Another ‘briefing paper’ about the Welsh plans for regulating home education

Perhaps I have unfairly focused upon the ‘briefing paper’ produced by Wendy Charles-Warner. After all, she is not the only player in town. Let’s look at the one produced by Fiona Nicholson up in Sheffield. It is to be hoped that I am not casting either the charming Ms Nicholson or her son into hazard by mentioning their general location, as I inadvertently did with Mrs Charles-Warner a fortnight ago. Here is the document produced by Fiona:



http://edyourself.org/walesbriefingpaper.pdf




 

I have observed before that in contrast to the campaign against Graham Badman’s proposals, the current agitation against the ideas being mooted in Wales are not concerned with abstract ideas about rights, duties or matters of conscience. Instead, objections to the proposed new law is stated in terms which are calculated to appeal to those who are not themselves home educators; the aim being to make others feel sympathetic to the cause. It is being very cleverly done. For instance the cost of the scheme and the fact that it might draw resources away from other vulnerable children is a popular debating tactic being used.

Fiona, in a pretty deft and cunning piece of sophistry, manages unfortunately to pander to homophobes. I am sure that this was not intentional, but never the less, that is what has happened. In an attempt to alarm Christians and get them on the side of home educators, she says this:



Sex Education

Concerns have been raised over the requirement for home education to "prepare [children] for the responsibilities of adulthood" [67] interpreted as meaning that the parent has to teach children about sex and contraception by a particular age. Some parents who are home educating because of particular religious or philosophical convictions would find themselves unable to comply and would not wish their children to be asked about sex education during the mandatory interview.





Now most of us, when we talk of ‘preparing children for the responsibilities of adulthood’ might well think in terms of things like teaching about income tax and mortgages; Fiona thinks, or purports to think, that it means that home educated children will have to be taught about contraception by a certain age. Worse still, a man from the council will be coming round and checking our children’s knowledge of contraceptive methods, in order to make sure that we have been fulfilling out duty around sex education. It is a chilling prospect! Well, it would be, if there was any truth in it.

Where does the homophobia come into this? Take a look at this piece about the new Welsh proposals on a Christian website:



http://www.christian.org.uk/news/wales-considers-forced-registration-for-home-schoolers/




Now look to the right and check out Related Articles. See the one about ‘compulsory Sex Education ‘undermines’ free society? This was a hot topic among many Christians at the same time that some home educators were fighting against certain parts of the Children, Schools and Families Bill in 2009 and 2010. One of the reasons for this is that quite a few Christians are bitterly opposed to their children being taught about homosexuality; in particular the notion that gay relationships can in any way be regarded as being as valid as heterosexual marriages. In fact, any sort of sex education, of the kind likely to be approved by a local authority,  is regarded by many Christians as a wicked plot which will end up with their children being taught how to commit sodomy or obtain abortions. Sex education, from this perspective, is designed to persuade innocent, God-fearing children that unnatural, same-sex unions are as holy as Christian marriage and that promiscuity is normal.  What about contraception? Why has Fiona mentioned that specifically? Are you a Catholic and so opposed to artificial birth control? You fool, the council will force you to teach your child about the use of contraception!   It is perhaps no coincidence that the campaign against the Welsh proposals has now attracted the favourable attention of the American Home School Legal Defense Association; a notoriously reactionary,  homophobic and right-wing group.

I suppose the real question to ask is whether Fiona Nicholson or anybody else has the least particle of evidence that local authorities really will be interrogating children about their knowledge of contraception and sex if this bill goes through. How will it work? Will it be like having the man round to read the gas meter? One imagines somebody from the council knocking on the door with a clipboard, saying, ‘Morning madam, I’ve come to check your daughter’s knowledge of contraception.' He is shown the poor little mite of eleven or whatever age it is by which Fiona thinks that children will have to be taught about sex and contraception. ‘Now Mary, can you give me three reasons why withdrawal is not a safe method of contraception? Do you know about the Dutch Cap?’

Is this really what any sane person imagines will be happening if the registration and monitoring of home education in Wales becomes law? If so, could we be given some evidence for this belief? Otherwise, it will look to many as though this is just one more of the ridiculous scare stories being put about to enlist the support of even the most unsavoury types in the campaign against the proposed legislation.

Home educated children and the 'broad and balanced curriculum'

Regular readers will know that I am something of a connoisseur of hypocrisy among home educators. Not that I believe there to be more hypocrisy among them than the general population, but rather that some of the more prominent among them tend to be very po-faced and sanctimonious and so the hypocrisy is all the more entertaining.


A few days ago on the television news, Robert Goddard of ATL, a teaching union, said this:



`All evidence suggests that whilst some young people that are home educated do get a broad and balanced curriculum, there's a lot of evidence that suggests that quite a few of them don't. We feel that registration and monitoring of that provision will help towards all young people getting those skills and knowledge that they need to excel in life’



Inevitably, some home educators promptly went mad and accused him of a ‘slur’ against home educating parents. What evidence did he have that quite a few home educated children were not getting a broad and balanced curriculum?

Well of course, anybody who took part in the Graham Badman enquiry and the associated fuss will know full well that an awful lot of home educators were and are bitterly opposed to giving their children a ‘broad and balanced curriculum’. They have a visceral dislike of any curriculum; especially one which is broad and balanced. The concept of broad and balanced curriculum was regularly denounced on home educating blogs, forums and lists as a coercive tool, one which right-thinking home educators should reject. Here are Alan Thomas and Harriet Patterson explaining why they don’t think it is necessary for home educated children. See section 5 of the following:



http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmchilsch/memo/elehomed/me1602.htm




Last year, the Department for Education website said this about home education:



'parents do not have to follow the National Curriculum. However, parents should deliver a broad and balanced curriculum'


This caused such anger among many home educators that Fiona Nicholson got together with Ian Dowty to try and make them remove it. The very idea, that home educating parents should be delivering a broad and balanced curriculum! It was outrageous!

And so a few years down the line, after having fought vociferously for their right not to provide their children with a broad and balanced curriculum, somebody from one of the teaching unions notices this and remarks upon it. He is at once attacked. How dare he suggest that quite a few home educated children are not receiving a broad and balanced curriculum? Why, it is a thing beloved of home educators, all of whom do their very best to ensure that their children receive such a curriculum.

This is such a monumentally awful piece of barefaced hypocrisy, that it goes straight into the Simon Webb Hall of Hypocrisy Fame. Indeed, I think that it will be a strong contender for the Seth Pecksniff Memorial Prize for Arrant Hypocrisy. Seriously, has anybody ever heard a better example of the doublethink which goes on in the world of British home education?

The Education select committee hearing on September 5th 2012

The witnesses who gave evidence about home education to the select committee were a remarkably homogenous bunch; all female, all white, all aged between forty and sixty five, all well spoken and probably all well educated as well. Most intriguing of all, every single one of them spoke in that same quiet, patient way that teachers and social workers do. This was eerie! In a sense, the whole session was a little like the three card trick. Many people are concerned that not all parents are capable of providing a proper education to their children and so eight women are presented who nobody in their senses would doubt for a moment are able to give their kids a decent education. It would have been interesting to put eight of the less sane and articulate home educators in front of the MPs and see what they made of them.

Despite the fact that Graham Stuart is now the Chair of the committee, I picked up on the fact that there seemed to be an appetite for some sort of registration among other members. This is because two facts emerged clearly. The first was that nobody knows how many children in this country are not at school because their parents are supposedly educating them at home. The second was that nobody has the least idea how many of those children are actually receiving an education. There were valiant attempts to obscure these facts, notably when Fiona Nicholson made the astonishingly untruthful claim that we know precisely how many children are being educated at home, because we have the figures from the local authorities. Incidentally, I watched with bated breath when Fiona was asked whether she was in favour of a simple scheme which would mean the registration of all home educated children. Great amusement was caused three years ago, when she gave evidence to the select committee at that time. Despite being asked by the then Chair several times, she appeared uncertain as to whether she was in favour of registration and he finally put her down as a ’Don’t know’! This time, she was ready and answered crisply and firmly as soon as the question was asked.

I have an idea that several members of the select committee smelt a rat when presented with such a clearly intelligent and well-informed group of women. They were clearly not typical of the sort of parent with whom many local authorities come into contact and about the children of whom there is such concern. Although there was no talk of monitoring this time, the idea of registration was definitely in the air. I would not be surprised if that actually happened in the end. It would of course not be the end of the matter, particularly if events in Wales follow their current course. Whether compulsory registration of home educated children would be a good or bad thing is a debatable point, but I have an idea that it is the direction that many people’s minds may be moving. It might seem like some to be a reasonable compromise between the wishes of the local authorities and the strong feelings of many home educators; a bare minimum to which few reasonable parents could object.

GCSE related scams for home educators

I have noticed lately that I am apparently turning into one of those unfortunate people that one occasionally encounters in the street; shuffling along and muttering to themselves, while shouting obscenities every so often. In my own case, this behaviour is all too often precipitated by some new idiocy from the world of home education, from which I still seem unable to disengage myself. Perhaps I am suffering from some species of pre-senile dementia. It can’t be normal to read through the various HE lists and start growling, ‘For fuck’s sake!’ to one’s self every few minutes!


What with the Education Committee considering the help available to home educators and Fiona Nicholson beavering away to find out which local authorities are providing help with alternative provision, this strikes me as a good time to consider why so many teachers and local authority officers flee shrieking in terror at the prospect of helping home educating parents to arrange for their children to sit examinations such as GCSEs. This is a big topic and I shall restrict myself today to just one aspect of it.

I was reading an appeal recently by a home educating mother who was trying to secure extra time and rest breaks for her son, so that he could take a GCSE. He would apparently need at least four breaks an hour for there to be any realistic chance of his sitting the examination. She wondered what proof she would need to furnish of her son’s problems. Cue somebody advising her that under the Disability Discrimination Act, she could take a firm line with anybody who doubted her word on the matter. Well why wouldn’t it be enough for a mother simply to explain the facts of the matter to the exam centre and for them just to provide the kid with the extra time or laptop or whatever he needs? The answer is that this whole business has turned into a huge racket in the last few years.

At the local comprehensive, no fewer than 15% of the children sitting GCSEs get extra time and various other things such as scribes or laptops. One child in six! What is truly astonishing is that they are almost without exception the most middle class children with the pushiest and most articulate parents. Rummy indeed! Are middle class children more prone to dyslexia and neurological difficulties? Well, no; it is of course a scam. By getting a report from a tame specialist, which will set you back a few hundred pounds, your child can have two hours to write an essay, rather than just the one hour that all the other children are getting. This is a huge advantage. Nor is this all.

It is also possible to boost your child’s exam marks by pleading a range of special circumstances, ranging from headaches on the day of the exam to being diagnosed with terminal cancer the day before. The one will give you an extra 1%, the other 5%. In between these two extremes are a whole raft of possible life-events; pets falling ill, seeing somebody killed in a road accident, death of a grandmother and so on. By combining a couple of these with dyslexia, you can give your kid a huge advantage in GCSEs.

What is the point of all this though? After all, GCSEs don’t matter all that much, do they? In fact they do matter a great deal if one wishes to get a place at one of the better universities. Oxford and Cambridge expect to see a string of seven or eight A* GCSEs as standard, as do a few other universities in the Russell Group. At less prestigious places, GCSE results are often used as a tiebreaker. If you have a bunch of kids, all with three A levels at A, you can look at their GCSEs; the one with mostly As will often trump the one with mostly Bs.

A natural consequence of all this is that many well informed parents work the system by pretending that their children are dyslectic and have suffered some sort of trauma the day before an exam. This sort of thing is nearly always accepted, but many teachers are getting a bit sick of it. Between them, the exam boards each get over half a million appeals for special consideration every year and only 3% are rejected. With one child in six being given extra time, separate rooms, laptops and so on during GCSEs; it is starting to be plain that this is becoming another tactic by parents to boost their kids’ grades at GCSE from B to A or from A to A*.

I am not of course saying that there is no such thing as dyslexia. Nor am I objecting to children with special educational needs being granted extra help. Rather, I am claiming that middle class parents are using the system to give their children an unfair advantage over the rest and that attempts are now being made to discourage the practice. One of these is to be a bit stricter about which children genuinely have a disability.

I am afraid that home educating parents are famous for wanting special provision for their children. There are a number of possible explanations for this. One is that many home educated children have been withdrawn from school precisely because they had special needs that the school was unable to cater for. Another might be because the parents are predominantly middle class and are therefore using the same scam as many other middle class parents. It may also be the case that they are so used to having their own way and believing their child to be special, that they want different treatment as a matter of course.

Whatever the explanation, and it could well be a mixture of all of the above, it makes fixing up GCSEs for home educators something of a nightmare and is one reason why many places give them a wide berth. In my next piece, I shall look at a few other reasons why so few people seem to want to help home educators to enter their children for exams.