I’m blogging this as an idea in progress, as much to sort it out in my head as anything.

First there’s the problem. The Home Education community in the UK is frazzled. We’ve won a major battle with the death of the EHE clauses of the CSF Bill and if life were fair we’d be due a nice long rest with nobody bothering us for a few years at least. Life isn’t fair and we’re not going to get that.

Kelly Green and Gold blogged about “Home Education: The Image” earlier this month and “Why it isn’t over” yesterday. Others have made similar points but I can’t face looking through the rather long list of blogs that I follow to find them all right now. The point is, it’s NOT over. Right now there’s a break in active hostilities against us but do we want to wait for the next attack? I really wish I could find the blog post on the timing of the Kyrah Ishaq case and the Badman report and all the behind the scenes plotting and planning that went on after the ‘light touch’ changes were dropped, but you get the point. Just because they’re not making slanderous statements to the press right now doesn’t mean that they’re not doing anything, that there aren’t meetings taking place, memos being circulated. They won’t underestimate us again and we can’t count on the kind of good luck that saw the Ishaq mistrial scupper DCSF plans last year.

Back in February Blogdial made the case for the home ed community hiring a professional PR firm.

This full time PR endeavour has only one purpose; to make it psychologically impossible for any MP to consider any controls on Home Education. It should be anathema to them; they should bristle at the suggestion of controlling or interfering with Home Education.

Maybe that’s what we need, but it’s not something I feel equipped to try to convince anyone of right now so I’m going to suggest that we start off with a much more typically HE approach.

Do1Thing4HE

The Do One Thing idea seemed to work well when the BBC used it for wildlife. Not everyone can or wants to install a wildlife pond or set over their garden to plants for bees, but everyone can do something, however small like hanging up one bird feeder, and thousands of something smalls add up to something big.

There are thousands of us. Some blog, some get out there and petition parliament, blow bubbles, bang drums, and some feel like it’s all too massive a problem to be able to do anything, but everyone CAN do something. It might just be making the decision to attend that Not Back to School Picnic this year rather than not attending. It might be writing the letter to your local paper that you’d though about but never got around to. If everyone, yes EVERYONE, decides that they are going to do something, even just one small thing to raise the profile of HE in a positive way, to educate MPs, LAs and the public, then the cumulative effect will be amazing.

You don’t even need to decide right now what your One Thing is going to be, just make a note of your commitment to doing something. If you’re doing 101 Things in 1001 Days then make it one of those things. “Do something for HE”.

So, there’s the basic idea. Comments? Suggestions? Links to relevant blogs that I should have linked to?

Last Modified: Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 @ 19:19

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Firebird, Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.