Home educated children in danger...

Readers will perhaps be aware by now that I am more in favour of the monitoring of home education than some home educators and former home educators. I also have an idea that there are types of abuse which might be easier to carry out against children who are not attending school. Even I gasped though, when I read the following on the website of the South West Safeguarding and Child Protection Group (is it me, or does this have a faintly sinister ring about?)


Anyway, the South West Safeguarding and Child Protection Group have identified a number of dangers to children, which they discuss here:

http://www.online-procedures.co.uk/swcpp/contents/guidance-child-protection/elective-home-education/


One observes that Elective Home Education is listed as a child protection concern, coming immediately before Exploitation and Trafficking of Children, Female Genital Mutilation and Forced Marriage. This is very irritating. Don’t take my word for it; read it for yourselves. Some of the concerns that they cite around home education are frankly ludicrous. Take this one, for example:

Children who are home educated may be taught by other adults. Not all parents will exercise their responsibility to ensure that employment checks, including CRB checks have been carried out.

There is huge industry in providing tutoring for schoolchildren, aimed at getting them up to scratch for entrance examinations, GCSEs and A levels. Home educating parents are probably a good deal less likely to be using services such as these anyway, but if the concern is that tutors without CRB checks are gaining access to children, then they should start with the main bulk of such teaching, which is, as I say, undertaken with schoolchildren. A complete red herring.

If I lived in Devon or Somerset, I would be inclined to be a little annoyed at this sort of nonsense. On a slightly more pedantic note, I would be angry that a publicly funded body of this sort were using ‘safeguarding’ as a gerund verb. This is unforgivable and deserves the strictest censure.

Home educators of yesteryear

I have been musing lately about the recent past; a sad habit of many as they approach their twilight years. Those able to remember the fuss over the publication of Graham Badman’s report will perhaps recall that shortly after it came out, I had a couple of articles published in newspapers about home education. These were my personal views on the subject and they provoked a storm of protest from some other home educators.


I did not understand then and still do not to this day, why reading the views of another home educator who disagreed with one’s own views could cause so much rage, but we will let that pass. What I have found curious over the three years or so since this happened is that the most aggressive of my critics have shown that they were actually following a fad at the time and had no real commitment to home education. I am not going to name any names here, but am talking about mothers who became heroines of to home educators for their Freedom of Information requests and so on.

One of the most well known figures in the campaign against Badman was only home educating her daughter because she had not been able to persuade her well-off family to shell out for a private school. This has since been done and the child is now attending a good, independent school. Another only ever wanted to keep her child at home until she was 11, always having the aim of getting her into a grammar school. She has now done this. Three other women who were both extremely active in fighting Badman and also very angry with me, have now sent their children to school.

I do not say that it is wrong to send children to school, but it is odd to see people who are one moment utterly gung-ho in favour of home education and the next packing their kids off to school. This has confirmed what I suspected at the time, that the real cause of their anger at me was that I had decided to home educate my child for no other reason than that I wished to home educate. This was and still is rare in the British home educating scene.

Meanwhile, back at the asylum...

Sometimes, one despairs utterly of British home educators. Consider the following collection of dangerous eccentrics:



http://www.home-education.biz/blog/education/dealing-with-highly-intrusive-parasitic-public-servants

Reading this actually makes me wonder whether some of these people might genuinely be paranoid schizophrenics. Two suggestions, plucked at random from this nonsense, will illustrate what I mean.

Is your child feeling safe and secure and appearing to be psychologically healthy? Here’s a handy little hint that will soon put a stop to that! Try this:

Always tell your children how much you love them and how, if ever they were taken from you, you would never, ever stop looking for them.


It has probably never occurred to your child before that they might be taken from you. Plant the seeds of doubt in their mind and they will soon be laying awake at night, needlessly worrying about this.

Or try this;

If you are innocent and feel that your family is facing a truly significant threat, consider leaving the country before the case goes to court.


Thee is something quite terrifying about madness like this. One recognises some of the usual suspects here, people like Nikki Harper from Lincolnshire who is quoted.  I do hope that local authorities are reading this stuff, so that they have an idea of the sort of disordered thinking which affects some parents supposedly capable of delivering an education to their children.

Innocent until proven guilty part 2

I have been more than half persuaded by the arguments presented here by those who feel that the presumption of innocence should be paramount and that we should not treat people as being likely to be involved in the commission of illegal acts, unless there is strong evidence to suggest such a thing. As a result of this, I have become uneasy in my mind lately about the activities of the Inland Revenue.


As readers are perhaps aware, the tax inspectors are constantly on the lookout for those fiddling their taxes. They insist on comprehensive and detailed forms being filled out and make many visits to businesses on a random basis, just on the off chance that offences are being committed. This is outrageous.

What would be far fairer, as well as more in keeping with the spirit of English jurisprudence, would be if a network of Honesty Boxes were established on street corners. These would be rather like pillar boxes and instead of tax being deducted automatically by employers or our having to fill out complex forms regularly, we would all be responsible for calculating our own tax and then putting it in these Honesty Boxes. Of course, if the Inland Revenue had sound reason to suspect that somebody was not paying enough tax, they could still make a visit, but the automatic assumption that citizens would be guilty of fiddling their taxes unless closely supervised would be done away with. Remember, ’Innocent until proven guilty’!

More about the monitoring of home education

When I wrote recently on this topic, I was surprised to find that there was broad agreement about many points. Here are a few more points with which few home educators will disagree. First, there will always be cases of cruel or abusive people mistreating or even murdering their children. Most of these children are at school and a few are home educated. Such abusers can be very cunning and a brief visit once a year will almost certainly miss some of these wicked parents.


A second point is that annual visits for every home educating family is an expensive and not particularly effective way of keeping an eye on the situation. To give an example, one need only look at my own case. Essex County Council chose to involve themselves and start visiting our home when my daughter was eight. We live in Loughton and their office is in Colchester. Each visit entailed a seventy mile round trip for the woman. By the time my daughter was thirteen and taking IGCSEs, it was clear to both us and the local authority that such visits were a waste of their time and ours. There are many similar cases. This sort of thing is not a good use of resources.

On the other hand, I do not believe that we should just assume that every parent is capable of undertaking this civic duty. Just as somebody who volunteers to undertake the duty of policing, as special constables do, is required first to demonstrate his or her fitness to undertake the task; so to with those who would educate a child. The easiest way to assess the suitability for exercising this duty is for somebody from the local authority to make an initial visit to the home and speak to both the parent and child. In this way, I would guess that a chat and a look around the home would make it clear that a large proportion of those parents were quite capable of taking on this duty. The remaining people, I am thinking a ballpark figure of perhaps 10% to 20% could be offered the choice of continuing to home educate with some involvement and monitoring by the local authority or, if they declined, a School Attendance Order would be issued.

Of course, such a rough and ready method would result in some unfit parents being overlooked and other perfectly capable parents being offered closer supervision. On the whole though, I think that this would work better than the current system, where some parents are never seen at all. The beauty of a system like this is that it would require no new legislation. All that would be necessary would be for local authorities to tell parents that they could not be convinced that a suitable education was taking place without visiting their home. Of course, parents have no duty in law to comply with this and those that refused would automatically be issued with a School Attendance Order.

I have an idea that a system of this sort would sift out quite a few parents who are not really educating their children, while leaving the 80% or so who are to get on with the job without any interference. For those who doubt that it would be possible to judge in the course of a two hour or so visit, which parents and homes were suitable for the education of a child; there are various strong indicators. The presence of many books is one. A home with no books on display is almost certainly a home where parents are not valuing learning and education. This would be easily spotted within the first few minutes of a visit.

Innocent until proven guilty...

Every so often home educators catch hold of some phrase and before you know it you are seeing it on every blog, list and forum. Ultra vires is one of these, ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is another. Local authorities must be reminded that home educating parents are ’innocent until proven guilty’ if they should happen to ask about a child’s education. Most home educating parents simply parrot this expression without having the least idea what they mean by it. It ties in with the idea which I explored in a recent post, that many home educators like to feel that they are being persecuted. The idea that the government or local authority should wrongly be treating them as guilty of something fits in neatly with this craving for persecution. Let us look at the idea of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ and see just what these characters think they mean by it.


Commenting on a recent post of mine, somebody said:



There is a law that states that we must provide a suitable education. You are either
innocent or guilty of breaking that law. What's so difficult to understand about

that?



This is of course, complete nonsense. Nobody is breaking any law by not providing her child with a suitable education and I have no idea why anybody would believe this. Still, many home educators appear to think that this is so. Perhaps we can clear up this misunderstanding. If I have care of a child aged between five and sixteen and do not cause him to receive an education, I am not committing any sort of offence, either criminal or civil. If somebody suggests that my child might not be receiving an education, this cannot mean that they are accusing me of being ‘guilty’; there is nothing to be guilty of. I am not breaking any law by failing to educate a child, nor can I be arrested nor any civil proceedings be brought against me by anybody. The whole concept of innocence or guilt simply does not apply under those circumstances. Guilty of what, exactly? The thing is meaningless. I am not, even theoretically, guilty of breaking any law.

The only time that the idea of innocence or guilt could possibly enter into a discussion of a child’s education in this country is if the child is enrolled at a school or the subject of a School Attendance Order which names a specific school which he should attend. None of this applies to home educators. Their children are not enrolled at school and as many Freedom of Information requests have established, School Attendance Orders are issued my most local authorities perhaps once every couple of years and even then, hardly ever to home educating parents. Here is the wording used in School Attendance Orders:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1995/2090/schedule/made

It will be seen that the offence would be not failing the duty to provide the child with a suitable education, but one of ignoring the order itself. The offence is created and comes into being only by the serving of the order and relates only to that. No SAO, no offence.

Nobody in this country could ever be taken to court for not providing a child with an education; it is not an offence. Therefore even the most zealous local authority officer could not suspect a home educating parent of committing an offence. The idea of ’innocence’ or ’guilt’ is utterly without meaning. The only time that any offence could ever be taking place would be if the local authority issued an SAO and that simply does not happen. It would only be at the moment that a School Attendance Order was served on a parent  that even the very possibility of an offence was created.

As I said at the beginning, this really has more to do with the widespread desire of many home educators to believe themselves victims of persecution than anything else. They want to believe that heartless officials are falsely  accusing them of breaking the law. One more time; it is not against the law to keep your child from school and fail to educate him. Nobody could, even in theory, be taken to court for this. The only way that you could fall foul of the law is if your child is a registered pupil at a school or fails to attend the school named in a School Attendance Order. Unless this is happening, you are not breaking any law, nor could anybody even suspect you of breaking any law regarding the education of your child.

One final time, unless any readers have actually been served with a School Attendance Order or have children who are registered pupils at a school and are not being sent regularly, there can be no possibility of any offence and consequently no talk of innocence or guilt. Forget the expression 'innocent until proven guilty'; it does not and cannot apply to you. No mechanism exists for prosecuting anybody for failing to abide by the duty of causing a child to receive a suitable education. Prosecutions can only be brought with regard to failing to send a child to school.

Why local authorities must be allowed to visit home educating families

It is time to draw together the threads of the various themes at which we have recently been looking. In the first place, it is clear that some parents are less able than others to provide an education for their children by themselves. A quadraplegic mother, for instance, who is also deaf, blind, unable to speak and has severe learning difficulties, would not be able to educate her own child. An extreme case, but there are plenty of less afflicted individuals who are unable personally to educate their own children in a satisfactory fashion. (It is important though to remember that the child in a similar condition would still have the right to an education, a point to which we shall shortly return.)



I have complained before of the apparent inability of some home educators to distinguish between rights and duties. The unfortunate individual cited above gives us a perfect opportunity to do so. No matter how disabled a person in this country, he or she is entitled to a fair trial. He has a right to a fair trial. Consider now the case of a juror, though. We have a duty to sit on juries if called to do so. A duty, not a right. Jurors must fulfil certain criteria and if they do not do so, they are not allowed to undertake this duty. Think now of the case of the paralysed woman whom I mentioned above. She cannot see, hear, speak or even think clearly and logically. Such a person would still have the right to a fair trial, obviously. She would not though have a right to be in a jury. This is a duty which she is not competent to undertake. I am sure that none of us would want this person to be deciding on our guilt or innocence.


This case is precisely similar to home education. If parents had a right to educate their children at home, then clearly the mother who could not move, hear, speak, see or think properly, would enjoy that right; just as she enjoys the right to a fair trial. If on the other hand, she has a duty to her child, then it would be reasonable for us to assess whether or not she was capable of undertaking that duty. Another way of looking at this is to consider the child with similar problems. He still has a right to an education, no matter what difficulties he has. Rights are not dependent upon any external circumstances; they exist automatically. We test people for their ability to undertake duties though and quite rightly so.


In short, it is both logically and ethically  correct for a local authority to wish to satisfy itself that somebody wishing to undertake the duty of educating their own child is in fact capable of undertaking this duty. The legal situation is a little more complex, but ethically and logically, the case could hardly be clearer. To assess this competence, local authority officers need at the very least to interview the parent and form some judgement of the person's ability to undertake this duty; just as a court will routinely assess the suitability of jurors. Anything less than this would be a gross betrayal of the rights of the children concerned in the matter. To sum up, if we were thinking of checking up on people to decide whether or not they should have certain rights; this would be absolutely dreadful. If we are checking that they are able to fulfill some duty or other, this is not only acceptable; it is necessary. Some home educating parents feel that threats are being made to deprive them of a right. In fact, checks are being made to see if they are able to undertake a duty. The two cases could hardly be more different.