A final few words about Cheryl Moy

My posts about Alison Sauer, Cheryl Moy and Wendy Charles-Warner seem to have struck a chord or touched a nerve with an awful lot of people. Since many of them were opposed to Cheryl Moy and had unflattering things to say about her, I think it only fair to let her own words speak for her; so that we can make an objective judgement about what sort of person she is.

As some may know, Cheryl posts on Mumsnet under the pseudonym of Pinkchez.  Here she is six weeks ago, offering advice about an aspect of the statementing process:

http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/special_needs/a1688836-Is-it-true-if-you-home-educate-you-lose-the-statement


I think that the easiest way of seeing whether people falling out with Cheryl is down to her or is rather being caused by jealous and spiteful parents who are not as caring as her, is to look at an earlier thread on Mumsnet.

In April 2009, the school  which Cheryl’s oldest child was attending wanted to have him assessed as being possibly on the autistic spectrum. She was bitterly opposed to any such move, because she felt that her son was actually gifted and that any diagnosis of this sort would in some way be a bad thing for him. She went onto Mumsnet on April 24th 2009 to ask on a special needs thread if other mothers had children who had  been misdiagnosed and also to announce that she was setting up a support group. Here is her original post:

How many parents have got kids with these diagnosis but arent convinced its right, I have teachers doin their best to get my son labelled, but it isnt going to happen, he is highly gifted, his IQ is in the top 2% of the population at 8, but this comes with some issues, he is scared of new situations, doesnt like shopping centres above ground floor, chews clothes, wont sit still, gets bored etc,
does this sound familiar?
I'm trying to establish a support group if anyone is interested?


The exchanges which followed may be found here:

http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/special_needs/744555-misdiagnosis-of-autism-aspergers-ADHD/AllOnOnePage


All the parents were sympathetic and did their very best to help Cheryl with advice and by sharing their own experiences. She grew increasingly angry with everybody and it took her just four days to explode and fall out with all the other parents. Here is her final post:

some people on here need to get off their high horses and see what else is happening beyond their experiences
and can i add having letters after your name means bugger all.
most have you have completely mis understood why i came on here, luckily for those that have contacted me, i now have enough open minded non ignorant/arogant people to create a support group. i do not want your opinions regarding my son, i didnt ask for them, good luck to your kids they are gonna need it with parents that have serious issues like some of you. and i dont care if this offends, you should learn to read and understand my very first message. if you didnt understand it u shud have asked instead of attacked.


As can be seen, here is Cheryl going into a group of strangers, all of whom had children with special needs, and apparently asking for advice. Her unfortunate manner managed to alienate everybody else and she ended up after a few days by accusing the other parents of attacking her. Not only that, but she tells them that they themselves  have problems that are likely to have an adverse effect upon their children! I think that this sheds some light upon the difficulties that others have with Cheryl Moy and also on her own personality. As for a woman who behaved like this then setting up a special needs group, as she claims to have done last month…

Socialisation

When I was interviewed on Radio Sheffield the other day, it was perhaps inevitable that one of the questions asked should relate to socialisation. I often get a little tetchy when this subject is raised in connection with home education and it was all I could do to stop myself swearing at the idiot asking the question!

     What nobody with children at school ever seems to realise is that the socialisation which is the norm at schools is actually of a very limited and specific type, which is often not transferable to real life. To explain what I mean by this, it will be necessary to relate a personal anecdote.

     When my daughter was thirteen and also in the summer when she was fourteen, the local authority here in Essex managed to get hold of some money to run a series of events over the long summer holiday. These were courses and activities aimed at children and young people of all ages. They ranged from archery and canoeing to poetry and self assertiveness workshops. All were completely free to the young people taking part. My daughter signed up for masses of things for each of those summers and had a great time.

     What I found profoundly depressing was that many of the activities had to be cancelled, because not enough children wanted to take part and it was not worth laying them on only for one or two. This was puzzling, because a constant complaint round here is that there is nothing for young people to do.  I was so curious about this that I looked into it a bit; asking the parents of schoolchildren that I know, why they thought that their own children had not been interested. The answers were interesting. Typical responses from the young people themselves were statements such as, “I wouldn’t know anybody.”  or “None of my mates are going.” The idea of turning up to met a bunch of people that they did not know was frankly unnerving for these schoolchildren. My own daughter and also incidentally a few other home educated children locally, just turned up alone and joined in. This was an uncomfortable idea for many children of school age, which is why so many events were not run in the end.

     In effect, the children at school had been conditioned to socialise with a group of thirty or so other young people, none of whom varied in age by more than twelve months. They were keen to mix with these children, but not with anybody who was slightly young or older. They certainly did not want to spend the day with strangers. This is in sharp contrast to many home educated children, who are used to mixing with unknown people of all ages; from toddlers and babies, all the way through to very old men and women. 

More about Alison Sauer and her chums

My recent post on Cheryl Moy and her pernicious influence garnered many comments. I wish today  to address some of the points raised in those comments. Those writing seemed to be divisible into three categories. There were those who agreed with what I said and expanded upon it, those who disagreed and felt that Cheryl had been unfairly maligned and finally those who felt that it did not really matter and that if people did not like Cheryl and cronies of hers such as Alison Sauer; then they should just give them a wide berth. Let's look at  the idea that those who do not get on with Alison Sauer and her various proxies should simply keep out of their way; a reasonable point on the face of it, but in practice easier said than done.

     Many home educating parents, especially those who have withdrawn their children from school, miss the camaraderie of the school gate. They wish to associate with other parents, talk things over with them and have some sort of social life based upon their child’s educational arrangements. This is perfectly understandable and explains why many join home educating groups or online communities. Surely, there are so many such things running that it should prove possible to avoid falling foul of Alison Sauer and her  various chums? In practice, new parents very frequently stumble across Alison without even trying. I have been accused of having an obsession with Alison Sauer which, if true, would be unfortunate indeed! I think it is more the case that at every touch and turn, I come across her and her influence on the British home education scene. Let us see how this works by imagining a newly home educating mother who has decided to make a few connections on the internet with other home educators.

Almost the first online group that one comes across when googling is one largely run by   and solely moderated by Cheryl Moy. Cheryl chooses who may join this group and is very ready to chuck out anybody who either disagrees with her or even asks too many questions. Let us suppose that our hypothetical mother then decides instead to join  Education Otherwise. Alison Sauer and her friend Wendy Charles-Warner have their feet well and truly under the table in this organisation.   The moderators of the support list for EO are, like Cheryl Moy, always ready and willing to chuck off the list those to whom they take a dislike. Perhaps our mother has a question about social services involvement? Ah, there is an official contact at Education otherwise to deal with this sort of question. It is… Cheryl Moy.

Dear me, thinks our mother, this won’t do at all. I don’t care for these women and so I will go elsewhere on the internet. She googles home education and finds that Roland Meighan  is a well-known and independent figure in British home education. He runs a charity that anybody can join for a small fee. Our mother signs up to Personalised Education Now and then to her horror finds out that one of the trustees is Alison Sauer! She flees in terror and then finds Home Education UK. This is one of the biggest lists and support groups. What she may not know is that Mike Fortune-Wood who runs it is an old friend of Alison Sauer’s. he was involved in helping her draw up the guidelines on home education for local authorities that were so nearly foisted on us. He too has a strong connection with Roland Meighan and has been paid for his work at Personalised Education Now.  

Our mother has now been through four of the biggest groups in the home education scene. She decides that since Alison Sauer and Cheryl Moy seem to be all over the place, she will now contact an MP who has an interest in home education and acts as its advocate and defender. She emails Graham Stuart with her views. But wait, what happens next? Graham Stuart passes her details on to Alison Sauer and the next thing she knows is that Alison has sent her a sniffy email. (No, I am not making that up. Several people who have contacted Graham Stuart have had their names sent to Alison Sauer!)

It is very difficult to avoid coming across Alison, Cheryl and Wendy if you are interested in home education in this country. If they were pleasant and good natured people, this would not be a problem. They are not. I know for a fact that people who disagree with them are threatened with legal action; both civil and criminal. I know that others have been told that information about them will be passed to social services. How do I know this? For one thing, Alison Sauer has told others that Wendy Charles-Warner  intends to take legal action against me for revealing that she lives in a manor house surrounded by a sixty acre estate. I know because people have actually gone to the police and accused me of stalking and harassing them on this blog. I know because I have received nuisance deliveries to my home, after Alison Sauer publicised my address and suggested that people might arrange nuisance deliveries. I have received many emails from other parents, thanking me for drawing attention to the problem; people who have become frightened of what these characters  might do next. One mother was worried that her children might be taken into care, after she fell out with two of these women and hints were made that social services might get involved.

The suggestion that home educating parents can just give Alison Sauer and her friends a wide berth and keep clear of them is ingenuous. They crop up in all sorts of unexpected places in connection with home education and it is hard not to encounter her if you are at all interested in the topic of home education. She was heavily involved in both the Welsh consultation and the flexi-schooling business. In fact, I defy anybody to take an active interest in home education in this country and not to keep tripping over Alison and her confederates.

A problem with Education Otherwise

Murmurs of discontent are growing about Education Otherwise; oldest of the home education support groups in this country. Part of the problem is that they are allowing some pretty strange types to get their feet under the table and these people are behaving in ways that do not bring any credit at all upon the organisation.

Take, for example, Cheryl Moy, who claims to be Education Otherwise’s  social services liason officer. It is not clear just what this post entails, but there is concern that Cheryl is using this supposed position to bully parents. Indeed, she has been known to threaten that  home educating parents who do not do as she tells them will be reported to social services. She is also rather aggressive to people generally and runs a large national face book group for home educators as her personal domain; deleting comments and members if there is any opposition to her views. 

Cheryl Moy is of course Alison Sauer’s best friend and they run together an odd group called HE Angels. Alison Sauer also has a position with Education Otherwise, as does another of her close friends; Wendy Charles-Warner. People find that raising concerns about one of these people soon brings down the wrath of various others and the result is that although unhappy with the conduct of Cheryl Moy, a lot of parents are reluctant to speak out about her and Alison Sauer.

It might be no bad thing if Education Otherwise were to specify the roles that these women hold in the group and perhaps tell everybody just what their remit is.  If the present situation is allowed to continue, it is unlikely to do the reputation of EO much good.

An interview with BBC Radio Sheffield

I thought that readers might like the opportunity to hear me talking about a favourite subject of mine; that is to say, home education. Here is a link to an interview which I gave on home education this morning. I am on a little over two hours into the programme:


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0163hjr



For once, I find myself compelled to agree with my critics! Several people have asked the perfectly fair question of what on earth I am doing, shooting my mouth of  here about home education in Sheffield. There are sound grounds for asking this question, seeing that I neither live in nor have any connection with Sheffield and am not in any case a home educator. There is an explanation and it is a curious one.

 The researchers for the programme approached several people whom they thought might be able to speak authoritatively on  home education in Sheffield. One of these was Fiona Nicholson, who lives in the city, acts as a consultant on home education and has a site on the subject called Ed Yourself. The researcher spoke to her and she refused to take part in a programme about this subject. They also spoke to Edwina Theunnison, who is a trustee of Education Otherwise. She too declined to take part. This being the case, I thought that I ought to step into the breach! If these others had agreed to be interviewed, then I would not have involved myself.

I must draw attention to the Ingle family, who also spoke. Their son did A Levels at home, which is something I could not have faced in a million years. Here is a piece about them:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/08/16/a-level-results-2012-home-schooling-effective_n_1786949.html

More Sauer Consultancy related confusion!

Following from yesterday's post about the muddle surrounding Alison Sauer's various companies and trading names, I observe that on her facebook page there is another company or trading name associated with Sauer Consultancy Ltd. This is named as SC Management; obviously a variation of SC Education. This enterprise apparently is concerned  not with education, but rather;

' Project Management and Consultancy in the Chemical, Process and related industries'





The difficulty here is that there is already a registered company called SC Management Ltd and it has been running for forty years. I really can't understand why Alison and her husband play around like this with companies and trading names which are so similar to others that confusion is bound to result. I mean, Midlands Productions Ltd and Midlands Productions Limited, SC Education and SC Education Ltd, SC Management and SC Management Ltd. Am I really alone in seeing the scope for misunderstandings and mix-ups?

The nature of this blog

From time to time, somebody commenting here will say something so weird, that I feel that I must have slipped into another dimension or parallel universe. This happened yesterday, when the remark was made, apropos of this blog, that, ‘your kudos is less than your ego suggests’. This was pretty bizarre, but actually sums up the apparent attitude of quite a few of those who comment here. Perhaps it might be a good time to make one or two things clear.

First, this is a purely personal blog, visited at most by a few hundred people each day. It does not represent anything other than my own musings on a subject which is dear to me; that is to say home education. Quite a few of those commenting here get irritable if they feel that comments have been deleted or altered; even my own comments on posts that I have myself made! This happened only the other day. The impression I get is that some of those who come on here regard this in the way that they would a blog run by an organisation or company; that is to say that I abide by certain conventions or rules. I do not. It is a personal blog and although I do not operate any moderation, if I should take it into my head to delete anything, then I shall go right ahead and do so. Many blogs on home education in this country do not allow unmoderated comments to appear; I am under no sort of obligation to allow anybody to say anything here. It is, as I said, a personal blog. I might mention that soon after I started this blog, I tried to turn it into a team effort, allowing anybody who wished to do so to contribute posts. See;

http://homeeducationheretic.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/turning-this-into-team-blog.html


Despite the huge number of angry people who were at that time commenting here, not one wished to put his or her own point of view forward in the form of a post here. I even contacted all the more well known people in the home education scene and invited them to contribute. Nobody wished to do so, probably because it would have meant putting their names to their opinions.

I shall not have as much time to spend on this blog in the next few months as I might wish and that brings me neatly to another point. I do not have unlimited time to spend  here and sometimes, when the debate seems to me to becoming fruitless, I stop visiting the comments on some threads. This is not discourtesy on my part; still less is it the case that by failing to respond, I am tacitly admitting defeat on the point under discussion. I simply do not have the time. I am currently turning out six to eight books a year and in addition to that I am writing for various magazines and newspapers. There really is not time to answer every comment here.

Finally, I must respond to the person yesterday who felt that I had less kudos than is in fact the case. I am assuming that whoever said this knows what kudos actually is; that is to say praise and acclaim. I can truthfully say that I have never received any praise and acclaim for the opinions that I share on here! Once in a while, somebody will rather grudgingly concede that I might have a point, but that is about as far as it goes. Can anybody point out to me any kudos at all that I might have received here? This is a genuine enquiry, because it is always possible that on some of those threads to which I have stopped responding,  there is much kudos to be found. I could, I will freely confess, do with some!

SC Education

One of the most tiresome things about this blog is the way that some trifling remark of mine will be seized upon and analysed to death; those commenting being quite unable to let things drop. We saw a good example of this today. Somebody who has started commenting here recently asked who Alison Sauer is. I gave a brief and accurate answer:

She is rather a controversial figure in the British home education scene. A home educating parent herself, she runs a business which offers training to local authorities on the best way to deal with home education. Because she has a financial stake in this way, some people mistrust her and feel that she is not objective. Currently, she runs an outfit called SC Education which promotes flexi-schooling. Again, this could be a conflict of interest when she is campaigning about home education. She is a close associate of Mike Fortune-Wood, who runs the Home Education UK site and also of Wendy Charles-Warner, the Education Otherwise representative in Wales.


Of course, it could not end there! One person told me to ‘get my facts straight’ and another said that, ‘her LA training business went bust and so did her flexischooling business SC Education.’ This is not altogether true and so I responded by saying:

To be strictly accurate SC Education did not exist in the first place! She was trading under this name, but it was not registered at Companies House; which is sailing pretty close to the wind.

I thought that this would be the end of the it, but of course I was reckoning without some of the more, shall we say, determined characters who comment here. They seemed to think that this was an outrageous slur upon Alison Sauer and  indicated that I had an obsession with her. Let us just clear this up and see what the situation actually is with Alison Sauer’s various companies. I certainly do not think that the information I gave was ‘smearing’ her, as one person suggested.

Alison Sauer has a limited company called Sauer Consultancy, which she runs with her husband. Among other things, this company advises local authorities about home education. She and her husband are  also the directors of  Heatherside Homes Ltd; a company involved in property development. At the end of February 2012, Alison and her husband began two new companies and this is where things get a little confusing. She began calling her old company, Sauer Consultancy Ltd, SC Education. This was not a separate company, it was simply Sauer Consultancy, trading as SC Education. I’m not sure why she did this. I’ve been told that she felt her name was not a brilliant advertisement in view of some of the stuff which has happened in the past and that she wanted a neutral company name that would not be immediately associated with her. I don’t know how true this is.

Now there is no reason why you should not call your business by any name you like, as long as nobody else is using the name you have chosen. You must not however misrepresent yourself as  a limited company if you are not. If you are a limited company, then you must tell people who you are when you do business with them,  your registration number,  registered office and so on. This is where Alison fell down a little, because she began to stop telling people what the real name of her company was. Take a look at this;


http://www.sc-education.co.uk/details/article/test/



Now anybody reading this will draw at least one erroneous conclusion about the state of affairs. The first thing which is obvious is that this is  a company which is registered in the United Kingdom. At the bottom is the registration number and the registered address is also given. What is the name of the company? Well the heading is SC Education and the text refers to, ‘SC Education and its legal advisers’. The conclusion is inescapable; this document relates to a company called SC Education. Only of course it doesn’t; because there is no such company. Here is a person dealing with the public, but not revealing the name of her company. This is what I meant by ‘sailing close to the wind’. It is not a serious matter; the most that might happen is that she could get her knuckles rapped by the people at Companies House, but it is certainly misleading and confusing.  How mentioning this could be thought of as a ‘smear’ is quite beyond me! Confusion is almost guaranteed here, because until eighteen months earlier, there had been another company registered with this name at Companies House.

There is nothing criminal about any of this, it is the sort of thing that people do quite often, but it is never the less not strictly open and above board. SC Education have been representing themselves as a limited company, but do not really exist as a company at all.  I hope that this clears up this simple misunderstanding and explains why I said that she was sailing close to the wind.

Another book...

Readers might like to see this piece of mine from today's Daily Express, about yet another book of mine; this time about the 1970s. It is not often that one gets paid to review a book which one has written! I have been putting up stuff like  this about my writing, as an explanation of why I sometimes drop out of sight or stop answering comments on posts here. It is not that I am lost for an adequate response; that very seldom happens! It is simply that I am too busy with my real work. This leads some simple souls to imagine that they have won a glorious victory in the comments here, when it is really that I have more important things to do than quibble endlessly over every minor point.

http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/fashion-beauty/388595/Growing-up-in-the-decade-that-style-forgot

Growing up in the decade that style forgot

IMAGINE being a teenager in a world without mobiles, texts, computers, internet access, DVD players or games consoles. A time when sharing music meant not clicking a mouse but taking a vinyl record round to somebody’s house, when making a quick phone call would probably involve queuing outside a red telephone box.

By: Simon Webb

Published: Tue, April 2, 2013

0Comments

Flares and satin were all the rage at the start of the decade

Life in the Seventies was very different from now and nowhere are developments more pronounced than in the technology used for entertainment and communication.

Today, many teenagers would find life without a mobile phone unimaginable. So it comes as something of a shock to learn that as recently as three or four decades ago fewer than half of British households had a landline.

For the majority of people receiving calls at home was impossible and making one entailed using a call box. One of the first questions they would ask of new acquaintances was: “Are you on the telephone?” Nowadays this sounds as bizarre as asking somebody if they have electricity.

For most youngsters the only way of communicating with friends was to walk to their house, or cycle round on your Chopper bike, and see if they were in.

At the beginning of the Seventies, record players and transistor radios were the only means for kids to enjoy their music. Seeing singers and groups perform meant tuning in to Top Of The Pops on Thursday evenings. There was no way to record programmes and so it was necessary to watch them as they were broadcast – more often than not on a black and white television. Being able to listen to favourite music on demand was not something young people took for granted. Records were expensive and it was possible to build up only a modest collection at home.

Making tape recordings from records or radio broadcasts became possible as the decade progressed but the quality of such illegal “downloads” left a great deal to be desired. Some lucky teenagers had their own cassette players, although these were expensive and the music sounded nowhere near as good as it did on record players. Perhaps the greatest dream of many was to be able to play their music on an eight-track stereo. This system, with its chunky great cassettes, appeared in 1970 but had dropped out of use by 1980.

Sitcoms such as Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em epitomised family television

There has never been a decade quite like the Seventies

Without the internet and the ability to access music and information about singers at will, news about the music scene had to be gleaned from such magazines as New Musical Express and Melody Maker. Fan magazines catered for the need to know more about the private lives of the members of such bands as the Bay City Rollers as well as providing the pin-up posters to be found on nearly every bedroom wall.

Television was far more of a social activity for families. With only one set in the average home and no video recorders, everyone had to watch the same thing at the same time. There were only three channels and this effectively meant that almost everybody would be watching certain popular programmes such as The Generation Game or Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em. These days the different generations watch whatever they want on their laptops, televisions, DVD players or a host of other electronic devices. Viewing is no longer the communal activity it once was, which is a pity. The television was a focal point for households in the Seventies and the teenager sitting and laughing at On The Buses with his parents inevitably felt a closer bond with them than one watching an entirely different programme from the rest of the family up in his bedroom.

The Seventies has been called “the decade that style forgot”. Teenagers wore some of the more outlandish fashions which have come to sum up the era. Platform shoes, flares, bell-bottom jeans and hotpants were all enthusiastically championed. The strange thing about many of these phenomena is that they emerged promptly in 1970 and then disappeared in 1979, fitting neatly into the decade. The 16-year-old girl wearing platforms in 1970 would have been a daring trend-setter but nine years later no sartorially savvy teenager would have been seen dead in them.

This was the period when young fashions spilled over into, and had a profound effect upon, the adult world. Photographs of families at the seaside during the Sixties show middle aged men sitting on the beach wearing collars and ties. By the Eighties this would have unthinkable. The longer hair adopted by many youths in the Seventies, together with the more casual way of dressing, became universally accepted.

The most noticeable difference between the lives of teenagers then and the way things are today lies in how they communicated with one another. As private telephones were available only in a minority of households their use by teenagers was strictly controlled. Phone charges were very high and most young people would only be able to make brief calls. This meant that practically all conversations took place face to face; social life invariably meant meeting other people and talking to them.

These days an enormous amount of interaction takes place via the printed word on Facebook and by texting on mobile telephones and it is possible for someone to enjoy a rich social life without having to leave their bedroom. This type of existence would be a bizarre concept to a teenager from the Seventies.

By 1979 fashion was beginning to change, as the Bay City Rollers made way for Bob Geldof

Yet the digital revolution which made such things as mobiles and the internet possible had its roots in this fascinating 10 years and was one of the things that made it such an exhilarating time to be young.

When the decade began we all used mechanical typewriters, cameras, gramophones, clockwork watches and slide rules – the kind of technology that had existed in Queen Victoria’s reign. By 1980, however, there were push-button telephones, digital watches, electronic calculators and even the very first computer games.

Making the transition from child to adult during a period of such dramatic change was tremendously exciting. There has never been a decade quite like the Seventies. Few generations can say that they have witnessed the birth of a new era but millions of now middle-aged men and women really did see the drab, post-war world transformed in front of their very eyes.

To order a copy of A 1970s Teenager From Bell-Bottoms To Disco Dancing, by Simon Webb, (The History Press Ltd) at £9.99 send a cheque or PO made payable to Express Bookshop to: 1970s Offer, PO Box 200 Falmouth TR11 4WJ or tel 0871 988 8367 or online at www.expressbookshop.com UK delivery is free. Calls cost 10p per minute from UK landlines.

More social history...

A treat for readers who would like to read another review of a book of mine, this time  about the East End in the 1960s;

http://eastlondonhistory.com/2012/11/16/1960s-east-end-childhood-by-simon-webb/

1960s East End Childhood by Simon Webb

Nov. 16 Uncategorized no comments

Do you remember playing in East End streets free of traffic? The days when children could play out on their local road free from fears of muggers or sexual molestation? If you do you’re probably recalling a 1960s’ childhood … or you think you are.

Simon Webb’s fascinating new book* opens with the declaration that “this book is not intended to be…an exercise in demythologising or debunking, rather [to] give a more rounded and balanced portrait of children’s lives in the East End of half a century ago”. In fact, it’s all of those things, and is the more entertaining for doing just that, as the author painstakingly takes apart some of the myths clouding our received version of history. His tools? Commonsense, his own memories and (not always the case in local history books) some solid research and hard facts.

We begin in a world which, although only 50 years away, is almost totally unrecognisable. To quote the famous opening lines of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” And how different it was – trolleybuses, steam trains and black and white telly (if you had one). A land where everybody smoked all the time, be it on the tube or in a hospital ward. A land where murderers were hanged, black faces were rare and few of us had phones let alone mobile ones (so used phone boxes instead).

Foreign then, but not necessarily better. Webb admits to finding “the mythology of childhood in the East End…at odds with my own recollections”, and diving into the records he establishes that his memory is the more reliable guide. Take those safe and traffic-free streets for instance. Although there were far fewer vehicles on the roads in 1961, ten times as many children were killed in traffic accidents than in 2010. We should also remember that cars were built like tin cans and seatbelts were a rarity.

And if you lived in a working class area, you were far MORE likely to die in an accident. The children of manual workers were much more liable to die from house fires or car crashes, and the child mortality rate was even more shocking. A decade or so into the new NHS, which should have evened things up between rich and poor, and the percentage of babies dying before their first birthday in East London compared with figures in the developing world today.

Then there are those innocent childhood games. Hopscotch always get a mention in memoirs of sun-soaked cockney childhood, but Simon moves briskly on to Last One Across, where boys would race across a busy road or railway line, ideally (though not unfailingly) beating the onrushing truck or train. Today those kids would be getting their adrenaline rush at Alton Towers or Thorpe Park – just as thrilling but unlikely to be fatal.

East End boys of the early 1960s might well have recognised some of their pastimes in the pages of the Just William books (popular for more than 40 years at this point). Simon remembers airguns and catapults being routinely carried; and almost as routinely, there were trips to hospital, lost eyes and permanent scarring. Then there was a boy at Simon’s school – who built a bomb from bangers one November. Returning to investigate why his bomb had failed to explode, he arrived just as it did so – removing his hand.

With leaky gas fires, yet-to-be-eradicated diseases and a meagre diet, it seems things weren’t much safer at home. We should mention those lead toys which slipped so easily into infants’ mouths. But lest we give the impression that the East End of the early sixties was a sepia-tinted death trap both indoors and out, Simon reminds us that there was much about this simpler and less organised age to admire. Children’s services may not have existed in any coherent form, but it was a given that – on your estate or street – all the children were ‘parented’ (or at least watched over) by all the adults.

And while modern families have an enormous wealth of consumer goods, the difficulty of affording luxuries in the sixties (let alone the lack of any luxuries to be had) meant they were all the more prized. The received mythology is that we all saved industriously in the sixties, living within our means, while drowning in credit. The truth is that today we’re likely to buy that iPod or digital camera outright; half a century ago we were buying our pushbikes and record players on hire purchase, ‘the never never’. God help the clumsy child who broke the radio that still wasn’t paid for. The television, meanwhile, would likely be rented.

In a pervese way, it’s reassuring to remind ourselves that people have always thought that things were getting worse. The 1960s had its moral panics about children’s reading matter. The Children and Young People (Harmful Publications) Act of 1955 had tried to stem the flood of lurid and disturbing comics, but go into any East End newsagent and you would find racked Sinister Tales, Creepy Worlds and Tales from the Crypt. And there have always been hysterical crusades about pop musicians and their lyrics, from Elvis through the Rolling Stones and on. To quote another wise head who had seen it all before: “Never ask: ‘Oh why were things so much better in the old days?’ It’s not an intelligent question!” That’s Ecclesiastes, from the second century BC. Rose-tinted spectacles, it seems, have always been around.

*A 1960s East End Childhood by Simon Webb. Published by The History Press, www.thehistorypress.co.uk. £7.99.

An interesting social history of selective education...

I thought that readers might like to read a review of one of my recent books about education and schooling:

http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/Schooling-question-class-middle-lower/story-18322791-detail/story.html#axzz2P8AGtQyd

Like it or not, British education post-war was dominated by the 11-plus which divided those pupils who went on to Grammar School at 11, and the vast majority who didn't.

In fact, at least three quarters of children failed the exam and ended up at secondary schools, which is where they stayed until they left to find a job at the age of 15.

1. ​

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"The history of this 75 per cent or more of children who were neither privately educated, nor attended grammar school, has often been neglected and sometimes entirely overlooked," says Simon Webb, the author of a new book on the subject.

"Fictional accounts of childhood during this time, from Enid Blyton's Famous Five stories to C S Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, show a world where independent, fee-paying schools are the norm," he adds.

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"Real life reminisces of school in the late 1940s and Fifties seem to focus upon the lives of children at grammar and private school, rather than exploring life at ordinary primary schools and secondary moderns."

Simon's book, a lively and fascinating mix of personal reminisces and well researched fact, follows the nation's schoolchildren as Rab Butler's 1944 Education Act was translated into reality.

Under Butler's scheme – part of a "brave new world" – every child in the country would have access to free education through a system of grammar, technical and secondary modern schools.

As many authorities failed to institute the technical schools, it was left as pretty much a two-tier system.

From 1947, despite considerable opposition, all children were obliged by law to remain in full-time education until they were 15 years old.

Despite the snob appeal of the grammar schools – pupils had to wear a uniform and boys a cap – the Labour Party were strongly in favour of them.

They regarded these establishments – many of which had once been private – as agents of social mobility which would enable bright working-class pupils to "fulfil their potential".

Nevertheless many aspects of the grammar schools – including the use of surnames and teachers wearing gowns – mirrored those of the private schools, on which they were based.

For so-called "late developers" there was access to these schools through 13-plus exams, although in reality this was nothing more than a trickle.

Bright pupils from secondary moderns were either not encouraged, or not able, until 1965, to take CSE or GCE exams.

In fact many left school without any qualifications whatsoever, a situation which barred them from any type of office work, however lowly.

By the 1950s it was becoming obvious, says Simon, that the 11-plus was doing nothing but sort out articulate middle-class children, often not the brightest, and provide them with grammar school places.

"It is worth noting that throughout the 1940s and Fifties half of the children attending grammar schools were from middle-class families," says Simon Webb.

"This was wholly disproportionate to the size of the middle classes at the time and suggested that they were taking up more than their fair share of places.

"Whatever had earlier been claimed the 11-plus examination had little to do with intelligence and everything to do with previous schooling and education."

For those starting out at primary school, which was at five, as it is today, the occasion was either traumatic or eagerly awaited.

In those days mothers were always busy – Monday's washing could take all day and shopping was a daily chore – and with few amusements, such as TV, many children were bored.

If you were lucky enough to find yourself at an infant school which had graduated from chalk and slates to pencils then, at seven, there were dip pens and ink, which could make an awful mess, even with blotting paper. Even after they were being mass produced, in the 1960s, many schools still refused to let their children use Biros.

Age seven, and now in the juniors, pupils would be streamed, A, B or C according to ability, and even moved around in class after a weekly test.

The A stream pupils, many of who, it must be said, had natural ability, would be groomed for the 11-plus and a possible place at grammar school.

Due to a post-war "bulge" there could be as many as 40, or even 50, children in just one class.

Given these high numbers (most private schools aimed for half of this) then perhaps it was in the nature of things that slower pupils were overlooked while attention was focused on the brightest.

Teachers' "pets" were a well- known phenomena.

Such was the division at 11 that many pupils who had passed the 11-plus found themselves cut off socially from the friends that they had grown up with at primary school.

Snobbery, a fact of life in post-war Britain, remained rife.

If you grew up in the post-war years, as I did, then this book will bring the memories – both good and bad – flooding back.

Little did we realise (did anyone, apart from the educationalists) that we were being used as guinea pigs in a huge piece of social engineering.

Just how much the education we got fitted us for life outside the school gates is another question all together, beyond the remit of Simon Webb's book.

One secondary school pupil describes how he learned more from a teacher who let them tinker with (and drive!) his old car than he ever did in the classroom.

The chapters on discipline, uniforms, religion and school buildings I found especially interesting.

The Best Days of our Lives by Simon Webb is published by The History Press at £12.99.

Read more: http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/Schooling-question-class-middle-lower/story-18322791-detail/story.html#ixzz2P8B2fQff
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The converts to autonomous education

I was interested to see yesterday  one of my most vociferous critics here,  a keen autonomous educator,  mention in passing that he or she had tried to teach a child to read at the age of two. We saw the same thing with David Hough up in Cambridge; the education begins in a way that many people would call hot-housing  and then later, the parents are converted to autonomous education. This even happened with Mike Fortune-Wood, that arch apostle of the autonomous home education movement. He writes that at first he did ‘home at school’, and only  later become a convert to autonomy.  I have seen this sort of thing many times before, not only among home educators, but also with friends of ours who sent their children to school. One notable case was that of a man who began with ante-natal education, involving  a loudspeaker pressed against his wife’s belly during pregnancy. (No, honestly, this was not me!) When the kid was born, he stuck labels on everything, so that the kid was seeing words like table and door at baby eye level. What is curious is that he gave all this up after six months and became strongly opposed to this sort of game.

     I have remarked many times before that there is something a little fanatical and cult-like about some of the more enthusiastic autonomous types. It seems to be less a pedagogy and more a philosophy of life; almost a religion. Now as I am sure that readers know, converts are the very devil for being keen as mustard about their new faith. We see this with Catholics and I have also encountered it with those who convert to Islam and Judaism. Often, these characters are ten times more strict about their faith than those who were born into it. I am wondering if something of the sort might happen with those who are, as it were, converts to autonomous education? Anybody reading what Jan Fortune-Wood has to say about the education of children would surely think that her faith in autonomous education was bred in the bone, but it is nothing of the sort. A few years ago, she too was dead keen on ‘school at home’. She had an epiphany and was converted to the cause of autonomy; of which she is now a champion.

     All this would make sense really. One  notices that those who send their children to school and then change to home education are frequently more fanatical about the business than people like me who have been involved for decades. There definitely seems to be a different mindset among those who deregister their children, which sets them apart from those who did not send their children in the first place. This too has the feeling of a conversion.

     I am not being dogmatic about this, it is just something which I have noticed over the years. Do readers know of any other well known autonomous educators who began by doing ‘school at home’?

Ian Dowty's legal opinion on flexi-schooling

I thought that readers might be interested to hear what Ian Dowty has to say on the subject of flexi-schooling. As readers probably know, he is a lawyer whose own son gained a place at Oxford after being home educated. This is a message that he sent to Alison Sauer;

 Flexi-schooling is legally possible (apparently), but the bottom-line is that it's at the discretion of a school's head who can start it or stop it at any time. You can't make any head do it, whether they "refuse" for good or bad or policy (whether local or central) reasons. That would be the case even if "or otherwise" included flexi-schooling, which is about as far as you can go, surely? If I've missed something, let me know and I'll gladly reconsider.

In my view it is better by far to leave the legal position alone and to win hearts and minds over to flexi-schooling with solid examples of how it works and the projects/schools based on it. If you want to make it something a parent can insist on, it seems to me that you have to address the problem that it might deprive a place to a child whose parents want full-time school. Alternatively you could perhaps argue that it could alleviate the problem of a shortage of places if 2 parents wanting flexi-schooling shared a school place.

You might want to point out to the DfE that its latest guidance issued on 22nd March seems to be wrong where it says " Pupils should be marked absent from school during periods when they are receiving home education." Since they are absent with leave of the head they cannot be "absent" and should not be marked as such - s444(3) Education Act 1996 makes it clear that "The child shall not be taken to have failed to attend regularly at the school by reason of his absence from the school— (a) with leave". If a child is marked as absent, the LA can use the register as evidence in court that the child is not attending regularly and this might give rise to an erroneous prosecution of a child who is actually deemed by s444(3) not to be absent. They ought to leave the law alone too :)

More deliberately misleading claims about autonomous education

We looked yesterday at the case of a child  who was taught to read and then advertised as having just ‘picked up’ reading spontaneously. This sort of thing can have a bad effect upon parents who are thinking of home educating, because it gives them an unrealistic idea of what home education entails. It has caused some parents to simply wait for their children to start reading; having formed the impression that this is something which happens naturally as a matter of course. Here is a typical example of such a dupe. This mother’s account of her children’s education was until recently to be found on the Education Otherwise site as an inspiration to others! Here she is, talking of her seven and ten year old children, both of whom are functionally illiterate;

‘Their days are often filled with television and lots of play…They will read one day and will do so because they want to, not because somebody tells them to.’

Here is a mother who is simply waiting for her children to ‘pick up’ reading. She has been gulled into this foolish course of action  by misleading accounts such as that at which we looked yesterday.


Another type of deception is that practiced by those who pretend that their children were pretty backward in various subjects and then suddenly made great leaps at a late age; thus catching up and even overtaking  conventionally schooled children of the same age. We hear of children who could not read until the age of twelve or who were hopeless at maths until they  were thirteen and then in the space of a few years made up for lost time and went to university. Almost invariably, there is more to these cases too than meets the eye.

Two home education success stories which have been doing the rounds now for years and are still regularly trotted out, are the autonomously educated boys; one of whom got into Oxford to study law and the other who went to Manchester to study bio-chemistry. The second of these cases is an absolute classic in deception on the part of the child’s mother and I have recently come across an interesting letter from her dating back to 2007. Here it is;


'The “inspectors” quoted in the BBC article completely do not understand autonomous education, which is practiced by at least one in four home educators in Britain. Autonomous education is child led, with parents facilitating, not dictating and allowing the child to retain the urge to educate themselves, the drive which leads them to teach themselves to walk and talk, and by not supressing that urge allowing them to learn all they need to know to get on in the world they live in. To the LA advisors, this is so far away from the regulated, prescribed curriculums that make up their world, that they see it as no educational provision, because unless the child decides structure is the way they wish to learn, there is often no external way to assess the child’s education. My two children have been lucky enough to decide on their own education, and an inspector making judgements about my son at 13 would have been horrified at this child who had not yet decided writing was an important thing in his life, or maths. However my son was recently the youngest entrant ever at the Manchester School of Medicine’s PhD programme, following his degree.'

What are we to make of this? Well, the mother wants us to believe that her autonomously educated son was not too hot at  maths at the age of thirteen and that a local authority  inspector would have been horrified at his standard in this subject. But then look what happened; he went on to become the youngest ever entrant at the Manchester School of Medicine!  Curious that she omits to mention that the boy had already passed a GCSE in mathematics at the age of twelve, three or four years earlier than the usual age that this is taken in schools. The reality is that far from being horrified at his attainment in maths, any inspector would have been extremely impressed. This can hardly have been an innocent mistake on the part of the mother; she knew perfectly well when she was talking about how horrified an inspector would have been, that her son took his GCSE in this subject at twelve. She tells us here that he had not, at the age of thirteen, decided that maths was an important thing in his life,  when in fact he chose to pursue the subject and take a GCSE in it at twelve!

The result of this sort of deceit is that parents whose teenagers are not doing well at maths or reading are lulled into believing that it does not matter. Just look! Here is a child who is a complete duffer at maths when he is thirteen and then a year later, he is studying it at A level!  In the course of a year, he has caught up with and overtaken the fourteen year-olds at school. Nonsense like this can be very damaging for parents who don’t realise that they should actually be concerned about children unable to read at twelve or carry out basic arithmetical operations at thirteen. They are enabled to kid themselves that some miracle will happen and that their children will soon catch up without any teaching  on their part. 

Why does this bother me? I am hugely enthusiastic about home education. At the moment there are tens of thousands of home educated children in this country, but I would like to see the practice increase at least tenfold. I wish that hundreds of thousands of parents would take full responsibility for the education of their children and reject schools entirely. Educating children though is a full-time task and unless parents are prepared to devote their lives to it for ten or fifteen years, then they had better not attempt it at all. Those who undertake the enterprise believing that their children will be hopeless at maths at the age of thirteen and then suddenly whiz ahead and be at A level standard a year later, all under their own steam, are in for a terrible shock. Untruthful and deliberately misleading reports such as those we have looked at over the last few days are not helping matters. They present a distorted and wholly unrealistic view of home education. Any parents who decide to home educate after having read stuff like this are being set up to fail. Worse still, their children are being primed for failure and that really does bother me.

The autonomous acquisition of literacy in home educated children

One of the most commonly held beliefs among  certain  British home educators  is that it is unnecessary to teach children to read; that they will somehow just ‘pick it up’ naturally, just like walking and talking. I don’t claim that this is impossible, but I can certainly say that in every such case that I have been able to investigate, there is more to the business than at first meets the eye. I want today to look at a classic example of this sort of thing. 

     Here is an item from a local newspaper in Cambridgeshire;

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Cambridge/Are-home-educated-children-better-off.htm

Now let us examine what is said here about the way that this child  supposedly learned to read. This is, according to the parents, an autonomous education.  We are told  that:

‘Kit was not forced to read, but instead started to pick it up when he realised it would be useful for him to learn about other things.’

We also read that;

‘he didn't want to start learning to read until he was six, and has rejected the system of phonics which is used in many schools.’


This is  fairly typical of the  kind of claims made by autonomous home educators about the learning of reading. According to this account, at the age of six this boy started to pick up reading because he realised that it would be useful. He was not forced to learn and had no dealings with phonics; that is to say learning the sounds of individual letters.

Really, if it is this easy, you wonder that anybody bothers teaching children to read at all! Why not just let them pick it up naturally like this, in their own time?  All that work in schools on teaching phonics to five and six year-olds and here is a kid who begins to read at the same age as most schoolchildren,  without any fuss; he just learns  by himself when he is ready. A  classic case of the autonomous acquisition of literacy. Except of course, it is all complete nonsense. I happen to know this for a fact. Here is what the child’s mother wrote six years before that newspaper report:

22 December 2003
…has been having a wonderful time of late learning things like numbers and letters. He was transfixed by the Sesame Street DVDs on the subjects, but was restless when I tried to do some alphabet with him today. I wrote letters in his sketchbook and he furiously scribbled them out. We came into the computer room and fired up nickjr.co.uk, which has some lovely games for 2 year olds, in case you never knew. When he knew the very same set of letters in the very same order as Mummy, suddenly it started clicking. Mummy was NOT making this up to be cruel. This is some secret code he needs to learn. As in he thinks he needs to learn it now, not just Mummy thinks he needs to learn it. He's not expert at mouse moving yet, and clicks tend to happen not at all or 30 in a row, but he likes to point to the screen and make choices and have me click on them for him. Today's winners seem to be the letter K and the letter Z. He's always been a big fan of S. 

That entry was made when the child was two years and three months of age and as we can see, one of the parents has already begun teaching her son to read. The method that she is using is of course phonics; teaching her son the letters of the alphabet and the sounds that they make. A month later, in January 2004, when the boy was two years and four months, his mother was using flashcards of letters and numbers to teach him. A month after that, her efforts began to pay off, because by February 3rd 2004, the child could recognise every single letter of the alphabet and the associated sounds. Not bad for a boy who is still only two years and five months old.

Now there is nothing at all wrong with any of this; I did exactly the same with my own daughter. It is called teaching a child to read and, just like me, this parent thought that the earlier that you undertake the process, the better. Let us now look at that newspaper report again;

‘he didn't want to start learning to read until he was six…started to pick it up when he realised it would be useful for him to learn about other things’

At best, this is exceedingly misleading; at worst, a complete falsehood. He was being  taught to read  systematically four years before he was six, by phonics; the same method used in schools. Anybody think that this might have some bearing on his acquisition of literacy?

Tomorrow, we shall be thinking a little   about this sort of deception. What motivates home educating parents to teach children to read and then pretend that their children have learned to read without any structured teaching? It is common enough and I know of many  such cases. We shall look at why people do this and also consider the ill effects that accounts of such supposedly autonomous learning can have  upon gullible parents who are persuaded that if their children are left to their own devices, then they too will somehow just ‘pick up’ the ability to read.

The problem with the internet for home educated children

I said yesterday that research on the internet posed special problems for some home educated children. Of course, it is not only home educated children who get a lot of their information from the internet and to illustrate the problem clearly, we shall look first at something which happened recently at a secondary school. The pupils had been told to research on the internet about America’s first inhabitants. One girl turned up at the next lesson with a lot of impressive looking stuff from a university website. She had discovered that the ancestors of the native Americans were in fact Jews who arrived in the country about 500 BC. She had also found a link to an academic article about supposed DNA evidence which backed up this mad idea. Here is one of the sources of her knowledge:

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/review/?vol=18&num=1&id=601&cat_id=488

     Actually, it all sounds very plausible and if it were not for the fact that I know Mormonism to be raving mad, I might almost be persuaded myself by all this fancy, scientific language!

     Now fortunately, the teacher was able to put her right about this and explain that Brigham Young University was not the best place to go to for information on this topic. For him to do this though, he needed to have a good deal of prior knowledge about the subject. He needed to know about the Clovis People, the land bridge over the Bering Strait and also a bit about the beliefs of Mormonism. In other words, the teacher was able to guide the child to a correct understanding of the implausibility of what she had found during her research; not withstanding the fact that she had been getting the information from a university. Left to herself, the girl had gone hopelessly astray. Of course, she should ideally have cross-checked what she had found at Brigham Young with various other sources and perhaps visited the library as well to look at a few books. Teenagers aren’t always like that though and many take the first thing they read as being true; as long as it is from a university and contains many long words.

     Consider the case of a home educated child whose parents might not know  about the origin of humans in the Americas or anything about Mormonism. If their child announced that she had learned that the aboriginal inhabitants of America were from the Middle East, they might not have the knowledge to set her straight. It is entirely possible that the child could stumble across this nonsense and then go off believing it to be true. Of course, if the child were to be told that this was not the true history of America and urged to look more deeply into the subject, she might be able to get the matter a little clearer. But why would she do so if she believed the first site that she came across?  In other words, just roaming around the internet and picking up information in this way without the guidance of a knowledgeable adult is not really the best way to learn things. This is of course because the internet contains an awful lot of misleading and downright untruthful information. 

     There is a strand in modern British home education which holds that the internet is the ideal place for  children to acquire information. Indeed, some believe that a child can more or less educate herself without any guidance, provided that she is given unlimited access to the internet. This is a mistaken view.  Without a teacher and guide to correct errors and set the child along the right path to knowledge, there are too many pitfalls to make this a suitable mode of education. Certainly, the child might bring some of the idiotic things she learns on the internet to her parents, thus giving them a chance to put her right. But there are still likely to be many things which remain uncorrected; urban myths, old wives’ tales and downright fabrications.  This is why most educators feel the need for a skeleton framework of knowledge to ensure that the child acquires the basics in a sound way. Once this is in place and suitable research techniques have been taught, the child will be less at  hazard from falling into beliefs such as that native Americans are really the descendants of the Children of Israel!