School; another aspect of the hidden curriculum

In the last few years, there has been increasing concern about the supposed lack of social mobility in this country. Poor, black and working class children just don’t seem to get as far as Oxbridge and professions such as medicine and law are still dominated by privately educated, middle class types. I’m very interested in this phenomenon and have been looking closely at some of the more unexpected causes of this failure for children to move from one social class to another. School plays a great role in this problem, but not always in a straightforward and obvious way. Let’s look at an apparently trivial incident which I witnessed today; one that casts light upon this whole business.

Here is an English lesson; one in which a class of nine year-olds are being taught the difference between fact and opinion. The way that this is being done is by acting out an imaginary scene from a trial. This takes the form of a dialogue in the court  between an impartial judge and an obviously prejudiced policeman, who says things about the defendant such as, ‘Well, he looks guilty to me!’.  The teacher wants two children to play the parts of the judge and the policeman. First, she wants somebody to be the judge. She says, ‘Now remember, judges speak very posh, because they mostly went to private schools, so you’ll have to speak like this…’ She then gives a grotesque and exaggerated impression of an upper class voice. Let’s look at what these working class children are being taught here.

The first lesson is that there is not the least hope of their ever becoming judges. They know that they are certainly not posh and of course none of them go to a private school. Here is one possible ambition disposed of immediately. What else are they learning? They learn that being posh and well educated is something that they should mock. The teacher is sneering at the way posh people talk. The message that these children take form this is that clearly enunciated, standard English is somehow ridiculous and that people who  speak it are different from them.  At one time, ordinary working class children like this were taught at school to aspire to better themselves and to aim high. These days, they learn that ‘posh’ people like judges are somehow a different species. In the 1950s at schools in East London, children were taught that they could rise, if they wished. They  were encouraged to think beyond their day to day lives. Some of those pupils did indeed rise and go on to become professors, judges, doctors and so on. There is not the remotest chance of this sort of thing happening when children are being inculcated with class enmity, as is very common in working class schools today.

There is another pernicious effect of this sort of attitude.  There has been concern that some schools become popular with the middle classes and that they then monopolise them, to the exclusion of others; who then end up at so-called ‘sink schools’.  Here is what happens sometimes when middle class parents send their children to a very working class school of the type that I have been writing about lately. Because the pupils have been encouraged to hate anything at all ‘posh’, they extend this feeling towards those who speak correct and grammatical English. Well spoken children are viewed with great suspicion. If they also have an interest in books and want to work hard, they are soon mocked and shunned. They then become very miserable and their parent often remove them from the school and send them to one with a less hostile atmosphere.

There is a good deal more to be said on this topic, but that is all that I have time for tonight. Readers might like to reflect that exclusivity is not only the province of the middle or upper classes and that in some schools, pupils are actively encouraged to dislike and mistrust those of a different social standing from themselves. This is hardly a good thing from the point of social mobility.

The war against home education

Dealing with some of the more militant types of home educator is a bit like coping with a remedial class for slow learners. Everything needs to be repeated endlessly, explained in a dozen different ways and then the whole, soul-destroying process begins anew the next day. Not only that, but one gets the same silly comments and interruptions, the constant cries of, “Sir, I don’t get it!” I felt this most forcibly when people were asking on here recently, as to  why I went into detail about the actual reason that our old friend went to Ireland.  I assumed that my motives would be plain, but I see now that I must settle down and explain, step by step, exactly why I wanted to set the case out in such detail.

To begin with, it is necessary for readers to understand that there is a certain strand among British home educators who believe, or purport to believe, I am not sure which, that some sort of war is being waged against their chosen method of education. They claim that attempts are constantly being made to suppress home education and that there is an agenda by some in the mainstream educational establishment to do away with the practice entirely. It is of course preposterous, but there it is. In order to maintain this worldview,  these people  need always to be uncovering new plots against home educators; they require  a continuous stream of threats and menaces to their favoured  lifestyle. (Of course, fighting all these attacks on their liberties makes for a far more congenial life than actually educating their children! It is  essentially a displacement activity, which means that rather than teaching their kids their times tables, they can instead spend their time  lobbying MPs and writing political manifestos).

Sometimes, there are slack periods, when no obvious danger is looming on the horizon for home education in this country.  When this happens, they  have  to fabricate threats and pretend that some individual is being persecuted because she is a home educator.  This stops other home educating parents becoming complacent and thinking that they are safe! This is what was done last year, when this appeal was widely circulated among home educators;

A well-known member of the HE community and trusted friend needs our help. The 
person's family is facing a possible court order and they felt the need to leave the country very quickly in order to protect the children from unfounded interference based on home education as a risk factor. 

Now anybody reading this, would assume that home education was integral to the threat facing this person. She is a member of the HE community and  she is facing a court order and the possibility of ‘unfounded interference based on home education as a risk factor’.  This was very neatly done and many people fell for it. Of course, the attention of social services and their unfounded interference was precipitated not by home education at all, but by the sequence of events which I outlined a few days ago. The key factors were things such as the condition of the home, the call to the police and previous trouble with various authorities which also had nothing to do with home education. The mother in this case was also in the habit of posting about her use of illegal drugs and that probably didn’t help matters either! So while it was not wholly untruthful to say that home education was a risk factor, the ‘unfounded interference’ about which people were worrying, was not based upon this. If it was a factor, it amounted to about 0.00001% of the total of concerns being expressed by the agencies involved.

This is not an exceptional case, of course. We regularly see home educators trying to work up fears that they are under attack and that if we don’t all support them, then our own lifestyles will be the next to be targeted by the government. I have mentioned any number of incidents of this sort  on here over the years; this was not the worst example of such scaremongering, not by a long chalk. In this case though, hardly anybody with whom I have been in contact knew the true story. Those who signed the original letter have been very keen to keep the actual events from being known, because it shows that all those people like Neil Taylor-Moore, Alison Preuss and Barbara Stark, who signed that letter,  were playing people for mugs and using a case which had very little to do with home education in order to put the wind up them.  It was this practice, which is not limited to that particular instance, to which I wished to draw attention. 

New terminiology in home education

Readers will perhaps recall that at the time of the  Badman enquiry, a variety of unflattering names were coined for those home educators who were suspected of being in favour of increased monitoring, so that they could profit financially. For example, they were called, 'Rent seekers'. I have been watching the emergence of two new terms for such people. So far, these terms have been limited to the likes of Fiona Nicholson, who is felt by some of the more unbalanced home educators to be Quisling in chief and  sidekick to Graham Stuart. I have seen her described as both a 'minion' and a 'fence-sitter'. 

I have to say that I like the expression 'minion'. It makes Fiona sound like a character from Game of Thrones! Incidentally, here is a little puzzle. The most demented and irrational of the home educating crowd all seem to be in the Midlands or the north of England. I wonder why that should be? There are plenty of home educators in London and the south of England, but they seem a little saner and less excitable than those in places like  Stafford and Doncaster. Whenever I am the victim of an especially unpleasant rumour, I can be quite sure that it will have had it's origins somewhere well north of London and the Home Counties. Is it something in the water, or what? 

How to obtain information about home education from Graham Stuart; the right way and the wrong way

Some readers have been asking today  about Graham Stuart’s reply to Lisa Amphlett. I thought that it was worth talking a little about this and publishing it here. There were hints that my post  yesterday  was part of a coordinated attempt to smear a group of home educators in the Midlands. It wasn’t of course, it’s just that there is no such thing as coincidence in the Looking-glass world inhabited by these characters. Still, it gives me a chance to look at the correct way to find things out from MPs and also to look at the wrong way of going about the business. The hint was, you see, that because one of this group had failed to extract answers from an MP about something to do with home education, that must be why I had posted about a woman who had been in Ireland and is now in the midlands. (Yes, I realise that this makes no sense at all, but you know what these people are like!)

A couple of weeks back, I wanted to know  three things about Graham Stuart’s intentions,  and also about  the  functioning of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on home education.  The best way to find things out, is of course simply to ask. If you are going to do this, it is better by far to limit your enquiries to one simple question at a time. Once this has been asked, you can leave it a week or two and then ask another question. It might take a few weeks, but that way you tend to find out what you want to know. The first thing I wanted was a written statement of Graham Stuart’s plans, if any, for new regulations about home education. I emailed him on November 22nd, saying;

Dear Mr Stuart,      I'm sorry to trouble you, but a number of people are concerned that you might be in favour of some new regulation for home education in this country. I wonder if you could just confirm whether this is true or not? Thanks a lot.
                                            Simon Webb.

Short and to the point, you see. An hour and  half later,  one of his advisers replied, saying:


Dear Mr Webb,

Thank you for your email. 

The APPG for Home Education, which Graham chairs, is encouraging local authority home education officers to form a national organisation so that they can build expertise, and also challenge bad practice and ignorance in their authorities.

There is no question whatever of Graham suggesting or supporting new regulation regarding home education.  The aim is precisely to avoid some of the problems which arise through local authority officials misinterpreting the existing regulations (whether by accident or design).

Kind regards,

Simon


You see? Easy peasy and now I have a written statement about this MP’s intentions; ’ There is no question whatever of Graham suggesting or supporting new regulation regarding home education.‘ Working in this way, I shall  eventually have simple answers to all my questions. Now let’s look at the wrong way to go about it.  Here is another email to Graham Stuart, this one sent the day after my own:


Dear Graham,
Thank you for taking the time to engage with me on Twitter and invite communication via email. In the interests of openness and transparency, this is an open letter that I will publish on my blog along with any response.
I write with reference to two points:
1. The APPG and its structure, and
2. The proposal that you mentioned at the end of the last APPG meeting in October 2013.
I will deal with them separately for clarity’s sake.
I appreciate that the APPG has been functioning for some time without widespread interest from the HE community. However, your minuted suggestion that  ”home education experts from local authority areas” should come together to form a national organisation to “build expertise and challenge bad practice and ignorance” has precipitated interest, criticism and concern. This is, I believe, largely because of the potentially negative outcomes of such a proposal, which I will expand upon below.
A key concern for me is the unelected nature of the APPG, its secretariat (HEAS) and the “secretariat support”. I can only find the APPG minutes on the secretariat support’s personal website, and from reading those minutes I have deduced that she is responsible for the preparation of delegate lists, invites, agendas, supporting/briefing papers and minutes. I tried to communicate directly with this individual, to be told that my questions would not be answered.
My questions regarding the structure of the APPG are below:
How and when was the secretariat and secretariat function proposed, agreed and clarified? By whom? What were the terms of reference?
To whom do I direct my request for a full client list of the secretariat/secretariat support, as per P11 of the HoC Guide to the Rules on All-Party Groups?
How do I arrange for all future delegate lists/agendas, supporting/briefing papers and minutes to be either made publicly available at the time of their production or sent directly to me and any other interested parties?
What is the formal position of the APPG with regard to proposals that are made and taken forward through the APPG without consultation with and representation of the home education community, especially when such proposals have the potential to negatively impact upon all home educating families?
Is there a procedure for challenging/appeal against the decision to incorporate a secretariat and/or “secretariat support” — on the grounds of, say, a lack of neutrality, conflict of interest, or unprofessionalism when dealing with key stakeholders?
With regard to the proposal itself, I outlined my concerns in my blog post “Questions arising from the home education APPG” (hyperlink here). The professionalisation of “home education” will legitimise and validate what is currently an optional role (and rightly so) within local authorities.
A national organisation has the potential to rubber stamp local authorities as “good” (whatever “good” is defined as; surely operating within the law does not require national organisation?) without maintaining adequate oversight of developing problems or bad practice — this happens surprisingly quickly, and even local authorities with “good” reputations continue to make mistakes.
It could well block home educators from tackling local problems at a local level, effectively funnelling all efforts through a monolithic, “official” body. This is the antithesis of localism and it is incredibly disempowering and destructive in the medium to long term (it happened in my own local authority area when “experts” intervened without the consent of many active local home educators). Having seen the detailed and complex level at which home educators have had to operate in “good practice” areas, I fail to see how a national organisation could hope to replicate the levels of application, dedication and diversity needed to turn local authorities round.
The most worrying aspect, for me at least, is the potential this association has to cause significant harm in the hands of a government that has few sympathies with the importance of families and the primacy of the parent with regard to welfare and education. You and I tweeted about Barry Sheerman’s perspective (hyperlink here) a week or two ago, and it is precisely this entrenched attitude towards home education, also seen in many local authority officers, that could turn any professional organisation into a powerful lobbying group against freedom in education after the next general election.
It is true that there is nothing to stop officers organising if they so wish. However, I think it is totally unacceptable to organise and/or additionally resource this through an unelected and unaccountable body in the face of significant opposition from the affected community, and I would like to express my opposition to this in the strongest terms.
My questions regarding your proposal are below:
Have you had discussions about this national organisation prior to proposing it at the end of the last APPG?
When you referred to “home education experts from local authorities” did you mean local authority officers, consultants or individuals from the home education community?
What is your definition of “home education expert”?
What exactly is the purpose of the next APPG? Is it to scope the proposal, or actively take it forward? Has there been or will there be an evidence based impact assessment?
Are there formal mechanisms in place to deal with opposition from key stakeholders?
I am conscious of asking so many questions but I think they are reasonable and pertinent to the current situation, so thank you for your patience. Should you need any clarification regarding any of the points I have raised, please let me know. I look forward to hearing from you and sharing any responses.
Lisa Amphlett


Oh, dear! Can anybody spot the difference between this email and my own? Yes, that’s right, mine was a couple of dozen words, containing a single question. Lisa Amphlett’s, on the other hand, is a long, rambling communication, with no fewer than thirteen questions embedded in it.  What do readers think are the chances of anybody ploughing through all that and answering all the  questions? That’s right; practically zero!  So it proved, because here is the answer which she received ten days later:


Dear Lisa
Thank you for your letter of 23 November about the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Home Education.
APPGs are designed to provide an opportunity for Parliamentarians to learn more about a topic, and that is the function served by the Home Education group.
As you may know, I have been engaged in highlighting and challenging inappropriate behaviour by local authority officers regarding home education for some years. This can sometimes feel like an uphill struggle. It is my belief, and that of the APPG, that an association of local authority officers dealing with Home Education would make it easier to share best practice, stamp out misunderstanding and ensure fair treatment of home educating families.
Any such association would determine its own priorities but could provide local authority officers with guidance to help them challenge the sometimes unnecessarily defensive approach adopted by some local authorities towards home educating parents.
Yours sincerely,
Graham


This all illustrates the  two cardinal rules for such endeavours. First, keep it short and secondly, ask only one simple question at a time.  I have a suspicion that Lisa Amphlett will never receive answers to her questions, whereas I have now the answers to the two most important questions I wished to ask. The third, I shall have in another few days. 

Already, the rage is mounting about this and the conspiracy theorists are gearing up. I fear that the only real mystery is why anybody would think for a moment that such a long winded and prolix communication had the remotest chance of being answered!

Oh, no! Simon Webb is publicising the names of children

I suppose that I have only myself to blame for the latest piece of nonsense to be circulating about me on face book and twitter! When Lisa Amphlett was expressing the desire to speak to me on the telephone or at least exchange emails with me yesterday, I just knew that it would end badly. I said as much to her on the comments here, when I declined politely to do so. She was persuasive though, saying;

my offer of an email, telephone or face to face conversation stands. How can honest communication be anything less than a good idea? 

How indeed? And how could I have been such a mug? Despite refusing to play, she eventually sent me a personal email, trying to draw me into a debate. I could have deleted it, but felt that that would be a bit rude. She was clearly anxious to be in touch with me.  Now the first thing that I noticed was that she had CC’d her email into a third party; a man whose name I did not recognise. Obviously, I checked this person, just in case he was a lawyer or something. A quick google led me to a newspaper article featuring this man, who turned out to be Lisa Amphlett’s partner. In the article, they were very free with their personal details, mentioning their daughter’s name and precise age. I was amused to find that this meant that from 2009 to 2012, Lisa’s daughter had been under the age of five and she had therefore not technically been a home educator at all during those years of activism on behalf of the cause. It will be recalled that much has been made of the fact that Fiona Nicholson is not technically a home educator either, by virtue of her  own son’s age. 

I replied amiably enough to Lisa’s email, checking that I was right about her daughter’s age. I mentioned that I too had been regarded by some as not competent to speak about home education, because my daughter too was not aged between five and sixteen and I was therefore not a home educator. I thought this pleasingly ironic. Let us pause for a moment here and consider what has happened. Lisa has in the past telephoned a newspaper and advertised her daughter’s name and age. She clearly didn’t mind this information being freely available on the internet. She has gone out of her way to get me to exchange emails with her, even though I have told her that I don’t wish to do so. I have teased her about the fact that for three years of her home education activity, she was not officially a home educator at all and we part on what seems to me good terms. Anybody see anything reprehensible in my conduct?

Before we go any further, I should explain that I was pretty sure that this would all end  in unpleasantness, whether I did or did not  respond to Lisa Amphlett’s advances. How could I know this? It is really very simple. Whenever anybody makes a fetish of being honest and truthful, as Lisa did when she talked of, ‘my personal integrity, which I take very seriously’, you can be pretty sure that the individual will turn out to be a tricksy liar! (It’s much the same as her friend Maire Stafford, you see. She of course describes herself in her twitter profile as being mild, shy, timid and sweet; it’s a racing certainty that such a person will prove to be an aggressive bully).

So far, so good. At Lisa Amphlett’s urging, I have been in touch with her and exchanged a few good humoured messages. Imagine my surprise, when I found that as a result of this, people were talking of trying to close down this blog or speculating about calling the police. You gasp? You think it unlikely? Here is a man called Peter Flynn, tweeting last night;

 breach of privacy. Report them to the Blog hosting firm !


if he used the names of my children I'd report him to the police.

https://twitter.com/PeterRFlynn


So, I am to be reported to the police and also the Blog hosting firm, because Lisa Amphlett wanted a newspaper to report the name and age of her daughter? No, that would be crazy! It must be because I publicised the child’s name by mentioning it to her mother. But wait, surely her own mother would already know her daughter’s name? Very odd.

Here is another of that same crowd:

he is playing a dirty game..using names of children etc. Nasty man.

https://twitter.com/offshorebella


I won't weary readers with any more examples.  The good thing here is that we are able to see precisely what has happened and follow  these untruthful rumours to their source. This can only be the personal email that I sent Lisa Amphlett. It is good to be able to see in detail how these rumours are started and who is responsible for them. If nothing else, it should act as a warning for others who become embroiled with this particular bunch of home educators. I say home educators, but you have to ask how much time they are actually  able to spare for educating their children! One sees them engaging in all sorts of conspiracies and rumour mongering at all hours of the day and night, but they never seem to discuss education or childcare. They are all of them too obsessed with fighting imaginary hobgoblins. A little more education and a little less fretting about supposed threats to their chosen lifestyle would be my recommendation for some of this particular crew! In the meantime, the take-home message is clear. If somebody claims that her personal integrity is very important to her; be afraid, be very afraid! You will soon find lies and innuendo about yourself being spread across the internet.

The ‘Exiled Educator’; an update

Readers will perhaps recall that there was a little unpleasantness here a couple of weeks ago, following  a casual remark which I made in answer to a comment by Gill Kilner. I said:

I have just remembered, weren't you one of that gang who helped somebody slip out of the country and relocate to Ireland, in order to avoid answering all those awkward questions from social services about leaving her kids alone in the house?


Cue predictable outrage, in the course of which I was accused of everything  from criminal harassment and libel to suffering from a cogitative dissonance! How dare I say that she left her children alone in the house! I knew nothing about it and was smearing an innocent woman! There was renewed hostility when I elaborated by explaining that the  woman’s seventeen year-old son had been left in charge of his younger siblings and that this came to the attention of social services, because he was not a fit person to be left looking after young children. 

This sort of thing is a bit of a distraction from the real business of this blog, but now that the dust has settled a little, I thought that I would set out the facts of the case and allow readers to decide for themselves if I was right.

The mother in question  went off for the evening, leaving her teenage son to take care of the younger children.  While he was babysitting  a prank call was made  to the police from the house. They duly attended the property, whereupon the boy refused to let them in. They then forced entry to the home. At this point, perhaps we could just consider what I said; that the mother left her children alone in the house. Anybody think that this is the sort of thing that having a responsible adult in the house would have prevented from happening?

Having gained entry to the home, the police discovered that not only was there not a responsible adult looking after the children, conditions in the place left somewhat to be desired. There was, for example, animal shit all over the floor. As a result of this, they did the sensible thing and notified social services. The mother had had trouble before with both the police and social services. She was pregnant at the time and was in the habit of smoking cannabis and then more or less boasting about it. There were rumours that the kids might be about to be taken into care and so she left the country for Ireland, where she started a blog briefly, called,  The Exiled Educator. This may be found here:

http://the-exiled-educator.blogspot.co.uk/

  She had the baby, returned to this country and now lives in the north of England,  not far from  Nottingham.

I am hoping that some of those who were so unpleasant to me about what I said will now take the opportunity to apologise; beginning with Gill Kilner. I don’t really expect this to happen, but readers might like to look back at the things people said here, when they evidently knew all about this and wanted to pretend that I was making up lies about this case. What a bunch!

The spontaneous acquisition of literacy

The idea has been advanced lately, in the comments on this blog,  that if education were not compulsory and also that if children did not go to school, then they would still learn to read and write.  It is suggested that this would be a natural process, a by-product if you like, of living in a literate society. Mention is made of libraries, travel and the internet as means by which literacy would be acquired more or less automatically; perhaps with a little gentle encouragement from parents. This is all so fantastic, that I hardly know where to begin!

I think that part of the problem here is that some of those who comment on this blog simply don’t know how millions of children in this country live. These well-meaning people are so used to living in and visiting  homes filled with books, newspapers and magazines, environments which are overflowing with print, places where adults read and talk about books; that they cannot imagine the linguistically impoverished  backgrounds of the children living in some parts of the country. Learn to read spontaneously? These children don’t really learn to speak, until they start nursery!

Although I am working currently in a school, for many years I used to do home visiting in various capacities. I can tell readers now that an awful lot of children live in homes where there is literally no printed matter. Until they start school, they never see anybody read anything at all. Their homes are filled with flickering screens of various types; four or five televisions, games consoles, DVD players  and computers. Reading is not part of their lives in any way at all. They hear almost no conversation.  Somebody talked of travel yesterday, as though that were also the sort of thing which would stimulate and encourage literacy. I could introduce readers to  five year-old children in east London who have literally never been more than a mile and a half from their home. Their lives are as restricted as medieval peasants. These are children who have never travelled the few miles to central London, never been on a train, never visited a library. On a school trip with a group of seven year-olds from Hackney, I saw children panicking, because they had never seen an escalator before! They were terrified at this strange metal object which threatened to carry them down under ground and we had to take some of them down the fixed stairs. I am not talking here of a few pathological or atypical cases; this sort of life is common on some of the housing estates that I know.

School is a beacon of hope for these children. It is the only hope that they will ever have for being stimulated, for learning, for discovering anything beyond their immediate existence. These kids find it hard enough to learn to read and write as it is. The notion that they would achieve this without school is utterly grotesque.

This is not to say that it is impossible for children to learn to read without direct instruction. Those who see their parents reading a newspaper every day and become curious as to what is going on, those whose parents point out words regularly, saying things like, ‘This sign  says exit’ and so  on, the ones whose homes are filled with books and other reading matter; these children will be primed to acquire literacy. These are the children whose lives are probably enriched by visits to museums and zoos, those whose parents talk to them all the time and set up activities for them. I don’t personally think this the best way for a child to learn reading and writing, but it certainly happens. There is then a tendency for the parents of such children to say; ’I didn’t teach my child to read and now he is applying for Oxford. That must mean that nobody’s children need to be taught to read.’  This is a grave error and I shall have more to say about it in future posts. We are, incidentally, approaching now the crux of the matter; the main anxiety of local authorities when it comes to home education.