Home Page News 2 March 2009

The subject of home education continues to attract a fair amount of media interest. There was a fascinating article in last week’s Independent newspaper which was in the main pretty balanced – you read the article in full by clicking here.

I received an email from a member of staff at the Department for Children, Schools and Families last week expressing some dismay that I was not embracing the most recent consultation mor enthusiastically and that I was being critical of the DCSF’s behaviour in the area of home education. You may be interested to read the reasons that I gave for my mis-givings over the current consulation -

1. The re-visiting of this matter less than 18 months after a successful consultation that resulted in the publication of very good guidelines to LAs on the topic of elective home education;
2. The short time period of the consultation;
3. The decision to undertake academic review after the consultation, rather than before, which would have made far more sense, because this would have allowed the academic review to feed into and affect the consultation;
4. The wording of a number of the questions in the current consultation – notably “Do you think that home educated children are able to achieve the following five Every Child Matters outcomes?” Leaving aside any discussion about the appropriateness of applying the ECM’s outcomes to individual families, this separates home educated children in a way that is, in my opinion, discriminatory.
5. The wording of the final question – “Some people have expressed concern that home education could be used as a cover for child abuse, forced marriage, domestic servitude or other forms of child neglect. What do you think Government should do to ensure this does not happen?” is flawed in so many ways. Without defining who the ‘some people’ are, the question is almost worthless and is profoundly discriminatory – the vast majority of children who are abused, neglected, experience domestic servitude, and are forced into unwelcome marriages, actually attend school. If LAs cannot protect even these children, then the application of the ECMs agenda to home educators is not only entirely inappropriate but it actually smacks of hypocrisy.
6. If the DCSF was serious about supporting home educators they would ensure that their policies in this area were research driven. The DCSF has never funded serious longitudinal research into elective home education or even as far as I know commissioned a comprehensive literature search in this area. In the absence of these, the DCSF leaves itself open to accusations of prejudice, discrimination and simply being nobbled by LAs, certain children’s charities, some of those in the educational media and certain politicians all of whom were unhappy with the outcome of the last consultation.