Badman and the DCSF’s ‘doomsday’ scenario

Much has been written about the Badman Report and most home educators have, rightly, been indignant at the manner in which the Department for Children, Schools and Families aided and abetted by some in the educational media and children’s charities have decided to wage open warfare on sensible law-abiding parents whose only ‘crime’ is to step outside the government prescribed education system and try to offer their children something better!

Though there is ample research that demonstrates clearly that children who learn without schools do at least as well as their schooled peers, that their employment outcomes are excellent and that they integrate well into society, Graham Badman has chosen to ignore this. Was this consultation a genuine attempt to improve relations between local authorities and home educators or was it, in reality, little more than a ‘stitch-up’, a sham, where Ed Balls, Delyth Morgan and others within the DCSF could ensure that the last island of educational independent in this country was brought within the controlling tentacles of government? Badman’s unwillingness to acknowledge research that has findings favourable to home education and the membership of his advisory committee, which included three specialists on safeguarding children and a champion of ‘children’s rights’ and no current home educators would suggest that Badman and his masters knew quite well what recommendations they wanted to see at the close of this consultation.

Though Badman has been compelled to acknowledge that there is no evidence to support Delyth Morgan’s shameful association of home education and forms of child abuse, Baroness Morgan, herself, has never publicly apologised for this slur and Graham Badman’s recommendations clearly assume that home educated children are intrinsically more vulnerable and need greater protection from their parents, than those children who attend school!

Is the real issue that home educated children simply highlight the failures that are so common within the school-system? Perhaps the teachers’ unions dislike the fact that untrained mums and dads do a better job than their members or that unpaid parents with limited physical resources appear to be more successful than a nationalised education system costing billions!

Perhaps, in the end, this whole Badman exercise is based upon fear – the fear that more parents will recognise that successive governments over the last twenty years have experimented with the nation’s children, promising much, delivering very little and changing strategy often enough to disguise the outcomes of their actions.

Once parents recognise what has occurred, the number of families home educating could explode as thousands of parents decide to take full responsibility for their children’s education and leave the far riskier national school environment.

Is this ‘doomsday’ scenario what is truly behind the DCSF’s current attack on home educators?