Local authorities and home educators

Let us try and approach this topic with an open mind and see what common ground there might be; the sort of things with which everybody would agree. In the first place, it is almost certainly true that most home educating parents love and care for their children just as much as parents who send their children to school. Indeed, I would guess that on the whole, home educating parents tend to be even more concerned about their children’s welfare and education than those who do not assume responsibility for their child’s education.


We can probably also agree that among those parents who do not send their children to school, there will be some who neglect their child’s education and others who are abusive and cruel. This is the case with parents who do send their kids to school and so it would be unlikely to be any different with those who don’t.

So far, so good. I think that most home educating parents, as well as most local authority officers would find nothing so far to which they could object.

Local authorities fear that  a substantial number of parents who do not send their children to school are neglectful of their children’s needs and that their children are possibly suffering harm by being at home, rather than at school. Is this likely? In other words, is there any evidence that children kept at home are more likely to be at risk than those sent to school?

The first thing that we must avoid doing is to judge home educators by the type of people one comes across on the Internet. Many of these people are unbalanced and do not give a brilliant impression of home educators to outsiders. One clue about the likely incidence of strange people  is that groups of people committed to what most people would see as weird and far-out ideas do tend to have a pretty high proportion of individuals who range from eccentric to raving mad. This is so with animal rights activists, nudists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, home educators and various other fringe groups. Many of these people will be fairly normal, quite a few will be on the borderline and a good number will be extremely odd. The proportion of very odd people in such groups is likely to be higher than in mainstream organisations such as the Rotarians, a reading group or members of a bowls club.

The tricky part with home educators is that by definition, such people are more intimately associated with children than are the members of most, for want of a better expression, crank movements. This puts them into a different class from those who worship the sun at Stonehenge or drink their own urine.  What adults do to themselves is in general  not, or should not be, any concern of either the government or the local authority. Where children are concerned, the case is altered.

What I have done here is really to clear the ground and set out a few thoughts that most people would agree with. I shall build on tis foundation in the coming days.

Won't Somebody Persecute Me?

One of the great disadvantages of being a middle class, white heterosexual in this country is that you seldom get the chance to play the victim. After all, we hold all the levers of power in the land; we make the very rules. Sure, we can ring our hands about the plight of starving Africans and writhe in synthetic agony at the destruction of the rain forests, but it doesn’t really hit us where we live and we can forget about it all until the next time we feel like chucking Oxfam a couple of quid. This is why Graham Badman's enquiry came as such a boon to some people; it gave them the chance to pose as victims themselves; to present themselves as prisoners of conscience.

 
For good or ill , the Badman business fell by the wayside and the legal situation remained unchanged, leaving many middle class home educators bereft; they could no longer claim to be on the verge of becoming political prisoners! Whatever was to be done to maintain the illusion? The answer was simple. Any letter from their local authority was to be scrutinised for offence and if that didn’t work then the council’s website would be trawled and Freedom of Information requests made until something turned up to which exception could be taken. Keep this up long enough and sooner or later you will come across some old document or flow-chart which hints that not all local authorities are abiding by every tiny detail of the law. Then you can once again make out that you are a victim; only a step or two down from a deported Jew about to enter a gas chamber.


There is something peculiarly middle class about this whole business of pretending that getting a snotty letter from your local council is on a par with being persecuted for one’s beliefs or ethnicity; middle class and horribly pretentious. Of course local authorities often misquote the law, either because they are in a muddle themselves or because they are trying it on. Normal people laugh it off and get on with their lives. I worked once at an East End market and the council was always sending threatening letters and promising to prosecute stallholders. The standard response was for the men to take the letters with them when they were about to visit the lavatory, telling their mates that they were going to wipe their arse with the council’s latest nonsense. This indicates that ordinary working class people tend to have a much healthier and more robust view of the realities of the world than some neurotic, middle class types!


There are signs that this kind of thing is starting to subside a little. It coincides with the latest figures, which show that home education is no longer on the increase. Perhaps in a year or two it will all be over. Those who seized upon home education as an alternative remedy like homeopathy will send their kids back to school and get on with their lives. The only remaining home educators will be those who genuinely want to home educate; those who choose to undertake their child’s education for positive and ideological reasons.