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!

Do parents in this country have a right to educate their children at home?

The debate about the Welsh proposals to regulate home education have inevitably brought forth the usual talk of a parental ’right’ to home educate. This is so at odds with the actual state of affairs in England and Wales that I feel it is time once more to shoot down this absurd notion.

We have various rights in this country; for example the right to a fair trial. We are the passive recipients of this right no matter who or what we are. We can be clever or stupid, deaf or blind, confined to a wheelchair or mentally ill, foreign or British; we all have a right, guaranteed by law, to receive a fair trial. The same situation applies to children and education. They have a right, guaranteed under law, to a full-time education. This is irrespective of whether they are clever or stupid, disabled, foreign or anything else; it is a right they all enjoy between the ages of five and sixteen.

Rights are enjoyed by all, but this is not the case with duties. These often entail some activity on the part of those upon whom they are imposed. Take sitting as a juror. This is not a right but a duty. If a potential juror were to be unable to undertake the duty, then he would not be called upon to perform it. Suppose somebody called for jury service were to be deaf, blind, unable to speak and also suffering from a psychosis. Few of us would want such a person to sit in judgement upon us. A person of this sort would not be allowed to undertake the duty of jury service. This is because sitting on a jury is a duty and not a right. Because it entails an activity, it is quite reasonable to enquire whether or not the person concerned is capable of fulfilling the duty. Of course, being deaf, blind, unable to speak and being also mentally ill would not affect somebody’s right to a fair trial. This is the difference between a right and a duty.

Wherever there is a right, there are corresponding duties. In other words, if we have a right to a fair trial, then others have a duty to make sure that we get it. If I have a right to walk down the street, then that right must be protected and others have a duty not to impede me as I stroll down the high road. Rights and duties again, you see; two very different things.

Now if children in this country have a right to an efficient, full-time education, then others must have a duty to see that they get it. The people who have this duty are usually the parents. They have a duty, which means that they must take active steps to ensure that the child’s rights are granted to it. Some undertake this duty by registering the child at school, others prefer to provide the education themselves. They are fulfilling a duty by doing this, not exercising a right.

Since, just as in the case of the disabled juror at whom we looked above, undertaking the duty of providing the child with an education is an active thing, something which parents do, not something to which they are entitled, it is perfectly reasonable that society check that they are in fact capable of carrying out this duty. We would not wish to impose a duty upon somebody who was not up to the job, would we? So it is that society, in the form of local authorities, might wish to reassure themselves that parents are able to perform what is a very arduous duty. Providing a full-time education for a child should not be lightly undertaken and our common sense tells us that just as in the case of the juror who could not be expected to fulfil his duty during a trial, so too will there be parents who are not really up to the job of providing an education for their child. That there should be a presumption that all parents are able to fulfil their duty in this way, would be ridiculous. Many would clearly not be able to do so.

All that is being proposed in Wales is that society enquire a little into the extent to which individual parents are able personally to provide their children with an education, rather than fulfilling their duty towards their child by handing the job over to trained professionals. This has nothing at all to do with the ’rights’ of the parents; they have none in this case. It is concerned solely and simply with protecting the right of the child to a suitable education. In other words, the aim will be to ensure that those charged with the duty of causing the child to receive an education, that is to say the parents, are in fact discharging this duty.

Any debate about the Welsh proposals which makes any mention whatsoever of the ’rights’ of parents has already taken a wrong turn. The only debate about the matter should be whether or not it is being claimed that all parents are actually capable of undertaking this duty, that of educating their children themselves at home. If we agree that some are not, and most of us would concede this, then the question arises as to the extent to which society is entitled to make enquiries and take action to safeguard the rights of children.

Campaigning against the Welsh proposals on home education; a slight problem

I can see a problem looming for those who are gearing up for a Badman style campaign against the Welsh Assembly’s new proposals to regulate home education. It is a very simple one and has perhaps already occurred to some people in Wales. It is this; most of those shooting their mouths off on the subject don’t actually live in Wales and will not be affected in the least by any measures implemented by the Welsh Assembly. I have an idea that this is likely to deal a death-blow to the organised opposition to the registration and inspection proposals which are currently being debated in the principality.

There are not all that many home educating families in Wales, at least compared with this country. Certainly not the tens of thousands that we have in England. Almost all the people who have so far been expressing opinions on the subject are living here in England. I can quite see their point. They fear, quite realistically, that if a regimen of monitoring and inspection is successfully instituted in Wales, then after a year or two, it will be the most natural thing in the world for the government in Westminster to point to it as a great idea that we should adopt here. They are right to fear this; I should say that it would be a racing certainty if the Welsh proposals go through.

Never the less, when meetings in Wales are packed with various English people, some of whom are not even home educators,  it is going to raise a few eyebrows. This will  look particularly odd when speakers from England at such conferences  outnumber the Welsh, as here:

http://www.ehew.co.uk/index.php/conference-oct-18th-2012

 It will also look a bit strange when the responses to the consultation there are found to be vastly more numerous than the total number of Welsh home educators! I am going to be interested to see who in the Welsh Assembly is the first to draw attention to this situation. I quite understand the motives of those in England who are mixing themselves up in this affair, but really it could be argued that  it is nobody else’s business, apart from those who actually live in Wales.

The fight for children’s rights

The struggle to provide children with rights and end their status as mere chattels or belongings of their parents has been a long and bitter one. At every stage, the cry by parents has been the same; ‘The state has no business intruding in family life and is harming the rights of parents by doing so.’

In the 19th Century, many children were forced to work down mines and up chimneys from an unbelievably early age. They had no rights in the matter at all. Each time some piece of legislation prevented, for example, children under the age of ten from going down coal mines; there was outrage, principally from parents. How dare the state dictate to mothers and fathers what their children should or should not do? This was an assault upon the rights of parents and indeed the very institution of the family. If a father could sell his eight year-old son to a chimney sweep for £5, what on earth business was it of anybody else?

Nowhere was this outrage more indignantly expressed than when the government tried to secure the right of children to receive an education. The 1861 Newcastle Report into the State of Popular Education in England summed the case up neatly. It said:



Any universal compulsory system appears to us neither attainable nor desirable. An attempt to replace an independent system of education by a compulsory system, managed by the government, would be met by objections, both political and religious.



Wiser counsels prevailed and in 1870 the Elementary Education Act was passed, popularly known as Forster’s Act. A decade later, education was made compulsory for all children between the ages of five and ten and there was a huge uproar. Parents led the complaints, comparing the British government with that of Prussia; a grave insult indeed! The crux of the matter was that this was an erosion of parents’ rights to raise their children as they saw fit. Compulsory education was an attack on the family. In the ten years following the making of education compulsory for children, prosecutions of parents for the non-attendance at school of their children were running at over a hundred thousand a year. It was the commonest offence in England, apart from drunkenness.

Every single attempt to increase the rights of children, which of course means giving greater duties to their parents, has been met by strong opposition by parents. The governments of the day have had to lead the way, fighting apathy, sloth and reactionary parents in order to furnish children with more legal rights and protection under the law.

In recent years, we have seen two examples of this tendency. One has been the efforts of the legislature to make it a criminal offence to strike children. This has met with only limited success. Parents have fought ferociously to retain their right to beat children. Incredibly, even now in the 21st Century, there are those in this country who feel that they should enjoy the ’right’ to hit their kids! Any attempt to abolish this ’right’ is met by howls of protest and the familiar claim that the state is intruding where it has no business to be; that is to say into family life.

The other recent example of this reactionary and backward-looking trend is of course the campaign by some parents a few years ago to force the state not to enquire to closely into whether or not children were receiving a suitable education. Again, parental ’rights’ were cited and the government was told that any move to check up if children not attending school were actually being educated was an attack on the family by the state. Just as when the 1870 Elementary Education Act was being planned, the case of Germany was brandished by parents fighting against any diminution of their supposed rights. That this was essentially about the rights of parents and not of children can easily be seen by the language being used. The right of children to an education was scarcely mentioned, it was all about the ’right’ of parents to home educate.

Although the calling of a general election in 2010 ended the hopes for this latest extension of children’s rights, the cause is not entirely lost. A first step would be at the very least the registration of all children who are not attending school. Such a move is now planned by Wales and there are signs that Scotland too has such a scheme in mind. If this happens in those two countries, then introducing such registration in England would be merely an exercise in bringing this country into line with what is happening elsewhere in the United Kingdom. As has always happened throughout history, the reactionaries will howl their protests, but we must hope that this time they do not get their own way and that one more step is taken in ensuring that the most vulnerable members of society are properly protected and furnished with the rights that they deserve.

Home education conference

Somebody remarked wryly that this conference in Wales on home education has only one Welsh home educating parent speaking. The rest are either professionals or people from outside Wales.

http://bridgendhomeeducators.org/blog/october-18th-2012-home-education-conference/


Interesting to note that while both Fiona Nicholson and  Louisa Haywood-Samuel are happy to acknowledge that they are home educating parents, Alison Sauer carefully avoids mentioning this; the reason being that she wishes to present herself as a professional and not a parent. Precisely why she is taking part in this conference when she does not live in Wales is a question which several people have raised in emails to me! I am beginning to see why she was irritated at my mentioning home education in Wales on this blog; she thought that I was poaching on her preserves.

Another Serious Case Review involving the death of a home educated child

A few days ago I posted details of a Serious Case Review from Barking and Dagenham which involved the death of a home educated child. Here is one from Wales, which apparently has some bearing on the decision of the Welsh Assembly to look at the compulsory registration of home educated children:

http://www.wrexham.gov.uk/assets/pdfs/lscb/case_review/child_siond.pdf

Home education in Wales

A few links so that those interested in the subject of home education in Wales can find out a little more.




http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/education-news/2011/01/20/revealed-the-hundreds-of-welsh-children-being-educated-at-home-91466-28018759/




http://www.home-education.biz/forum/wales/14857-welsh-assembly-govt-sept-consultation-on-home-education.html




http://www.home-education.biz/forum/wales/14923-big-brother-wales-goes-for-compulsory-registration.html




http://edyourself.org/articles/EnglandandWales.php

Wales introducing registratation of home educators

Just on the offchance that nobody else has noticed, I thought that I would mention that next month a bill will be introduced in Wales which will require home educators to register with their local authority.

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2012/07/17/carwyn-jones-sets-out-welsh-government-s-law-making-plans-91466-31414898/