No home visits under new law

Well now that the draft details of the new legislation has been published, I should imagine that most home educators, even the autonomous ones, will be breathing a sigh of relief! It will not as widely feared, be a criminal offence to fail to register for home education. The local authority will not even be visiting homes routinely, at least not as long as these parents have the sense that the Lord gave to a goat, anyway. Section 3 d of the new regulations says that the local authority will be;


"visiting, at least once in the registration period, the place (or
at least one of the places) where education is provided to the
child."

What could be better? All that a parent who is determined to avoid having local authority officers in her home needs to do is say that the bulk of the education is taking place in the local library. All that will be necessary is meeting somebody in the library. It is a perfect face saving clause for both sides and must have surely been inserted for that very reason. I shall be making a fuller post later, but in the meantime, it is to be hoped that home educating parents will be content with this hugely watered down version of the Badman recommendations. Seeing children alone is also out if either parent or child object. Another needless anxiety removed.

"This is going to make a lot of happy, intelligent, sensible young people, become unhappy, fearful and insecure."

The above words are from the comments page in the Times on Monday and they were written by a parent apropos of the Badman Report and its proposals for regular visits from the local authority to check up on home education. I have to say, I find this a truly extraordinary assertion and cannot help but wonder what sort of young people the writer associates with! I mean, really.

The overwhelming majority of happy, intelligent, sensible and well balanced young people are used to meeting a wide variety of strangers on a regular basis. If they are home educated, then they are probably also used to at least some of these strangers asking them fatheaded questions like, "Do you know your nine times table?" or "What will you do about GCSEs?" The idea that a stranger coming to the house once a year will precipitate stable and well balanced young people to lapse into a state of fearful insecurity by asking questions like this, is a very odd one. It might have that effect upon their parents, I suppose, particularly if they are anxious about the impending visit because they have not been educating their child. This anxiety could then transmit itself to the child. In such a case though, it is the parents who are responsible for the resultant unhappiness and insecurity, not the local authority.

I have only encountered one case of this sort of behaviour personally. This was a home educating family a few miles away whom we visited when my daughter was nine. The daughter was so timid and shy that she hid upstairs during our visit and communicated by calling downstairs to her mother. Even at the age of nine, my daughter found this very peculiar. Without wishing to appear judgemental or pejorative, both the child's parents were mad as Hatters, which I think had some bearing on the behaviour of the child herself.

In general, it seems to be parents who are upset about children being questioned, rather than the children themselves. One of the mothers who was present, told me what happened when Graham Badman visited a home education group in Kent. A child expressed the desire to be a vet when she grew up. Graham Badman very pleasantly enquired if she knew that she would need a high level of mathematics for such an ambition to be feasible. He asked her casually if she was familiar with, say, the concept of square roots. Upon which, several parents intervened indignantly and the whole incident has passed into legend as showing Badman in his true colours as a villainous character like the Childcatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

I suppose that there may exist children who are so pathologically shy and nervous that they would be traumatised by the presence of an unfamiliar adult, particularly one who spoke to them. Such children are surely rare and I have no doubt at all that this degree of neurosis would qualify as a special educational need in itself and be taken into account and catered for sensitively under any new regulations. Most normal children and young people are however a little more robust. Many actually enjoy showing off and talking about their achievements. This was certainly the case with my own daughter and I used to pity the officer from our local authority who had to sit through my daughter's playing of the guitar, recorder and piano and then feign pleasure at the sight of her paintings before reading long passages of her creative writing! What a hideous job, spending the day watching other people's ghastly kids showing off!

I may perhaps be wrong, but I get the distinct impression that many of the parents who are getting worked up about this issue are themselves somewhat highly strung and emotional. As I said above, anxiety can easily be transmitted to their children and the result could be that the whole family are in a state of profound nervous excitement as the day approaches for a visit from the LA. The remedy surely lies in the parents relaxing a bit and reassuring their child that there is really nothing to be worried about.

Should children who are not receiving a "suitable education" be sent back to school?

There can be little doubt that many children supposedly being taught at home are actually receiving no sort of education at all. Does this matter? Should the local authority have the power to send such children back to school? It depends, I think, upon the circumstances.

There are at least three completely different groups of children who are not at school and are probably not receiving a "suitable education". The first are older teenagers who have been deregistered from school because they are regular truants, hate school or are in danger of being excluded for bad behaviour. Another group are children with learning difficulties of such severity that there is no realistic chance of their developing much beyond their current capabilities. The last group are the most controversial. They are children who have been withdrawn from school by their parents with the genuine intention of teaching them, but who then find themselves incapable of providing a good education for their children. Let us look at each of these categories in turn.

Fourteen and fifteen year old youths who have no intention of studying at school and are sick of the whole business of being educated are a very difficult case. On the one hand, dragging them back to school would be pointless for them; they won't actually learn anything there. Even if you can force them to sit in a classroom they will disrupt the education of those who do wish to learn. I doubt there is much to be gained by taking their parents to court either. On the other hand, I would be reluctant to accept that we should just write them off and say effectively, "Leave them to it, there's no point bothering with them!" Perhaps more vocational course at FE colleges are the answer.

Some children with severe learning difficulties, global developmental delay combined with autistic features, that sort of thing, are not going to learn much whether they are at school or home. For such children, being at home with a loving parent doing what they please is likely to be a good deal kinder than the constant badgering and attempts to engage them which they are likely to get in a special school. Sometimes, all the specialised teaching in the world will only cause distress, and all to no real purpose. In these cases, the child is perhaps better at home with his parents, no matter what the staff at the school say. I have had some experience of children like this, whose parents just want them safe at home with them and I am wholly on the parents' side. Even when the child is capable of making progress, the distress caused by the whole teaching process often seems, at least to me, to amount to cruelty. Most LAs turn a blind eye to this group and realise that they are happier at home with their families.

The final category are those whose existence most exercised Graham Badman during his review of elective home education. They are the children who are being kept at home with parents who really do not know how to provide them with an education. These children have been deregistered because of bullying, minor special educational needs or because their parents have fallen out with the school. Many of this group are of primary school age and a lot of local authorities are genuinely concerned that they are not being educated and that this will have a bad effect on their prospects in later life. I suppose that ideally such families would be offered support and help from the LA; help with advice on following a curriculum and so on. There are two problems here. First, many of these families have had a lot of conflict with the school and local authority. They do not want anything to do with them, they just want to be left alone. Secondly of course, many of the parents are "autonomous", so they won't want help with any sort of curriculum at all.

It is families like this who are likely to bear the brunt of any new legislation. Ultimately, I suppose, there will be sanctions like fines and prison in order to force parents to engage with the LA, just as is currently the case with the parents of truants. I really cannot think though that sending mothers to prison just because they are not teaching their children effectively would be a just and equitable solution to such a problem. Nor would taking their children into care, another possibility if welfare concerns are invoked. What should we do then, if we are satisfied that a child is not being educated adequately and the parents refuse to discuss the situation and come to a compromise?

I have no answer at all to this. Like many people I am worried about some of the children who are not being sent to school. I am in favour of new laws, but have not the least notion of what we can do ultimately to make parents educate their children. As I say, locking up the parents and putting the kids in care is hardly likely to improve their educational prospects! I think that other home educating parents are aware of this situation, but avoid fretting over it either by denying that such families exist or claiming that they are very rare.