I’ve just been looking at our local LEA’s website and the information they have there seems to indicate that they’re going to be particularly interfering.  They go on and on about home visits and inspecting children’s work and there’s a form they ‘request’ that we fill in if we’re intending to HE and one of the questions on it is ‘how do you intend to ensure that your child gets to have social interaction with other children?’.  I’m wondering how long we can stay ‘hidden’ for simply because I don’t want to have to answer to anyone!  I know that we are a million times better placed to educate our children than school teachers, yet we’re going to have people breathing down our necks wanting to see work our children have done to ‘prove’ what they know!  My children just don’t do things unless they want to do them, and I want it to stay that way.  I don’t want them to do things to show me or anyone else what they know or can do - I want them to be able to do the things they want to be able to do!  Thank goodness there is such a good support network in the UK now for HEors.  To be honest, I don’t envisage any problems with proving that Flopsy and Mopsy are capable of anything, as they are ahead of most children their age in many things - that’s not showing off, it’s just the way they are and I’d be just as happy if they were behind other children their age.  What I want is for them to do things as and when they want to, not as and when I, or the LEA ‘Home Visitor’/government wants them to.  I don’t care about some random targets some random person has invented for children - if my children don’t want to reach them, then that’s fine by me!  I’m in the process of deciding what I’m going to do with the letters I’ve been warned by other local HEing families that the LEA will be sending me this year…if I ignore them (which I’d ideally like to do!), I’m told they’ll say ‘if you don’t tell us where your child is going to school, you won’t get your first choice and we’ll just allocate them a place at your most local school’.  Ok, this is illegal (I’m told) but will just cause more hassle, surely than would happen if I just ‘played the game’ in the first place and told them we were HEing, but then we’ll get them at our door saying ’show us your children’s work’.  I’ve been advised that we might get away with replying and saying ‘we’re making private arrangments’ but it seems that our LEA is quite clued up (lots of HEing families in our area) and will probably suss us out.  So it seems they’re going to force us to tell them what we’re up to, as if they register Flopsy with a school (whether they do it legally or illegally), we’ll have to deregister her, or at least get into a battle with them to get them to admit they are in the wrong - sneaky so-and-so’s!  In an ideal world, the LEA would know nothing about us, and we could just get on with our lives with no interference, allowing our children to live as they want and learn as they want to and not asking them to prove periodically to some stranger that they are learning.  Of course, I could just let the inspectors (sorry - ‘home visitors’ - as if that term sounds less busy-body!) speak to the girls and they’d soon work out that they’re doing ok, but then I have to let them have access to my children, which I also don’t want!  So, our plan is:

 1. Ignore any letters we get and deal with any more worrying ones as and when they come with the support and advice of those who know the law better than we do

2. Enjoy what may be the last year we have of not having to justify ourselves to anyone