Educating Outside the Box

I’m going to track some of the media output on the Khyra Ishaq case today to see who is a DCSF lapdog. Lapdogs get a FAIL, reporting the facts without comment from Badman or the like gets a PASS. Feel free to put any you find in the comments or Tweet me and I’ll add them.

FAIL

• BBC - Could Khyra Ishaq have been saved? A spectacular fail too, but with their track record of being anti-HE not at all unexpected. Note - the BBC have a complaints form if you find the above as offensive as I do. Maire, Tech, Debs, Jax and Jemmo have blogged theirs. Advise on HOW you complain to the BBC from Hecate including the relevant bits of the Broadcasting Code.
• Not the Guardian’s fault they’re just printing what the Statement from Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board has to say, which boils down to some serious buck passing and scapegoating, just as you’d expect!

PASS

• Daily Mail - Mother guilty of deliberately starving daughter, 7, to death despite numerous visits from social workers
• Channel 4 - Khyra Ishaq’s mother convicted of manslaughter
• Birmingham Mail - Khyra Ishaq death: Child starved to death surrounded by food
• Channel 4 - ‘Alarm bells should have rung’
• Guardian - Khyra Ishaq: the warning signs that were missed
• Times - Khyra Ishaq: locked away without food and punished with a cane
• Telegraph - Mother of Khyra Ishaq cleared of murder
• Sky News - Judge Condemns Council Over Girl Who Starved
• 24dash - Birmingham City Council apologises for failing to save starved Khyra
• Times - Judge attacks council over Khyra Ishaq who was starved to death
• Independent - Mother of Khyra Ishaq who starved to death cleared of murder

Today Michael Gove did a live Q&A on the TimesOnline site.

Naomi:
Home educators have no faith in government , after being treated so badly by Labour. How can that be rectified?

Michael Gove:
Dear Naomi

I think home educators do a wonderful job - they give up time and sacrifice so much for their children - Government should support them and we won’t allow the current Government’s plans to stigmatise home educators to get through

Naomi:
Thank you ,but can you promise us that clause 26/27 of csf bill will never be
law?

Michael Gove:
Dear Naomi

yes

One little word. Three lowercase letters. Lovely aren’t they? “can you promise us that clause 26/27 of csf bill will never be law?” “yes”.

The DCSF will no doubt use every dirty trick at their disposal, including lying about poor little Khyra, to try to make him break this promise, so the battle isn’t over, but let’s allow ourselves to seriously consider that we will make it to Polling Day without compulsory licensing on the books.

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.