NorthStarUK Blog

Home Page News – 28th September 2009

The UK government seems determined to undermine home educators and make life more dificult for families who choose to teach their children outside of the school system. Not only have we seen the DCSF launch a review of home education amid fears that home education was being used as a cover for abuse or domestic servitude, but Graham Badman’s final report suggested the imposition of draconian control measures clearly targetted at discouraging parents from choosing home education. For various reasons, the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee has chosen to look into the way that Graham Badman undertook his review. As I reminded everybody last week, the deadline for members of the public to make submissions to the Select Committee was the 22nd September.

I was staggered, therefore, to read last week that Graham Badman has now asked local authorities to provide him with more information to help support the original data that his report is based upon. It seems that his original statistical data was based on a very small sample – he now needs more data to support his findings and recommendations! As somebody wrote last week – “he is looking for evidence to support his evidence!” This is little more than a tacit admission on his part that the data that he currently has will not stand the scrutiny of the select committee and that he needs to find more supporting data. One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to smell a rat here!

Whilst Christian home educators and others must be vigilant and do all that we can to stop the proposed changes in legislation; at the same time, we have to remember that we have a sovereign God who we believe is in charge of this world. Ed Balls and Graham Badman are not the real ones in control – as much as they may think that they are. I visited the delightful Swallow Falls in North Wales over the weekend. One cannot help but be overwhelmed by the power and beauty of the water as it cascades down the valley. I was reminded not only of the wonder of creation but of the power of God’s grace – which is poured out upon this world so lavishly. At this time especially, those of us who are home educators in the UK need to hold on to this truth and thrive in the knowledge that our gracious God is in control.

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?

Some thoughts on pedagogy from Switzerland

I recently returned from the EurECA Conference in Vevey, Switzerland. Apart from the memorable setting, overlooking Lake Geneva and looking at the peaks of the Dents du Midi in the distance, and the practical theme – How should Christians teach? – I will remember it for the insights of David Smith, now teaching at Calvin College, Grand Rapids USA, as he spoke primarily on pedagogy. He suggested we stop using the word methodology and re establish the word pedagogy. Briefly, his argument was that methodology is rooted in a scientific method, that if we teach in a specific way then there would be certain predictable results, whereas pedagogy stems from a community of learners living close to and learning from the ‘master’.

As I sat listening and making notes I found myself really thinking about how to start my teaching at the beginning of the year and how to start units of work in a more interesting way. David’s assertion was that how we start has a big impact on pupils and it really impacts on how they will react to our course over the year. As I reflected on how to apply this at Trinity School I also began to think – but how can this be applied to on-line teaching?

I know that my present lessons are better than when I started with NorthStarUK but the speed of change in schools classrooms brought about by constantly improving IT facilities, interactive white boards, You Tube clips etc mean that we can’t sit back either.

We clearly do a good job in teaching our NorthStarUK students from the results over the years, but as a Christian teacher I still want to do better. My personal challenge from the conference is focussed on improving the start of courses, but that is only the beginning, I can’t let the rest of the course become predictable and in the eyes of the students ‘boring’. So it looks as if there is yet more work to do in the next few months.

ContactPoint – safety in number?

Today, the UK government’s ContactPoint database goes live. Although initially the database will only be accessible to local authorities in the north west of England, the plan is to roll it out nationwide and permit just under 400,000 individuals to look at a raft of information about every child in the UK. Costing a quarter of a billion pounds to set up, the government has consistently argued that it will enable services for children to be coordinated and ensure that no child slips through the net.

ContactPoint will hold a raft of information about children in England, including their name, address, date of birth, health information including GP details and information about other professionals involved in providing care for a child.  Of particular significance to home educating families the database will hold  details about the child’s formal education provision.

Auditors, Deloitte and Touche published a report in 2007, however stating that the database could never be totally secure.  The government appears to acknowledge this since it has decided to shield the identities of over 50,000 who are regarded as particularly vulnerable.

Whilst some children’s charities have welcomes the new database, opposition political parties have been critical – the Liberal Democrats have called it “intrusive” and the Conservatives have raised concerns about security matters.

The Christian home education group, Home Service, has consistently opposed the implementation of ContactPoint, arguing that it will not achieve its objective of improving the connected-ness of children’s services nor will it improve the situation greatly for the thousands of children in England suffering abuse who are  already known to the local authorities.  In addition, Home Service has argued that the introduction of ContactPoint will rob home educators of their right to privacy. The currently legal position in England and wales is that most families are not required to notify the local authority of their decision to home educate their children.  ContactPoint will destroy this right because the database will each child’s school. This will enable local authorities and others to monitor home educating families in a way that was impossible previously and in a ay that current legislation does not require.

ContactPoint grew out of the desire to improve child safety in the aftermath of the death of Victoria Climbie. Will children in the north west be any safer today as a result of ContactPoint?  The tragic case of Baby P – where health care professionals and social workers were acutely aware of the child’s suffering but appeared to do nothing of substance to prevent it happening -  seems to suggest that the answer to this question is quite simply ‘No”!

“a better all round learning experience … attending school”

Over the weekend I was chatting with a teacher friend of mine about a 15 year old student that he has in his class who has severe learning difficulties, dyslexia and he has spent the whole of his secondary career learning to speak English as an additional language.  When asked questions in class he usually smiles and answers with just one or two words almost entirely unrelated to the correct answer; in exams his answers often consist of little more than words extracted from the question he is trying to answer. This young man is ’statemented’, which means that his local authority has acknowledged that he has learning difficulties that are beyond the resources of his school to meet. Despite this, according to my friend, he has no additional resources allocated to him  – no teaching assistant sitting with him helping him understand what the teacher is saying or differentiating his work and for four years he has made little or no progress.

You may wonder why I have mentioned this young man in my home page news. Well, over the weekend I also read about the case of Elysha Robertson, a  seven year old in Rotherham who suffers from a disease related to motor neurone disease but so rare that doctors don’t even have a name for it. Elysha’s intellectual ability is unimpaired but the disease has robbed her of all movement from the waist up. She now communicates using her toes and is fed via a tube into her stomach.

Elysha’s mum withdrew her from a local special school because she felt that the school was not doing a good enough job of educating her daughter. Mrs Robertson has said “I want to teach my child at home because I believe she has made better progress than she did at Newman School where she was taught before.”

The response of the local authority has been aggressive and intolerant.  The Council’s social services department supported by the school is arguing that Elysha could be suffering from isolation and missing the company of other children, and has opted to use legislation relating to child abuse and neglect to call a case conference and demand that the Robertson’s attend.

A spokeswoman for Rotherham Council has stated ” .. the authority would always recommend that children receive a better all round learning experience from attending school.”  I couldn’t help thinking of the young Asian boy taught by my friend when I read this!

Narcissistic children and self-esteem

There can be no doubt that self-esteem is an important part of people’s lives. It is also true that we all like to be encouraged and affirmed in what we do and who we are – it makes us feel good about ourselves.

Historically, British schools have been pretty poor at developing pupil’s self-esteem; in fact I would argue that they have often done serious damage to pupils in this regard. Some years ago I came across a youngman in his 20s who when he was 16 and about to go into his GCSE maths exam had been told by his maths teacher, that it would be a waste of his time and that of the exam marker if he actually bothered to sit the exam. Five or six years later when I met this young man he still regarded himself as ’stupid’ – not merely in maths but generally. I was reminded of this young man, this week when I read of a paper presented at the Association of School and College Leaders conference in Birmingham by Dr Carol Craig suggesting that our schools are in danger of producing narcissistic children who are likely to develop an “all about me mentality”. The ‘praise culture’ was something that also arose in a conversation I had with a former colleague a few weeks ago. We had worked together for a number of years in special educational needs within a mainstream school. She told me of a new member of staff who was inclined, in her opinion, to praise children for ‘almost anything’ – if a child sat quietly for five minute, he was praised before the rest of the class; if he wrote two or three lines in English, he was similarly praised. In the opinion of my former colleague this devalued praise – the child was simply being praised for what he should have been doing in the first place!

Teachers are, however, in a very powerful position within their classrooms. Ultimately, it is teachers who decide what is truth and what is not,what is correct and what is wrong. I have often chided teaching friends of mine by saying that as teachers we are the only individuals who ask people questions to which we already know the answer! That position of power is so easily abused when a child is scorned or even mocked for not knowing the answer that the teacher is looking for. In my experience, far from creating a generation of narcissistic egoists, my feeling is that teachers do not give children sufficient real praise. Those of us who are home educating need to guard against the same failing – our children need to be encouraged not only when they do well, but also when they have tried their best – and as parents we are best placed totell the difference.

By the way, if you are interested in what happened to the young man with the appalling maths teacher, heeventually went to university and secured a very respectable 2:1degree, but only after good people convinced him that his schoolexperience was inaccurate and that he was actually quite able!

Why we offer IGCSE qualifications

Manchaster Grammar School, one of the most prestigious independent schools in the North West of England, announced last week that it was replacing all of its GCSE exams with IGCSEs. Although this might appear as a minor decision akin to a school changing its exam board in history or maths, the reality is that there is an increasingly political dimension to the quarrel that is taking place in England over supporters of GCSEs and IGCSEs. Government funded schools are forbidden from offering students IGCSEs because the Department for Children, Schools and Families does not accept that IGCSEs assess the National Curriculum, which is what must be taught in English and Welsh schools. Independent schools can offer IGCSEs, because they do not receive government money.

In recent years there has been a growing lobby that has argued that GCSEs have been dumbed down, made less of a challenge; this lobby further suggest that IGCSEs have maintained their intellectual rigour and are therefore more worthy exams for 16 year olds – a good grade at IGCSE says more about a particular student than does the same grade at GCSE, so the argument goes.

These arguments have not been helped by the high master of St Paul’s School in London who recently described GCSEs as “simply pap, … baby food, … examination rusks…” In response, those who support GCSEs have suggested that the shift to IGCSEs is being done for marketing reasons or for elitist feelings of superiority. IGCSEs give certain independent schools boasting rights over their state school cousins!

This whole discussion is especially topical, it seems to me, coming as it does a week after I announced to NorthStarUK would effectively be scrapping GCSEs in September. Why do we, in NorthStarUK, offer IGCSEs and not GCSEs? Well the simple answer, as I pointed out last week, is that GCSEs have been closed off to us by new government regulations. However, I would argue that IGCSEs are better qualifications than GCSEs, in any case! In my opinion, there are a number of reasons for this, none of which are to do with elitism or because of a supposed dumbing down in GCSEs -

• IGCSE specifications, more often than not, have a wider range of topics to study than GCSE. The National Curriculum has had a stifling effect on school curricula.
• IGCSEs have an international dimension to their courses that is normally absent in GCSEs. In my opinion, this is especially important for young people who are going to be adults over the next 50 years.
• IGCSEs are based around terminal exams, which is education speak for saying that students are assessed by one or more exams at the end of the course. The new GCSEs will be assessed by a series of modular tests where students will be permitted to forget the material after the module has ended.
• IGCSEs are not affected or shaped by politicians – our current national curriculum has seen more changes over the last ten years than I care to remember, and all have been affected as a result of political pressure.

“Children brought up to be ignorant”

The following is a letter that was sent to the Independent in response to a rather unpleasant letter from Helena Cox  published in today’s newspaper. Ms Cox’s letter claimed that home educating ‘fundamentalist christian families’  were brainwashing their children and she claimed that this was tantamount to child abuse.

Dear Sir

Re Helena Cox’s letter – Children brought up to be ignorant

I was astounded to read Helena Cox’s letter of the 18th March and, I must confess, somewhat disappointed that the Independent felt able to publish something so filled with prejudice and discrimination.

Based upon some part time work as a home tutor Ms Cox feels qualified to write in such intolerant terms about families who are undertaking their moral responsibilities as parents so seriously that they are prepared to sacrifice in all manner of ways to raise their children to be effective and useful members of society. There is a growing body of research both from UK and American academics that clearly demonstrate that home educated children – even those from Christian families – out-perform their peers in academic, maturational and social measures. Maybe Mx Cox needs to read more widely.

It seems, according to Ms Cox, that  all children should be taught, ideally by people like herself, in order to ensure that  they grow up to be as tolerant as she is towards minorities now living in Britain.

Having sent twenty years mixing with home educated children and their parents, I simply do not recognise the picture that Ms Cox paints. ‘Brainwashing’,   ‘child abuse’ as well as the wonderfully pejorative use of ‘fundamentalist’ betray Ms Cox for what she really is – an illiberal, intolerant statist who would have all children, in schools being taught the same government approved curriculum to ensure that they could exercise free will, as adults! Even the Dark Ages were not as dark as that!

Steve Richards, B.Ed., M.A. (Educ), M.Ed.

Educational Director, NorthStarUK

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.

Home Page News – 23 February 2009

All educational systems are underpinned by a belief system or worldview. This is inevitable and unavoidable. In schools and colleges around the world – whether it is governments or individual teachers – decision-makers choose to teach children what is most important to them. And what is most important is actually shaped by our worldview. That is why a growing number of Christians are increasingly uncomfortable with the English National Curriculum; although it claims to be religiously neutral it leaves God out of every subject (except for Religious Studies, of course) – no mention of God in history, biology, geography, English – the list could go on! This is not neutrality but a form of practical atheism. In NorthStarUK we do not make our worldview conspicuous – in the end much of our subject matter is the same as that taught in secular schools. However, a Christian view of the world underpins all that we do and it is this that sets us apart. 

Some months ago I was commissioned to produce a series of short videos introducing home education to a wider Christian audience. We have almost completed the first episode and have put it on YouTube to find out what people think. It deals with the issue of neutrality in education and challenges Christians to think deeply about these matters. If you would like to watch the video, simply here.