Showing posts with label Wendy Charles-Warner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wendy Charles-Warner. Show all posts
Thursday, 21 July 2016
Causing trouble for home educating parents
There is a longstanding and mistaken idea that there exists in this country a powerful home education movement, which constantly agitates for and defends the supposed rights of, home educating parents. Even the Department for Education has fallen for this false belief and it is one of the reasons why there are no plans to slip through a new law to regulate and control home education in Britain. It is felt that the campaign which was waged in the aftermath of the Graham Badman report was so fierce and produced such bad publicity for the government, that it really is not worth repeating the exercise. This is the chief reason that the DfE has no intention currently of pressing for a change in the law; it would simply be more trouble than it is worth to fight all those home educators again!
In fact, despite there being anything up to 80,000 home educated children in this country, which would mean perhaps 140,000 or 150,000 home educating parents, opposition to any form of registration and monitoring is actively maintained by only a few hundred people; many of whom are not even home educators. I say a few hundred, there is probably a hard core of a few dozen who are doing all the work to maintain the position that registration of home educated children would be an intolerable imposition on parents. Hardly any of the parents of the 20,000 or more home educated children known to local authorities have any problem at all with being known and the vast majority cheerfully accept visits if their LA wished to make them.
How many parents are really determined to fight against things such as the registration of home educated children? This is very hard to say, because the tiny handful who fight against this idea manage to make themselves look far more numerous than is really the case. They do this by adopting false names and being very industrious in complaining to online newspapers and so on whenever any article appears about home education. If there is a poll on the internet on the subject of home education, they organise via Facebook groups for anti-registration messages to be sent in bulk. What this means is that an illusion is created that there is some kind of mass movement against registration and monitoring. A typical example of the way that this is done may be seen by looking at a Facebook group called Home Education and Your Local Authority; Help dealing With Officialdom. This is run by a former home educator called Wendy Charles-Warner, using the name Jennifer Downing. Many of those fighting against monitoring prefer to use false names in this way; why this should be is something of a mystery! The other person running the group is man called David Hough, who lives in California and will hardly be affected by any of the changes in British home education which he so vigorously opposes.
The two people who run what is generally known as the ‘Officialdom’ group are to be found all over the internet under various guises; seldom or never using their real names. If an article appears in a small, provincial newspaper which suggests that somebody wants the registration of home educated children, then people from this group will comment online, putting forward their anti-registration line. Here is an example; llondel is David Hough in America. He often uses this name or sometimes Thienz to post his comments;
http://www.droitwichadvertiser.co.uk/news/worcester_news/13790522.The__overwhelming_majority__of_home_educated_children_are_safe__says_senior_Worcestershire_Tory/
Readers might care to look for similar examples online; there are many. This sort of thing creates the impression that a lot of people feel as David Hough and Wendy Charles-Warner, the owners of the face book group, do about registration and monitoring; there is no reason to suppose that this is the case. Their group is devoted to stirring up parents and trying to set them in opposition to their local authority and the advice they give is always aimed at confrontation, rather than cooperation. Here is David Hough advising a parent on the ’Officialdom’ group whose local authority wishes to speak to her about her home educated child;
post a letter with a second-class stamp on your last day there informing them that as of that date you're no longer in their area but that you will still be home educating. Don't give them your new address or area, and make sure the new occupants of the house and any neighbours also know not to tell them where you've gone if they know.
An atmosphere is created of people on the run from the authorities and anxious to hide their children. It need hardly be said that this sort of behaviour only makes local authorities more suspicious of home educators and more determined to track them down! It is counter-productive. I shall give other examples of these sorts of covert operations by small groups of militant former home educators in the next few days. In the meantime, it is worth bearing in mind that neither of the two people running this Facebook group are parents home educating their children in this country and so are not likely to be affected by any of the problems which might result from their activities.
Thursday, 14 July 2016
How to scare potential home educators
Following on from yesterday’s post, in which we looked at the pernicious influence of a document entitled Home Education and the Safeguarding Myth, which was consulted by those investigating the death of Dylan Seabridge, I want to consider now a fear which some well-known figures in the world of British home education seem determined to promote; the idea that parents opting to educate their children at home are routinely referred to social services. This is of course quite untrue, but for some reason people like Mike Fortune-Wood, Wendy Charles-Warner, Alison Sauer and Paula Rothermel all seem determined to promote this particular fiction and even, as in the Home Education and Safeguarding Myth paper, elevate it to the status of supposed fact. Here are two quotations on the subject; the first from Wendy Charles-Warner’s document and the second from Paula Rothermel’ book, International Perspectives on Home Education; Do We Still Need Schools?
'referral rates in some Local Authorities indicate a policy of automatic referral for home educated children,'
'there is an increasing tendency for welfare officers and social workers to become involved with home-educating families from the outset.'
Both these statements were published in 2015, so this is very much a current myth in the making. Rothermel gives no reference for her belief that social workers might be involved with home educating families ‘from the outset’, and it is possible that she has relied upon Wendy Charles-Warner for the figures to back up this strange assertion. Looking at how these figures were acquired will show us firstly that the idea is a nonsense and secondly that we may safely disregard the paper Home Education and the Safeguarding Myth as a reliable source of information on this, or indeed any other, subject.
We find that Wendy Charles-Warner is claiming that in one local authority 100% of home educated children have been referred to social services. It is of course quite untrue and the explanation casts further doubt upon the methods used by the author of the paper to compile and analyse data.
The local authority in question is Telford and Wrekin and on 31 December 2014, a Ms Martel, acting on behalf of the author of Home Education and the Safeguarding Myth, made a Freedom of Information request, asking how many children aged 5 to 16 in the LA had been referred to social services. She then asked, how many of these were home educated. The answer given was;
Aged 5-9 EHE number is 28
Aged 10-16 EHE number is 105
This was a simple error on the part of whoever answered the request, because these are the total numbers of home educated children in the LA. In fairness to the local authority, the question was not very well phrased and it is easy to see how the misunderstanding arose. Obviously, they have not referred every single child to social services. Just to be sure, I telephoned Malcolm Webster, the man at Telford and Wrekin who deals with EHE, and asked about this. He was absolutely bemused at the idea that he would have been referring every child to social services. Why on earth would he do such a thing? Just to make perfectly sure, I followed this up with a Freedom of Information request of my own, which confirmed what I had suspected.
The fact that the document's author did not bother to make checks of this kind indicates another flaw in the process. It also suggests that the number of social services referrals for home educated children has been greatly inflated. The numbers are very low anyway and the addition of 133 extra children in this way was sufficient to throw all the apparently careful calculations made about social services referrals hopelessly out of kilter. When this and one or two other points are taken into account, there turn out to be no more referrals for home educated children than there are for those at school.
I do not know why these characters are so determined to spread the alarming notion that home educating parents are being referred, as a matter of course, to social services. In the case of one of those mentioned above, there is probably a strong business end to it, for she runs a company called 3rd Way Law, which is a commercial concern helping people deal with legal problems relating to home education. Obviously, the more anxiety there is about the possibility of social workers knocking on the door; the greater market there will be for an organisation which will, for a price, help deal with the supposed problem. From this perspective, it makes sound business sense to promote a feeling of unease and fear among potential home educators.
'referral rates in some Local Authorities indicate a policy of automatic referral for home educated children,'
'there is an increasing tendency for welfare officers and social workers to become involved with home-educating families from the outset.'
Both these statements were published in 2015, so this is very much a current myth in the making. Rothermel gives no reference for her belief that social workers might be involved with home educating families ‘from the outset’, and it is possible that she has relied upon Wendy Charles-Warner for the figures to back up this strange assertion. Looking at how these figures were acquired will show us firstly that the idea is a nonsense and secondly that we may safely disregard the paper Home Education and the Safeguarding Myth as a reliable source of information on this, or indeed any other, subject.
We find that Wendy Charles-Warner is claiming that in one local authority 100% of home educated children have been referred to social services. It is of course quite untrue and the explanation casts further doubt upon the methods used by the author of the paper to compile and analyse data.
The local authority in question is Telford and Wrekin and on 31 December 2014, a Ms Martel, acting on behalf of the author of Home Education and the Safeguarding Myth, made a Freedom of Information request, asking how many children aged 5 to 16 in the LA had been referred to social services. She then asked, how many of these were home educated. The answer given was;
Aged 5-9 EHE number is 28
Aged 10-16 EHE number is 105
This was a simple error on the part of whoever answered the request, because these are the total numbers of home educated children in the LA. In fairness to the local authority, the question was not very well phrased and it is easy to see how the misunderstanding arose. Obviously, they have not referred every single child to social services. Just to be sure, I telephoned Malcolm Webster, the man at Telford and Wrekin who deals with EHE, and asked about this. He was absolutely bemused at the idea that he would have been referring every child to social services. Why on earth would he do such a thing? Just to make perfectly sure, I followed this up with a Freedom of Information request of my own, which confirmed what I had suspected.
The fact that the document's author did not bother to make checks of this kind indicates another flaw in the process. It also suggests that the number of social services referrals for home educated children has been greatly inflated. The numbers are very low anyway and the addition of 133 extra children in this way was sufficient to throw all the apparently careful calculations made about social services referrals hopelessly out of kilter. When this and one or two other points are taken into account, there turn out to be no more referrals for home educated children than there are for those at school.
I do not know why these characters are so determined to spread the alarming notion that home educating parents are being referred, as a matter of course, to social services. In the case of one of those mentioned above, there is probably a strong business end to it, for she runs a company called 3rd Way Law, which is a commercial concern helping people deal with legal problems relating to home education. Obviously, the more anxiety there is about the possibility of social workers knocking on the door; the greater market there will be for an organisation which will, for a price, help deal with the supposed problem. From this perspective, it makes sound business sense to promote a feeling of unease and fear among potential home educators.
Wednesday, 13 July 2016
The Child Practice Review on Dylan Seabridge
I have been reading through the Child Practice Review which was held in the wake of Dylan Seabridges's death. One point leaped out at me, and this was that Wendy Charles-Warner's paper about safeguarding and home education was cited. This was a great shock, because this document has caused harm to home educators in several ways and to see it being consulted officially in this way is a little disturbing.
Those of you familiar with the thing will know that the author is hoping to tell us something about the rate of abuse in home educating families; Wendy Charles-warner claims in this paper to have something useful and novel to say about the levels of abuse in home educating families. How do we know how many home educated children are being abused? For the author, this is simple. For everybody else though, it is shockingly offensive and wholly misleading. The only way that abuse is measured is by the number of children with Child Protection Plans. The author thinks, quite wrongly, that any child with a Child Protection Plan in place must have been ill-treated, neglected or abused by her parents. She says this explicitly on page 13;
A child educated at home subject to a CPP is most usually found to have suffered at the hands of a carer or parent
This is completely untrue. Children are given Child Protection Plans for all sorts of reasons which do not involve suffering at the hands of their parents. Sometimes, a teenage mother is unable to cope, perhaps another mother has an unsuitable boyfriend, there is drug use, it look as though the mother is struggling; there are all kinds of reasons for CPPs. The aim of issuing one is often to avert problems. To suggest that any child with a CPP has ’suffered at the hands of a carer or parent’ is not only wrong, it is also stupendously offensive to parents who are being helped by social services. I know home educating parents whose children have had, or do have, CPPs and I doubt very much whether any of the professionals involved with them think that they are are abusers!
In short, the only way that the author of Home Education and the Safeguarding Myth has been able to say anything at all about the abuse of both schooled and home educated children is by assuming that all or most Child Protection Plans are a result of abuse or neglect. This is quite untrue and tells us that we may safely disregard anything she has to say on the subject of levels of childhood abuse.
That a group of social workers, people from health and so on have been reading this sort of thing and seeing that a home educator herself thinks that any home educating parent with a CPP has probably been, as Wendy Charles-Warner puts it, suffering at the hands of a parent, is terrible. I shall have more to say about this document in future posts.
Those of you familiar with the thing will know that the author is hoping to tell us something about the rate of abuse in home educating families; Wendy Charles-warner claims in this paper to have something useful and novel to say about the levels of abuse in home educating families. How do we know how many home educated children are being abused? For the author, this is simple. For everybody else though, it is shockingly offensive and wholly misleading. The only way that abuse is measured is by the number of children with Child Protection Plans. The author thinks, quite wrongly, that any child with a Child Protection Plan in place must have been ill-treated, neglected or abused by her parents. She says this explicitly on page 13;
A child educated at home subject to a CPP is most usually found to have suffered at the hands of a carer or parent
This is completely untrue. Children are given Child Protection Plans for all sorts of reasons which do not involve suffering at the hands of their parents. Sometimes, a teenage mother is unable to cope, perhaps another mother has an unsuitable boyfriend, there is drug use, it look as though the mother is struggling; there are all kinds of reasons for CPPs. The aim of issuing one is often to avert problems. To suggest that any child with a CPP has ’suffered at the hands of a carer or parent’ is not only wrong, it is also stupendously offensive to parents who are being helped by social services. I know home educating parents whose children have had, or do have, CPPs and I doubt very much whether any of the professionals involved with them think that they are are abusers!
In short, the only way that the author of Home Education and the Safeguarding Myth has been able to say anything at all about the abuse of both schooled and home educated children is by assuming that all or most Child Protection Plans are a result of abuse or neglect. This is quite untrue and tells us that we may safely disregard anything she has to say on the subject of levels of childhood abuse.
That a group of social workers, people from health and so on have been reading this sort of thing and seeing that a home educator herself thinks that any home educating parent with a CPP has probably been, as Wendy Charles-Warner puts it, suffering at the hands of a parent, is terrible. I shall have more to say about this document in future posts.
Wednesday, 17 June 2015
A Militant Home Educator
Mrs Wendy
Charles-Warner must surely be one of the best known home educators in the
country. An indefatigable, an unkind person might say shameless, self-publicist;
she has appeared in many newspapers in support of her chosen hobby horse. In
addition to being a representative of the national home education charity, Education
Otherwise, Mrs Charles-Warner has remorselessly chronicled in print the lives
of the daughter and grandson whom she taught herself. Here is a recent example
of her appearance in a national newspaper, in this case The Guardian, on behalf of Education Otherwise;
In addition
to these activities, Mrs Charles-Warner runs, under an assumed name, a Facebook
group which purports to help home educating parents in their disputes with local
authorities. It is popularly known as
Help Dealing with Officialdom and may be found here;
So much for
the public face of this woman’s activities on behalf of the cause of home
education. There is another side to her interest in this subject though and it
is one about which she is strangely reticent. It is time now to shed light upon
this lesser known aspect of Mrs Charles-Warner’s involvement with home education in this
country.
A brief look
at the advice given on the Facebook group mentioned above, soon shows that its
members are urged to live in a state of virtual warfare with their local
authorities; refusing visits and doing their utmost not to cooperate with any
requests for information about the education which they are providing for their
children. This is because, as Mrs Charles-Warner has repeatedly said, ‘There is
no legal basis to monitor home education’. On her Facebook group yesterday, a
mother posted, saying that she was happy to have a visit from her local
authority to check up on the educational provision she was making for her
child. Mrs Charles-Warner thought this a bad idea, saying ‘I would not meet
with her because she is seeking work samples and evidence, to which she is not
entitled.’
I hope we
all have this clear now. Wendy Charles-Warner, who acts on behalf of Education
Otherwise and is a militant home educator, advises parents not to meet with
local authority officers or provide evidence of a child’s work. One mother who
adopted this strategy, received a pretty sharp letter from her local authority
last week. They threatened her with legal action. The letter she received may be seen below.
Look now at
the lower right hand of that letter and you will see who
helped to compose it. It was of course, none other than that
same Wendy Charles-Warner who was yesterday urging a parent who was happy to receive
a visit and provide samples of work to resist such an intrusion. And yet here
she is now, helping and advising a local authority to take action against
somebody who follows just this approach! Note that the letter, drafted with Mrs Charles-Warner's help, demands visits and samples of work; the very things which she told another mother that local authorities have no business even to ask for.
I will leave
readers to judge for themselves what is going on here. It is however worth bearing
in mind that Mrs Charles-Warner and the woman with whom she runs the Facebook
group are founders and joint directors of a company which has a commercial interest
in education; Heatherside Education Consultants Ltd. Almost unbelievably, after
advising the local authority to send this letter, Mrs Charles-Warner then set
out to offer her advice to the recipient on how to deal with the local authority! Cynical readers might think all this a
perfect illustration of that old saying which mentions those who run with the
fox, while at the same time hunting with the hounds.
Sunday, 15 June 2014
A Forensic Psychologist is determined to get her two penn'orth in a few weeks ago...
21.05.14.
Dear Kayleigh
Thank you very much for this. I think it is very important that knowledgeable
members of the home educating community are involved in the creation of the new
guidelines, rather than the minister (or more likely his staff) electing to use only
home educators local to Cardiff for convenience.
As Welsh liaison for Education Otherwise, the largest home educating charity in the
UK and author of the briefing paper used during the consultations, I am anxious
that I should be involved from the very start in all aspects of the new guidelines.
I would be very grateful if the committee felt able to recommend that my
involvement is accepted from day one.
Best wishes
Wendy Charles-Warner
Dear Kayleigh
Thank you very much for this. I think it is very important that knowledgeable
members of the home educating community are involved in the creation of the new
guidelines, rather than the minister (or more likely his staff) electing to use only
home educators local to Cardiff for convenience.
As Welsh liaison for Education Otherwise, the largest home educating charity in the
UK and author of the briefing paper used during the consultations, I am anxious
that I should be involved from the very start in all aspects of the new guidelines.
I would be very grateful if the committee felt able to recommend that my
involvement is accepted from day one.
Best wishes
Wendy Charles-Warner
Friday, 13 June 2014
Alison Sauer's latest business venture
Readers might be interested to know that Alison Sauer has started a new company with Wendy Charles-Warner; Heatherside Educational Consultants Limited. They only registered this business a little over a week ago, so it is too early to say much about it. There are already one or two points of interest though. Mrs Charles-Warner is listed as a forensic psychologist; rather than a lawyer. Also, her service address is given as being the same as Alison Sauer's in Barnoldswick. Most companies, when registering with Companies House, give at least some vague indication of the nature of the business being undertaken. This is not the case with Heatherside Educational Consultants Limited, which is slightly unusual.
Readers will perhaps be aware that Alison Sauer is already director of a company with a similar-sounding name to the new one; namely, Heatherside Homes Ltd.
Readers will perhaps be aware that Alison Sauer is already director of a company with a similar-sounding name to the new one; namely, Heatherside Homes Ltd.
Sunday, 24 March 2013
Wendy Charles-Warner
Wendy Charles Warner
A number of comments have been made in this blog which suggest that Wendy Charles Warner has behaved in a criminal or immoral fashion. I have no personal knowledge of any such behaviour, nor any reason whatsoever to suppose that these suggestions are true. May I ask readers to think very carefully before posting and to refrain from posting anything which could be interpreted in this way.
Friday, 21 September 2012
Wendy Charles-Warner
Wendy Charles Warner
A number of comments have been made in this blog which suggest that Wendy Charles Warner has behaved in a criminal or immoral fashion. I have no personal knowledge of any such behaviour, nor any reason whatsoever to suppose that these suggestions are true. May I ask readers to think very carefully before posting and to refrain from posting anything which could be interpreted in this way.
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