Just read another post on a mainstream parenting forum which has made me glad we’re not sending the girls to school - the daughter in year 2 was kept in during playtime because she didn’t do her homework! What age is year 2? 6/7 years? I thought one of the reasons we’re meant to send our children to school is for the ’socialising’ and yet if children dare to have fun at home instead of doing work, they are punished by being forced to stay in while all their friends play :-( Makes me so angry!
Flopsy got the Usborne Flip Flap Body Book for Christmas and is mad on it. Although we will definitely be building up a good collection of fact-based books for her and the other girls as time goes on, financial constraints kind of stop us going out and buying books on every subject she expresses an interest in right away! So…where can I find good websites that cover similar subjects for the early years? Surely there must be some out there! Come on experienced HEors…where are they? 
Reading a message on a parenting forum from a mum asking how she can get her nearly 5 year old to do colouring in. He’s very good at it, when he does do it, but he doesn’t ever want to do it, and she knows he needs to get doing it so that they can assess him properly at school as lots of maths problems need him to colour things in etc. Gah! It’s things like that that make me more determined than ever to not send the girls to school - I guess if he doesn’t colour in at school, then he either gets labelled as un-cooperative or it’s assumed he’s not capable. Talk about deadening a child’s eagerness to learn and enjoy life 
Flopsy: Mummy, what does one and one make?
Me: two
Flopsy: what does two and two make?
Me: four
Flopsy: what does four and four make?
Me: eight
Flopsy: what does eight and eight make?
Me: sixteen
Flopsy: sixteen? ok, thanks.
Mopsy is acquiring numeracy skills in a completely different way to how Flopsy did it. Flopsy has an excellent grasp of number, often doing very simple addition sums without realising it (of course, I have to stop myself leaping up and trying to get her to do more, and to understand the implications of what she’s just done LOL!), and can count to a hundred easily now. She learnt all this firstly by learning 1-10 by rote (at 23 months old - the same age Mopsy is now) - simply through hearing us do it hundreds of times with an abacus style toy she had, and through rhymes etc. Then she suddenly used this knowledge to count something (a couple of weeks later) - three straws, I think it was - and we knew she had acquired a concept of number. Mopsy, on the other hand, is pretty pants at getting her numbers in the right order, and her counting usually goes ‘three four three four three’, occasionally with a ‘one’ or a ‘two’ shoved in there somewhere! However, she only does her counting when she can see that there is more than one of something and has been doing this for quite some time now - she has acquired her concept of number before knowing the numbers themselves. It’s totally fascinating, as I’m sure she’s learnt her numeracy skills in a far more natural way - Flopsy being our first baby, we spent a lot of time surreptitiously ‘teaching’ her these things, while Mopsy has just learnt from living and from being with her big sister all the time. In the last week, Mopsy has been recognising and identifying when there is only one thing, and when there are two things. She’s really learning and it’s a delight to watch - this is one of the reasons I’ve mentioned many times before, that we want to HE - we want to *see* the learning happening because it’s one of the most rewarding things about parenting, in my opinion
I’ve been burying my head in the sand about this (ashamedly!) but at last have realised that I need to act, just as so many of my fellow HEors and HEors-to-be are doing. UK HEors who aren’t yet aware of the worrying situation, and all of our wonderful friends and family who support our decision to autonously educate our children, please read this post (from Carlotta) and if you feel you can, follow the suggestions Carlotta makes. Over the next week or so I’ll be making my way through the list myself. Many thanks!
Home Educators everywhere:
If you are not already aware, it may be of interest to Home Educators to know that the government are preparing to look at the way that home education is monitored and otherwise controlled. This is being done under the aegis of the Department for Education and Skills, (the DfES), the government dep’t that is responsible for developing strategies in education. Part of their remit is to aim to achieve excellence for all and their functions will accord with the Every Child Matters agenda. http://www.dfes.gov.uk/aboutus/
Following last year’s DfES consultation on draft local authority Home Education guidelines, in which many local authorities expressed frustration at not being able to monitor home education as they would prefer, and which many HEors felt did not adequately or fairly represent the views of a large portion of the HE community, the DfES intend to conduct another consultation on Elective Home Education. The DfES describe the proposed consultation as being “a full one, conducted via the Department’s consultation website.”..where they hope to ensure that the documents are accessible to as many people as possible. http://www.dfes.gov.uk/consultations/
Put simply, it appears that the DfES is considering using the Every Child Matters Agenda to insist that HEors conform to standards as decided by the state. This could mean that they would like to impose a system of routine monitoring to assess progress. It would
also, in all probability, mean that they would like to intervene in the matter of educational content, either explicitly through the imposition of a curriculum or through the method of punitive monitoring.
The DfES’s complaint with the current system is that whilst schools are subject to close inspection, home educators appear to get away with it and that “whilst s437 of the Education Act 1996 provides a remedy for LAs which have concerns that there may be no suitable provision, this is unwieldy, time consuming and expensive and in some cases will be nugatory where home educators are making good provision but are resistant to LA enquiries.”
To keep Home Education as we know and love it,
1/ Write to Elaine Haste of the Elective Home Education Department (DfES) at Elaine.HASTE@dfes.gsi.gov.uk or at info@dfes.gsi.gov.uk and ask to be included on a list of those who receive information about the consultation.
sample letter/email to DFES :
“I am a home educating parent. I understand that there is to be a DFES consultation about light touch changes to the “monitoring” of home educated children. Please keep me informed of any further developments with regard to this consultation.
Yours sincerely”
Elaine Haste
Elective Home Education
DfES
Mowden Hall,
Darlington
DL3 9BG.
( If you would rather remain more anonymous, I understand that you can create a hotmail account, or use a new e-mail address, but I do need to research this more, I’m afraid. )
NB: This does NOT mean that you have taken part in the consultation and the DfES cannot honestly claim that you have. The reason why this last point is important is that HEors who are experienced in the area of government consultations are rightfully cynical about the uses to which these exercises are put. On previous occasions, HEors have found that they may as well have been shouting at the moon, since their views were not adequately or fairly represented in any conclusions or practice, though the DfES nonetheless was able to band it about that they had consulted us.
So why bother signing up now if we don’t plan to actually take part in the consultation? Signing up is important because the DfES needs to know just how many of us they are going to have to deal with. They need to realise just how many of us will resist changes in a serious way. If the ptb think that they currently have significant problems with the dealing with HEors under the present legislation, they need to realise just how many more problems they are going to have should they change the situation in the way they appear to intend. This will only happen if the numbers of us who look as if we are going to be resistant to change really stack up.
If thousands of us dig in our heals, refuse automatic monitoring, refuse to use their curricula, and make it quite clear how much trouble we are going to give them, I think they will think twice about going down the route of increased monitoring and interference. The law may be awkward to enforce now, (and so it should be, imo, for otherwise we would live in a police state) but it will be a damn sight more difficult for them to enforce if they try to change it, for not only will they find themselves issuing bundles of expensive SAOs, but they will also find out that many of our children have unusual educational needs for which they will rightfully have to cater.
2/ Spread awareness. Send this post (or improved version) anywhere you think helpful. Tell at least 4 other HEors what is going on and get them to sign up, as above. Get them to tell at least 4 others. Put this on Local HE Lists everywhere. Blog the story if you have an HE or any other kind of blog. Use this explanation there if you don’t have the time to re-write it fully.
3/ Spread the positive word about home education (personalised learning, healthy happy children etc ) possibly using the recent media stuff about “toxic childhood”. This would be the “battle of hearts n minds” stuff.
4/Sign the petition at: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/HErights/
5/ If you are a member of Education Otherwise you might want to communicate your feelings to the EO Government Policy Group about what you would ideally like EO to be doing about all this. You could also speak to your Local Contact. If you are a member of any other home education support organisation (or you know anyone who is) please pass on general information about the forthcoming DFES consultation.
6/ If you have any energy left, I would also write to your MP, whose seat will doubtless be a much more marginal than it has been for years. Tell her/him , for example, that you don’t want your private family life invaded, that should the situation change and HEors be told what to do, you believe that changes will lead to a challenge in the law that holds that parents should be responsible for the education of their children and that you will encourage parents everywhere whose children are failed by the state system to sue the state for it’s woeful failure….see this by way of an example.
HEors managed to resist similar state encroachment in the US. They jammed the switchboards, looked as if they could be an expensive problem, and frightened candidates by threatening to use their vote in this consideration alone. We can do it here too.
Do copy anywhere if useful.
The Daily Mail had this article yesterday. A snippet:
The report showed that the proportion of both primary and secondary schools deemed inadequate virtually doubled to seven per cent and 13 per cent respectively over the last year.
So essentially, what Ofsted are saying is that the Government is crap at ensuring that schools provide children with a good education and that the situation is in fact getting worse! And the Government think that they are qualified to interfere in home education???? If they can’t even ensure a good education in schools, how can they possibly think they’re going to be able to ensure that HE’d children will get a good education?
…perfectly illustrated by Allie. I’ve talked on and off about this subject throughout my blogging time, but to read an adult’s account of what they genuinely felt as a child trying to live up to expectations is so powerful - much more so than speculation about what our children feel when we praise them or label them.
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
Flopsy would be starting school next September (2007). I’ve just been looking at an online parenting forum and someone had posted about how she’s really daunted by having to have her school application forms in by mid-November. It’s made me realise how ignorant I’ve made myself of the shcool system - I mean I know what happens in school because I’ve been there. I know about the National Curriculum because it was introduced while I was at school and it was what my mum had to learn about when she trained as a primary school teacher. I know what good teachers do and what bad teachers do. But I don’t know about all the official-ness - what I’m meant to do if Flopsy goes to school; when I’m meant to do it; how I should prepare her etc. I’ve not actively ignored any talk about school, but most of our friends now either have babies way too young for school, or children who’ve been in school a while, or are home educating. And I don’t see a Health Visitor and the girls don’t have jabs, so there’s no way the system gets a chance to butt their noses in and tell me what to do. It’s also a bit scary because…well…this is the time we really do have to make a decision. Do we start researching schools so we’ve got options open to us should our circumstances suddenly change? Or do we continue as we have done just ambling along ‘playing it by ear’ intending to home educate Flopsy? What have others done who’ve made the decision to HE before their children were school age?
