Closing down the debate

Earlier this month, a ‘briefing paper’ was written about the proposed changes in the law in Wales touching upon home education. This document has been widely disseminated by the author and is freely available on public sites such as the one run by Mike Fortune-Wood, which may be found here:



http://www.home-education.org.uk/wales.htm






This document was written by a woman called Wendy Charles-Warner; her name may found below the introduction to the ‘briefing paper’ on page 3. So far there is, I suppose, nothing to which any normal person could object. Anybody who wished to find out where the author lives and what she looks like would only need to google her name; it is distinctive enough. The suggestion is being made that googling her name in this way could cause danger to her and put her family at risk. This sounds a little far - fetched, but was being claimed back in August by Alison Sauer in an email to a home educating parent who had used Mrs Charles-Warner’s name on a website. She was in danger in August then, if identified, but has since then appeared in four newspapers and published the document mentioned above, to which she was happy to put her name. She also did not object to her full address being printed in one newspaper and her photograph in another.

My problem with the so-called briefing paper lie with the claim made in the introduction, that:



‘Outcomes for children will be shown to be considerably better when

electively home educated than educated at school’



There is no evidence for such a claim and I have tried to discuss why this is so. A couple of days ago, I posted on a home educating list, drawing attention to what I saw as problems with the evidence that was cited in the paper. I did not identify the author's address at all, but merely mentioned that she lived in Snowdonia; a vague enough location. Alison Sauer then contacted the list owner and told her that Mrs Charles-Warner, who is a well-known and successful hotel owner who advertises her address commercially in a hundred different places, was put in danger by my post. It was removed. Over the last few days, I put up two posts here, going into a little detail about some of the difficulties of the author’s claim that home educated children do better academically at than those at school.

Alison Sauer organised a campaign via private messages on face book which was designed to stop people debating this aspect of the ‘briefing paper’. The result was that people were posting pornographic fantasies about the experiences of me and my penis in a massage parlour, to give one notable example. This made rational debate impossible and so I deleted the posts.

This sort of thing, attempting to prevent discussion of unwelcome ideas by means of threats, abuse and made-up stories, is something of a leitmotif  in British home education. It is not the first time that it has happened to me and it has been used with varying degrees of success against others who question the more extravagant claims of home educators in this country. There are a handful of people who orchestrate such activity. Alison Sauer is one, Mike Fortune-Wood is another. Both are, incidentally, involved with the document I have been talking about. Mike Fortune-Wood has gone so far as to engage in a conspiracy to try and have me arrested. Alison Sauer is currently trying to get Mrs Charles-Warner to take legal action against me for posting links on this blog to recent newspaper articles which featured her!

I must apologise to those who actually are interested in home education, but this sort of tactic does make it very hard to discuss things in a reasonable way. That is of course the whole aim; to close down the debate and make anybody who wishes to ask questions shut up and go away. I shall be out today and so unable to reply to any comments. Might I ask those who wish to speculate on the size of my penis to email me directly at simon.webb14@btinternet.com. ? I have had a few emails from both home educators and education professionals who were horrified at some of the comments on the posts which I deleted. I do not think that they really showed home education at its best!