We should understand the nature of the threat to home education. This is the first of a thousand cuts that will be aimed at killing off home education. It is unlikely to be banned outright but it will be made so difficult, and the regulatory requirements so onerous, that nobody will choose to do it.

The motive for this is simple: absolute State control over children.

Why isn’t the liberal left up in arms about this destruction of freedom?

I’m not sure this is about a total control over Children, it’s more about a creeping managerialism that pervades what modern Labourism is becoming.

I think that they believe people have a right to home educate, but that they need “help” to do so properly. That a manager will know best because they are “professional” and understand cost benefit analysis far better than any parent…

Good luck to home educators.

I am really torn on this. There is a real fear that home education is sometimes used as an excuse to cover up abuse. I am sure that the vast majority of home educators do a great job and are genuine loving parents, but the old system where the state had no right of access could not continue.

That is not, however , a reason to impose a methodology for how Home Education is to be done. I recognise that the reason for home education is often because parents do not like the state system, so making them apply it at home is bound to be counter-productive.

I suspect the bureaucracy is not an intentional thing – it is just something that comes as second nature to Socialists.

This needs a great deal more thought. The Ed Balls approach, to just implement as seen, is just the lazy option.

I have heard a rumour that no ‘hoodie’ was ever home-educated – is this true?

In other words, teenage rage amongst homies (not hoodies) is far more likely to be turned against their own family rather than the general public?

Martin Curtis

Why should we adopt an approach of inspections for Home Ed children? Is the family’s right to privacy now to be cast aside on the off-chance that one of them has committed a crime. Is there a real fear that HE is a cover for abuse? Badman admits that there is no evidence to support this theory, so the fear you claim is there is entirely irrational. Is kneejerk reactions to irrational fears the correct way to determine if basic civil liberties should be cast aside?

If you believe that it is, then torture is presumably also acceptable, at least if there is a “real fear” that someone might be planning a bombing. I guess the right to silence can go for the same reason. Double jeopardy? The same. (Whoops, that’s gone already). In fact are there any civil liberties that cannot be denied on the grounds that there is a “real fear” that someone has committed a crime?

@Martin

Good comment, though I will take you up on a single word…

“I suspect the bureaucracy is not an intentional thing – it is just something that comes as second nature to Socialists.”

The bureaucracy of education has many roots, and some of it is understandable, but the policy of determining the curriculum of all schools, stipulating what can be taught and how, standardising lesson planning and imposing a punitive assessment system which provides statistics that are then used as part of a national ranking system – the bulk of that was introduced by Thatcher and Major.

Whatever you think of it, it was clearly an expression of their social conservatism and a reaction against liberal reforms of the hated 60s and 70s in the education system. It is social conservatism and its attendant authoritarianism that Labour has adopted, and surely not ‘Socialism’.

Unless Socialism in your world not only, rather hilariously, extends to the men who invaded Iraq and are trying to privatise the Post Office, but also extends to Lord Baker and Chris Woodhead.

“There is a real fear that home education is sometimes used as an excuse to cover up abuse.”

Got any evidence to back this up?

I don’t think there is a ‘real fear’. The review was meant to find evidence of abuse and it didn’t, Ed Balls admitted as much. Despite what they’re telling the public there are more than adequate systems in place to protect home educated children. The fact that the ENTIRE child protection system is over burdened, under funded and not working is hardly the fault of home educators who naturally resent being scapegoated.

I’m afraid I think the Liberal Left is being quiet on this subject because they have the erroneous idea that the majority of home educators are right wing Christians who want to teach their children anti-science and conservative family values. Meanwhile the Right imagine we’re a bunch of ultra-liberal sandal wearing tree-huggers. What we really are is a fantastically eclectic mix of every race, religion and political persuasion. We choose to take full responsibility for the education of our children for varied reasons and undertake our duties in many different ways.

This government talks a great game on diversity but what they mean is they don’t mind you having different coloured skin or sexual orientation. If you have different thoughts it scares them. If you choose to opt out of the system that they offer you have to be stopped.

The second quote, to anyone who has looked into how New Labour has done business over the years, speaks volumes. As soon as they start talking about “commissioning” and “organisations including the voluntary sector”, what they mean is that this new service will be contracted out to commercial providers (almost always headed by former ministers and senior civil servants) and, thanks to taxpayers money, will be vastly profitable for these providers. I’ll bet that’s why Ed Balls is so keen on it, not any hostility to the idea of home education.

Martin Curtis: “There is a real fear that home education is sometimes used as an excuse to cover up abuse.”

I think you’re probably right – home education could fairly obviously be used by someone with malign intentions (and no, I’m not including teaching creationism here) to get their children away from public view, or indeed by local authorities to get ‘problem’ kids out of their school system when there’s no real likelihood of home education being provided.

However, that is no excuse for this report’s apparently unrelated attempt to force some kind of National Curriculum Lite on home educators, or to waste money creating some kind of vaguely Orwellian (and commercially-provided) home education enforcement unit, when all that’s actually needed is to fix the existing child protection services, and perhaps to provide a basic registration system that they can consult in case of a problem arising.

“There is a real fear that home education is sometimes used as an excuse to cover up abuse.”

It is a real fear about something that doesn’t really exist. I don’t believe there is any evidence of any correlation between home education and abuse. When people bring up this point, it smells to me like an examined prejudice.

It would be as absurd as claiming, for example, that state education is is an excuse to force vulnerable children into situations where they are more likely to be bullied.

“The Government now say this is about the balance between children’s rights and parent’s rights; they should tread more carefully and ponder on whether parents or the state will best ensure that children’s rights are provided.”

Will parents or the state best ensure children’s rights are provided?

Well, the answer will depend on the parents in question. Some will ensure their children’s rights are provided infinitely better than the state can, while others will be inept and effectively deny their children an adequate education. A large variation in competence is pretty much inevitable in any big group.

The question then becomes one of how far the government should go in protecting the presumably small number of children who are receiving an inadequate education under the guise of home schooling. After all, the state has a duty of care towards all its citizens, including children.

I suspect an occasional – perhaps annual – visit from the LEA, approaching with a broad definition of what constitutes an adequate education, would be sufficient here. This could hardly be claimed to be harmful to parents and might well rescue a few children from the real harm of an insufficient education.

Talking about the harm of an insufficient education, surely what the government should really be focusing its energies upon is creating a state system which nurtures individuality and creativity rather than simply teaches children how to pass assessments. This would mean that such a freedom from pressurised testing would cease to be the preserve of children whose parents have the resources to educate them at home. I suspect that if that were to happen, many home schooling parents would put their children back into the state system.

http://petespolitics.wordpress.com

Don’t they see that this review clearly shows that we have a Government who wish to reduce parental responsibility by making all of us accountable to the State in how we bring up our children? Or are they actually happy with that?

Why wouldn’t they be happy with it? The government doesn’t wish to reduce parental responsibility, it has the basic job of ensuring that people are not abusing that responsibility whether that is through actual abuse, through an erroneous claim that children are educated properly or in any other way. I don’t imagine for a moment that many home educators are doing their children a significant disservice, nor would I assume that the checks in place are inadequate but I think the questions above are a little absurd because every parent is accountable to the state every day as an individual and as a parent and that shouldn’t really be a surprise. Education is compulsory here, it’s the law and in that sense we’re accountable and for a significant proportion of childhood we should be.

It seems everyone supports home education then. Am I the only one that finds it a bit, well, weird? I’m sure there are many families that educate their kids well at home, but it just goes against the grain of everything I understand childhood to be about. Are there particular reasons why some kids are educated at home? I don’t understand why you would want to deprive kids of the ‘social’ education that is involved in going to school and being able to get away from your parents for at least part of the day. Maybe they all turn out to be well-rounded adults, but why on earth it would be a liberal-left ideal to have kids home schoolds, I have no idea. Then again, if you are one of those liberal-lefties that don’t have to have both parents out at work, just to pay the bills, I guess you can do what you want.

The “social education” thing is a bit of a red herring I think, although completely understandable if you haven’t experienced it yourself (I was home educated till 15). Groups like Education Otherwise (http://www.education-otherwise.org/) help families link up and give the kids the opportunity to hang out. A good thing about this is that typically children of different ages mix. Home education is not ideal for all children, but one thing I think I got out of it specifically related to the social aspect is that, since my childhood friends were often a little older or younger than me, there wasn’t the peer group of many children of the same age, which I think tends to foster self-doubt in children: “I’m not very good at Subject X” – unless they’re top of class in all subjects. Also I think I’m more self-motivated and feel like I can learn whatever I want to without assistance – this has proven very useful in work life.

On the flipside, the whole hierarchy and regimentation of the office / workplace has never felt natural, which I think is a result of not going to school. I personally see this as a good thing (I’ve left the office life behind and freelance) but it might make it harder for people to adjust to work life as it is for the majority of people.

Oh and re: “I suspect the bureaucracy is not an intentional thing – it is just something that comes as second nature to Socialists.” What nonsense. My parents, who taught me, are socialists, and found the bureaucracy involved from the education authority (this was in the Thatcher years) entirely odious. The meddling state can be found in any many systems of government, so why single out socialism?

I’ll get back into this in a while, I just wanted to reply to comment 15.

I’m currently researching on my own – without funding or any sort of assistance – just what you are talking about in regards to peer groups. The idea of “vertical tutor groups” and vertical teaching groups are still relatively new, though I work in a school with the former. The verticality is a reference to having pupils arranged other than by age group. Pupils from Year 7 to 11 share the same teachers. In the idea of a vertical teaching group, pupils are arranged according to ability, and progress at different speeds for each subject, perhaps being in the “alpha” group for science whilst being in group two or three for Design Technology.

So far as I have seen, there are a few good effects of VT but just how much they make inroads into peer pressure – which seems to be essentially what you are talking about – is up for question, since no control experiment exists that can factor out the influence of different social media, from the Youth Club to the press, all of which contribute to that pressure and none of which are contingent upon associating with the same age-group.

@ nina

Of course Education if compulsory but school is not and nor is a specific curriculum.

We are accountable to our children, if the state imposes its view or the view of Mr Badman or Mr Balls view of what education is the flexibility to provide the best education for our individual child is removed. The state is there to protect if abuse or neglect are occurring, society is there to notice these, we don’t need state monitoring of every family, the harm this could cause is untold. Our children benefit if we understand that we are responsible for their education and welfare, they do not benefit if we mistakenly assume that the state is responsible, if we do what they direct rather than working to provide for the child’s needs.

There is no need to extend the law as the review proposes.

A nice summary of the challenge here

http://www.renegadeparent.net/post/Just-say-NO-loud-and-clear.aspx#top

she says and surely most people whether parents or not will agree

“It is NOT acceptable for the state to have ultimate control of the education of our children
It is NOT acceptable for the state to make ultra vires judgements about the welfare of our children and then act in loco parentis
It is NOT acceptable for the state to operate on a presumption of guilt
It is NOT acceptable for the state to demand access to our homes without reasonable suspicion that an actual offence has been or is about to be committed
It is NOT acceptable for the state to demand access to our children without reasonable suspicion that an actual offence has been or is about to be committed
It is NOT acceptable for the state to demand unsupervised access to our children

These are all contained within the recommendations of Badman’s review document. The government has them accepted in full as “proportionate and reasonable”.

If the state education system does not suit your child then you need the freedom to provide a different one. This review if implemented will close escape routes from the educational system for those children who find it unsuitable or intolerable as many do. It sets some very scary precedents from civil liberites perspective.

The Government play the children’s rights card but that just doesn’t add up, how can it when the report recommends that children should be interviewed by an LA officer without parents or others even the police don’t get to do that.

If we want to really do children’s rights then we (parents and the state) need to give every child the opportunity (opportunity not compulsion) to make real choices about their education.

What we need the Government to do is to the repair the safety net, to ensure that schools, education authorities and social services can do their jobs, we do not need them to take total control of our children’s lives.

@ left outside

“I’m not sure this is about a total control over Children, it’s more about a creeping managerialism that pervades what modern Labourism is becoming.

I think that they believe people have a right to home educate, but that they need “help” to do so properly. That a manager will know best because they are “professional” and understand cost benefit analysis far better than any parent…”

Indeed and that creeping managerialism is dangerous as it so often seems to cut out the parent who is seen as some technician or tool of the experts in raising the child. That is not good for children.

To see how this affects all parents look here

http://sometimesitspeaceful.blogspot.com/2009/02/ecm-brave-new-world.html

“If I knew for a certainly that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life” Thoreau

“Good luck to home educators”

Thanks for that, it sounds like genuine support.

But are we on our own sent off with wishes of good luck?
The very strongest home educators will find a way of doing it, emigrate, or apply for asylum like the German family

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5090892/German-family-claim-asylum-in-US-over-home-schooling.html

It is those who wouldn’t first think of it but find school doesn’t suit their children and are then turned to this great way of life whose children will really suffer.

There needs to be choice in education.

For once I can agree with the statement “there needs to be choice in education”! Funny because that same statement is usually (e.g. by the Tories) deployed to argue for public funding of private schools, an insidious argument that disguises an ideological agenda (dismantling public services in favour of profit-driven enterprises).

@ David Semple

“I’ll get back into this in a while”

I hope you will have some helpful ideas.
I am genuinely curious, is there are fundamental reason why the Left seems content to allow infringement of liberties and intrusion in family life?

Looking forward to you thoughts.

Elizabeth

Joshua

It is precisely because we want choice in education that we have to dismantle state monopolies in favour of profit-driven enterprises. Enterprises only make profits if they give the public what the public wants. “Public services” will only give us what they think we need.

@ Joshua

Indeed and it needs to be choice that is affordable.

Home education does for many families mean reducing income and getting by on less while their children are young, it is a choice many are glad to be able to make.

In this instance it looks like the review is recommending creating an industry out of HE, creating teams of assessors and monitors as Jungle pointed out above.

“As soon as they start talking about “commissioning” and “organisations including the voluntary sector”, what they mean is that this new service will be contracted out to commercial providers (almost always headed by former ministers and senior civil servants) and, thanks to taxpayers money, will be vastly profitable for these providers.”

One of the problems with HE is that it is cheap and no one is making a profit out of it.
Radical idea in today’s world, that learning can be cheap and spontaneous, it needs to always be something that requires funding, planning and paid experts to drive it.

Take skateboarding for instance:
http://childrenarepeople.blogspot.com/2009/04/comparative-thoughts-about-school-and.html

I like this example, it’s one that relates to our life here, I spent 3 hours playing with my 4 year old in view of the skate park yesterday where my 6 year old and his friend had “lessons” in stunt biking from the older boys. It was a joy to watch how children who are strangers to each other can develop teaching and learning relationships in such contexts.

More on how well children learn without plans and direction
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

@ political animal

“It seems everyone supports home education then. Am I the only one that finds it a bit, well, weird?”

No lots of people think it’s weird.

As Daisy Goodwin said in the Times yesterday

“When my brother told me that he was not going to send his children to school I felt it was my duty to put him straight. Education is best left to the professionals: how else are your kids going to learn how to socialise, play team sports, behave badly in the lunch queue? But what I really meant was: I am sending my children to school, so what’s good enough for me should be good enough for you.

People who elect not to send their children to school are troubling to the rest of us. They offend our sense of the way things should be: after all, we went to school — and while they may not have been the happiest days of our lives, going to class made us into the people we are today.”

Elizabeth,

They were the happiest days of my life. And the same can be said for most people that I know; I frequently have conversations about how I never believed it when my parents said that school would rank amongst my fondest memories. And yet it does – and every time I have that conversation, it’s surprising how many people express similar sentiments.

I doubt very much that most people are bothered by homeschooling at all, Elizabeth. Most people, in my experience, haven’t a clue what homeschooling is, what the advantages and disadvantages are and so forth.

The evidence I offer here is no more and no less anecdotal than yours – but you’ll note that you’re the one making the sweeping statements that you can’t possibly have evidence for, without acknowledging a sense of limitation to your views.

Well it is a bit weird.

But it is a choice parents should be allowed to make.

Why isn’t the left more supportive….well that question answers itself!

The question of why the left seems hell-bent on destroying HE is intriguing. As Paula Rothermel of the University of Durham has found, working class children in HE outperform middle class children in schools. As soon as poor people look like they might get a step up, the ground is pulled from under their feet by those on the left.

@ David

“They were the happiest days of my life. And the same can be said for most people that I know;”

Great but that does not justify the erosion of civil liberties recommended in the review.

“The evidence I offer here is no more and no less anecdotal than yours – but you’ll note that you’re the one making the sweeping statements that you can’t possibly have evidence for, without acknowledging a sense of limitation to your views.”

I don’t wish to have the school v home ed argument right now, it is trivial compared to the civil liberties one. Both should exist if people want them, there should be choice and flexibility.

My interest is in ensuring we have the freedom to choose, I’m not advocating that everyone should Home Educate just that those of us who choose HE so should be free to do so.

I agree entirely that children who want to go to school should be able to do so.
If mine want to they can, they have loads of school friends, one of them has been to school, it is not hidden from them believe me.

We are well aware of school, it’s advantages and disadvantages. Home education as you say is less understood and so those who know most about school often know little about what might contrast with it.

Home educating parents and many of their children have knowledge and experience of school; they make an active choice one the Government wishes to constrain.

Elizabeth

This is a general question, because while I know a lot about Home Education I know almost nothing about it in this country.

Given that for most of us below the upper middle class both parents in any family have to work full or at least part time, to what extent is home education statistically dominated by the middle classes?

I genuinely don’t know. In the environments I’m knowledgeable about the question just doesn’t come up, because those environments are radically different in both affluence and culture from this one.

Bishop Hill @26:

If this had anything to do with the study you quote it would be the Conservatives trying to kill HE. One reason I ask the question I do is that it would explain the OPs query:

Why are we mainly getting support from the right?

It’s easy to come up with Call Me Dave style reasons: the right are proponents of individual liberty and choice, the right are proponents of responsibility and of strong family values. I just don’t think these are terribly likely to be things the Tories care about. What they care about a year before an election that might put them in government for the first time this century is electioneering, and that implies that Home Educators are a significant group among either the Tory core constituency (i.e. the extremely affluent) or among their swing constituency. That constituency would be “people who supported Blair but won’t now”. In my reading of current affairs, that’s the recently-affluent and lower-middle classes

John Q Publican

The figures you want are here:

14% of HE parents are in unskilled or manual trades
21% of HE parents have no post-school education

There’s another paper here. The most common profession in the sample was school teacher/lecturer (13%), which speaks volumes in itself.

I think the answer is that all social classes use HE, but whatever you conclude, it’s worth pointing out that this is tangential to my original point, that working class children do really well out of it.

I’m not really following the rest of your point. What have the Tories got to do with it? The fact remains that it is Labour who are doing this and it is broadly only those on the left who have supported the idea of government forcing its way into people’s homes. LibDems and Tories have been silent, while wild eyed extremists on the right, like UKIP and the Libertarians, have made a stand for civil liberties. When those in the centre are attacking civil liberties, it’s good to be an extremist .

Do Labour consider that too many middle class parents consider the local state school not good enough and therefore HE is an attack on the left wing dominated state education system of this country? Labour is concerned that too many aspirational parents are not using state education, particularly comprehensives. Brown and Balls are tribal politicians . It would be interesting to hear about the NUT’s and other union’s view of HE. Increasingly , the unions control Labour’s purse strings. Much of middle class left wing politics involves social engineering. By parents undertaking HE ., they reduce the ability of the Labour Party and middle class left wing types to socially engineer their children and therefore it is challenge to their authority. Balls and Brown cannot tolerate AND cope with being challenged.

Bishop Hill:

Thank you. I suspect I need to find more sources to supplement, but that’s my problem.

In terms of content:

There’s another paper here. The most common profession in the sample was school teacher/lecturer (13%), which speaks volumes in itself.

Yah. I came out of HE very well, in part because my father is a university lecturer and my mother is a primary school teacher. However, I was home educated because the nearest school that could give me a viable Western education was 800 miles away.
I eventually went to a boarding school in the next country over, which I also did very well out of (and learned to play team-sports other than soccer).

I think the answer is that all social classes use HE, but whatever you conclude, it’s worth pointing out that this is tangential to my original point, that working class children do really well out of it.

It’s quite probable that they do, but I haven’t read the figures yet (or found supporting ones) so I can’t comment. I can say that theoretically it ought to make a bloody huge difference, because middle-class children are statistically more likely to have adults read to them for pleasure when very young than are children of parents who have to work harder and have less money to spend on leisure. Not being regularly read to and given a chance to discuss the reading is a very major factor in poor educational performance and home education will clearly provide a thing kids in school lack: 1:1 interactions.

The other reason I got an unexpectedly good education out of my boarding school is that my GCSE class, to name an example, had only three of us in it. That’s a whole hell of a lot of teacher interaction time.

I’m not really following the rest of your point. What have the Tories got to do with it?

Well, two things: firstly, in my experience of UK people who home school K3 kids [1], they are all people who can live comfortably on a single income and who think that the local comprehensives are of insufficient academic standard, and/or too diverse in the makeup of the student body. As I pointed out, that places them in the middle of the right-wing target demographic for this particular period of electioneering. Secondarily, as I quoted, the OP brought in the Tories, not me.

I don’t like Labour’s attitudes to education much, but that’s because they’re non-evidentiary, not because they are intrinsically flawed. I know some peopel working on research for DfES among others, who are dedicated, brilliant and really care about the kids and the teachers. They are all inclined to rant about Labour.

Most people can’t teach. Many people think they can. That’s a combination which inclines me to believe that having professionals in the loop somewhere isn’t a bad idea.

Labour’s tendency to invade privacy is no worse than what I remember from the Tories; the only difference being that the Tory cabinets considered privacy a privilege of the rich and the Labour cabinet believe privacy to be a privilege of the Labour cabinet.

[1] I know other people who home-school much younger kids, and whose reasonings are different. I suspect that this portrays a generational shift in attitude; younger parents who home-school are likely to have internet-generation attitudes, older generation parents who home school are likely to be doing so because they can afford it but can’t afford an Independent boarding school. The reason I’m cagey about making such a deduction is that I know very well I don’t have the data; I just have some stacked anecodotes.

I have no objection at all to HE in principle but what if a parent who wants to educate their child is not actually competent to do so? I’m not sure I would be. I think the government’s proposals do seem excessive in some ways but is it totally unreasonable for there to be some kind of independent assessment of the child’s progress to ensure that they are actually getting a proper education?

“Most people can’t teach. Many people think they can. That’s a combination which inclines me to believe that having professionals in the loop somewhere isn’t a bad idea.”

Once again, we are back with the “professional”. Who are they meant to be exactly? We can all acknowledge that parents can make mistakes but, trying to appeal to someone other than them eventually leads you up to some other rather less obvious claim to authority.

In my experience, home education gives you such a massive head start over a school-educated child – more efficient, because it’s tailored to a child’s abilities, no queueing, no slow progress to make sure everyone in the class keeps up, and if the child is slow at a subject, no stigmatisation, and as much extra help as is needed – that the parent would have to be quite sensationally crap to do any worse than a school.

However, I think the problems arise when the education authority expects you to follow the national curriculum. This kind of defeats the point – it enforces its own mediocrity and what it thinks is the best way to teach a child, which it isn’t, especially outside a mass-production education system.

And yes, the department of education was very intrusive and annoying under the Tories. It’s easy to sound like whatever you want when you’ve been out of power for a while.

@ Bishop Hill. Enterprises do not give the public anything; they sell to individuals. The only time they do provide a public service is via hybrid systems like PPP, which amounts to giving our (the people’s) tax money to shareholders – state-subsidised monopoly capitalism – the worst of all possible worlds.

Joshua

Sure. The point still stands though. A business will only make money if it sells to the public things that the public wants. A public service can deliver what it likes.

But they don’t sell to “the public”. That’s my point. They sell to individuals.

Yeah, and just like with home education, if it is individual parents and children making the choice, then the service is more likely to be good for their children than when a bureaucrat makes the decision. That is one of the reasons why many private schools and private providers provide a better education than state providers. And since individuals make up the public, what is good (or better) for individual families is better for the public overall.

Look at it this way. What sort of bookshops and publishers do home educators buy their materials from? Are they (at least sometimes) profit making by any chance? Does it matter, if the materials are good and at a decent price? Isn’t there likely to be some sort of correlation between an organisation’s successful pursuit of profit, and their delivering goods that parents find useful?

Nick @33:

Once again, we are back with the “professional”. Who are they meant to be exactly? We can all acknowledge that parents can make mistakes but, trying to appeal to someone other than them eventually leads you up to some other rather less obvious claim to authority.

There’s a distinction between choosing a teaching methodology, source materials and approach (there’s more than one choice in each of these decision, considerably more than one, that work) and the craft skill of teaching and assessing effectively. There is then, also, a capacity for teaching which is an analogue to a capacity for drawing or music; ‘talent’ is a deprecated word these days, but it’s the appropriate one.

You can’t train people in the last, but you most certainly can inform people as to their choices in terms of techniques, theory, approaches and source materials: and you certainly can train people in the craft skills. The difficulty experienced by a number of families in the system I was part of was that the parents in question, dedicated and serious though they were, did not have either the knowledge to assess (for example) the differences in quality and approach between U. Nebraska correspondence courses and a self-designed curriculum: nor did they have the teaching skills and practice that a trained teacher would have.

Other things useful to know: the environment was one of extreme isolation, where families were living in village situations anything up to 200 miles from the nearest ex-pats and any anywhere up to 500 miles from the nearest library. The adults in question were all at least to some extent academically experienced, being professional linguists and grammarians for the most part. This did not equip them to teach GCSE-equivalent physics to their kids.

The solution we developed (I say we; I’m talking about my mother, using me and my sister, along with six other kids, as internal assessment candidates for the development process) was called the Educational Resource Centre. It functioned by developing a communally funded, communally developed and maintained resource base kept up to date over time, and a team of three itinerant teachers who were responsible for tracking the lending function of the ERC. They traveled to visit (as in, live with, typically for one to three months) families during which time they could assist with teaching and assessing the kids, but much more importantly they could train the parents in how to effectively teach the kids subjects the parents did not know well. Skill training and monitoring are not bad things.

The ERC worked remarkably well, and delivered quality educations to perhaps 200 children K1-K3 between 1981 and 1991 (the time period I was directly involved) using one lending library of resources and three qualified teachers. The system is still operating, though I know very little about what’s happening now as I’ve not been home in 15 years. The flexibility of the system can be seen in that children were successfully prepared for re-integration into Western education establishments in no less than 12 countries, including the UK, the USA, South Korea and India.

When I mentioned professionals being involved in the process, this is what I had in mind. Having someone who knows what the hell they’re doing is useful if you’re going to learn a craft skill: and teaching is a craft. Now, if the 1980s in rural Africa had been equipped with the internet, we could probably have enhanced the model considerably as well as making it massively cheaper and more efficient. I suspect one could develop that starting point into a very interesting model for UK communities of home educators.

What I think I agree with you on is that I see no particular reason for the teachers in such a model to be government-involved or funded. In fact, it would be considerably better if they weren’t, because they would then work directly for the parents and thus the children they served in any given HE network. I would be much happier about that, than I am about what Labour are trying to sell.

Joshua Mostafa @34:

In my experience, home education gives you such a massive head start over a school-educated child – more efficient, because it’s tailored to a child’s abilities, no queueing, no slow progress to make sure everyone in the class keeps up, and if the child is slow at a subject, no stigmatisation, and as much extra help as is needed – that the parent would have to be quite sensationally crap to do any worse than a school.

Or just biased. I was very lucky that my father is an academic theologian, or the ‘Religious Education’ aspect of my home-schooling would have been conducted according to the wishes of my mother, who is an American fundamentalist evangelical. This would also have affected how I was taught biology, history and geography, to name but three fields where such bias can seriously screw up your education practices.

There’s a lot of things that are advantageous about HE which are to one extent or another value judgements but at least two, which are implicit in your summary but not clearly delineated, are objectively significant. The “massive head start” over school educated children is (or should be) literal: I could read aloud paying attention to performative punctuation, and also write my own (very short!) fiction, when I was 3. Point being not that I’m brilliant but that my parents started teaching me to read before I could talk properly, mostly through the medium of Dr. Seuss books. A very small child fits inside the gap between book and parent and can thus associate pictures => cadence and words of parental voice => words on page much faster than using most traditional teaching methods. The head start is literal: it’s gained by actually starting earlier, not just working better. You can give your kid that head start whether you plan to home educate in the long term or not.

Secondly, 1:1 teaching time is the root of most of the advantages you then split out. Tailoring, differentiated progress curves, lack of peer stigma, etc. are all symptoms of the basic advantage, which is very small class sizes.

Hmmm: missed one aspect, there. Teaching != formal teaching methods, necessarily. Families using the ERC varied in approach from fairly traditional models across to self-directed learning and some Montessori-style practices in early years.

Joshua

I’m not following you. Enterprises sell to individuals and make a profit if they sell what those individuals want. “Public services” deliver what they like and don’t have to worry if anyone actually wants what they deliver.

That’s why you want profit-seeking businesses delivering things and not state monopolies.

Bishop Hill:

Do you recognise the difference between essentials/infrastructure and commodities in terms of how market forces interact with each other?

If the planned economies of the post-war era hadn’t taken infrastructure build seriously, our road network would be a lot sparser and worse-engineered (i.e. cheaper) than it is. Ditto education; if there had not been a liberal push in the early 20th Century to expand systematic education beyond the middle classes we would still see 60% of the country illiterate. Equally, compare and contrast our health situation with that in the USA if one does not earn a lot; at least over here, we try to reflect the basic idea that being sick means you should get healthcare, rather than that being rich means you should get healthcare.

No monopoly is good, including most government ones: but the open market is notoriously bad at building things that are necessary but will never turn a profit. The point of public services is that you put money in and get services out. How effective a given government is at delivering on this principle varies: but for a business, it isn’t even a relevant idea. Businesses put money in and get more money out. Failing to understand this basic principle is why most of Africa sees its infrastructure development money going into the pockets of individuals; they see public services as an opportunity for some private person to get money, rather than a need for the public as a whole to spend it. Bizarrely, that also describes the Tory’s PPP and Labour’s PFI quite perfectly.

@John Q Publican

“Teaching != formal teaching methods”

It is those of us who do not use formal teaching methods who are most under attack in this review. Oh and working class and other parents who are patronised and misjudged by prejudiced middle class professionals. (speaking here as a probably middle class professional who certainly appears like a looney hippy mum to some of the prejudiced middle class professionals who deal with our family) There’s nothing like becoming the weird one to challenge ones own prejudices.

The review quotes case law from the 80s saying this Autonomous Education is no more than childminding.

I beg to disagree with the intended insult this is (while having ultimate respect for the job of childminding myself)

For information on Autonomous Education see here

http://homeschooler.org.uk/links/issues/autonomous-learning

It’s not anything new or radical but the kind of learning that is forgotten by many (while something we all use often unconsciously). It suits our modern world full of explosions in information and learning methods. It seems radical but only because it is so different to school which has become our main way of providing education to children.
Mr Badman and Mr Balls can’t get their heads round it so they wish to outlaw it.

http://sometimesitspeaceful.blogspot.com/2009/06/autonomous-learning-cant-be-planned.html

I’ll drop back to provide a final answer to the question of whether Home Ed benefits people who feel they are “working class” and answer the criticism that middle class parents should not be fleeing the state school system, a view we personally held strongly ’till our own child was suffering and we were powerless to work with the system to solve the problem. So we jumped outside it and all is now well. This is the freedom that must remain for all parents regardless of class hoping we can hold on to it.

Thanks to all for the insights provided.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth:

It is those of us who do not use formal teaching methods who are most under attack in this review.

Yes. One of the political aims I have which I care a great deal about is changing the understanding of ‘education’ from how to recite orthodox answers into how to ask useful questions. The reasoning (for me) is to do with the difference between paper-based information search-and-storage and a more effective, higher-bandwidth world that we now live in: but I’m an ex-geek whose field was designing internet networks.

It’s not anything new or radical but the kind of learning that is forgotten by many (while something we all use often unconsciously). It suits our modern world full of explosions in information and learning methods. It seems radical but only because it is so different to school which has become our main way of providing education to children.

And we seem to agree on that bit.

the criticism that middle class parents should not be fleeing the state school system, a view we personally held strongly ’till our own child was suffering and we were powerless to work with the system to solve the problem. So we jumped outside it and all is now well. This is the freedom that must remain for all parents regardless of class hoping we can hold on to it.

We certainly agree on this bit.

I happen to have a vested interest in distributed educational networks, both from my own history but also, and more importantly, because I plan to have kids. I don’t want them intellectually crippled by a school system designed to create cubicle drones: I’d like my kids to be heretics [1] Secondly, I grew up in a tribal world: I feel the lateral disconnection of particularly urban Britons very acutely. I would like my kids to have some sense that the people their parents select as role models were chosen, not allocated by a post-code lottery.

[1] A term I still read as meaning ‘free-thinker’. My religion is into orthopraxy not orthodoxy, and I still twitch when someone tries to tell me the ‘right’ way to think. In so far as there’s a right way to think, it is independently.

John Q

You raise a lot of points here, most of which I would take issue with.

Roads: more doesn’t necessarily equal better. That was the mistake the Soviets made. As to quality, have you ever compared the quality of a pay-road (in France or the US) to a state-run road?

Schools. It is a myth that education was limited to the middle classes before the state got involved. The Newcastle Commission of 1861 found that over 95% of children were schooled. Who was buying Tom Paine and Charles Dickens if it was only the middle classes who could read?

etc

But this is to miss my point anyway. If you are concerned about access, talk about access (education vouchers, personal healthcare accounts etc etc).. But let’s not avoid the fact that the state monopoly has to go.

Roads: more doesn’t necessarily equal better. That was the mistake the Soviets made. As to quality, have you ever compared the quality of a pay-road (in France or the US) to a state-run road?

Have you ever compared the quality of our C-roads with rural road upkeep in America or Germany? Do you really think the M6 Toll Road is better engineered than the rest of the motorway network of equivalent age? Given that it’s being built to precisely the same specifications, for statutory reasons… Do you really think it’s a good idea to put things that one needs, as opposed to commodities one wants, into private, profiteering hands which will set up cartels, like OPEC, or price-fixing schemes, like the mobile phone operators? We don’t need mobile phones. We do need roads. We do need educated kids. Privatisatisation is not a panacea; sometimes you have to spend money to get things, rather than spending money to get more money.

Schools. It is a myth that education was limited to the middle classes before the state got involved. The Newcastle Commission of 1861 found that over 95% of children were schooled

One day a week, until the age of 9, to a level that equates to K1 today. By the church, who were a functional monopoly on the education of any poor person, due to their willingness to do it as charity rather than expecting remuneration.

Who was buying Tom Paine and Charles Dickens if it was only the middle classes who could read?

Well for a start, Tom Paine was half a century dead by 1861, and I’m assuming you’re not seriously suggesting that literacy included 95% of the country in 1809? And the people buying Dickens were newspaper and magazine subscribers. Who you think were the newspaper subscribers in the 1860s? Seriously. What a modern person thinks of as ‘education’ was available only to the very select few until quite recently.

But this is to miss my point anyway. If you are concerned about access, talk about access (education vouchers, personal healthcare accounts etc etc).. But let’s not avoid the fact that the state monopoly has to go.

Well, yes. I know. In fact, I said as much:

No monopoly is good, including most government ones

I’ve also argued in several places in this thread that HE is a good thing, that it should be detached from governmental interference.

@ Bishop replying to John Q

“Schools. It is a myth that education was limited to the middle classes before the state got involved. The Newcastle Commission of 1861 found that over 95% of children were schooled. Who was buying Tom Paine and Charles Dickens if it was only the middle classes who could read?”

Good book on this topic
Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/4012

“But this is to miss my point anyway. If you are concerned about access, talk about access (education vouchers, personal healthcare accounts etc etc).. But let’s not avoid the fact that the state monopoly has to go.”

Tom Hodgkinsin in The Idle Parent….
(Obviously hide this book when LA come round to check the children are safe and well)

“We must take personal responsibility. That way lies freedom from whinging. Take Mill’s wise words on education, which most of us leave to an external agency:

‘If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased., and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them. The objections which are urged with reason against the State education do not apply to the enforcement of education by the state, but to the State’s taking it upon itself to direct that education which is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another… it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body. ‘

Why does the state have to exert so much control over state education? Why can’t they leave teachers alone? Mill is right that few parents would complain if they were given education vouchers that could be redeemed at any school. It is the ideological control that we object to.

So we whinge about our schools, whether they be private or state. Moaning about the private school we have chosen for our child is an example of ‘moasting’ at its most absurd, but moaning about any school is ridiculous, since there are plenty of alternative available, including homeschooling and learning groups. Once you’ve made your bed you should lie in it, and if you don’t like it get out.”

DIY education!! that to me is the best answer, so much easier to sort it out yourself than to have to battle with schools or the state to get it right. How much better we would all be educated if we followed this philosophy?

Elsewhere in the book he says:

“We must take education into our own hands, whether that means changing existing schools or creating new ones. And we don’t have to wait to be given permission by anyone. We can do what we want.”

We will need permission to get on and educate our kids our way if the recomendations of the review are put in place.

@ John Q.

“I plan to have kids. I don’t want them intellectually crippled by a school system designed to create cubicle drones: I’d like my kids to be heretics [1] Secondly, I grew up in a tribal world: I feel the lateral disconnection of particularly urban Britons very acutely. I would like my kids to have some sense that the people their parents select as role models were chosen, not allocated by a post-code lottery.”

Unasked for advice

Unschool your kids and set up or join an intentional community

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling
http://www.diggersanddreamers.org.uk

John Q

Are rural roads in the USA and Germany privately run?

Re schools. I think you’re wrong here. It wasn’t just church schools. (Ragged schools, quaker schools, private schools, dame schools too).

A Council of Education survey of Northumbrian miners in 1840 found that 79% could read. In 1865 a survey of marines and other sailors found that 80 of the marines and 89% of the sailors could read. For those recently recruited, the figure was 99%. In Hull in 1841, 92% of adults could read. In 1839 92% of Gloucestershire handloom weavers could read. (Figures are all from West: Education and the State>/i>)

I accept that what was provided was probably relatively narrow, although I would say that it’s unfair to apply 20th century standards to 19th century schools. Most of what the middle classes wanted the poor to be taught was religion and morals (just as they now want them to be taught socialism and environmentalism). The poor had different priorities and back then had the power to get what they wanted. Hence a focus on the 3Rs with few of the frills. Nowadays, in a much wealthier society, they could surely afford to broaden education much further if they wanted.

And besides, do state schools provide an education, in the sense that you use. I would dispute it.

Elizabeth

The Mill quote is one I know well. I seem to remember doing a post on it a few years back.

Why does the state have to exert so much control over state education? Why can’t they leave teachers alone?

This is a feature, not a bug. Accountability of teachers can come in one of two ways. Either through market discipline – direct from school to parent – or it can go from school to politician to parent, via the ballot box (occasionally). Politicians are just trying to make teachers do what parents want. The fact that parents want different things is too difficult for them, however, so they end up making a shambles of everything.

@Bishop Hill
Re the roads – what piffle. Where I live (NSW in Australia) there are plenty of toll roads. Sure they are better to drive on – cleaner, wider, and (significantly) emptier. They are also stupidly expensive; and the basic idea behind them (If you use it, you pay for it) is fundamentally wrong. As a people, we use roads. If people avoid toll roads and we end up with heavy traffic through residential areas, other people than those not paying the toll end up paying in other ways – pollution, more accidents, etc. It is the public who need roads; not individuals. The same is true for other public services also; it’s a fundamental principle. I would not like to live in a country with competing private road systems, police forces, etc: it would be madness, a nation built on a fundamental distrust of others and a miserly, penny-pinching, ideological solipsism.

But back to education. Your point, Bishop Hill, about teacher accountability is a good one, and highlights the difficulties in the current system. It’s a good example of the problems of centralised, representative democracy; we do need it, but we also need citizen involvement at the local level. A lot of noise is being made about this at the moment by politicians, but very little in the way of practical ideas that will make a difference.

All I know is the school I was forced to attend finished bottom of the academic league table for the whole of England. I stopped going as it was so horrendous. I and my family received all sorts of threats such as I would be put into care or sectioned and my parents would go to prison if I didn’t attend. Being told this pack of lies my parents physically dragged me to school for 2 years. This destroyed my family relations and my mental health. If we had been aware of an alternative to state education I’m sure they would have chosen it. As it is I wish I could sue the bastards in authority.

“All I know is the school I was forced to attend finished bottom of the academic league table for the whole of England. I stopped going as it was so horrendous. I and my family received all sorts of threats such as I would be put into care or sectioned and my parents would go to prison if I didn’t attend. ”

This is exactly what could happen if these recommendations become law.
I’m sorry that apparant lack of options has had such an effect on your life. I know personally of many people who have been affected by issues around school being unsuitable for them personally and further damaged by there being no choice but to attend.

“Can’t Go Won’t Go” by Mike Fortune Wood is an excellent book on the topic of school refusal and the alternatives.

Instead of Education by John Holt is a book that looks at learning out of the box for bothe children and adults. It’s had an effect on the adult education in our home as well as the children’s.

Best wishes

Elizabeth

Thanks for those words, it’s a bit late for me but it’s criminal the authorities are still lying to families and telling them there is no alternative but to attend school.

The sick thing is I loved learning and finished top of every subject (despite the intimidation from anti-achievement fellow pupils). But I hated the environment, it was just crowd control (and it even failed at that). As it was I never gained any qualifications and have spent my life on benefits, so even if money is all they care about it’s uneconomical.

“Enterprises only make profits if they give the public what the public wants.”

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Come back when you’ve put the crackpipe down.