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.