Regulating Home Education
This article is by author missdisco.
Elizabeth Mills response to the regulation of Home Education seemed to echo the common response from home-educators. Another opportunity for the state to control how we treat our children. And so on. It’s something I find an increasingly tiresome argument, as I seem to be one of the few people viewing regulation of home education as a positive thing.
I was home-educated between 1993-2001. It was an appalling experience. My mother was, in the most polite terms, a manipulative bitch, who actually never bothered to teach us at all. It was a whim for her for about a year, but then I think she just lost it and just couldn’t be bothered with anything, except keeping us in the house. As a child I barely left the house except maybe once a week to help do the shopping in Morrisons. I didn’t do science, languages, PE, art, music, or anything interesting. My interest in English Literature arose out of being a Manics fan, otherwise I suspect I would have never had that.
Only once did someone come round to inspect us. Once in eight years. The night before that inspection is something I try to forget. Essentially an hours beating to make sure when they ask how me and my sisters felt our response was that we were happier. My memories of the inspection were that he had no problem with our basic skills – from the few rushed examples of work pushed at him – but that he was concerned by our mothers Irish nationalist stance in everything and the lack of PE, language or music. Mostly though, he disliked that none of our work was dated, because that meant he had no idea when what he saw was produced.
Review of Home Education is Published
This article is by author Elizabeth Mills
A few months ago I wrote about how the government was planning to make changes to home education.
The review has just been published.
Mr Balls likes it and says the Government will implement the recommendations.
There are a few positive things like such as giving us easier access to exams and forcing Local Authorities to consult with Home Educators.
It advocates compulsory registration and annual assessment of home educated children, who should be seen by LA officials without their parents present. Looks like our children will have more rigorous (and more expensive) individual assessment than those children who are at school.
It’s not the immigrants’ fault that BNP voters are badly educated
Which schools in the UK do worst? No, it’s not the ones in areas crammed with ethnic minority kids. Or at least, not only do all ethnic groups other than black kids perform more-or-less identically in GCSEs [*] – out of the four worst-performing councils in London educationally, two of them have above-average levels of white-British kids, and one is hovering on the margins.
Mind-boggling power: Balls on education
Following a request to write out some of my views on Ed Balls’ latest proposals. Presumably, since I was asked by a homeschooler, I’m supposed to defend the rampant centralisation of education. I am, of course, not going to.
It is a frightening thought that for a government that continues to make noises about empowering communities, the man in charge of DCSF seems intent on grabbing an insane amount of power. Despite claims that it would only be used to counteract something like the scrapping of Shakespeare, one wonders if this government actually believes its own communitarian rhetoric.
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Top-Up Fee increases: Who pays?
Imagine that energy prices once again start to soar in the UK, £1000’s added to the average yearly bill each year with the reason given that the raising of the cost wouldn’t greatly dissuade people from consuming energy. Would this be acceptable? It’s safe to say, I think, that there would be a huge outcry about the abuse of an oligarchies power. This is also how we should act to Vice-Chancellor claims that tuition fees should rise to £4k at least, and £20k at most, when the review of the “cap” comes up shortly.
Let us take Higher Education not to be a luxury commodity, in a world where so many more students are taking the higher education root (though less than the 50% intended by our government) and most from families that can generally afford the current charges comfortably (see the lack of proportionate increase of “poor” students in to the higher education system). It is now a necessity to go through university to show your skills, knowledge and employability for an ever decreasing number of appropriate jobs and average graduate salary. continue reading… »
Against ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ on teenage pregnancy
We’ll begin, as is the vogue when writing about this topic, with some of those tiresome anedotes which somehow prove the observations which follow.
Back when I was still lugging crates of cheap pop around a newsagents in Meadowhall, I worked with a girl named Claire*. Claire was sexually active well before the age of consent, was pregnant by the age of sixteen and had only a handful of GCSEs to her name. So far, so ‘Shameless ‘. Except, as soon as her maternity leave was up, Claire returned to work whatever hours she could manage whilst still looking after her newborn. Some two years after giving birth, she enrolled on a part-time hairdressing course, which she squeezed-in between her paid work and all the hours where she simply had to be a mum. She finally qualified last year and, last I heard, was working in a hair salon with dreams of one day opening her own.
How do we deal with poverty?
Over at CentreRight, Jill Kirby eviscerates the ’shamelessly cheerful’ Harriet Harman for attending the launch of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s report into poverty, inequality & government policy.
She interprets the report like so:
As we stare into the pit of a plunging labour market, there is not much for the Government to be proud of. While she wages war on Mandy, staking out her place as the true champion of equality, Hattie would do well to apologise – on behalf of all her colleagues and especially her erstwhile friend and mentor Gordon Brown – for the wasted years, the wasted billions and the wasted opportunities. Opportunites to create a pro-work, pro-family welfare system with reduced dependency and genuine (not grade-inflated) educational opportunities for all. It’s no good telling us you cared, or asking us to let you try more of the same. You had your chance (and our money) and you blew it. You might at least say sorry.
There’s a little too much tubthumping here for this to be a fair analysis.
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Cambridge University’s lacking equality
Cambridge – bastion of male dominance – still! So I’ve referred the buggers to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission for investigation.
It’s because of the appallingly wide gap between what the university pays men and women. The university’s own Equal Pay Report shows that men are paid on average nearly a third more than women – £37,157 compared to £28,247.
There are two reasons for the gap.
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Protecting our children’s rights to education
Home Educating families face ongoing and increasing challenges in protecting the right to educate our children without interference from the state.
There have been three Government reviews into Home Education in the last four years.
The most recent is extremely concerning as it alleges links between Home Education to abuse without producing any evidence. Details of the review are here.
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Tech politics: libertarians and the Library
A year ago, I wrote a piece here about the great art of the Gothic and Renaissance periods, and how we owe its existence to the Dead Hand of the (Tuscan) State. But where should we look for actions of slightly more modern government working to enrich our lives? Certainly not in the unending flow of nutty, illiberal laws; nor in the insidious creep of compliance culture (subject of a memorable Stephen Fry podcast). So, here’s an idea: look to the British Library.
More specifically, their Turning the Pages project, 10 years in the developing, that put our national library in the very first rank of learning innovation worldwide. (See the video.) The project’s achievement has been to digitize 15 (so far) of the Library’s most valuable manuscripts, and deliver them inside an interactive online environment that re-creates the experience of handling them in the raw.
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What do Alfie & Chantelle tell us about modern Britain?
In a limited sense, the rightwing commentariat are bang on the money; yes, the case of Alfie Patten, Chantelle Steadman and the daughter born of their one-off adolescent legover does tell us much about morality in Britain today. It’s just that it doesn’t point to quite the things they would have us believe.
The evasion tactic these writers habitually employ – essentially, laying everything from teenage knife crime to the death of Baby P at the door of some inchoate ‘liberalism’ – does not and cannot wash in these instances, because by definition, every aspect of contemporary British culture is of rightist provenance.
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Movement politics: a century ago
The new movement politics – the lessons from Obama and the potential of the internet for progressive campaigning, which new spaces such as Liberal Conspiracy seek to realise
– is both the idea of the moment and quite an old idea too.
If politics is the art of the possible, progressive change has depended on the arguments and campaigns which can change the possibilities of politics. One of the best descriptions of why this matters was offered a century ago, as Beatrice Webb recorded in her diary the reaction of Winston Churchill, then a New Liberal member of the Asquith cabinet, to her campaign for the abolition of the poor law.
That campaign arose from the publication – one hundred years ago tomorrow – of the Minority Report to the Royal Commission on the Poor Law.
October 3rd 1909 – Winston and his wife dined here the other night to meet a party of young Fabians. He is taking on the look of the mature statesman – bon vivant and orator, somewhat in love with his own phrases. He did not altogether like the news of our successful agitation. ‘You should leave the work of converting the country to us, Mrs Webb, you ought to convert the Cabinet’. ‘That would be all right if we wanted merely a change in the law, but we want’, I added, ‘to really change the minds of the people with regard to the facts of destitution, to make the feel the infamy of it and the possibility of avoiding it. That won’t be done by converting the Cabinet, even if we could convert the Cabinet – which I doubt. We will leave that task to a converted country’
The power of sterotypes
Reputations can be self-fulfilling prophecies ; if you give a man a bad name, he‘ll live down to it. A new paper (pdf) by Thomas Dee shows this.
He did an experiment at Swarthmore College, asking a group of students to take a GRE test. Before the test, some students were asked about their sporting activities, and whether these conflicted with their academic work, whilst others were not asked.
And Mr Dee found that the athletes who were asked these questions performed significantly worse than the athletes who weren’t.
This corroborates the finding of an immediate “Obama effect” upon blacks’ exam performance. As Obama became more prominent, the stereotype of blacks as non-cerebral declined, and so test scores improved.
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How do we deal with these casualties?
In 2002 Amrit Bhandari was walking through the centre of Chester when two women asked him for money. He refused, but the beggars persisted and one threatened to accuse the 72-year-old of rape if he didn’t hand something over. They never assaulted him, but Mr Bhandari was so panicked by the harrassment that he suffered a heart attack. Rather than try to help the man they had literally frightened to death, the girls took his briefcase and wallet, and fled.
One of the girls sentenced for the manslaughter of Amrit Bhandri was Sarah Campbell. Sarah’s short life was one filled with horrors few of us can imagine; sexually abused throughout her childhood and raped at 15, she became clinically depressed, sought escape through drugs and, by the age of 16, was enslaved by an addiction to heroin. Just one day into her three year sentence, Sarah swallowed a lethal quantity of prescription drugs. She was eighteen years old.
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Youth crime and Tories; another broken record
Since the Tory conference 2007, there have been periods where every week or so, the Conservatives announce a new policy with which they hope to win over more votes. It seems to be the nature of politics these days; one doesn’t exist unless one is appearing in the media. When announcing such policies, the Tories in question often indulge in hyperbole, blaming Labour, citing the end of Labour, citing the awakening of popular consciousness against Labour and so on, ad nauseam.
The last few weeks have seen such behaviour with regard to crime – knife crime at first, then moving to general crime and now it is the turn of youth crime. “Back public against crime – Tory” is the ridiculously jingoistic title of the BBC piece showcasing Dominic Grieve’s interview with the Indy. The Shadow Attorny General has been saying that we should give adults the right to intervene with any young person they feel to be acting in an anti-social manner.
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Nadine Dorries’ sex education ‘policy’ in tatters
Conservative MP Nadine Dorries doesn’t like politically correct health advice such as teaching children about contraception. In a blog-post on her website in April, titled ‘Beyond the School Gates’, she said:
Throughout the session it struck me that the discussion focused on dealing with the consequences of teenage sex, in the form of STIs and pregnancy; whereas the fundamental problem, the fact that sex is now regarded as a recreational pastime, no relationship required, is largely ignored. Much easier to focus on how quickly we can get treatment to an infected sixteen year old, than how we get the same sixteen year old to think twice before having sex again, until at least within the confines of a stable relationship.
…
The money that the Department of Health spent on their campaign could have been used on developing a national standard for sex education within schools, which taught the principles of self respect and at least began to address the issue of values, morals and ethics within education and wider society.
Ahh yes, I smell thinking along the ‘silver ring thing‘ phenomena. Except, new research from the US now shows these gimmicks don’t work.
Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.
The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a “virginity pledge,” but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.
(via NHS BlogDoctor). In other words, not only does trying to teach abstinence of responsibility not work, but it leads to even more unprotected sex. Despite the evidence however, I doubt a minister who regularly hangs around with Christian fundamentalists is likely to take any heed.
Suggestions to reduce domestic violence
All we know are the facts. We know that domestic violence accounts for 16% of all violent crime and that a quarter of women & 15% of men will suffer abuse in their lifetimes. We know that women are overwhelmingly more likely to suffer repeated abuse, that two women a week are killed by a current or former partner and that one incident of abuse is reported to the police every minute of the day. Sadly, we also know that these reports only account for a fraction of the true number of attacks, many of which go unreported.
We know, too, that no government, no matter how active or intrusive, could stop partners from being violent to each other, and as the goal of eradicating domestic violence will always be unreachable, the question we must ask is whether we – as a state, as a society, and as individuals – are doing the most we can to condemn, prosecute and punish its perpatrators, and protect, counsel and care for its victims.
That question has been raised again this week as Labour and the Conservatives lock horns over who has the better policies to reduce domestic violence and improve care for those who’ve suffered from it.
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Let’s respond to the Welfare Reform Bill
There’s been a lot of debate in recent days about James Purnell’s welfare reform proposals. Supporters claim that the measures are true to Labour’s traditional values, are essential in difficult economic times and that there is nothing progressive about leaving people to languish on benefit.
Opponents claim that the plans would privatise the welfare state, are an attack on the most vulnerable in our society, and won’t work. In response to the proposals, they’ve set up the ‘Welfare for All’ campaign.
And the truth is… both sides have a point. Even the strongest critics of the bill would probably agree that there are some good ideas in it, for example changing the rules so that people don’t have their benefits reduced if they get child maintenance payments; while even some of the bill’s strongest supporters would concede that we don’t know how successful some of its proposals will actually turn out to be in practice.
Which is where you come in.
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Who’s winning the war on welfare?
There has never been a better – or a worse – time to reform the welfare system. Aided by a recession which has made public spending the top political issue, and the deep anger caused by the tragedies of Baby P and Shannon Matthews, the public have become far more receptive to the idea of a tougher, sanction-based system than they were in the halcyon days of summer.
Short of a Labour rebellion on the scale of the 10p tax fiasco, our increasing antipathy towards the terminally jobless will probably see Purnell’s pet project sail through the Commons. And yet, as some are painfully aware, in days when the jobless figures keep rising, it’s hard to find jobs for the short-term unemployed, let alone those who have never worked in their lives.
The problem with trying to write about welfare reform is so much of the rhetoric tends to merge economic issues (the amount of money the state spends on the poorest in society) with social problems (the crime, poor education, family breakdown and general dysfunction which can be found in impoverished communities).The two are heavily linked, of course, but the mistake politicians often make is assuming that by producing policies to tackle the former, the latter will somehow fix itself.
The chief perpetrators of this mistake are the Labour government.
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Faith schools need to change
The report launched by the Runnymede Trust today, Right to Divide? Faith Schools and Community Cohesion’, is serious, balanced and well researched.
The Right to Divide report recommends that faith schools should:
* End selection on the basis of faith
* Give children a greater say in how the school is run
* Make broad-based RE lessons part of the national curriculum
* Do better at serving the most disadvantaged
* Stop privileging religious identity over those of gender, ethnicity, age, ability or sexual orientation
But it also says that faith should continue to play an important role in the education system.
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» How bad is the feline obesity crisis?
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
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