Home Ed Wool Gathering

The Children, Schools and Families Bill, Clause 26… hmmmmm. Before I start waffling on lets just recall what exactly we’re fighting for shall we?

Freedom to make what we believe are the best choices for our children. We’re not talking safeguarding or education, we’re talking lifestyles. HE becomes your life, there is no seperation between family life and education, there’s no seam to show where education ends and family begins. It all naturally flows together. But its fragile. Make it an exercise in paperwork and you will destroy it!

It is a perfectly legal choice to educate your child at home, whatever your reasons whether it’s from scratch or you’ve taken your child out of school for whatever reason. And as a legal choice the government should be supporting home edders not branding us as negligent child abusers. And I do not use that term lightly, that implication has been made very very clear, one can only presume to pursuade fellow MPs and the general public to support a part of the Bill that gives Local Authorities the right to intrude (yes, intrude! For at least 2 * 4 hour visits and 1 * 8 hour visit!) upon a families private home, the right to interview our children without parental representation if deemed necessary, so far I haven’t seen what the criteria will be for LA officials to work out under what circumstances this will be necessary. To inflict mountains of paperwork on us (the Registration Scheme) requiring answers to questions that even the most organised and structured home edders would struggle to provide let alone those families who follow the autonomous route.

It is such a crying shame that something as beautiful, individual, free as home education is threatened by auditing and paper work.

That’s not to say that things don’t need to be changed. LA training needs to be looked into, revised, in short they need to buck their ideas up! Support for home educators needs to be discussed and not dismissed with “We have no idea how many HE children there are so we possibly can’t comment on what support is needed” Oh no, but you have enough info on figures to have Registration, Monitoring, Safeguarding etc. all worked out, enough figures to put a stop to our way of life.

Anyhoooooo enough of my drivel…..

Firstly to cheer yourselves up! Go on, have a giggle! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QjdcdG4mP4

It has occured to me (as I can find politics rather confuddling!) that I’d pop all my links and bits and bobs on here to 1) get it together in my head, and 2) so that everythings in one place and might be helpful to some of you as a kind of resource…

This is by no means ‘it’ I’ve got a ton of e-mails that need sorting through to put on both here and Facebook but I’m planning on adding a page of links but this will do for now! This is mostly ‘new’ stuff that I’ve been sent or found very recently and a few things I’ve got saved in favourites…

For copies of the Badman Review, Impact Assessments, Campaign news, if you need a refresher, catch up or new to it all definately visit here…

www.freedomforchildrentogrow.org

Also please visit here, this is where we keep up to date with things via Graham Stuart…

http://www.grahamstuarteducation.com/

And if you haven’t already signed this petition please take a look…

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Home-ed-families/

Home Ed Voices

https://heyc.org.uk/

http://talesfromthedales.tumblr.com/post/342876073/happy-anniversary-balls-badman-and-dcsf

http://montrose42.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/the-children-schools-and-families-bill-target-for-home-educators/

http://billysu.tumblr.com/post/343058501/csf-bill-in-committee

http://www.home-education.biz/forum/england/9997-a-whole-year-of-harassment-and-vilification.html

LINKS

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/parliament/2010/01/michael-gove-explains-why-home-education-for-their-children-is-every-parents-human-right.html

http://www.libdemvoice.org/home-schooling-what-is-the-liberal-approach-17566.html

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmbills/008/amend/pbc0081501a.25-31.html   Ammendments 15th Jan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGNxZ4fcvhE

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Amendments_proposed_by_Mr_Nick_Gibb,_Tim_Loughton_and_Bill_Wiggin_as_of_19_January_2010#Amended_text_of_Section_5_of_Schedule_1

Committee (19th Jan) –  

http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspxmeetingId=5645http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmpublic/childsch/100119/pm/10119s04.htm
http://goo.gl/EqOV

Transcript of yesterday’s (19th Jan) session at the Public Bill Committee
http://services.parliament.uk/bills/200910/childrenschoolsandfamilies/committee\s/houseofcommonspublicbillcommitteeonthechildrenschoolsandfamiliesbill200910.htm\
http://goo.gl/TZwj

Submissions to the Public Bill Committee (19th Jan)

AN INTERESTING READ

• Anniversary of the Badman Review Launch: Fuelling the Anguish

Exactly a year ago the Department for Children Schools and Families launched the Badman Review of Home Education. Last October we wrote that home educators had been subject to nine months of policy based evidence making. The tide began to turn with the publication of the Select Committee Report, which reprimanded the Department for relying on unsound evidence and for rushing to legislate on home education without publishing feedback from the recent public consultation.
Two months after the Secretary of State reassured parliament that right of access to the home and private interviews with children would be both voluntary and optional, the Department finally published feedback from the consultation which set out the real position.
“We have decided that local authorities should visit the place where education is taking place, which will usually be the family home, as part of their monitoring work. If families choose not to cooperate, and as a result are not on the register, local authorities will be able to use a school attendance order to require the home educated child or children to attend school.”
MPs and Lords are being asked at every stage to accept without evidence that there is no alternative and also to accept that most questions about the future will remain unanswered since the Department has either not yet had time to make any decisions or chooses not to share any information before the Bill becomes law. A simple indication of how much the legal skeleton will be fleshed out later may be seen in the extensive regulation-making powers in six new sections of the 1996 Education Act, namely 19A, 19B, 19C, 19F, I9G and 19H.
The memorandum to the Children Schools and Families Bill notes dispassionately that all of the regulation-making powers will be subject to the negative resolution procedure which is apparently appropriate “as the registration scheme will be too detailed to be on the face of the legislation and will contain extensive administrative provision.”
In the month following the publication of the Children Schools and Families Bill, the Department quietly produced a Research Paper which stated:
“The cost and benefit estimates for home education are the largest of any measure in the Bill. The size of the ranges reflects the state of knowledge about the number of home educated children. A range of 20,000 to 80,000 is used for the costs. Unit costs are assumed to be lower for the 20,000 pupils already known to local authorities as they are thought to need less ongoing monitoring. The benefits range quoted in the Impact Assessment’s summary and in the table above uses the ‘most likely’ range of 20,000 to 40,000 home educated children. The detailed analysis puts the estimated benefits for 80,000 home educated pupils at £1.6 billion”
The Select Committee challenged the figures from the Department and we are still waiting for the revised Impact Assessment which was promised to arrive “prior to the Bill Committee stage”.
At 5.15 today the Public Bill Committee will take evidence on the home education clause of the Bill from a panel which includes Graham Badman, author of the Badman Review and Fiona Nicholson, Trustee of Education Otherwise.
The National Autistic Society which will also be giving evidence on the Bill today has published an announcement this morning.
The Committee stage of the Bill will be concluded by February 4th and the Bill will then move swiftly to the Report stage and to the Third Reading in the Commons before going to the Lords.
Documents for the Bill may be found here.
From time to time the Department also indicates that there are plans to conduct an Independent Government Review on the same lines as the Badman Review over what constitutes suitable education at home. This Review has always been shrouded in secrecy which the Select Committee noted had “fuelled the anguish” of home educators.