Busy

We are still here but too busy to blog! We have been doing various things re. the Badman Review. We had a fairly encouraging visit to our MP. I hope that something will come of that. Dani has put in work on postcards for supportive family and friends to send. Those are all genuine home ed kids having a good time in the park :-)I swing between feeling hopeful that we can resist at least the worst excesses of all the nonsense and despondent that all is lost. We shall see.

Saturday was our local community festival and we did a stall selling some of the kids’ old toys. We all got a bit sunburned as we failed to appreciate the fact that our shady stall would become sunny as the day wore on. P and her cousin S were photographed for the local paper. They had both put in lots of work as part of the organising group for the day. I have been so impressed with their efforts – selling plants, stamping the ‘passports’ for the day and putting flyers on parked cars. They also sat in a fair few meetings. Pearlie seems to enjoy that. Can’t imagine where she gets that from... ;-)

This week is frantic. We are doing our best to get ready for HESFES but we seem to have lots of other stuff happening. Last night was the Little Green Pig Open Mic. L took part in a couple of collaborative pieces and also read a story of his own. He does write a mean story and he did very well at the reading – standing close to the microphone, doing an intro and using gesture. He had practised alone in his room so we had no idea how prepared he was. Home edders were well represented – as usual. I really like it that LGP includes both school children and home edders.
I have to keep rushing back to town to get things we’ve suddenly realised are vital for HESFES. No doubt there will come a moment when we just have to stop doing that! Do other people do this?

“Melamine cups... That’s what we need...Wellies.... A bigger sun suit... Shorts... Matches... Washing-up liquid! Painkillers... Burn plasters... More string! The railcard has run out! Panic!”

As we have a normal week in terms of home ed groups, work for me and Dani - and P eager to keep up with maths books - it is all a bit tight. Will be blogging again after HESFES...

“Where’s your plan?”says Mr Badman...

It is difficult to know where to start when it comes to the Badman report. Why don’t we want to be registered? Why don’t we want to open our homes to local authority officials or allow them to interview our children alone? Many people will, I know, be blogging their opinions on these – as we probably will. But this blog post is going to be about this recommendation:

“At the time of registration parents/carers/guardians must provide a clear statement of their educational approach, intent and desired/planned outcomes for the child over the following twelve months.”

I can give you a statement of our family’s educational approach, if you want. We’ve done this for our local authority back in 2004 when we started home educating. It was an explanation of the philosophy on which we base our children’s education. At its heart were two terms – child-led and autonomous.

I don’t believe that Graham Badman has never heard these two terms. So I can only assume that he wants to outlaw an educational approach based on them. How so? Well, the crucial point is that we don’t have “planned outcomes for the child.”

Perhaps this is a surprise to some people. Our son was four when we started home educating. Surely we decided on an approach to literacy, and set about teaching him to read? Well, no, actually, we didn’t. So, can he read? Erm, yes... How did that happen? Well, that would be another blog post in itself, but let’s just say that it was an unplanned, efficient, empowering voyage of discovery.

Now I know that teachers in schools are compelled to do a huge amount of planning. I work in a university and see the kind of detailed plans that education students on placement must produce for a literacy hour with a class of four/five year olds. OK. If that’s the system that the govt decrees and the teachers, parents and children comply with – then that’s up to them.

The state education system is a top down model. The govt decides the curriculum, the teachers design the lessons and the students consume them. In such a model you’ll find planning – and lots of it! But our whole approach to education is based on our children’s intrinsic desire to learn. They are in the driving seat. If they want to make plans (which they often do, actually, being the children of parents who love a plan!) then they do. They are not answerable to us should the plan not come off, or should they choose to change the plan. Indeed, we believe that practising these planning skills is a wonderful learning opportunity in itself.

More than anything, I want our children to remain free to discover. I believe that their enthusiasm for learning is precious. I will not see them robbed of it by an official who wants to hold us to some list of ‘outcomes’. I will not have their education (which I believe to be their right and their property) reduced to a list of tick boxes on a sheet. I won’t have that sheet held over us all. We don’t all share your obsession with measuring...

Graham Badman would have the govt believe that people who educate as we do are carrying out some kind of ‘unproven’ experiment on our children. "Where are the studies that show it works?" Well, to that I can only, politely, ask him to look at state schooling. Does that work? Really? For all the children? In every way? We are not cranks attempting to keep our children in ignorance. There is still some John Holt on the reading lists for trainee teachers, isn’t there? Look him up, Mr Badman. Look him up, Mr Balls.

Mr Badman and Mr Balls. You couldn’t make it up, could you?! They are surely some characters from a lesser known Roald Dahl book?

BTW, while I have been typing this my children’s unplanned activities (i.e. I had no idea they would happen last year!) have been:

Walking over to Dani’s workplace to photocopy a hand-made zine. P has been making this for the last week or so. It’s a zine of lists. She has been inspired by some sessions on zine making that we allowed her to take in the company of a self-confessed Anarchist, no less... Oh dear, is this helping our case?

L has been making short films of action figures with the video camera. Some of these are shop bought figures and some home-made aliens made out of Fimo.

Discovering a “way cool” caterpillar in the garden. This was L again. He took the camera out to record the event.

Scooting off to a local community association meeting to do some work for our approaching community festival day. We had no idea our twelve year old would decide to attend planning meetings for this year’s event. She’s done lots of work – delivering things, selling plants to fundraise, etc.

Reading me some snippets from First News. This was L again. He thought I should know something important about the mother of the person who won last year’s “Britain’s Got Talent”. Now I do.

Varnishing a stone from the garden that looks like an alien egg. Yes, this was Leo too.

Writing some X-Files case notes with a dipping pen and ink. Leo likes to use many different things to write.

Outcomes? Hold on, I’ll just pull their heads open and have a look...

Call to action

Imagine a world where...

• All vegetarians* are required to register with their local authorities, and inform the authorities whenever they move house.
  
• Vegetarians must be visited annually by an inspector (usually a former employee of the meat industry), who will assess their dietary plans for the coming year against government standards.
  
• Inspectors have the right to interview children in vegetarian families, without their parents present, in order to find out whether the children are safe and well, and ask them if they are happy to be living on a vegetarian diet.

No need to use your imagination - this is reality.

These are measures actually being proposed by the British government, not for vegetarians but for people in England who make the lawful choice to educate their children outside the school system.

The proposed heavy-handed system of registration, monitoring and inspection will cost millions of pounds to implement. Money which will be diverted from providing services for families who actually need and want help. If you are looking for a needle in a haystack, don't make the haystack bigger!

If home educators can be treated this way, who will be next?

Would you be happy for your child to be questioned alone by a government official they do not know, when there is no reason to suppose any crime has been committed?

Do you trust the government to keep safe the personal data of thousands of families?

To bring in this system, the government is proposing to change the law. We have a short time in which to raise our voices and object.

What you can do:

• Respond to the DCSF consultation at http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/consultations/index.cfm?action=consultationDetails&consultationId=1643&external=no
  
• Write to your MP
  
• Write to local and national newspapers
  
• Tell your friends - pass this message on by email, blog it, photocopy it
  

*or people who don't drive/people who use homeopathy/smokers/people who don't have a television/any other group of people exercising their lawful right to make a minority choice

Today

I am appalled that the BNP has two MEPs heading for Europe. It is shocking to me that this party of fascist thuggery is able to attract the votes of nearly one million voters in this country. It makes my blood run cold.

On a happier note, I am glad of this - from the Green Party website.

"Party leader Caroline Lucas was re-elected comfortably, with the South East Green Party vote up by half, from 8% to 12%, finishing ahead of Labour. Dr Lucas's bid for election to the Westminster Parliament received a huge boost from a vote of 33.7% in Brighton and Hove. The Greens came first in Brighton and Hove, almost 6,000 votes ahead of the Conservatives, and with more than double Labour's vote across three parliamentary constituencies. Caroline Lucas will be contesting the Brighton Pavilion seat in the general election."

I think it could really happen next time. A Green MP for me, I hope.

Autonomy as they get older

As our children get older, I’m very happy with the way our family’s autonomous approach to home ed continues to work for us. I think that there are probably plenty of people who can quite easily understand a happy five year old doing finger-painting and playing with Lego, but who doubt that older children (like ours) can go on learning through their own choice of activities. Well, for our family, so far, this is working really well.

In some ways, nothing has really changed in the way we home ed now and how we did things five years ago. We haven’t felt the need to introduce any compulsion into the children’s activities and we still have a pretty busy lifestyle of groups and so on. In other ways, things have changed a lot as the children get older. There’s more independent activities for both of them – P in particular. The children’s social lives change as they get older. People need different kinds of support - financial is pretty important!

Some things are constant – conversation, books, outings. Some things change – interests (of course), and resources needed and used. Probably the greatest joy for me is the sense of freedom that endures. I love it that my twelve year old can get up at ten and read the paper while chatting with me, before pottering off to a day of things she has chosen and often organised for herself. That does seem rather wonderful when I compare it to the option of getting on the bus to senior school at 8am every morning. Equally wonderful is the freedom for someone to pursue something with a passion. L went to a story writing workshop on spooky stories this week and got up the following morning to finish his story. That took a couple of hours (off and on) and he was able to do it in his pjs.

Of course, every day is not a joyful journey of educational discovery because life has bumps. We get tired. Dani and I have to juggle work, home ed, looking after the house and pursuing our own interests. That doesn’t always happen well and we muck up from time to time. But I’d far rather be juggling like this than packing the kids off each morning and working 9-5. I love the little moments that we snatch when I can just hear everyone thinking happily away to themselves. I love coming home from work to be greeted by excited people telling me all about their varied days.

I have no idea if we will still be doing this, in this way, in another five years. I imagine that things will change as the children hit their mid-teens – in many ways. But, as long as we’re all happy and making choices that suit us, then I’ll be chuffed. If the govt. wants to propose anything that will curtail our choices then they can’t expect us to roll over. This is too precious.

A mish mash

Here’s a few things that have been going on in the Greenhouse (and out of it) lately.

L has been writing lots of stuff - on blog, typed and printed and by hand. He’s also been drawing. He doesn’t want me to give you details but you can read his blogs if you want.

We’ve all been finding out something each week about a particular country. My ignorance astounds me.

People are always asking questions in this house. Recent examples - why does the earth spin? How does fermentation work?

I had a tiring weekend going to work while fighting with a migraine. It hit me on Sunday night, in the end, and I fell asleep on the sofa while D was making the dinner.

P is currently out buying foodstuffs for a picnic. This is the second picnic she and friends have organised for themselves. They are doing the whole thing – picking a theme and a location, buying and making the food, researching transport and so on. I hope they get good weather for this one.

D and I spent a long afternoon tidying and putting stuff in our new loft space. It is a brilliant space but I think we’ll have no problem filling it... One of our aims was to make L’s bedroom much less cluttered so it will be easier to decorate. We’re hoping to get that done over the next month or two. L is desperate for a proper desk.

I have been going to my creative writing course, which is quite intensive. We get very prescriptive homework each week, which is quite unlike any other creative writing course I’ve done. It is good because it makes me tackle weak points in my writing but I do find it hard to give it time when I have so little time for the story I’m currently working on. We shall see.

P has been making pretty bunting to decorate her room. She’s also been taking photos and getting some beautiful prints done. She has a plan for an exhibition but I’d better not say too much about that.

We have the tvs working again, although the dish is currently sitting on some scaffolding rather than the chimney stack. I’m really hoping that everything will get properly finished this week and then the scaffolding can come down and the dish be properly attached to the chimney stack. I must say that having tv back again has made me realise how much rubbish there is on tv. We rather enjoyed a period of cherry picking our programmes.

While we were without tv, we borrowed dvds of Black Books from the library. The kids really enjoyed it. It is a bit ruder than I remembered but never mind!

I am helping P cover all the MEP year seven maths books. She is aiming at completing them all by mid-July – her target, of course, not ours. She did a mock foundation level GCSE maths paper on the BBC website a few weeks ago and managed to get 80% which would be enough for a c at GCSE, I think.

I showed L how to add up in columns the other day and he was pleased with the fact that this meant he could now add up huge numbers. The workbook we were looking at only had three digit numbers, which I thought was odd. I mean, how many nine year olds can resist adding up millions? Once you ‘get it’ it really doesn’t make any difference how large the numbers are, does it?

We went to see No Fit State Circus on Friday. This was rather spectacular but poor old L was struck down with a migraine and had to go outside and miss the second half. Dani walked around outside with him and he managed not to throw up. They waited on the windy seafront for me and P to emerge. I’d certainly recommend the show but probably not if you have really little ones. Being on your feet the whole time and being shunted about by stewards is rather taxing for small people.

L went to a book signing, which you can read about on his blog - linked earlier.

Dani is knitting a lot. She has a little notebook full of strange markings, which she keeps at her elbow... All very mysterious to a non-knitter.

I’m sure there’s been loads more happening but I can’t be bothered to tell you more now. Time to make lunch, I think.

Hello

We are still here but circumstances have made blogging rather tricky recently. We have been without a tv for a couple of weeks – as the builders have been re-building the chimney stack on which the sky dish sits. This means that the computer has been being a tv fairly often. When it isn’t being a tv then it is in great demand as a computer. I tend to get two minutes here and there.

Things were also further complicated by a trojan that got on the pc and caused some chaos before we dealt with it. A local computer guy came to work on it for us as D had exhausted her abilities. My abilities with such things go about as far as running a scan and then making panic noises... All is well now, though we are using Vista which is taking a little bit of getting used to.

The building work should be over in a couple of days (probably by Wednesday night) and we are full of plans for moving some stuff to the loft and then re-decorating Leo’s bedroom. The garden is also in urgent need of some attention. We need the scaffolding to go before we can really do that.

May is Brighton Festival month and we went to a free event last night at a park nearby. It was good but pretty packed. The kids did a good job of slithering through the crowds so they could see but I spent rather a lot of time looking at the backs of tall people. We’re planning a trip to the circus later in the week and I’m hoping that the fact that it is not a seated event doesn’t mean I have same experience.

P had her birthday last week (12!!) and we are having a little family picnic tomorrow. She got a camera as her main present and has been enjoying exploring the features.

I have been watching a lot of X-Files with L. I have been rather enjoying it. It isn’t something I chose to watch when it was made (sci-fi and conspiracy not really being my sort of thing) but my horizons have been widened by having someone in the family who is drawn to such stuff. I was counting my blessings this week that this period without tv has occurred when there is online tv and also when the kids are older and we don’t have to have endless repeats of The Fun Song Factory or Scooby Doo! Those things were great when they were little but it is nice being able to truly enjoy the same programmes.

I went to the first week of my new writing course. It’s hard to judge on one session but I hope it will be useful. I have homework! Whether or not I get it done is very much dependent on my getting a turn on the pc. Everyone here is just going out to a knitting/crochet event but I have to leave for work in half an hour so I can’t do it now... Ho hum.

D and the kids went to a St George’s day event recently and D brought me home a book and a rose. The stories are by some of my favourite authors but they are based on/influenced by operas and I know virtually nothing about opera. A learning opportunity – should I get time!

Kids are busy as ever. We still have a plastered grandmother. She is back at fracture clinic this week – so fingers crossed for that. Summer is galloping towards us and is full of all sorts of exciting events.

The home ed review team should be reporting in this month and everyone is rather on tenterhooks about that. I must confess that I’m trying not to get too drawn into the internal home ed politics of it. There’ll be decisions to be made when we see what they propose. Until then I’m trying to keep focussed on doing what it is we really want to do with our lives. Things in my life (most unbloggable) are dealing me a hefty reminder that we should live each day as fully as we can.

What about love?

I have been spending quite a lot of time with my mum recently. She has broken her ankle. It has got us talking about what happens when people get older and how we would like to be cared for. My mum is (when she’s not falling in holes at allotments!) a fit and active 73 year old. She is not in need of twenty four hour personal or medical care but, if she were, I like to think that we, as a family, would be able to provide it. We might need some support to do that but we certainly wouldn’t need the kind of services offered to the Figg family of Coventry.

What kind of ‘care’ is it to come and snatch a woman of 86 from her family home (with police and battering ram at the ready) and take her back to an institution in which her daughter says she is unhappy? What kind of brutal, self-righteous ‘care’ is that? So, apparently, ‘experts’ deem that this woman needs the kind of specialist attention that can only be provided in an institution. A spokesperson for the local authority is quoted as saying,

“Social services decided she needed to be in a specialist home because they were concerned that the high level of care she required might not be met by her daughter and her partner.
He said: "If someone needs caring for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we have to look at what additional support is there and whether one person can realistically offer that level of care.
"There is a lot of personal care management as well as the dispensation of often complex medication.”

What strikes me is that an institution might well be very competent at dispensing complex medication but people there won’t be dispensing love.

We, as a society, have fallen into the trap of thinking that care is some kind of product – a package or a programme. To care is a verb – caring is about doing. For me, that doing is often motivated by loving. Love is almost entirely absent from official discussion about how people are best cared for. I was thinking this a few weeks ago when there was a report on some study or other that claimed that children in nurseries had better ‘skills’ than those cared for by their grandparents. I couldn’t help wondering how one would quantify the benefits of being cared for (in your very early years) by people who love you. I suspect it can’t be done. But I'm still sure that those extra hugs and kisses in toddlerhood are of huge significance to the long-term health and happiness of those people lucky enough to get them.

The thing is that we are people, not plants. We do best when we are recognised as the unique individuals we are. This is best done by people who know us very well. When people know us for who we really are, and love us for that, we are really home. In my later years I don’t want to come to in a moment of lucidity to find myself dressed in a peach frock, parked in front of some daytime soap. I want to be with people who know *me* not how to care for an ‘old person’.

I’m not saying that no-one should use residential care services. People have to make the decisions that work for them. But if people want to live together with their elderly relatives, rather than see them placed in an institution, then I’d rather my taxes were funding services to help them do that than paying the wages of people to come and abduct them back into four walls ‘for their own good’.

The failure to recognise the huge significance of love is probably no surprise when you look at how governments behave. But what has happened in our world that the word of an ‘expert’ has come to trump our love for each other? What dark times are these that we are being sold the idea that institutional settings are in our best interest, from the cradle to the grave?

Hello

I managed to get a touch of sunburn on my face yesterday. It was a beautiful day and we took bikes across town to the best cycling park. Sunday I spent with the injured grandmother and Dani took the kids on a country walk. Friday and Saturday were lazy days at home (it was drizzly), watching videos, pottering around and so on. The injured grandmother came round to use our ground floor shower. I introduced the kids to “A murder is announced” – BBC 1980s version with Joan Hickson.

I have a bit of spare time with week because I’ve taken some leave from work. I’m determined to make some space for writing and haircuts for me and the boy. He’s hasn’t wanted a haircut recently but it was annoying him yesterday while he was bike riding.

Builders are back on the roof this morning and kids have Squeezebox, so it feels like a pretty normal Tuesday. But we’ll soon notice that it’s school holidays if we go to the park later...

I have been mulling a post about how home ed/life changes as people grow up. But I need a proper stretch of time on the computer and now we are four heavy computer users that’s not easy!

Oh, yeah, and we did Easter as much as we ever do - buns and chocolate. Dani made excellent hot cross buns. I had some sort of Christian knock the door last week to ask me if I was interested in celebrating the death of Jesus! I'm no expert but I thought it was the resurrection that was the cause for celebration.

Structural engineer, chimney stack, life and all that

I must not (bangs head on wall – gently!) ever say that things are all going well with the building work. We have had a visit from a structural engineer and we need more scaffolding for the removal and re-building of the chimney stack up on the roof. “Can of worms!” – as the builder keeps saying to me. The mysterious missing chimney breast in the basement was not, it turns out, supported by anything. So it looks like we’ll be getting some steels inserted under that at some point soon too.

Life goes on around all this. Both P and L would like people to visit their blogs. We have been playing Boggle with the injured grandmother and admiring her wonderful purple plaster. School holidays have meant some more time with local cousins. P and L are really on fire with motivation at the moment and it’s great to be summoned for help with craft knives or maths questions, but I’m flagging a bit because of the house stuff. This is a small house and the work being done feels rather like major surgery on its aged body. I’m not sleeping well. D and I are both busy at work. Easter vacation isn’t much of a vacation at my work as lots of students are working on dissertations and so on.

I am looking forward to the weekend and some rest. In the meantime I’m off to find out a fact about Yemen. P has decided that each week we should pick a country off the map and each find out a fact about it... A home educator’s work is never done. Wouldn’t have it any other way, of course. And, by the way, we spent time today considering at what ages different family members would be (or were) half the age of others. It’s fun. It was interesting to see that L is now three quarters of P’s age when six years ago he was only half her age. P only has to wait until she’s 26 and she’ll be half of my 52... I wonder if the house will still be standing then???