Educating Outside the Box

Let’s get something straight. See this picture?

This is ‘The Scapegoat’ by William Holman Hunt. It is NOT a home educator.

Khyra Ishaq was NOT home educated.

The people finding themselves being blamed for this child’s tragic death are DESPERATE to shift the focus. They always are. Forget ‘lessons will be learnt’, they’re not interested in that. They’re interested in convincing the public that it was somebody else’s fault, that they don’t have the necessary powers and THEY are not to blame.

Well they can just sod right off because Khyra Ishaq was NOT home educated. Her mother stopped her going to school and so technically she was truanting. The systems and individuals who should have stepped in when her school raised concerns about her did not. They did not use the powers that they have. Saying that registering home educators would have made any difference is not just a LIE it is blatant SCAPEGOATING. It is an insult to a dead child and shows a shocking lack of concern for other children who may even now be suffering abuse because social services and the police aren’t doing their jobs.

You can judge the loyalties and agendas of every newspaper and other media outlet on how they spin the Khyra Ishaq story once the murder trial is over. If you see Home Education being blamed you know whose pocket they are in.

Well, I’d made them and they fit the theme of Love

Audrey made cupcakes today to enter into English Mum’s Great Valentine’s Day Cupcake Challenge.

For someone to do a decent job* there are an awful lot of things to consider. It’s NOT going to be simple!

You can’t just take all the families known to a Local Authority and do a straight average of GCSE results to compare with average school outcomes. For a start families known to their LA are heavily slanted towards those whose children went to school and were deregistered for some reason, usually a serious problem. Families which have home educated from the start are much more likely to be ‘unknown’.

It would hardly be fair for example to compare a boy with severe SEN who was withdrawn from school age 13 after years of unresolved bullying with the national average for all children and try to claim a poor outcome for HE. You would have to compare him with a similar boy who remained in school, a like for like comparison to see what difference those few years of HE vs school made. Even for children HE from the start you’d need to compare them with the same socio-economic group in the same area to get a fair comparison.

The other big problem is, how do you measure outcomes? Not a trivial question as a combination of freedom from the requirement to do GCSEs and parents having to fund them means that HE children very often just don’t take them. You might compare UCCA scores at 16 or maybe 18? That at least would count in A Levels taken early, IGCSEs, music grade exams etc. That does perpetuate the idea that it’s all about exams of course but it would paint part of the picture. Maybe look at what they’re doing at 18, actually look rather than rely on NEET figures which, as we’ve seen, are a bit rubbish.

Then I suppose you probably ought to figure in the social outcomes, levels of crime, drug use, teen pregnancies, all the stuff that politicians get worked up about. Again taking care to adjust for time spent in school and what problems, if any, started there. For example you can hardly pin a teen pregnancy on HE if the girl in question only became HE after she got that way!

No, it really is NOT going to be simple.

* hands up everyone who thinks that the DCSF have no desire to fund anyone doing a decent job

This time a little bit more specific. It’s the Muslims who need watching dontchaknow.

There should be some safeguard against home educated Muslim girls, or any others, not receiving the equality of opportunity that would be offered at school, or should be; and reassurance that children who are not English speakers are learning the language.

Baroness Deech

but having just had our feet run over by the cart I suspect that a lot of home educators will NOT feel like taking part in any research commissioned by the DCSF.

2010001 DCSF: Home Education - A Feasibility Study of the Educational Experience and Attainment of Home-Educated Children

DCSF intends to commission a study to investigate the.feasibility of embarking on a longitudinal project investigating the provision of teaching and learning for, and the attainment of, home-educated children.

The overarching aim of the feasibility study will be to:

A small-scale investigation at LA-level to assess numbers of home-educated children known to them;

Research with voluntary organisations to establish number and type of children known to them; and

Research with families who home educate.

It is anticipated that the project will start in April 2010.

(the above was a direct copy/paste and all typos and grammatical errors are the business of the DCSF)

It’s a lovely little touch that this research falls under the DfES Objective “Close the gap in educational achievement for children from disadvantaged backgrounds”.

They kicked off pandering to the Labour Class War agenda then let one HE question through:

[Comment From naomi naomi: ]
Why is home education such a problem to you? These families cost the state nothing regarding educational funding and yet gain excellent results by adapting the education to suit their childs needs.Why do you insist on treating them like potential abusers? There is no evidence that large numbers of home ed children are at risk.The current system if implimented correctly would be more than satisfactory.Why put the blame on caring devoted parents ,when in fact it is often local officials and social services that let children down and allow KNOWN abuse to continue?

Ed Balls:
Home education is part of our education system. I fully support the right of parents to educate their children at home if they choose. To say that I am labelling them as potential abusers is just plain wrong. But as a society we do have an obligation to make sure that the rights of all children, to learn and be safe, are respected too.

and that was it, on to SATs and more opportunities for Balls to attempt to come across as if he gives a stuff and of course try to plug his worthless policies. One question and the answer was, in order, WRONG, LIE, LIE and WRONG.

Memorandum submitted by LGA (CS 23)

Thus it is our understanding that councils have a statutory duty to promote high standards, ensure fair access to educational opportunity and promote the fulfilment by every child of his or her educational potential. This applies whether or not children attend school.

And? So what? I’m fairly confident that government guidelines don’t generally use slang so ‘promote’ is unlikely to mean “to get possession of by doubtful means or by ingenuity” on this occasion. No, I suspect it means “to help or encourage to exist or flourish”, which is NOT the same as ‘ensuring’ or ‘enforcing’. You can promote something without controlling it, without monitoring it, in fact in the case of home education doing either of those things will achieve pretty much the opposite of encouraging it exist or flourish. As an excuse for more power this is a really, really lame argument and simply demonstrates how some people in local government need things explained very slowly and carefully, using only short, simple words.

I was going to fisk Diana Johnson’s contributions to the debate but to be honest every time she opened her mouth such utter garbage spewed forth that I’d be working on it for a week and nobody would want to read it. So here are just two choice quotes to demonstrate what a bizarre, delusional, alternate reality world she seems to be living in.

“the issue is about moving home education to a new way of working in a spirit of collaboration and co-operation with local authorities.”

Yes, she actually said that! She stood there and said that on the record. How can you possibly even try to talk to someone who is THIS out of touch with the real world? Seriously?

“Our proposals are not about state control of home education. They are about acting when a child’s rights are not being met by their parents. The proposals are moderate and proportionate, and they will keep England among the most liberal countries in the world for home education.”

What do you think, does she know she’s talking crap or is she totally and utterly awaaaaaaaaaay with the fairies?

The speeches against the bill varied from good to magnificent and I couldn’t really quote from them without spoiling the effect, go read them (starting half way down this page) or watch and listen here.

I’m solidly and embarrassingly mono-lingual, so this is about as far as you can get from an issue that would ever effect me. However I found myself very uncomfortable listening to the following exchanges yesterday, and reading the transcript today has intensified that feeling.

Mrs. Ann Cryer (Keighley) (Lab): The hon. Gentleman keeps talking about certain aspects of my constituency, but I have been living there for a long time and the children are very dear to my heart. What if an inspector went into a home and discovered that the parent who had decided to home educate spoke no English? What is the hon. Gentleman’s remedy if we are not to have inspectors?

Mr. Gibb: Those issues apply in other parts of the education system. The hon. Lady has been complaining that there are children who are not getting English lessons in the schools that they attend, so I do not think that that is an issue solely related to home education.

Mrs. Cryer: I have never said that children do not get English lessons. They could not possibly join or perform in the school if there were not dedicated groups of reception class teachers teaching them English on arrival. My complaint is that there is no English spoken in the home so they are thrown in at the deep end once they arrive at age four.

Mr. Gibb: I have friends who speak only French in their homes. It is not for me to object to the way those parents bring up their children. We have to be careful what powers we take for ourselves as the state, and this issue treads over the line between the duties that the state has and those that families have for bringing up their own children.

Several hon. Members rose—

Mr. Gibb: I will give way to the hon. Member for Battersea and then the Minister, and then I will crack on, if I may.

Martin Linton: Is the hon. Gentleman saying that he and his party would be happy if children in this country were educated without any knowledge of English?

Mr. Gibb: No, I am not. The issues are very difficult and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath said during the debate on Second Reading, things are not satisfactory at the moment, and we will have to look at this issue. But this is not the right approach to tackle such difficult matters. In the words of an old clichÃ(c), it is a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and it is offending tens of thousands of people. That is the problem. We have to consider this again, more sensitively, to tackle the problems that both hon. Members have highlighted.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families (Ms Diana R. Johnson): Will the hon. Gentleman comment on one of the recommendations of the Select Committee? On home education, it believes that the prospect of a child gaining basic literacy and numeracy skills and a breadth of education is right. How does that fit with the hon. Gentleman’s comments on having perhaps only one language in the home, which is not English?

Mr. Gibb: There are many schools in this country where 8 per cent. of young people are not learning to read. The way the Government are trying to tackle such matters is not right. For one thing, it is costing between £130 million and £567 million a year, which will be completely wasted if their approach is designed to change the way children are home educated.

Mr. Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con): I wonder, following the Minister’s intervention, whether—from what she said about the system of local authority inspectors looking to see that a suitable education is being provided— any family who cannot demonstrate suitable English skills will automatically be deprived of the right to home educate? That seems to be the logical conclusion of what the Minister suggested. If that is the message she wants to send out to people in such a situation in this country, perhaps she can say it more clearly.

What kind of logical scrutiny does Diana Johnson’s concern about “a child gaining basic literacy and numeracy skills and a breadth of education” in a language other than English stand? What does she imagine happens in other countries?! Yes, it’s true that children starting at a school where classes are all given in English will probably have problems if they don’t speak good English, but if they’re being home educated in the family language then that problem just doesn’t exist. You can learn numeracy perfectly well in French or Punjabi. I have no direct evidence but suspect that literacy is a much more transferable skill than Ms Johnson thinks and a “breadth of education” whatever that is, is just as likely in Polish as English.

Which leaves me with this uncomfortable feeling that ignorance and racism are at work. Of course the people involved will no doubt throw up their hands in horror and deny such a charge, how DARE anyone accuse them of racism! But still, there they are trying to justify sweeping new powers on the basis of … what? A belief that anyone with a native language other than English is somehow automatically ill-educated and incapable of providing their children with a suitable education?