Just how much time does Ed Balls have in a week?

Just how much time does Ed Balls have in a week? In a week of headlines that clearly show the desperate state of the nations schools – including news of increased assaults on teachers, news that white boys from poor families continue to be let down by the schooling system, GCSE science grades are inflated, as many as one in eight primary school children had been given the wrong SATS results and almost 50% of 14 year olds admitted to having been bullied – Ed Balls has still found the time to pick on home educating families.

With less than six months left in the job, Ed Balls seems determined to leave his mark. Having publicly accepted every one of Graham badman’s recommendations immediately the Badman Report was published, he has now pushed ahead and drafted legislation in the Children, Schools and Families Bill that will see virtually all of Badman’s recommendations pass into law. Despite ample research that demonstrates that children taught outside schools are more likely to be successful – both educationally and socially – Ed Balls thinks he knows best. He plan to make every home educating family register with their local authority. Each year, parents will have to provide local authority staff with a clear programme of what they plan to teach their children. Each year, local authority staff with little or no experience of home educating will then be permitted to decide whether or not the family may continue to educate without schools! Even OFSTED does not inspect school that often!

In one simple legislative act, Ed Balls has transformed the educational landscape – responsibility for educating children has now been transferred from parents to the state. How ironic that that slippery slope which began with Margaret Thatcher’s National Curriculum in 1988 should finally bring us to the point where our children are not our own – they now belong to the state to be taught what the state wishes and in a place that the state designates!

Perhaps, after all, Ed Balls can afford to ignore the mundane and pressing problems of the school system – because he has his eyes on the bigger picture. Home education demonstrates that parents and children do not need schools, they do not need trained teachers and they do not need the state. Perhaps this is just too radical and too scary for poor Ed Balls to countenance.

The end of ‘Stalinist’ educational centralisation?

Broadly speaking, when it comes to education I take the view that more choice is always better than less choice. This was why, in 1988, I was opposed to the introduction of the National Curriculum in England and Wales. I argued that it would introduce an era of increased government meddling wand this would result in increased secularisation in our schools, far less choice for parents and students and no real improvement in education. I am not one to say ‘I told you so’ but I cannot help but feel that events over the last twenty years have confirmed my concerns; indeed, recent reports have suggested that maths and reading standards are no better than they were in the 1950s. The Cambridge Prmary Review, even went so far as to describe our current system as having ‘Stalinist overtones‘ in its obsession with central government control over all things educational!

This brings me to an interesting article that I read last week relating to Swedish ‘free schools’. Since the 1990s, parents, charities and even businesses in Sweden have been permitted to set up non-fee-paying schools, funded by the government; parents are provided with a ‘virtual voucher’ currently worth around £7,000 which they can spend at any ordinary state school or independent ‘free school’ that they prefer. In 1992, the Swedes dismantled a monolithic state-run education system (which already had very good standards, one might add) to create a radical system where student and parental choice was made a priority. What is now particularly interesting is that the Conservatives have expressed an interest in introducing similar reforms in the UK, if they win the forthcoming general election in 2010. I am not an especially political animal and I have to confess that I have never voted Conservative in my life! However, one cannot help but feel that educational choice and the freedom that would inevitably follow, would serve families far better than the pseudo-pontifical pronouncements of any Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. And even those of us who home educate, have to see this as a good thing!

Scheming plots?

There is growing evidence that very senior staff within local authority social services departments have worked very closely with staff from the government’s Department for Children, Schools and Families to undermine parents rights to home educate and to portray home education as a growing risk to child safety. Recently a member of the House of Common’s Select Committee for Children, Schools and Families asked Maggie Atkinson, Ed Balls’ candidate for the post of Children’s Commissioner, “What do you think we should be saying as a Committee regarding the legislative process and the Badman Report, and whether it is protecting children’s interests or trampling all over the interests of home-educated children?” Her response was “I would give you two words, and they are the first and second names of the child who died ‘Khyra Ishaq’.”

Ms Atkinson was referring to the tragic case of a child from Birmingham whose mother and step-father allegedly starved her to death. In the last months of her life Khyra Ishaq did not attend school. However, what Ms Atkinson did not tell the Select Committee was that, months before, Khyra Ishaq’s teachers had repeatedly warned social workers of their concerns but had been told that the situation did not warrant further inquiry. Ms Atkinson also choose not to inform the Select Committee of the nineteen children in Birmingam who have died of abuse or neglect since 2004, nor did she feel it necessary to tell the committee members that sixteen of these were already known by social workers, police or health care staff to be at risk of harm. And the evidence of collusion between senior social services staff and the government – on the 16th January 2009, Maggie Atkinson and Graham Badman along with John Coughlan and John Freeman (Joint Presidents of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS)) had a 24 hour session with DCSF staff to work on matters relating to the DCSF’s Children’s Plan; three days later the ‘independent’ Badman Review was launched.