The growth of confrontation over the last fifteen years between home educators and local authorities

I have long thought that some of the more aggressive home educators bear a good deal of the responsibility for the antagonism  which presently exists between local authorities and the home educating community. Apropos of this, I was looking recently at a book which I acquired in 1998, when my daughter became five and I was, at a stroke, officially transformed into  a home educator. It is called The Home Education Handbook and was written by Jane Lowe,  who has been mentioned here recently.

The astonishing thing about The Home Education Handbook is that although it was published in 1996, it portrays a world that is scarcely recognisable now. Many home educating parents today seem to think that until people like Mike Fortune-Wood and others of his militant ilk  took a hand in things, home educators were being bossed about and bullied by local authorities left, right and centre. The picture drawn by Jane Lowe in 1996 is very different. Let me quote a few passages, to show you what I mean:

Most parents do not have any objection to a visit, because it helps to place the education in context.

It would hardly be possible to make such a statement today, where visits are widely regarded as being one of the most contentious issues in home education.

Many advisers are friendly and sympathetic and they may be able to give you helpful ideas and suggestions, but they are not obliged to give advice to home educators. The adviser’s remit is to check that you are providing proper education.

Once again, this sounds very different from the attitudes that one typically sees in places such as the HE-UK internet list!

The adviser has to assess the entire scope of your home education…Before the visit you could get out all the books and materials which you are using and arrange them on a table with the child’s own work.  It is helpful if the work is arranged in order in files, exercise books and folders…The adviser will be looking for some evidence of progress in the work that has been covered, and he will be checking to see that the work is at a level which is appropriate to the child’s age and capabilities.

I think that this is enough to give us a flavour of the thing. As I said, a little over fifteen years ago; but just imagine an organisation run by and for home educators producing this today! So different is the atmosphere now, that had I not mentioned beforehand that this was produced by Jane Lowe and the Home Education Advisory Service, readers might have been forgiven for thinking that I was quoting from some local authority website; one which was particularly strict and unfriendly to home educators at that! Yet this was the general feeling among home educating parents at that time and there was not the slightest hint of conflict with local authorities. My question is a simple one. To what do readers attribute the great change in attitude which has taken place since this was written? In the late 1990s, one of the main home education  support groups was in perfect accord with local authorities and advising parents to work alongside their LA and cooperate with them as far as possible. What has changed?

Just to anticipate one possible suggestion, that Jane Lowe was some sort of collaborator and her views suspect, I would ask readers to bear in mind that she was close to Alan Thomas and they wrote a book together.

More about making money from home education

A couple of days ago I posted about a local authority which is trying to get home educating parents to pay for courses at a further education college and suggested that it was an attempt to make money from home education. Commenting there, somebody has objected to the choice of the witnesses who gave evidence to the select committee on the same grounds; that they stand to make money from home education and should therefore have declared an interest in the proceedings from the start.

Now I must choose my words very carefully here and even so I shall probably be accused of being as stupid or mad as Peter Williams! After all, when I made the completely truthful and wholly unexceptionable remark that the majority of the eight witnesses were not technically home educators, it caused considerable annoyance. Since five of the eight do not have children aged between five and sixteen, that is to say of ‘compulsory school age, I cannot see how anybody can fail to agree that this forms a majority, but we shall let that pass for now. What of the suggestion that has been made to the effect that some also have a financial interest in home education, in particular  being paid by local authorities for various services? Did they form a majority of the witnesses? Did five of the eight witnesses have such interests? This is a curious point and one which did not occur to me before the anonymous comments on my last post. Let us consider the matter.

Since the object of this session of the select committee was to examine the support offered by local authorities to home educators, its form and extent, then it is probably true that anybody being paid to provide such support should have stated the fact clearly at the beginning. Such people are partial and we are entitled to weigh their evidence more carefully than those who do not stand to make anything from the recommendations of the committee.

Two of the witnesses, Ann Brown and Hannah Flowers, certainly have no financial interest in home education. What of the others? Julie Barker makes no secret of her work with and for a local authority. She is open about this. So too is Alison Sauer, who with her husband runs a consultancy which charges local authorities for providing services. Fiona Nicholson also runs a consultancy and is pretty active in attending meetings and running a website. I have no idea if she ever receives payment for any of this, but I am pretty sure that she hopes to; she wants to make home education her career. Zena Hodges is a trustee and ‘support adviser’ for the Home Education Centre in South West England. I have a suspicion that she is paid for her services, at any rate the constitution of the Home Education Centre specifically allows for this. It says that the committee members may make payments to themselves, provided that the payment is for skills and experience needed by the group. This is so neatly worded that I would be very surprised indeed if Zena is not receiving money in this way, although I am of course open to correction on this point. Jane Lowe has written a book on home education and is a trustee and also apparently a teacher with the Home Education Advisory Service.

It is fairly plain that at least half and probably the majority of the  witnesses called to give evidence to the select committee have or hope in the future to have some financial benefit from their association with a local authority in connection with home education. This was not obvious to the members of the committee and means that they probably did not realise that most of the people apparently speaking objectively about the relationship between home educators and local authorities stood to gain financially in some way if local authorities were advised to provide further services in this field. This does not of course mean that those who gave evidence were on the make! I don’t believe this for a moment. It does mean though that the proceedings were misleading and not transparent.

Another unfortunate circumstance was that the Chair of the select committee, Graham Stuart, has a close relationship with one of the witnesses, Alison Sauer. I do not, I hasten to add, mean a close personal relationship; this thought is almost unbearable! No, I mean that they have for several years been on first name terms and have collaborated in the past on a project which aimed to alter the relationship of home educating parents with local authorities. This was not made clear at the beginning of the session either.

The end result of all this is that anybody watching the evidence being given to the committee on September 5th would not know that the Chair of the select committee and most of the witnesses had various interests in either maintaining or overturning the status quo. This is not a good state of affairs; it does not make for openness.