The select committee's conclusions and recommendations

There seems to be a general impression that the select committee has given Graham Badman one in the eye with its conclusions, but I can't really see it myself. Badman suggested compulsory registration, and this is taken up in the Children, Schools and Families Bill. The select committee recommends that it be voluntary.......for two years. If all the home educators have not registered by then, it should become compulsory! Since registration is currently voluntary and a lot of parents don't register, I didn't myself, then we know perfectly well that after two years many will still not have done so. In effect, the select committee is also saying that registration should be compulsory.

The rest of the select committee's recommendations are like that. They are against home visits, but they were never mentioned anyway in the Children, Schools and Families Bill. They say that responsibility for revoking registration should not rest with local authority home education advisors, but whoever suggested for a moment that it should? They are in favour of the statement of educational approach and most of the other main planks of the Badman Report.

Actually, they go a little further than even Badman did in some respects. For instance in Para. 120, they say; "We note that in the case of school education the quality of teaching is thought to be the key factor in pupil's learning and attainment. In which case, the same must apply to parents and others who are responsible for the education of home educated children." Uh Oh, sounds like they have not entirely understood autonomous education here!

Still, as others have observed, this will all be ignored anyway when the Children, Schools and Families Bill receives its second reading in January.

The DCSF select committee report

The select committee's review of Badman's review has more or less agreed with everything which he proposed in his report. They came out against compulsory home visits and interviewing children alone, but since this has already been dropped, it isn't really news. They thought that it would all cost more than at first suggested, which is of course true. All the meat of the matter though, the registration and monitoring, statement of educational approach and so on, all that stays. It looks very much like a rubber stamp with a few minor details tweaked. I shall post more on this later today.

Submissions to the select committee

I have been looking through the submissions made to the DCSF select committee recently and very interesting reading they make too. On a personal note, they do tend rather to confirm my suspicion as to why I alone of home educating parents was called to give evidence to the committee. Readers will no doubt recollect that the suggestion was widely made that this was some sort of fix, evidence of a sinister conspiracy at the heart of the consultation process. It was, as I said all along, nothing of the sort. I mean just look at some of this stuff. Tania Berlow, well known to habitues of the HE-UK list, sent in an astonishing ten thousand words, craftily split up into three separate documents. Did she really imagine that anybody would actually read all that? The average civil servant has the attention span of a grasshopper; his eyes begin to glaze over after reading a couple of hundred words at most! Which is precisely why I cunningly limited my own submission to a mere three hundred words. No wonder they invited me; I was probably the only person whose submission was read in its entirety!

There are a number of interesting points about the submissions. One, which I have touched upon above, is the sheer number of words churned out by many of those sending memoranda to the committee. The Staffords between them managed five and a half thousand, somebody called Sariter Goacher sent in a single handed effort of five thousand. Even Jeremy Yallop, who opposed me in the TES debate, could not slim his opinions down to fewer than three and a half thousand words; more than ten times as many as my own submission.

As I suspected, the number of anti-Badman submissions had been inflated by various means. The Staffords and Tania Berlow sent in five submissions; that's five from just two home educating families. I noticed other husband and wife teams who had sent in separate pieces under different names in order to suggest that opposition to the Badman Report was greater than is actually the case. There were also a few parents and children both sending in separate memoranda. When you add to that the submissions from people who were opposed to the recommendations of the Badman Report but were not actually home educators (some were parents who were planning to home educate, others were academics ), MPs and somebody called Kelly Green who does not even live in this country, then the actual number of home educating families opposing Badman's recommendations in this way to the select committee is slim indeed.

A couple of other points that I noticed. Firstly, no fewer than eight "doctors". Not doctors of the sort who carry a stethoscope and measure your blood pressure, you understand, but academic types. I deplore this tendency for people to describe themselves as Dr. Smith in this way! It has crept up on us over the years; forty years ago nobody but a medical man would have dreamt of using the title "doctor". Ah well, autre temps, autre mores . Another thing that catches the eye immediately is the fact that 99% of the people who wrote to the select committee appear to be educated and white. Only a couple of names which look as though they have their origin in the Indian subcontinent, a few Jews, a group of Muslims and that's pretty well it on the minority front. I mention this, because some people objected to my inclusion in the list of witnesses specifically on the grounds that I was white, male and probably middle class. Looks as though I was not alone in this.

I have been looking closely at Paula Rothermel's submission, mainly because of the Munchausen's thing that was attributed to my influence. I have to say that there is something a little fishy about this submission. Dr. Rothermel, (another "doctor"!), had two meetings with Badman. At the second one she claims that he was dismissive of her research. She says;

"I consider the review to be seriously flawed. It should be a matter of concern to the Select Committee that the person commissioned to carry out the review could so easily be influenced by a lay person hostile to my work. I question the rigour applied to the Review."

Now how on earth did she know that it was a lay person who had influenced Graham Badman in this way? And how did she know that he had been easily influenced? How did she know that he hadn't been asking about her research to other people in the field? This is odd and it becomes even odder when I look at an email sent to me by Dr. Rothermel in May, shortly after she had met Graham Badman. She said then that the people who had been "bitching" about her work to him were other academics who were always denigrating her work. Could it be that she has told the select committee that he was "easily influenced" by a "lay person" in order to try and put him in a bad light?

I am also curious about this Munchausen's business. In her memorandum she says that the first thing Graham Badman asked her about was the possibility that home educating mothers suffered from Munchausen's Syndrome by proxy. Since she was in regular communication with Mike Fortune-Wood all through the time of the review, I am rather surprised that this strange suggestion did not surface earlier. After all, every time there was any talk of any sort of abuse, home educators leapt at once to crush the idea. How is it possible that Graham Badman was saying weird stuff like this in the early Spring and nobody has talked about it before? Very odd. At the very least I should have expected Mike Fortune-Wood to spread it round the HE-UK list. After all, it is a pretty odd suggestion and could have shown Graham Badman in a poor light had it been publicised. It would certainly have indicated that her was not impartial. But no, had these submissions not been made public, I suspect that we would never have heard about this.

I am still trawling through the other submissions to see what comes up. I have to say that the DCSF one is interesting, although some of their claims need to be checked carefully. I cannot resist closing with a quotation from somebody called Ruth Grey. She opens her submission with the line;

"I reject the Badman report and its recommendations in their entirety."

I love this! It puts me irresistibly in mind of the words of the ceremony of baptism, where one says; "I reject the Devil and all his works"!

The select committee, again.

Some people who skimmed through the video of the session yesterday have told me that they thought at first that I didn't say anything at all! It is true that I spoke infrequently and then only in a sentence or two, but this was still too much for some people. One person commenting after watching, said that I was deliberately allowed to have the final word. More observant viewers will perhaps have noticed that Zena Hodgson and I both signalled our desire to speak and it was a toss-up which of us spoke last. Despite having said about a tenth as much as any other of the witnesses, what I did say was enough to enrage an old friend of mine, Firebird from Godalming. Her account of what was said may be found on the Home Education Forums site. Firebird ends her account with the words, "Simon sticks the knife in". This was in reference to my final words to the select committee. I find this such a peculiar thing to say that I thought I would set out what I actually said at the end and see if anybody disagrees with it;

"Parents might have responsibility for their children's education, but all the rights are with the child. The child has a right to a suitable education. If it's not getting that right, then I think that society has a stake in establishing whether the rights of the child are being respected in regard to the right to receive an education; in which case, parents will have to give way to society's legitimate interest in the case."

"Simon sticks the knife in"......... I am sure that not everybody will agree with me in what I said. That is inevitable. But to suggest that ending such a discussion with a mention of the rights of the child, as opposed to the rights of parents which were talked about earlier in the session, is somehow "sticking the knife in".....

Such an attitude tells me a good deal about the person who would make such a strange statement. It tells me nothing at all about whether or not I was right to bring the discussion to a close by reminding those present that it is the children who have the rights here, rather than the parents.

The select committee

I don't think that there is much point in giving a detailed account of this morning's session; I'm sure that most people will have seen it by now. I thought that I would limit myself to a few impressions.

I got the feeling that with one or two exceptions, the committee was not opposed to home education in the slightest. However, I also got the distinct impression that they did not really "get" it a lot of the time. They honestly couldn't seem to see why anybody would object to registration. Similarly, they seemed a little puzzled about the fears that some parents had about visits. I at least understand the concerns, even if I don't share them; some of the MPs such as David Chaytor just didn't seem to get it at all.

I was interested to see the reactions of the other witnesses to a simple question about registration. I of course have no problem with this. Jane Lowe, Zena Hodgson and Carole Rutherford were opposed to them. The oddest performance when responding to this queston came from Fiona Nicholson of Education Otherwise. She seemed so dithery about the issue that in the end the Chair rather impatiently said words to the effect of, "You don't know", before moving on to the next person. I really cannot believe that in the four months since the Badman Report was published, Fiona Nicholson has not been able to make up her mind on this subject. I can only assume that she was hedging her bets and did not want to reveal her position on registration publicly just at the moment.

I have to say that I felt that the other witnessess did not really present their case very well, particularly Zena Hodgson. Too much waffle and wandering from the point, not enough simple, plain sentences. Still, that's really no affair of mine. I also noticed that like many enthusiasts, home educators seem to slip into the way of assuming that other people are quite familiar with their own special interest. I shall probably post a little more on this subject tomorrow.