscene Publications Act and the Protection of Children Act. Here is his own account of this:

http://danceproductions.wix.com/eroticartist#!about-videx-/c1jou


As to what  eleven year-old Guy posted on Facebook,  it was an advertisement for the book; The Nonce. When the police went to his home, they initially arrested the mother for possession of indecent material, which was found on a computer. She says that this was a misunderstanding; the material was actually on her eleven year-old son’s computer…

I have examined this case in some detail for a purpose, which is this. The next time that we hear of social workers wanting to speak to home educated children, we should not be too quick to assume that they are in the wrong and that this is persecution of an innocent family. Usually, as in this case, there is good reason to be concerned and the children’s interests are the priority.  Do any readers think that in this case, Hackney social services over-reacted? 

Identifying children missing from education; Part 2

This will be a brief post, for I am very busy today. I am constantly enchanted at the way that asking simple questions of home educators provokes such bizarre responses by some of those who comment here. Apparently, asking open ended questions like this  is symptomatic of great fear and narrow mindedness in those asking them!

I am glad that I had an opportunity yesterday of seeing what readers thought when confronted with a genuine case of a child missing from education. Not one felt that anything should be done about the child and many seemed to think that he was actually better off  as a long term truant than he would have been if he had remained at school. One person even thought that getting up at one in the afternoon, spending the next few hours playing computer games, before hanging out with a bunch of kids who were drifting into petty crime, actually constituted an acceptable education! I can see that most readers feel that such children should be left alone, because the alternative might involve them personally in some slight inconvenience, if, that is,  local authorities began trying to sort out genuinely home educated children from long term truants and those missing from education.

I was asked yesterday by more than one person what I would do about such children; those who drop out of school in this way. The general feeling seemed to be that the local authority was somehow responsible for children like this who truant. This is unlikely. Most children do not truant or drop out of school. There are a few who do, even in the best schools. We need to ask ourselves why most pupils remain at school and a few do not. Often, there are common factors in the home lives of truants; it is more likely that these are responsible for the problem than that it is the fault of the school. As I am sure readers know, academic success or failure has far more to do with home background than which school is attended; five times as much, according to some research. From this perspective, truanting is more often than not a sign of something wrong at home than  a problem at school.

What can be done about such children? Making the process of becoming a home educator a little more complex would be helpful. Many of the sort of parents like Jack’s mother, whom we met yesterday, would think twice if they knew that they would be interviewed before being able to deregister their children from school. I have seen a few parents who would be discouraged from sending off that letter if they knew that they would be visited regularly and have to explain to somebody just what they were doing about their son or daughter’s education. True, this would be irritating for genuine home educators, but it would only be a minor inconvenience for most.

Some children simply do not wish to learn about photosynthesis or 19th century poetry. Often, this too says something about their home background, but what can we actually do about it? A local college has a scheme now where ‘disaffected’ boys of fourteen and fifteen can learn about vehicle maintenance for a few days a week. A deal is struck with the boys whereby if they attend school on the other days, they get to muck about with engines for two days a week. This approach is worth expanding.

Already, this post has eaten into my time and so I must call a halt for now.

Visits and disordered thinking

I have talked over the last few days about the fact that almost every high profile home educator in this country, those who appear in the newspapers, on the television, lead support groups and constantly pop up on blogs and lists; have or claim to have malfunctioning brains. This sets home education apart from various other minority interests. Does this matter though? I think that it does, because it has a bearing on the agenda that that they push forward and urge others to adopt.


It is important to realise that those characters who hand out press releases and so on or appear on radio or television news programmes, have not been chosen by the majority of home educators to represent their interests. They are creating opinion, rather than merely reflecting it. We saw this very clearly with the reaction to the Graham Badman enquiry. It was announced on January 19th, 2009. That same day, a press release went out from Sheffield, which the BBC mentions here:



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




‘Home educators are angry’! Of course only one home educator is angry, but she wishes to stir up others so that they share her anger and desire not to allow regular monitoring of home educated children. This is a classic example of how the supposed leaders of the home educating ‘community’ try deliberately  to create an atmosphere of fear and mistrust. There is no evidence that any other home educators had even heard about the proposed review at that point, let alone that they were angry about it!

There is not room, nor do I have the time, to examine every aspect of how and why these prominent home educating parents shape the views and opinions of others to their own ends. I want to look at just one part of this; the campaign against visits from local authority officers.

Nobody except a home educating parent can understand why anybody would object to someone from the local authority checking on the educational  achievement and welfare of a child who is not at school. Yet this has become almost the orthodox position among many parents who educate their own children; they don't want visits. Why should this be so?

This opposition to visits has been spearheaded and coordinated by no more than hundred or so militant home educators or former home educators, most of whom, as I have said, have either learning difficulties or mental illnesses. This might explain why they feel so strongly about this subject and why they urge others to join in their own, almost pathological,  desire to avoid having visitors in their home from the local authority.

Let us take the case of a parent who is bipolar or schizophrenic. Without debating the rights or wrongs of the case, many people, including local authority officers, would think that such a parent would need closer monitoring and a sharper eye kept on her child than one who was not mentally ill. Such parents therefore wish to avoid local authority involvement in their lives as far as possible, lest they are told that they are not well enough to look after and teach their children. I know of a number of well known home educators in this position and their opposition to monitoring is a direct consequence of their medical condition.

Some parents with dyslexia or ADHD had terrible experience at school twenty, thirty or forty years ago, before such conditions were really understood. They are very quick to pull their children out of school at the first sign of trouble, because they think that the kids will suffer as they did themselves. A lot of them have a hatred and mistrust of teachers and schools, caused by their own experiences. Once they have the child at home, they are not prepared to allow any former teachers to come round and monitor their children’s progress. This scenario is enormously common among well known home educating parents.

I wrote yesterday about the way that bizarre belief systems are often associated with home educators with mental illnesses or learning difficulties. These provide another reason why parents do not want home visits from the local authority. Consider the case of the mother who blogs enthusiastically about her nine year old daughter’s enjoyment of spelling. What’s that? You can’t see why that would discourage anybody from wanting monitoring visits? Spelling is a part of literacy, why would you want to keep that hidden from a local authority officer? Not that sort of spelling, you fool! I mean spelling as in casting magical enchantments. The mother is witch and encourages her daughter to spend her time learning magic.  When you combine this with the fact that the father is a professional medium who raises the dead in the back parlour, you can see just why the parents are dead against having anybody from the County Council poking round the house and asking how their kid spends her days! Again, this is a pretty common theme among prominent home educators; children being at best exposed to and at worst indoctrinated in barking-mad worldviews.

Those home educators who are influential in British home education are nearly all like those I have described above. They have, or think they have, good reasons for avoiding visits from their local authority. They work hard to try and persuade others to share their odd approach to home education, which has of course the effect of creating tension and confrontation between local authorities and home educating parents. At the root of the problem is the disordered thinking of a fairly small number of militant home educators,  who  have managed to make their own weird  belief system the  default setting for many other parents who do not really know what is going on.

Making money out of home education

Those who hang around on home educating forums and lists on the internet will probably be familiar with the expression ‘rent seeker’. It is meant to describe a particular type of home educator who hopes to make money out of home education by hiring herself, or himself, out to local authorities or central government and charging for services. I have myself been accused of this and of course the archetypal ’rent seeker’, at least according to some, gave evidence to the select committee a couple of days ago.


Now I am all in favour of private enterprise in such matters, but I am also pleased to see the state getting in on this act as well and so was enchanted to see a local authority attempting to turn home education into a money-spinner. As readers probably know, it is possible for local authorities to obtain funding for home educated children to attend college once they are fourteen. Here is a local authority discussing this among themselves:



http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/moderngov/Published/C00000461/M00004827/AI00019641/$ProposaltoreclaimFundingforElectiveHomeEducated.docA.ps.pdf




Notice incidentally how home educators are ‘challenging’ the local authority to provide the funding! Not just asking or requesting. Interesting too to note one of their motives in agreeing to such requests:



BCSB is, therefore, supportive of any mechanisms which

may enable the local authority to track and monitor the education, safety and wellbeing

of those children who are receiving a home education.



Still, this is all to the good. Home educated children are actually getting to attend college and study for nothing, as the government has explicitly stated that they may. Some authorities though have scented an opportunity to make a bob or two from all this; the London Borough of Bexley, for example. Take a look at this:



http://www.adultedbexley.co.uk/SubjectHomeEd1.html






You will see that they are specifically targeting home educators and charging them cash upfront. You might be able to claim some of this back, but this is by no means certain. I have tried in vain to find out from Bexley whether any poor sap has actually been fleeced in this way, but they are strangely reluctant to discuss the matter or even say if anybody has handed over cash for one of these courses. I wonder if anybody knows any other local authority trying this on?

Another Serious Case Review involving the death of a home educated child

A few days ago I posted details of a Serious Case Review from Barking and Dagenham which involved the death of a home educated child. Here is one from Wales, which apparently has some bearing on the decision of the Welsh Assembly to look at the compulsory registration of home educated children:

http://www.wrexham.gov.uk/assets/pdfs/lscb/case_review/child_siond.pdf

Changes in pupil registration regulations

Regular readers will recall that I have several times written here that although there may be no specific new laws planned around home education, many of the recommendations of the Badman report could be introduced in small stages, simply by modifying existing laws. We have seen this happen in recent weeks when one of the suggestions made by Graham Badman was slipped in as an amendment to the Education (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2006 - as amended by The Education (Pupil Registration) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2010. This was the requirement that after parents deregister a child from school, the school should retain the child's name on their roll for twenty days. Personally, I think it a good idea, but that is neither here nor there. The fact is that when it was included as part of Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill 2009, a number of home educating parents objected to it. It has now been brought in anyway. The same will probably be happening with other recommendations from Badman. Michael Gove and Nick Gibb will simply slip them into changes in regulations and most people will not even notice until it has been done. What sort of changes could be made without drawing up a major new law? Well, almost anything really; some of them very wide ranging. Let me give an example.

I was at a special school in Hackney yesterday, with a mother who is very unhappy about the class that her child has now been placed in. She told the head that she regarded the new class as little better than baby-sitting and that unless her daughter is moved, she will simply remove her from the school and keep her at home. One might have though that like other parents wishing to home educate, she had a perfect right to do so and simply needed to write a letter to de-register her child from the school. She does not have the right to do this at all. Children at special schools cannot be de-registered without the consent of the local authority. The legal basis for this is to be found in Regulation 8(2) of those same Education(Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2006 which I mentioned above. And guess what? There is absolutely nothing to stop the government tacking another bit onto the The Education (Pupil Registration) (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2010, which extends this principle to all schools. I have heard it suggested that the requirement of Regulation 8(2) is discriminatory against disabled children and actually breaches the law because of this. Bringing other schools into line with this requirement would simply remove the discrimination against disabled pupils. In other words, it would be possible to compel the parents of all schoolchildren to seek permission of the local authority before they were allowed to take their kids out of school. From there, it would only be another small step to ensure that permission could be made contingent upon the parents signing an agreement that they would work closely with the local authority and accept regular visits. No signing of the agreement; no permission to de-register.

In case readers think that this is some fantasy which I have dreamed up, I suggest that they familiarise themselves with the process by which existing legislation can be amended in this way. They might be in for a shock. Michael Gove certainly does not want a big confrontation with home educators of the sort that Ed Balls had, but nor is he apparently intending to leave the situation as it is. Any future changes are likely to be small tweaks in the law and existing regulations. Most will, like the twenty day rule, be slipped past home educating parents until it is too late to do anything about it.

What's the hurry? My child can always take GCSEs and A levels later if she wants to

Whenever I write about teenagers studying for GCSEs, several people always remark that there is no reason why qualifications have to be taken at home at the same age that they are at school. Why shouldn't a twenty year old take GCSEs if that is what she wishes? What's the hurry?

There are two main reasons why it is a good idea to get fourteen and fifteen year olds to sit their GCSEs at the same age as schoolchildren. Parents who talk vaguely of their children sitting these important examinations 'later' usually have a mindset which is twenty or thirty years out of date. At one time it was quite possible to take evening classes at a local college, either free or for a nominal amount, and take any GCEs or GCSEs which one had failed at school. It used to be quite common. These days of course, hardly any FE colleges do such a thing. The only GCSE exams which they handle tend to be re-sits and these are generally limited to those who have already taken them at school. They are not for home educated children as a rule. Because by this age, they will probably not be amenable to being taught by their parents, most will need to do the GCSEs via a correspondence course. These typically cost around £300 for each subject.

A far more important reason for taking examinations at the age of fourteen or fifteen is this. Most teenagers at that age do not have the sort of distractions which we have in adulthood. They do not have to work for a living, few of them have partners and children, they do not have to worry about paying rent or any of the other things that adults concern themselves with. They are free to concentrate solely upon their studies. This lack of distractions makes it far more likely that they will achieve good grades. How many nineteen and twenty year olds want to sit down day after day learning about the causes of World War I or how to solve quadratic equations? At that age, there are usually far more interesting things to be doing, like going to the pub or having romantic entanglements! Better by far to study like this as a child than as an adult.

A levels, if taken even a year or two after everybody else, prove an even greater problem. Because of the coursework involved and the higher level of academic work, it is very hard to do A levels except at a college or sixth form. I have in the past mentioned that it is almost impossible to get on an A level course at college unless you already have five GCSEs at grades A*-C, but there is another consideration. If you start studying for A levels over the age of nineteen, you have to pay for them. This is quite pricy. There is also the fact that as a young person of twenty you will be compelled to spend every day with a bunch of sixteen year-olds, not something that many young men and women would relish.

These are some of the reasons why if examinations are going to be taken by a young person, they should be taken at the same time as everybody else of the same age. The idea of 'taking them later' is a bit of a chimera. I have known one or two twenty year-olds study at college for A levels and it has not worked out terribly well. It may happen, but I have never heard of it, that a nineteen or twenty year old takes five GCSEs. This would be very unusual though and probably expensive. The fact is that if a child reaches the age of sixteen without taking GCSEs, then that is probably it as far as GCSEs and A levels go. She will, if she enters formal education at all after this age, find herself limited to BTECs. New Diplomas and vocational courses. Nothing at all wrong with these of course, but is would surely be better for the sixteen year-old to have as wide a range of choices as possible in her future academic career, rather than being diverted into certain channels purely as a result of her parents ideology.

Parenting styles of home educators

I posted yesterday about the use of operant conditioning with children, which apparently left many readers with the impression that I am a cold and authoritarian parent. Some of the comments were very revealing; 'nauseous', abhorrent', 'distasteful' and so on. I am not altogether surprised by this, because the parenting style of many home educating parents who comment here is very different from my own. Let's have a look at parenting styles and see what the difference is between how I operate and how many other home educating parents seem to do things.

One of the most popular ways of categorising parenting styles is that devised by Diana Baumrind, an American developmental psychologist. Her classifications are very widely used these days. She divides parents into four types, based upon how demanding towards their children they are and how responsive to their needs. The first type are authoritarian parents. They are highly demanding, with very structured homes and expect instant obedience from their children. They are demanding without being responsive. Judging by some of the comments yesterday, this is how readers evidently see me! Perhaps this is because most of them seem to belong to the permissive or indulgent type of parent. This seems to be a very common type of home educator; they feel that they must not demand much of their children, focusing instead upon being responsive to their needs.
The children are free to choose how they wish to behave and few demands are made upon them. These parents are very non-traditional in the approach to parenting. Their children really direct their own lives and decide what they wish to do. There are also uninvolved or neglectful parents, who just leave their kids to it. These are both unresponsive and undemanding. I don't think many of the parents who come on here are like that.

The type of parenting which many psychologists today think is best is what is known as authoritative parenting. These parents are both very responsive but also demanding. This is child-centred parenting which has high expectations in terms of the child's behaviour. There is unconditional love combined with clear standards for the child. This sort of parenting is also known as balanced parenting and it is the parenting which most childcare experts today recommend.

Now I can see clear links between the indulgent or permissive style of parenting, in which few demands are made upon the child, and those home educating parents who describe themselves as autonomous or child centred. They allow the children to dictate what they wish to do, what they will learn and various other matters. Some have no set rules for bedtime or getting up in the morning and their children are almost entirely self-directed. No limits are set on television watching or computer use and no formal academic work is demanded. They do not like telling their children what to do and have an aversion to the word 'No'. Somebody who attends a home education group contacted me recently and said that the other parents at the group stared at her in shocked surprise because she often tells her son, 'No'. The feeling she got was that some home educating parents regarded this in the same light as smacking a child! It has to be said at once that this kind of parenting is associated with serious problems in adolescence and adulthood. What kind of problems? Well, drink and drugs for one. A recent study in America on teenage drinking found that the children of indulgent parents, those who are very warm emotionally to their children but make few demands upon them, are three times as likely to binge drink as the children of authoritative parents. The children of authoritarian parents were also at risk of misusing alcohol, as were those of uninvolved parents.

The children of permissive parents are also more prone to getting into trouble generally as adolescents than those of authoritative parents and also more likely to experiment with illegal drugs. Not surprisingly, they do not do as well academically either! On the plus side, indulgent parents do tend to have children high in self esteem and with low levels of depression. By far the best adjusted and happiest children and teenagers are those of authoritative parents. They are socially more competent than other children and generally better able to function in society. This is not only their own perception of themselves, they have very high self esteem, but also shows up on objective tests. Academically, this group also performs best.

A parenting style which imposes strong demands upon the child to behave in accordance with the parents expectations seems to be psychologically the best and most healthy for children. When this is combined with a child centred approach, unconditional love and a degree of flexibility, the resultant way of raising a child is called balanced parenting and it is almost universally recommended. Permissive parenting on the other hand, where the child decides for herself what she will do and when she will do it and few demands are made upon her by parents, is associated with many problems in later life. I said yesterday that I deliberately set out to use operant conditioning to modify my children's behaviour. I can make no such claim about my authoritative style of parenting. This came about through observing some pretty frightful children of friends, all of whom had been raised in an indulgent fashion by their misguided parents. These kids were generally of the spoilt brat type and some were so awful that we stopped inviting their parents round. It was the experience of those children which caused me to think carefully about what seemed the best way of childrearing. These were not dysfunctional families; most of those were uninvolved or neglectful parents. Our friends tend to be teachers, social workers and so on. The indulgent parenting style definitely seemed to be most popular among them.