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.
Thursday, 14 July 2016
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.
Friday, 8 July 2016
International Perspectives on Home Education: Do We Still Need Schools? by Paula Rothermel - A Review, Part 2
Some readers yesterday might perhaps have thought that I was being a little harsh when I suggested that Paula Rothermel’s contribution to the above book suggests either slapdash and shoddy research or deliberate dishonesty. The evidence however points strongly in that direction. Let us begin with what Rothermel has to say about one of the most well-known horror stories of British home education; the death of seven year-old Khyra Ishaq in 2008. The details of this case are familiar to most people in this country who are involved in home education. In the introduction to her book, Rothermel cites the Serious Case Review as a reference for her claim on page 8 that;
In the tragic case of one young child (Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board, 2010) the LA registered her as home educated simply because the parents stopped sending her to school.
This is of course absolutely untrue. In fact the child’s mother told the school as soon as she stopped sending her daughter that the child would be educated at home. As the Executive Summary of the subsequent Serious Case Review said;
The child and some siblings, were removed from state education during December 2007 and a clear statement issued by the mother, of her intention to educate them at home.
This is plain enough and the mother also told the police the same thing during a Safe and Well check. In addition to notifying the school and Education Welfare Service verbally of her intentions; on January 8th 2008 the child's mother sent a letter to the Special Educational Needs Assessment Service; explaining in writing that she would be educating her daughter Khyra at home. The inference is inescapable. Either the author has not actually read the Serious Case Review which she cites in her reference and is accordingly unfamiliar with its contents or she is intentionally misrepresenting the facts in order to strengthen her argument.
Consider another of Rothermel’s statements, when she writes on page 6 of;
the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee (CSFC,2010) set up to review Badman's report
In fact the Children, Schools and Families Committee was a standing committee established in 2007; two years before Graham Badman even began his investigations into home education. This select committee had nothing whatever to do with Badman's report, other than examining it briefly in 2009. Again, we are compelled to ask ourselves, is it the case that Rothermel simple knows nothing about the subject of which she is writing or is she exaggerating and romancing for dramatic effect? Neither of these would be what we look for in a supposedly academic work!
A charitable person will attribute errors such as these to superficial and inadequate research rather than outright mendacity, but a quick look at the body of the book provides us with a pointer that suggests that lack of knowledge alone is not a sufficient explanation.
It might be understandable, although still disconcerting, to find that an editor of a book like this knows little about the sources which she cites. Such ignorance could be innocent and unwitting. It is however quite a different matter where her own research is concerned. Surely she would know at once if anybody was making a mistake about that? Let us look now at Chapter 3 of the book, written by Noraisha Yusof; whom I mentioned yesterday. On page 44, Yusof says that;
Rothermel’s (2002) study of 419 UK families showed that the home educated children outperformed their schooled counterparts on a general mathematics test, achieving an average mark of 81 per cent, compared to the school educated pupils average mark of 45 per cent.
This seems clear and quite unambiguous. It is being claimed that Rothermel administered tests in mathematics to at least 419 children. No other construction could possibly be placed upon this sentence. In fact, as Rothermel herself knows perfectly well, the tests were given to just 35 children. We are left once more with only two choices. The first possibility is that Dr Rothermel simply does not remember accurately the research which she conducted. The second is that she knows very well that 419 children were not tested in this way, but feels that this figure looks 12 times more impressive than the actual one of 35. When reading through the contributions to her book, it would have been easy enough for Rothermel to correct something like this. That she chose not to is curious and revealing.
This is by no means an exhaustive catalogue of the mistakes or misrepresentations to be found in this book. Paula Rothermel is well known in British home educating circles as something of an expert on the subject and I think that we may really assume that she is not lacking in knowledge about such things as the Khyra Ishaq case; still less about her own research. We are drawn inexorably to the sad conclusion that the things which I have outlined above have been done by design, rather than accidentally.
I would be happy to be proved wrong about this and invite those able to put forward an opposing view to do so in the comments below. Anybody wishing to check what has been said here may go to Amazon, find the book and then use the feature which allows one to look inside the book at the text. I would not want anybody simply to take my word for anything written here, but urge people to look for themselves.
In the tragic case of one young child (Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board, 2010) the LA registered her as home educated simply because the parents stopped sending her to school.
This is of course absolutely untrue. In fact the child’s mother told the school as soon as she stopped sending her daughter that the child would be educated at home. As the Executive Summary of the subsequent Serious Case Review said;
The child and some siblings, were removed from state education during December 2007 and a clear statement issued by the mother, of her intention to educate them at home.
This is plain enough and the mother also told the police the same thing during a Safe and Well check. In addition to notifying the school and Education Welfare Service verbally of her intentions; on January 8th 2008 the child's mother sent a letter to the Special Educational Needs Assessment Service; explaining in writing that she would be educating her daughter Khyra at home. The inference is inescapable. Either the author has not actually read the Serious Case Review which she cites in her reference and is accordingly unfamiliar with its contents or she is intentionally misrepresenting the facts in order to strengthen her argument.
Consider another of Rothermel’s statements, when she writes on page 6 of;
the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee (CSFC,2010) set up to review Badman's report
In fact the Children, Schools and Families Committee was a standing committee established in 2007; two years before Graham Badman even began his investigations into home education. This select committee had nothing whatever to do with Badman's report, other than examining it briefly in 2009. Again, we are compelled to ask ourselves, is it the case that Rothermel simple knows nothing about the subject of which she is writing or is she exaggerating and romancing for dramatic effect? Neither of these would be what we look for in a supposedly academic work!
A charitable person will attribute errors such as these to superficial and inadequate research rather than outright mendacity, but a quick look at the body of the book provides us with a pointer that suggests that lack of knowledge alone is not a sufficient explanation.
It might be understandable, although still disconcerting, to find that an editor of a book like this knows little about the sources which she cites. Such ignorance could be innocent and unwitting. It is however quite a different matter where her own research is concerned. Surely she would know at once if anybody was making a mistake about that? Let us look now at Chapter 3 of the book, written by Noraisha Yusof; whom I mentioned yesterday. On page 44, Yusof says that;
Rothermel’s (2002) study of 419 UK families showed that the home educated children outperformed their schooled counterparts on a general mathematics test, achieving an average mark of 81 per cent, compared to the school educated pupils average mark of 45 per cent.
This seems clear and quite unambiguous. It is being claimed that Rothermel administered tests in mathematics to at least 419 children. No other construction could possibly be placed upon this sentence. In fact, as Rothermel herself knows perfectly well, the tests were given to just 35 children. We are left once more with only two choices. The first possibility is that Dr Rothermel simply does not remember accurately the research which she conducted. The second is that she knows very well that 419 children were not tested in this way, but feels that this figure looks 12 times more impressive than the actual one of 35. When reading through the contributions to her book, it would have been easy enough for Rothermel to correct something like this. That she chose not to is curious and revealing.
This is by no means an exhaustive catalogue of the mistakes or misrepresentations to be found in this book. Paula Rothermel is well known in British home educating circles as something of an expert on the subject and I think that we may really assume that she is not lacking in knowledge about such things as the Khyra Ishaq case; still less about her own research. We are drawn inexorably to the sad conclusion that the things which I have outlined above have been done by design, rather than accidentally.
I would be happy to be proved wrong about this and invite those able to put forward an opposing view to do so in the comments below. Anybody wishing to check what has been said here may go to Amazon, find the book and then use the feature which allows one to look inside the book at the text. I would not want anybody simply to take my word for anything written here, but urge people to look for themselves.
Wednesday, 6 July 2016
International Perspectives on Home Education: Do We Still Need Schools? by Paula Rothermel - A Review, Part 1
The editor of the above book, Paula Rothermel, is exceedingly dissatisfied with the way that it is selling; as well she might be, with sales currently running at fewer than one a year! Instead of asking herself where she might have gone wrong in compiling it or writing the introduction, Dr Rothermel evidently finds it easier to seek a scapegoat. She has accordingly come to the conclusion that if people aren’t queuing up to buy her book, then it must be my fault for reviewing the thing on Amazon! Put like that, it sounds quite mad and yet Roxane Featherstone, who is apparently a friend of Rothermel’s, has recently been advancing this hypothesis to anybody who will listen. Perhaps it is now time to examine this book in detail and try and work out the real reason why there is such a marked reluctance to purchase it.
There are two aspects in particular of Rothermel’s book which might be causing concern among potential customers and making them hesitate before shelling out £70 for it; apart that is from the grotesquely high price. The first of these is the introduction, which is written by Rothermel herself. This is a singularly awful piece of work, containing, apart from the factual errors, some of the most misleading and inaccurate references which it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. I shall deal with this separately in a subsequent post. The second thing likely to cause both professionals involved in education, as well as home educators themselves, to raise their eyebrows a little is the list of contributors; the first of whom is a woman called Leslie Barson. As soon as I saw the name, I gasped audibly and muttered under my breath, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ I have every reason to suppose that others glancing at the contents page reacted in precisely the same way. Leslie Barson attained notoriety a few years ago when, in the course of an interview for the Times Educational Supplement, she said;
I would remove the law that says education is compulsory ...I believe children should be able to work in paid employment as soon as they would like to, and would feel more valued if allowed to do this.
Yes, really. Here is a woman who would scrap the various laws which currently guarantee children an education and protect them from exploitation by unscrupulous parents and employers and turn back the clock a hundred and fifty years; so that children might once again spend their early years working in factories and fields, instead of being at school. This is the person whom Rothermel regards as perfectly suited to be the first name featured in her book. We return to the question of why Dr Rothermel’s book is not selling well. Here’s a hint; if you wish for professionals and academics in the field of education to buy a book, do try and avoid having the first name one sees upon opening it belonging to a woman who wishes to see the nation’s educational system dismantled, along with a return to the days when small children could be sent up chimneys and down mines!
The next name is unexceptional, somebody from Australia who is championing a crank theory of learning originating from a contemporary of Lysenko, but the third contributor once again causes a sharp intake of breath; it is one of the Yusof children. If Rothermel had scoured the length and breadth of Britain, she could hardly have uncovered a worse and less appetising example of home education than that inflicted upon the siblings of Noraisha Yusof, author of the third chapter of the book. Noraisha’s sister described her childhood as a ‘living hell’ and wrote of ‘15 years of emotional and physical abuse.’ At the age of 11, she tried to kill herself as a result of the home education to which she was subjected. What sort of abuse was there in the Yusof home? Her brother Abraham said of his father, ‘He used to wake us up in the middle of the night by punching our faces. It was awful what he put us through.’ The father was subsequently convicted of indecently assaulting two 15 year-old girls whom he was tutoring.
In her essay on the learning of mathematics in the home environment, Noraisha Yusof does not mention the valuable contribution made by being punched in the face at night. Nor does she explain how important it is to keep the home cold and to ban television and pop music; both integral parts of her own learning in the home environment which led to her attending university to study mathematics at the age of 16.
I have not the leisure to go further into the choice of authors made for Dr Rothermel’s book, but I will limit myself to saying that the sight of a reactionary who wishes to see children in this country stripped of the legal protection they currently enjoy is hardly calculated to encourage those of us who work in education to view her book kindly. Nor could I read, without feeling a little queasy, a piece about the virtues of learning mathematics at home, written by somebody from such an abusive home.
In the next piece about Rothermel’s book, we will look at her own contribution and try and work out whether she is guilty of nothing worse than sloppy research or whether, on the other hand, she has been deliberately untruthful in some of her claims.
There are two aspects in particular of Rothermel’s book which might be causing concern among potential customers and making them hesitate before shelling out £70 for it; apart that is from the grotesquely high price. The first of these is the introduction, which is written by Rothermel herself. This is a singularly awful piece of work, containing, apart from the factual errors, some of the most misleading and inaccurate references which it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. I shall deal with this separately in a subsequent post. The second thing likely to cause both professionals involved in education, as well as home educators themselves, to raise their eyebrows a little is the list of contributors; the first of whom is a woman called Leslie Barson. As soon as I saw the name, I gasped audibly and muttered under my breath, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ I have every reason to suppose that others glancing at the contents page reacted in precisely the same way. Leslie Barson attained notoriety a few years ago when, in the course of an interview for the Times Educational Supplement, she said;
I would remove the law that says education is compulsory ...I believe children should be able to work in paid employment as soon as they would like to, and would feel more valued if allowed to do this.
Yes, really. Here is a woman who would scrap the various laws which currently guarantee children an education and protect them from exploitation by unscrupulous parents and employers and turn back the clock a hundred and fifty years; so that children might once again spend their early years working in factories and fields, instead of being at school. This is the person whom Rothermel regards as perfectly suited to be the first name featured in her book. We return to the question of why Dr Rothermel’s book is not selling well. Here’s a hint; if you wish for professionals and academics in the field of education to buy a book, do try and avoid having the first name one sees upon opening it belonging to a woman who wishes to see the nation’s educational system dismantled, along with a return to the days when small children could be sent up chimneys and down mines!
The next name is unexceptional, somebody from Australia who is championing a crank theory of learning originating from a contemporary of Lysenko, but the third contributor once again causes a sharp intake of breath; it is one of the Yusof children. If Rothermel had scoured the length and breadth of Britain, she could hardly have uncovered a worse and less appetising example of home education than that inflicted upon the siblings of Noraisha Yusof, author of the third chapter of the book. Noraisha’s sister described her childhood as a ‘living hell’ and wrote of ‘15 years of emotional and physical abuse.’ At the age of 11, she tried to kill herself as a result of the home education to which she was subjected. What sort of abuse was there in the Yusof home? Her brother Abraham said of his father, ‘He used to wake us up in the middle of the night by punching our faces. It was awful what he put us through.’ The father was subsequently convicted of indecently assaulting two 15 year-old girls whom he was tutoring.
In her essay on the learning of mathematics in the home environment, Noraisha Yusof does not mention the valuable contribution made by being punched in the face at night. Nor does she explain how important it is to keep the home cold and to ban television and pop music; both integral parts of her own learning in the home environment which led to her attending university to study mathematics at the age of 16.
I have not the leisure to go further into the choice of authors made for Dr Rothermel’s book, but I will limit myself to saying that the sight of a reactionary who wishes to see children in this country stripped of the legal protection they currently enjoy is hardly calculated to encourage those of us who work in education to view her book kindly. Nor could I read, without feeling a little queasy, a piece about the virtues of learning mathematics at home, written by somebody from such an abusive home.
In the next piece about Rothermel’s book, we will look at her own contribution and try and work out whether she is guilty of nothing worse than sloppy research or whether, on the other hand, she has been deliberately untruthful in some of her claims.
Tuesday, 5 July 2016
Good news, and bad, for home educators
There is always a general anxiety among British home educators that whatever government is in power might suddenly take it into its head to pass a new law; regulating or restricting the practice of home education. I have spoken recently to people working for two local authorities, one in the Midlands and the other in East London, and it seems that there is not the remotest chance of this happening; at least for the foreseeable future. In fact the news is even better than that! A number of local authorities have begged the Department for Education to consider new legislation and the response has been quite brusque. They have been told that their existing powers are quite sufficient to deal with any supposed problems with home educators. This is what many people in the home educating community in this country have been saying for years and so I am sure that there will be a good deal of satisfaction about this development.
Mind you, as with so many things in this world, there is a bad side to this, as well as a good. In this case, it means that local authorities are, in effect, being urged to ensure that all home educating parents are actually teaching their children and working to a curriculum. Those who are not face the prospect of being issued with School Attendance Orders. The reason is simple; those not actively teaching their children to read and write, or instructing them in mathematics are breaching the law as it stands. This is perfectly well-known to most local authorities, but many parents have not the least idea that this is the legal situation. A few words of explanation might be necessary.
Of course, we know that home educators must provide for their children a full-time education which is efficient and suitable for their age and aptitude, but it is popularly supposed among most home educating parents that there exists no legal definition of what constitutes a ‘suitable’ or ’efficient’ education.. There is of course precedent or case law, but that is incredibly vague and waffly; something about an ’efficient’ education being one which achieves what it sets out to achieve. As a result, many parents think that they do not have to follow a curriculum or even teach their children if they don’t want to. They are quite wrong, as they will probably soon be finding out.
In 1981, there was a landmark court case involving a home educating mother called Iris Harrison (Harrison and Harrison v Stevenson (1981) QB (DC) 729/81). This is often seen as a victory by home educators, because they feel that it established their right to educate their children autonomously. In fact, the judgement contained the following words;
We regard the fundamental academic skills of writing, reading and arithmetic as fundamental to any education for life in the modern world - essential for communication, research or self-education. We should not in the ordinary case, regard a system of education as suitable for any child capable of learning such skills, if it failed to instil in the child the ability to read, write or cope with arithmetical problems, leaving it to time, chance and the inclination of the child to determine whether, if ever, the child ever achieved even elementary proficiency in these skills. Efficient education should include a systematic approach to learning the basic skills of reading, writing and numeracy.
In other words, the judge in that case ruled that home educated children had to be taught English and mathematics systematically. If this is not done, then the education cannot be regarded as being a suitable one.
A lecturer in law at a London university has been consulted about this and given as his opinion that the judgement in Harrison and Harrison v Stevenson means that local authorities are entitled to access to a child’s work and also that they may require evidence of academic progress from year to year. It is this which the Department for Education has in mind when it advises local authorities that they already have sufficient powers to act in the matter of home education. Any parent who refuses to teach his or her child mathematics is, according to the precedent in this case, not providing a suitable education.
I think that this post is long enough and I will have to continue it in a day or two. The obvious question that readers will be asking is if this is indeed the legal situation, then why has no local authority yet taken any home educating parents to court on the strength of it? This is an interesting point which I will deal with in my next post.
Mind you, as with so many things in this world, there is a bad side to this, as well as a good. In this case, it means that local authorities are, in effect, being urged to ensure that all home educating parents are actually teaching their children and working to a curriculum. Those who are not face the prospect of being issued with School Attendance Orders. The reason is simple; those not actively teaching their children to read and write, or instructing them in mathematics are breaching the law as it stands. This is perfectly well-known to most local authorities, but many parents have not the least idea that this is the legal situation. A few words of explanation might be necessary.
Of course, we know that home educators must provide for their children a full-time education which is efficient and suitable for their age and aptitude, but it is popularly supposed among most home educating parents that there exists no legal definition of what constitutes a ‘suitable’ or ’efficient’ education.. There is of course precedent or case law, but that is incredibly vague and waffly; something about an ’efficient’ education being one which achieves what it sets out to achieve. As a result, many parents think that they do not have to follow a curriculum or even teach their children if they don’t want to. They are quite wrong, as they will probably soon be finding out.
In 1981, there was a landmark court case involving a home educating mother called Iris Harrison (Harrison and Harrison v Stevenson (1981) QB (DC) 729/81). This is often seen as a victory by home educators, because they feel that it established their right to educate their children autonomously. In fact, the judgement contained the following words;
We regard the fundamental academic skills of writing, reading and arithmetic as fundamental to any education for life in the modern world - essential for communication, research or self-education. We should not in the ordinary case, regard a system of education as suitable for any child capable of learning such skills, if it failed to instil in the child the ability to read, write or cope with arithmetical problems, leaving it to time, chance and the inclination of the child to determine whether, if ever, the child ever achieved even elementary proficiency in these skills. Efficient education should include a systematic approach to learning the basic skills of reading, writing and numeracy.
In other words, the judge in that case ruled that home educated children had to be taught English and mathematics systematically. If this is not done, then the education cannot be regarded as being a suitable one.
A lecturer in law at a London university has been consulted about this and given as his opinion that the judgement in Harrison and Harrison v Stevenson means that local authorities are entitled to access to a child’s work and also that they may require evidence of academic progress from year to year. It is this which the Department for Education has in mind when it advises local authorities that they already have sufficient powers to act in the matter of home education. Any parent who refuses to teach his or her child mathematics is, according to the precedent in this case, not providing a suitable education.
I think that this post is long enough and I will have to continue it in a day or two. The obvious question that readers will be asking is if this is indeed the legal situation, then why has no local authority yet taken any home educating parents to court on the strength of it? This is an interesting point which I will deal with in my next post.
Wendy Charles-Warner and Alison Sauer's latest business venture
Heatherside Education Consultants Ltd, the company which was run by Wendy Charles-Warner and Alison Sauer, has now been dissolved. Their latest enterprise, also aimed at home educators, is called 3rd Way Law. The website may be seen below. The company who designed the website, Keston Media, is run by Julie Arnold, who was until recently a trustee of Education Otherwise. Some clients of 3rd Way Law are under the impression that they are solicitors, but this is not of course the case. I shall be writing more about this outfit in the future.
http://www.thirdwaylaw.co.uk/our-services.html
http://www.thirdwaylaw.co.uk/our-services.html
Monday, 4 July 2016
Paula Rothermel and her dupes spread lies about me…
I seldom post on this blog these days, but when people circulate untruthful stories about me; I feel that I should at least set the record straight.
Paula Rothermel’s name is probably familiar to many home educating parents in this country. In the late 1990s, she conducted a piece of research which has been widely quoted by home educators ever since. Last year, a book was published by Dr Rothermel; a compilation of essays about home education. This book hasn’t sold well and the author apparently blames me for this. It is claimed that a poor review which I gave for the thing on Amazon has harmed sales. The Amazon listing may be found here;
https://www.amazon.co.uk/International-Perspectives-Home-Education-Schools/dp/1137446846/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1467648259&sr=1-1&keywords=rothermel
Perhaps I should mention at this point that the publisher of this book, Palgrave Macmillan, approached me before agreeing a contract to elicit a professional opinion from me on the merits or otherwise of the thing. In my report, I pointed out that the references were a nightmare and that there were many factual inaccuracies. I suggested that these points might need to be dealt with if it was to be published. In the event, nobody bothered to correct any of the errors to which I drew attention and I posted a review of the book on Amazon.
I now find that Paula Rothermel is telling people that I have been dishonest in my review as part of some sort of personal vendetta against her; which is absurd. She had previously told the publisher, apropos of me, that, ‘The Select Committee condemned his contribution to the review on home education’. This is of course a bare-faced lie; as anybody reading the transcript of the select committee hearing can easily establish. Since I write non-fiction books for a living, making a false statement of this sort to a publisher was harmful to me. She went on to claim that I hated her and that she didn’t know why, since she had never met me!
The truth is that in the spring of 2009, Dr Rothermel contacted me quite out of the blue and asked for my advice about a developmental problem which afflicted her youngest child. I didn’t know her, but did my best to help. She told me all sorts of details about her life history and family circumstances. When I later criticised the methodology of the research which she had conducted, she became convinced that I was her enemy and threatened me with legal action. The whole business was very peculiar.
I would myself have been happy to forget all about this, except that a woman who evidently knows Rothermel is now dogging my footsteps on a Facebook group concerned with home education, to which I belong. It seems that all sorts of lies are being told by Paula Rothermel and since I have no idea where else these are being circulated, I thought that I would place this statement in the public domain; rather than being obliged to refute every individual claim being made about me by this woman and her friends.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
