Just ask!

I have been looking lately at the facebook pages and twitter feeds of various angry and discontented home educators. Much of their annoyance is directed currently not at local authorities, but rather towards the All-Party Parliamentary Group for home education. We have seen comments posted here, expressing these same feelings. 

Now there are, it seems to me, two entirely different points to consider. The first is that the people who now form the secretariat of that group were not elected to the post. This is a perfectly fair matter to debate and I have mentioned it here. The second point is that some people are now complaining that they have all sorts of questions that they wish to ask of the APPG, but that these remain unanswered.  Hints are made that Fiona Nicholson and Jane Lowe are blocking their enquiries and that Graham Stuart  won’t answer their questions. I have seen quite a few exchanges on facebook saying this kind of thing. The only problem is, none of these people will say, even when chatting to their mates on the internet, just what it is that they wish to know! Generally speaking, when people wish to find out about things like this, a straightforward question will receive an answer. I have always found it so and we saw Anne who comments here, using the same strategy successfully a few days ago.

I know that Graham Stuart comes on this blog and so does Fiona Nicholson. Here is what I suggest. Those who have any sort of question to ask the APPG, why not put it on the comments here? Tell us what it is that you would know and then I strongly suspect that somebody else commenting, will be able to answer. If the answer is not forthcoming in a day or two, then I will ask the relevant people in the APPG and, if need be, badger them until I find out. There’s no point in a whispering campaign, whereby people are complaining that they are being shut out and not told what they wish to know, unless a chance is given for others to answer the questions. So let’s all just explain clearly what it is that we wish to know of the APPG and that might be the best way to bring forth the information.

Fiona Nicholson and Jane Lowe in earlier incarnations, advertising the virtues of independent schools...

I found this piece, in which Fiona and Jane explain how great private schools are at helping home educators. particularly nice picture of Fiona:

http://www.isc.co.uk/Resources/Independent%20Schools%20Council/Research%20Archive/Bulletin%20Articles/2009_05_Bulletin_WhyOptForHomeEducation_JL_FN.pdf

The new SEN Code of Practice

Quite often, people commenting here say things like, ‘I’ve never even heard of these people who you say are so important’. Just because you have not heard of them, doesn’t mean that what they are doing won’t affect you. Take the new SEN Code of Practice that some of you probably know about. Who wrote it, in conjunction with the Department for Education? Step forward, Fiona Nicholson! What, you weren’t aware of this? Perhaps that’s because, as Fiona herself said, ‘well I haven't told home educators as they'll make a thing out of it’.  Come, come, all you home educators out there. I’m sure you wouldn’t really make a thing out  of it, would you? A little thing like this which will only  affect everybody whose child has a special educational need? Oh, you fusspots!

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!

Local authorities and home educated students taking examinations

Here is some information from Fiona Nicholson  about local authorities and the help that they have given to home educated children wishing to take examinations;

http://edyourself.org/examstatsnov2013.pdf

An interview with BBC Radio Sheffield

I thought that readers might like the opportunity to hear me talking about a favourite subject of mine; that is to say, home education. Here is a link to an interview which I gave on home education this morning. I am on a little over two hours into the programme:


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0163hjr



For once, I find myself compelled to agree with my critics! Several people have asked the perfectly fair question of what on earth I am doing, shooting my mouth of  here about home education in Sheffield. There are sound grounds for asking this question, seeing that I neither live in nor have any connection with Sheffield and am not in any case a home educator. There is an explanation and it is a curious one.

 The researchers for the programme approached several people whom they thought might be able to speak authoritatively on  home education in Sheffield. One of these was Fiona Nicholson, who lives in the city, acts as a consultant on home education and has a site on the subject called Ed Yourself. The researcher spoke to her and she refused to take part in a programme about this subject. They also spoke to Edwina Theunnison, who is a trustee of Education Otherwise. She too declined to take part. This being the case, I thought that I ought to step into the breach! If these others had agreed to be interviewed, then I would not have involved myself.

I must draw attention to the Ingle family, who also spoke. Their son did A Levels at home, which is something I could not have faced in a million years. Here is a piece about them:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/08/16/a-level-results-2012-home-schooling-effective_n_1786949.html

Another ‘briefing paper’ about the Welsh plans for regulating home education

Perhaps I have unfairly focused upon the ‘briefing paper’ produced by Wendy Charles-Warner. After all, she is not the only player in town. Let’s look at the one produced by Fiona Nicholson up in Sheffield. It is to be hoped that I am not casting either the charming Ms Nicholson or her son into hazard by mentioning their general location, as I inadvertently did with Mrs Charles-Warner a fortnight ago. Here is the document produced by Fiona:



http://edyourself.org/walesbriefingpaper.pdf




 

I have observed before that in contrast to the campaign against Graham Badman’s proposals, the current agitation against the ideas being mooted in Wales are not concerned with abstract ideas about rights, duties or matters of conscience. Instead, objections to the proposed new law is stated in terms which are calculated to appeal to those who are not themselves home educators; the aim being to make others feel sympathetic to the cause. It is being very cleverly done. For instance the cost of the scheme and the fact that it might draw resources away from other vulnerable children is a popular debating tactic being used.

Fiona, in a pretty deft and cunning piece of sophistry, manages unfortunately to pander to homophobes. I am sure that this was not intentional, but never the less, that is what has happened. In an attempt to alarm Christians and get them on the side of home educators, she says this:



Sex Education

Concerns have been raised over the requirement for home education to "prepare [children] for the responsibilities of adulthood" [67] interpreted as meaning that the parent has to teach children about sex and contraception by a particular age. Some parents who are home educating because of particular religious or philosophical convictions would find themselves unable to comply and would not wish their children to be asked about sex education during the mandatory interview.





Now most of us, when we talk of ‘preparing children for the responsibilities of adulthood’ might well think in terms of things like teaching about income tax and mortgages; Fiona thinks, or purports to think, that it means that home educated children will have to be taught about contraception by a certain age. Worse still, a man from the council will be coming round and checking our children’s knowledge of contraceptive methods, in order to make sure that we have been fulfilling out duty around sex education. It is a chilling prospect! Well, it would be, if there was any truth in it.

Where does the homophobia come into this? Take a look at this piece about the new Welsh proposals on a Christian website:



http://www.christian.org.uk/news/wales-considers-forced-registration-for-home-schoolers/




Now look to the right and check out Related Articles. See the one about ‘compulsory Sex Education ‘undermines’ free society? This was a hot topic among many Christians at the same time that some home educators were fighting against certain parts of the Children, Schools and Families Bill in 2009 and 2010. One of the reasons for this is that quite a few Christians are bitterly opposed to their children being taught about homosexuality; in particular the notion that gay relationships can in any way be regarded as being as valid as heterosexual marriages. In fact, any sort of sex education, of the kind likely to be approved by a local authority,  is regarded by many Christians as a wicked plot which will end up with their children being taught how to commit sodomy or obtain abortions. Sex education, from this perspective, is designed to persuade innocent, God-fearing children that unnatural, same-sex unions are as holy as Christian marriage and that promiscuity is normal.  What about contraception? Why has Fiona mentioned that specifically? Are you a Catholic and so opposed to artificial birth control? You fool, the council will force you to teach your child about the use of contraception!   It is perhaps no coincidence that the campaign against the Welsh proposals has now attracted the favourable attention of the American Home School Legal Defense Association; a notoriously reactionary,  homophobic and right-wing group.

I suppose the real question to ask is whether Fiona Nicholson or anybody else has the least particle of evidence that local authorities really will be interrogating children about their knowledge of contraception and sex if this bill goes through. How will it work? Will it be like having the man round to read the gas meter? One imagines somebody from the council knocking on the door with a clipboard, saying, ‘Morning madam, I’ve come to check your daughter’s knowledge of contraception.' He is shown the poor little mite of eleven or whatever age it is by which Fiona thinks that children will have to be taught about sex and contraception. ‘Now Mary, can you give me three reasons why withdrawal is not a safe method of contraception? Do you know about the Dutch Cap?’

Is this really what any sane person imagines will be happening if the registration and monitoring of home education in Wales becomes law? If so, could we be given some evidence for this belief? Otherwise, it will look to many as though this is just one more of the ridiculous scare stories being put about to enlist the support of even the most unsavoury types in the campaign against the proposed legislation.

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?

The Education select committee hearing on September 5th 2012

The witnesses who gave evidence about home education to the select committee were a remarkably homogenous bunch; all female, all white, all aged between forty and sixty five, all well spoken and probably all well educated as well. Most intriguing of all, every single one of them spoke in that same quiet, patient way that teachers and social workers do. This was eerie! In a sense, the whole session was a little like the three card trick. Many people are concerned that not all parents are capable of providing a proper education to their children and so eight women are presented who nobody in their senses would doubt for a moment are able to give their kids a decent education. It would have been interesting to put eight of the less sane and articulate home educators in front of the MPs and see what they made of them.

Despite the fact that Graham Stuart is now the Chair of the committee, I picked up on the fact that there seemed to be an appetite for some sort of registration among other members. This is because two facts emerged clearly. The first was that nobody knows how many children in this country are not at school because their parents are supposedly educating them at home. The second was that nobody has the least idea how many of those children are actually receiving an education. There were valiant attempts to obscure these facts, notably when Fiona Nicholson made the astonishingly untruthful claim that we know precisely how many children are being educated at home, because we have the figures from the local authorities. Incidentally, I watched with bated breath when Fiona was asked whether she was in favour of a simple scheme which would mean the registration of all home educated children. Great amusement was caused three years ago, when she gave evidence to the select committee at that time. Despite being asked by the then Chair several times, she appeared uncertain as to whether she was in favour of registration and he finally put her down as a ’Don’t know’! This time, she was ready and answered crisply and firmly as soon as the question was asked.

I have an idea that several members of the select committee smelt a rat when presented with such a clearly intelligent and well-informed group of women. They were clearly not typical of the sort of parent with whom many local authorities come into contact and about the children of whom there is such concern. Although there was no talk of monitoring this time, the idea of registration was definitely in the air. I would not be surprised if that actually happened in the end. It would of course not be the end of the matter, particularly if events in Wales follow their current course. Whether compulsory registration of home educated children would be a good or bad thing is a debatable point, but I have an idea that it is the direction that many people’s minds may be moving. It might seem like some to be a reasonable compromise between the wishes of the local authorities and the strong feelings of many home educators; a bare minimum to which few reasonable parents could object.

GCSE related scams for home educators

I have noticed lately that I am apparently turning into one of those unfortunate people that one occasionally encounters in the street; shuffling along and muttering to themselves, while shouting obscenities every so often. In my own case, this behaviour is all too often precipitated by some new idiocy from the world of home education, from which I still seem unable to disengage myself. Perhaps I am suffering from some species of pre-senile dementia. It can’t be normal to read through the various HE lists and start growling, ‘For fuck’s sake!’ to one’s self every few minutes!


What with the Education Committee considering the help available to home educators and Fiona Nicholson beavering away to find out which local authorities are providing help with alternative provision, this strikes me as a good time to consider why so many teachers and local authority officers flee shrieking in terror at the prospect of helping home educating parents to arrange for their children to sit examinations such as GCSEs. This is a big topic and I shall restrict myself today to just one aspect of it.

I was reading an appeal recently by a home educating mother who was trying to secure extra time and rest breaks for her son, so that he could take a GCSE. He would apparently need at least four breaks an hour for there to be any realistic chance of his sitting the examination. She wondered what proof she would need to furnish of her son’s problems. Cue somebody advising her that under the Disability Discrimination Act, she could take a firm line with anybody who doubted her word on the matter. Well why wouldn’t it be enough for a mother simply to explain the facts of the matter to the exam centre and for them just to provide the kid with the extra time or laptop or whatever he needs? The answer is that this whole business has turned into a huge racket in the last few years.

At the local comprehensive, no fewer than 15% of the children sitting GCSEs get extra time and various other things such as scribes or laptops. One child in six! What is truly astonishing is that they are almost without exception the most middle class children with the pushiest and most articulate parents. Rummy indeed! Are middle class children more prone to dyslexia and neurological difficulties? Well, no; it is of course a scam. By getting a report from a tame specialist, which will set you back a few hundred pounds, your child can have two hours to write an essay, rather than just the one hour that all the other children are getting. This is a huge advantage. Nor is this all.

It is also possible to boost your child’s exam marks by pleading a range of special circumstances, ranging from headaches on the day of the exam to being diagnosed with terminal cancer the day before. The one will give you an extra 1%, the other 5%. In between these two extremes are a whole raft of possible life-events; pets falling ill, seeing somebody killed in a road accident, death of a grandmother and so on. By combining a couple of these with dyslexia, you can give your kid a huge advantage in GCSEs.

What is the point of all this though? After all, GCSEs don’t matter all that much, do they? In fact they do matter a great deal if one wishes to get a place at one of the better universities. Oxford and Cambridge expect to see a string of seven or eight A* GCSEs as standard, as do a few other universities in the Russell Group. At less prestigious places, GCSE results are often used as a tiebreaker. If you have a bunch of kids, all with three A levels at A, you can look at their GCSEs; the one with mostly As will often trump the one with mostly Bs.

A natural consequence of all this is that many well informed parents work the system by pretending that their children are dyslectic and have suffered some sort of trauma the day before an exam. This sort of thing is nearly always accepted, but many teachers are getting a bit sick of it. Between them, the exam boards each get over half a million appeals for special consideration every year and only 3% are rejected. With one child in six being given extra time, separate rooms, laptops and so on during GCSEs; it is starting to be plain that this is becoming another tactic by parents to boost their kids’ grades at GCSE from B to A or from A to A*.

I am not of course saying that there is no such thing as dyslexia. Nor am I objecting to children with special educational needs being granted extra help. Rather, I am claiming that middle class parents are using the system to give their children an unfair advantage over the rest and that attempts are now being made to discourage the practice. One of these is to be a bit stricter about which children genuinely have a disability.

I am afraid that home educating parents are famous for wanting special provision for their children. There are a number of possible explanations for this. One is that many home educated children have been withdrawn from school precisely because they had special needs that the school was unable to cater for. Another might be because the parents are predominantly middle class and are therefore using the same scam as many other middle class parents. It may also be the case that they are so used to having their own way and believing their child to be special, that they want different treatment as a matter of course.

Whatever the explanation, and it could well be a mixture of all of the above, it makes fixing up GCSEs for home educators something of a nightmare and is one reason why many places give them a wide berth. In my next piece, I shall look at a few other reasons why so few people seem to want to help home educators to enter their children for exams.

A new home education site

Rumour has it that when Fiona Nicholson was edged out of the lead postion at Education Otherwise by Shena Deuchars and Co, she retreated to a darkened room for a few days, chewing her nails and wondering what to do next. The answer is here;


http://edyourself.org/


This is a new site for information and advice about home education. It begins with a little bit of a white lie; claiming, as it does, that; 'this website is the work of Fiona Nicholson'. Actually, it is the work of her son Theo, but we will let that pass. I was amazed to discover that Fiona had apparently been an 'expert witness' at the select committee in October 2009! I must remember to use this gag myself, it sounds quite impressive. I had never really thought of myself as having been an expert witness before. I have a suspicion that this expression has been pinched from Paula Rothermel's site. Fiona's site is interesting though and I shall be watching with interest to see how it develops over the next few months.

Education Otherwise

Shena Deuchars and Heidi de Wet in Swindon continue to stamp their authority on Education Otherwise. They have recently revealed, which will come as little or no surprise to those familiar with the organisation, that two thirds of EO's expenditure has been going on an office in Sheffield. This is now to be closed, marking the complete triumph of the new trustees in Swindon over the old clique in Sheffield.

Many people have noticed in recent years that Education Otherwise, once noted for being a friendly organisation devoted to helping parents who have chosen to educate their own children, has turned into some sort of aggressive political group, very ready to savage its own volunteers and members and cast them aside if they asked too many questions. It had been noticed that this trend really began around 2007. That this has not been popular with members can perhaps be seen by the fact that membership numbers are down 60% on what they were in 2006. One would have expected the Badman review to drive up membership, but this did not happen. Since the bulk of Education Otherwise's money comes from subscriptions from its members, this means that the organisation is in serious financial difficulties; it is spending far more than it is earning. This is not of course a situation which can continue. It is thought that there will be an attempt to recruit volunteers and try not to have paid staff. Of course, there may well be other reasons for the fall in membership numbers; I look at one possible explanation below.

The question is, has Education otherwise reached the end of the line now? Sometimes, groups which were once very valued and useful, fade away and decline for no other reason than that their time is over. There is no doubt that EO was a tremendous help to parents in the past and that it once had a role to play, particularly when home education was a fringe activity of which few were aware. Now that it is a well known option for parents, perhaps organisations like this have less of a part to play. If one wished to find out about the legalities and practicalities of home education in the early 1990s, then Education otherwise was an invaluable resource. Now, with so much information freely available on the Internet, there is less reason to pay an annual subscription. There are various Intrent lists, such as EO's own list which is free to non-members, for those who wish to ask questions and solicit support.

I used to belong to EO myself, but in recent years simply could not see the point in maintaining my membership. I have an idea that many others feel the same way, which might account in part for the fall in membership. I think that this year will prove crucial for the organisation. The full extent of the financial crisis which has engulfed Education Otherwise is now dawning on the new trustees and I think that the next AGM should be interesting. The rumour circulating is that certain individuals in the north of England were running EO in such a way as to help their own positions, rather than for the ultimate benefit of the membership. Surprise has been expressed at some of the claims for 'expenses' which have come to light. No doubt we shall be hearing more about this sort of thing in the near future. It will also be interesting to see if any of the new trustees decide to pay themselves for the work which they are doing. Many people thought that this was a bit of a slippery slope when the practice began a few years ago.

The new trustees at Education Otherwise

Following the Annual General Meeting of education Otherwise, a new set of trustees are in charge. I thought that it might be helpful to provide a little information about them, in order that people could be able to have some idea of the direction which the charity might take in the future.

Fiona Nicholson is still in. She was one of the group who more or less seized control of Education Otherwise three years ago. Fiona lives in Sheffield with her seventeen year-old autonomously educated son, who has never been to school or college. It will be remembered that she provided much innocent amusement during the select committee hearing last October, when she found herself quite unable to decide whether or not she was in favour of the compulsory registration of home educated children. Still, actions speak louder than words and it was observed that Fiona never felt any inclination to notify her own local authority of her intention to home educate her son, only taking this step when the child's father was threatening to do it for her. Annette Taberner, another of the old trustees who has not resigned, also lives in Sheffield and with Fiona is part of the Northern mafia who have exercised such influence on EO for years. For a while, it was thought that Fiona's best friend in Education Otherwise was Ann Newstead, but they do not seem to be as chummy as once they were. This is rumoured to be because Fiona did not share Ann's gung-ho approach to chucking EOs money around on expensive litigation and various other profligate activities which are not really in keeping with the charity's aims. Both Ann Newstead and her husband Alexander Roarke are no longer trustees. Fiona is a great fan of the Molesworth and William books, which must surely show that she is fundamentally sound.

Shena Deuchars is a copy editor who lives in Swindon. Her daughter managed to get a place at Exeter University to study law without having any GCSEs or A levels. The whole thing was achieved by Open University courses, which is encouraging for others. Shena is a very honest and decent person who cannot fail to have a wholesome effect upon EO.

Celia McDonagh remains as a trustee. This surprised some people, who thought that she would resign along with Jo Berry. She was very involved with the Jo Berry business, allegedly passing on emails to her about internal matters at Education Otherwise. This led to threats of libel action and her resignation was demanded. She was forced out at an Extraordinary General meeting in 2006, but returned a short time later.

Some people expected that the trustees who had presided over what looked like the decline and fall of Education Otherwise would stand down en masse, but this has not happened. In fact after the AGM on Saturday, seven of the existing trustees are still around. It remains to be seen whether the reforming zeal of people like Shena Deuchars and Heidi de Wet will be able to change the organisation and bring it back to life.

There has been some talk about the accounts not being approved at the AGM, but this does not really signify. After all, they have already gone to the Charity Commission. There were discrepancies between the amounts listed in the 2008 and 2009 accounts, but this sort of thing does happen sometimes. It will be recalled that EO sacked their last auditor because they were not satisfied with how the financial position was presented in the accounts. The Charity Commission will put the accounts up on their website in due course; they have had them since September.

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.

Undermining democracy

I am a great fan of democracy. It has its faults, but as Churchill said, 'Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time'. I am always irritated to see democracy being threatened or sidestepped in this country and unfortunately this is just what is happening at the moment with home education.

I live in a town called Loughton on the edge of London. We have a District Council and Town Council, both run by democratically elected councillors. If they screw up, we can vote them out at the next election. Parking enforcement is a big issue locally and there are usually campaigns being run about where yellow lines should be or which streets should require parking permits. This is all sorted out locally by vigorous debate among residents, councillors and local authority officers. Imagine how annoying it would be if a group of people from Sheffield and Wales invited themselves here and tried to bulldoze and bluster the council into changing their parking policies and arguing that their own ideas on the subject would be much better! I for one would object strongly. I would object even if these outsiders were pushing an agenda which I agreed with. Because they do not live here, are not voters and have not been democratically elected by anybody, they would have no business coming here and poking their nose in!

Perhaps some readers are now seeing where this argument is tending. Mike Fortune-Wood from Wales, Fiona Nicholson from Sheffield and Ian Dowty from London all went to Birmingham recently to try and persuade the local authority there to alter their policy on elective home education. Several points about this strike one immediately. Firstly, none of these people have the least particle of democratic legitimacy. They are, like the present writer, self-appointed pundits, chosen by nobody. This is in stark contrast to Birmingham City Council, who have been elected. As a thought experiment, let us try and imagine what the reaction would be if it came to light that I had invited myself to Birmingham and was trying to get the council to take a more gung ho approach towards monitoring. People would say, and quite rightly, that it was none of my business. Another point to consider is this. When I gave evidence to the Children, Schools and Families select committee last year, a great deal was made of the fact that since my daughter was sixteen, I could not be regarded as a home educator. There were angry comments to this effect on the Internet HE lists and people even contacted the select committee to complain how unfair it was. More recently, the same point has been made by people on the BRAG list; that I am no longer a home educator and therefore that my views on the subject should carry less weight than those who are currently educating their children at home. Precisely the same observation can be made about those meddling in Birmingham, such as Mike Fortune-Wood and Fiona Nicholson. They too, just like me, are not even home educators!

When local residents here in Loughton have meetings with the council to try and thrash something out, it is always done openly. Often, there is a bit in the local paper to the effect that residents are meeting next week with local authority officers or councillors to sort out some dispute. This is very right and proper and I would not like to see any such meetings being done on the quiet. It would make me suspicious. A lot of the stuff currently happening with home education though, is being done in this way. People only learn about meetings after the things have happened and even then the participants refuse to identify themselves openly, let alone say publicly what they have been saying to Birmingham Council or the Chair of the CSF select committee, as the case may be. This is very odd. If I heard that our local residents association had been having secret meetings with the town council and that none of them would talk about what had been going on or even admit to having been present, I would regard this as outrageous. So would most residents in this district.

A final point to consider is this. MPs and councillors have been voted in by the population generally, not just this special interest group or that. If policies, guidelines or laws are liable to be changed then other people have the right to know, not just those likely to be affected. Home education, truancy, children missing education, schools; all these things are matters of general public interest. Others may have points of view which they wish to express. The way that things are currently being done both with Graham Stuart's helpers and the people who went to Birmingham, means that nobody except a tiny handful of self-chosen individuals are involved in these processes. When the former Secretary of State for Education wished to change the law on home education he launched a public review and invited everybody, home educators and everybody else, to contribute their views and opinions. Later, the CSF select committee looked at the matter, again openly and publicly. This is how things are done in a democracy. The scrapping of Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill was a fine example of the democratic process at work. I have no idea what is likely to emerge from the meeting in Birmingham or the enterprise which Graham Stuart has launched. What I am absolutely sure of though is that anything which comes out of all this will have no legitimacy whatsoever. How could it? Most of those concerned on the home education side have not been elected by anybody and have got where they are simply by virtue of having sharper elbows and louder voices than others. This is not democracy.

Education Otherwise - flirting with the establishment

One of the disadvantages of a representative democracy such as ours is that we sometimes have to decide who our representatives actually are. In places like parliament, this is fairly easy; we choose them by secret ballot. In other cases, the people who become the representatives of certain sections of the population do so because they are quick off the mark, unscrupulous or have loud voices. This has happened with certain ethnic minorities, where hundreds of thousands of citizens end up being "represented" by groups of people who have got where they are simply by virtue of being pushy and media savvy.

Education Otherwise is regarded as being virtually synonymous with home education in the UK. Talk about home education and you have to refer to EO. For instance, almost every local authority mentions them when providing information on elective home education. A lot of parents join EO as a matter of course as soon as they make the decision to home educate, even if they then allow their membership to lapse after the first year. I have therefore been watching with fascination as this organisation, once a byword for radicalism and non-conformity, gradually eases itself into a comfortable niche as the establishment's partner in all matters relating to home education.

The signs that this was happening were plain long before Graham Badman started talking about the "Tasmanian Model" of home education practice. Some Trustees of Education Otherwise were very quick to pick up on Badman's apparently chance remarks on this subject and it was obvious that they visualised a role for Education Otherwise similar to that of the Tasmanian Home Educators Advisory Council. Just what the country needs, another quango! Others have noticed these developments and are uneasy about them. As I am not even a member, it could rightly be argued that it is really none of my business, but I have a personal angle here, in that I believe that I am able correctly to identify and empathise with the primary motivation of one of the main players in the affair.

Fiona Nicholson, a leading light of Education Otherwise, is one of those rare parents who have educated their child all the way through from five until sixteen, without once sending the kid to school. The present writer is in the same situation. The quasi bereavement felt as this process draws to a close is a curious sensation, akin I should imagine, to that felt by mothers on their child's first day of school. Some of us in this position sublimate these emotions by starting obscure Blogs and raving on in them about home education! Others, and I suspect that Fiona Nicholson is one of them, cast around for somewhat grander displacement activities to occupy themselves with and enable them to remain involved with home education. Her planned appearance at the Children Missing Education Conference on October 6th has not gone unremarked and I think that we will be hearing a good deal more of La Nicholson's activities as she transforms herself little by little into the official representative of home educating parents in this country. Who knows where this will ultimately lead, a seat in the Lords perhaps?

None of this is meant maliciously, as I am sure Fiona knows. She is, after all, one of the few people on home education lists with a sense of humour and certainly the only one whom I have encountered with a knowledge of the Molesworth books. So good luck, Fiona! I would be very surprised if we do not read a lot more about you in the future, particularly once the new legislation is in place.