Reflections in the Greenhouse

Not on the bus

2011-04-29T21:08:00.003+01:00

Now I know why my mum suggested a day trip to France in the summer of 1981! It was (in those days at least) a remarkably successful way of avoiding a royal wedding. The parallels with 1981 are hard to miss - here we are in the depths of a grim economic time with cuts aplenty and anger on the streets. So up they pop, "Look at the pretty dress! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain/ bunch of old-school Eton bastards doing over the poorest and most vulnerable again..."

But leaving aside the anger at the ridiculous pomp and forelock tugging, yesterday I found myself pondering the royal life as I sat on the bus to work. I was content, a bit melancholy for one reason and another, but basically content on the bus. Outside there were some late teens/early twenties larking about on the play equipment in the park - at ease with each other. Students on the bus were listening to music and reading their notes. A couple were discussing some complicated arrangement of bank accounts and overdrafts that might see them through to the end of the year. An old woman was pushing a trolley along the pavement with cat food poking out the top. No one wanted me for anything. I was in my home town feeling safe, feeling I belonged, feeling free. And I wondered then if any person born into the royal family can ever have that feeling? I tried to imagine a life where you have never known what it is to be just another person - to never have that invisibility. I wondered how it would be to never get on the bus, pay your fair, sit there and watch the world go by.

I know there are a lot of other things that being royal takes away - like worrying how you might pay the gas bill or wondering if the landlord might decide to sell your flat. No material suffering in such a life. But emotionally? What does it do to a child to be born into such a bizarre life? It's a curse, I reckon. The life of a caged animal. The life of a symbol, a stuffed suit or a face under a hat. No choice and no voice. No opportunity to be a part of society beyond the tiny elite. No chance to get on the bus.

The perils of advice

2011-03-08T16:29:00.002Z

One of the most exciting things about home education is the feeling of liberation from a dictated path. You really can make your own choices about, not just how your family approaches learning, but how you approach day to day life. I think that can feel quite intoxicating, especially if you are withdrawing your child from school. From observation of others, I think that feeling can be amplified still further if you are withdrawing your child after a long, miserable and frustrating time trying to get the system to meet his/her needs. But what is exciting can also be daunting and doubts and fears are also the lot of the new home educator. That’s when it can be invaluable to have others around with whom to talk. But these interactions can have pitfalls that I’ve come to recognise over the years we’ve been home educating.

If you decide to home educate, you are taking a step down a path - walking away from a whole raft of people who will tell you (and your child) what to do and how to do it. You won’t have a book sent home in a book bag and your child will no longer be part of a class or a year group working to a plan. That is swept away at a stroke. The decisions are yours – the mistakes are yours. The happy days are yours and the miserable days are yours. So it’s not surprising that most of us crave interaction with others in the same boat. We want to know what others do. But what I have come to realise is that no amount of talking to others can (or should) replace considered decisions about what is right for us – for our own children. Other people’s enthusiasm, be it for an expensive curriculum or a child-led lifestyle, is not a sales pitch unless we choose to respond to it in that way. If we do, and we don’t like what we buy, then we have only ourselves to blame. That sounds harsh. But I’ve seen people burn their fingers here and there in home education (had a minor singe or two myself!) and it’s often because they clutched up (too readily) what others were saying and doing and assumed that it would surely work for them too. If home education has one huge advantage over mass schooling it’s that it enables us to help our children find paths that are right for them as individuals. Yes we can exchange valuable information and experiences but we need to always have our own children’s needs at the heart of what we do.

‘Doing nothing’ Autonomous home education and what it isn’t

2011-03-04T16:57:00.001Z

Blowing off the dust I wander blearily back into this blog... It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged and I had started to think that I wouldn’t feel the urge to blog again, but here I am. Life is pretty different to how it was seven years ago when we first started home ed – but also very much the same in some respects.

Recently I have felt a little despairing about autonomous home education – not for us as a family, for us it continues to be what suits. We continue to take a ‘child-led’ approach, though one child is now a teen. We value autonomy and space and living to our own schedule. What has been making me a bit peeved of late is the sense that what we do is so often misunderstood and misrepresented – even within the world of home ed. I don’t want to go into details about our lives because I think that’s an invasion of other family members’ privacy these days. But I do feel the need to share some of what I’ve worked out over the years we’ve been home educating.

I have often heard, in home ed circles, autonomous education characterised as ‘doing nothing.’ Sometimes this is by those who are critical of the concept or those who don’t understand it and don’t want to. At other times I have heard people despairing about engaging with their older children or teens who have been advised by others to ‘say they’re doing autonomous education’. And it’s about then I want to wallop my head on a brick wall.

Autonomous education is not ‘doing nothing’. It doesn’t mean that we (the parents) couldn’t care less if our children grow up literate or numerate or able to function in wider society. It isn’t that we want to give our children a childhood devoid of challenge or progress or goals and ourselves an ‘easy’ life. Equally, it isn’t something to grab as a label if you are trying but failing to do parent-led education or school. It is not a waste or a doss or an excuse. For us, for my family, autonomous home education is engaged, active and busy and all about learning in its widest sense.

So I’m not at all sure if I want any label that relates to how we home educate. Because it makes no sense to claim an identity that’s so poorly understood and so often misapplied. And who’s to say I get the power to define? Perhaps it’s better to just get on with it and not worry about the labels?

So, here’s the core of the whole thing, for me. People are individuals. People love to learn. People crave self-determination. People have a right to support when young to help them access knowledge and to make sure they have the basic tools needed to function in society and respect others’ freedoms. People should be as happy as they can be because we only get one life. That’s it. That’s the ethos behind why I home ed. Call me what you like (within reason!)

Edinburgh trip

2010-04-01T19:12:00.002+01:00

We just spent a few days in Edinburgh. We stayed at a Travelodge for £26 a night and got advance train tickets, so the trip was rather a bargain. Edinburgh is fantastic. We went three years ago and this time we did some of the same stuff - tour of the Vaults (this time with silly ghost hunting equipment!) and yummy vege burger dinners - and some new things - excellent guided tour of the Scottish Parliament building and eating in Edinburgh's oldest vege restaurant.

The breakfasts at the Travelodge don't really compare with the same deal at a Premier Travel Inn. We found that we were always in need of something - milk, bread, knives etc! But the room was really nice and we all enjoyed evenings in bed watching the big tv on the wall or reading our books.

The Scottish Parliament was probably the highlight of the trip for me. The building is really beautiful and we got a free tour from a very sweet, enthusiastic young man. The cafeteria was great and we all sat around eating baked potatoes and avoiding the hideous rain. It rained pretty much non-stop for the whole trip and it was *cold*! When it wasn't raining it was snowing.

We all got lost (in various combinations!) in Jenners department store. I spent an enjoyable ten minutes browsing round the bathroom department imaging what towels I'd buy if I had an unlimited budget!

People bought books and yarn and other stuff. I read a Patrick Gale book I'd borrowed from my mum. I am always completely absorbed and full of admiration when reading one of his books. This one was excellent. I like the way he sometimes writes himself a lovely man into the work - a farmer this time!

We returned to a museum we'd liked before and which featured in a book we've read since our last trip there. There was an exhibition that was very much to my taste - Treasured. It had various beautiful objects, from insects in amber to exquisite glass models of undersea creatures.

The journey home was rather loopy. We weren't due to leave until 1pm but we decided to go to the station early as heavy snow had fallen across Scotland. Most of it had melted in Edinburgh but we rightly surmised that the trains would be affected. At first we thought we were looking at a bus to Newcastle! Eeek! But then we were advised to get a train heading for Birmingham using the west coast line. We changed trains at Carlisle and got a fast train to London. The whole business probably only added a couple of hours to our journey time but was a bit worrying. We were never entirely sure our tickets would continue to be accepted as we headed further south by a strange route. But it was fine. We didn't have reserved seats (of course) so we were sometimes a bit squashed up - but I've had far worse journeys!

I really love to get away. We live a rather relentless schedule as a family and getting away just changes the pace entirely.

Leo is ten!

2010-03-19T23:53:00.013Z

Nearly three years ago we did a blog post on our old blog in honour of P's tenth birthday. It's hard to believe that it's time to do the same for L. But it is!

Here he is aged nine months. A lovely, happy chap!

By his second birthday he was well into two of his first passions - frogs and The Singing Kettle. That birthday he got frogs from nearly everyone and he was thrilled. He also had a selection of little kettles.

Here he is aged three. The bits of paper were claws and scales. We spent a lot of our time helping with costume.

Eating his fourth birthday cake. He was dressed as Batman and we all sang the Batman theme instead of the traditional song.

On the beach in the Isles of Scilly - aged five.

Here he is is at six - reading an Edge Chronicles book.

Seven years old and being The Doctor.

Drawing and writing and always creating. Here he is doing it age eight.

Nine.

Ten years old with birthday bag and leather notebook bound for him by P.

Happy Birthday to our lovely boy!

Last ditch letter to MP

2010-02-13T19:49:00.002Z

We sent this to our MP today. There's still time to write to MPs before the Third Reading of the CSF Bill on 23rd Feb. Hope someone might find this useful/inspiring when composing their own letter - sorry it's so long!

Dear David,

Thank you for sending the DCSF response to the Parliamentary Petition you presented on behalf of your constituents in December, and for your letter dated 9th February.

Unfortunately, you are mistaken about the process of the Bill; there have been no successful amendments to Schedule 1 or to any other parts of the Bill which affect home educators. The effect on our lives would still be just as we described in our previous correspondence.

For the DCSF simply to repeat their assertion that the proposed monitoring would be "light touch" and that guidance would provide for it to be "proportionate and focused on support and encouragement for home educating families" does not alter the wording of the Bill, which contains no such guarantees.

It is very poor legislative practice for laws to be passed which rely so heavily on guidance for their implementation. Once the law is passed, there is no need for the guidance to be subject to Parliamentary scrutiny. There is nothing in the proposed Bill that protects home educating families from local authorities or future national governments who may choose to implement the provisions in a much more draconian and intrusive way than the DCSF's pronouncements would suggest.

It was pointed out to the Public Bill Committee in a submission from Canadian home educator Kelly Green, that Graham Badman's review of the legal position in other countries was highly selective. There is evidence from North America that the degree of regulation of home education in different jurisdictions makes no difference to the outcomes for home educated children. Ms Green's short submission can be seen at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmpublic/childsch/memo/ucm2602.htm

The DCSF response to the Parliamentary Petition is simply the latest in a series of misleading statments made by DCSF representatives over the last year. We attach a short document outlining some of the others we have identified, and would be grateful if you would take a few minutes to read it.

You will be asked to vote again on the Children, Schools and Families Bill at its Third Reading on February 23rd. Following a truncated Committee stage, the Bill is almost unchanged. The Committee did make time to discuss a large number of amendments to Schedule 1 and other amendments regarding home education at its final session on February 4th. Although the session ran out of time before most of the amendments could be voted on, the debate was very interesting, and we would urge you to read the transcript. You can find it at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmpublic/childsch/100204/pm/100204s05.htm

In particular, the contribution of Caroline Flint MP (beginning at Col. 493 in the Hansard record) was thoughtful and striking.

Ms Flint described the Government's proposals as "bureaucratic and overburdening to families and local authorities".

Having listened to her constituents and other home educating families who made submissions to the Public Bill Committee, she expressed her concern that the information required of parents would be excessive; that the provisions of the Bill would be applied inconsistently across the country; and that the Bill, as currently worded, could leave the government open to legal challenge.

She concluded by calling on the Government to step back from the proposals in the Bill:

"There must be a way forward that can bring the relevant communities together, whether they are parents, local government or the Department. I hope that we can find a way forward, because I am concerned that we will otherwise end up with something that cannot be delivered on the ground and that will create division when people
should be coming together, and I am sure that that is not what this Committee or the House want to achieve"

During the whole debate, no MP other than Diana Johnson made a substantive speech in support of the provisions outlined in Schedule 1.

There is one last opportunity for the House of Commons to remove these ill-considered proposals from the Bill. Amendments 63, 64 and 66 would remove Clauses 26 and 27, and Schedule 1, giving everyone an opportunity to step back and consider the best way forward. As Caroline Flint said, "for a number of different reasons, there has been a breakdown in confidence and trust on the issue." The first step in rebuilding trust with the home educating community would be for these amendments to be carried at the Third Reading.

We believe there is widespread agreement, even among Labour MPs, that Schedule 1 is now an obstacle to the Government's stated objective of working in cooperation with home educating parents, in the best interests of children.

We urge you to represent our views on this once again to ministers, in the hope that they will agree to accept the amendments. If the government refuses to be swayed, even by the arguments of its own loyal backbenchers, we would urge you to vote for the amendments when they come before the House.

Consent and the Ticky Boxy World

2010-01-12T00:51:00.001Z

It’s been a long time since we posted anything on this blog and, I suspect, that will be the case from here on in. Having older children, who spend a fair amount of their time online, makes it just too weird to be blogging our day to day lives. But, with today’s second reading of the bill in parliament, I had a vague spark of the anger that has got me blogging before.

The truth is that I’m worn out with the whole business of the government’s intention to start licensing our lives. Most of the time I just heave a sigh and shrug. They can’t bear to have us all out here just living our lives. Not with *children* who we (without any proper qualifications to do so, you understand) claim to be *educating*. What if we aren’t doing it properly? Surely we must be counted and checked and monitored – on and on and on and on, I suspect. Because that way they can make sure we are doing it properly...

Well, we’re not, of course, doing it properly. I know about properly. Properly would involve us (the adults) making plans all about what they (the children) will learn and then teaching it to them and testing them to make sure they were listening. Any spare time not devoted to paragraphs or fractions should probably be spent telling them not to get pregnant/get anyone else pregnant, abuse substances, carry knives or run up debts on credit cards.( That people insist on doing these stupid and feckless things is obviously down to the fact that no-one ever gave them in a lesson about the consequences.) Of course, even if we did it all as properly as properly then it would still be a substandard education because the children aren’t properly socialised. No, they suffer from the lack of the normal social environment of an over-heated room packed with twenty nine other souls who were born in the same academic year. So we are, I think, doomed when it comes to a passable level on the Scale of Normality.

There’s no way the Ticky Boxy World will let any of us pass without something that needs to be addressed and improved upon. No doubt, we will all be encouraged to live every moment in a *reflective* way, questioning how we could do it all better next time. So that when the Ticky Boxy Lady comes round again we can move up a level on her Ticky Boxy Sheet and enjoy a sense of *achievement.* Or, alternatively, they might just decide that we’re all failing and need to be put in special measures, which will probably mean School Attendance Orders aplenty.

They will arrive in our lives, I suspect, from Ticky Boxy World, and gasp in horror at the chaos of it all. The child who has reams of writing scattered around the house, all illustrated with mythical creatures and not a sheet of it marked! And, where is the child? In the garden playing with fire... The other one is out at a fundraiser down at the local anarchist club – talking to adults we have not met, vetted or barred. And, no, you won’t be reading her essay because, actually, it’s not really very useful to her if you do...

You see, the thing is, that out there in Ticky Boxy World, the people never do like it, you know. The Ticky Boxy Ladies and Men that come and inspect, they’re never welcome. No-one quite knows what to do about it, of course. Everyone is very used to a structure where no-one is asked if they consent. Not the children sitting on the mat doing their Jolly Phonics, not the bored teenagers doing as little as possible, not the teachers sitting in long meetings about strategies and approaches, not the head teachers burning the midnight oil before the Ticky Boxy People arrive. Being asked if this is what you want, if this is useful for you, if you can even agree to this as part of a deal – that doesn’t really happen much out there. You are in the Ticky Boxy Structure and you do as you are told.

And yet we have pottered merrily on – picking and choosing and not worrying too much. That is what they don’t like. I’m pretty sure of it. However they dress it up with concerns over this or that. It doesn’t wash with me. The truth is that they can’t let us be. It just doesn’t fit. Having sold their souls to the Devil of Inspection they cannot let anyone escape. But I think they might find that people used to living by common consent will not be as easily awed by the Ticky Boxy Lady. I hope not.

Another letter to our MP

2009-11-25T23:13:00.001Z

Dear David,

As we are sure you are aware, the Children, Schools and Families Bill received its first reading in the Commons last week. The Bill contains several of the most disturbing elements of the Badman Review recommendations.

We were dismayed to find that even before the results of the recent public consultation have been published, the government proposes to implement a licensing system for home education. More than 5000 people responded to the consultation. Among them were many home educating families, concerned at this rush to legislation that redefines the legal position of something so central to their lives.

The Bill proposes that any home educated child who is not ‘registered’ with the local authority will be the subject of a School Attendance Order, should they be discovered. In such a situation, the Bill states that “an authority shall disregard any education being provided to the child as a home- educated child.”

Though the government has clearly decided to back away from the idea of creating a new criminal offence of failing to register, it is attempting to create a compulsory system by threatening to force home educated children into school if their parents do not comply.

Similarly, the Bill states that there will be no automatic right of entry to homes or to see children alone. However, the proposed new Section 19F(1)(e) would give local authorities the right to remove a child’s name from the home education register if it appears to them that:

“by reason of a failure to co-operate with the authority in arrangements made by them under section 19E, or an objection to a meeting as mentioned in section 19E(4), the authority have not had an adequate opportunity to ascertain the matters referred to in section 19E(1)”

Our interpretation of this is that the system of monitoring will be determined by the local authority, and any objections raised by a home educating family could easily lead to their child’s removal from the register and a consequent School Attendance Order.

These sections in particular, especially combined with the proposed new section 19C (which allows for the issuing of regulations on various key aspects of the registration system) would have the effect of locking home educating families into a monitoring system, which can be amended without Parliamentary scrutiny by any future government.

We feel that our family’s decision to follow an alternative educational path has been defined from the outset of this process as a problem for the government to solve. This was clear to us from the moment the Terms of Reference for Graham Badman’s Review were published in January this year.
In spite of thousands of critical responses from home educating families both to the initial Review and the public consultation, this premise does not appear to have changed.

To us, this premise is mystifying. Our children’s education has, so far, been made up of largely unplanned, self-directed learning. As parents, we have seen this working. The children are curious, enthusiastic, engaged learners. They are learning to plan for themselves and to set their own goals. They are learning about the world and their place in it. They are happy.

We cannot see any benefit to them in an ever-escalating process of government intervention in their lives. After witnessing what has happened in state schools over the last twenty years, we cannot help but feel that any system of monitoring imposed on home educating families, no matter how “light touch” the government may claim it to be, will follow this same path of ever more control.

Please do all you can to represent our concerns in Parliament, including by voting for any amendments to the Bill which seek to delete Clauses 26 and 27 and Schedule 1.

Yours sincerely,

Dani Ahrens and Allie Rogers

Dani's consultation response

2009-10-18T00:14:00.005+01:00

I answered Disagree to all the questions. These were my comments. My response identifier was 3200.

Deadline for responding to this consultation is 23.45 on Monday 19th October.

1. Do you agree that these proposals strike the right balance between the rights of parents to home educate and the rights of children to receive a suitable education?

The rights of children to receive a suitable education are not in contradiction to the "rights" of parents to home educate, so the two things cannot be balanced against each other.

Parents have a duty to educate their children, both morally and in law. Their only "right" is to determine the most appropriate way to carry out this duty, bearing in mind their intimate knowledge of the needs and preferences of their individual children.

This is at the heart of English education law. The duties of the parent are one of the four foundations referred to by Lord Bingham in the Ali case (Ali v Lord Grey School [2006] UKHL 14), who said:
“This fourfold foundation has endured over a long period because it has, I think, certain inherent strengths. First, it recognises that the party with the keenest personal interest in securing the best available education for a child ordinarily is, or ought to be, the parent of the child.”

If a parent should fail to carry out their duty to provide their child with an education suitable to the child's age, aptitude and ability, and any special educational needs the child may have, then the local authority has a duty to take action.

The balance between the rights of children to a suitable education and the right of families to privacy is already struck in the most appropriate place. The law recognises that there may sometimes be a need for local authorities to act, but that this will only happen when parents fail in their duty.

The proposals outlined in the consultation document would severely unbalance the "fourfold foundation". Lord Adonis was advised in 2006 that such disruption would not necessarily bolster children’s rights to education. He wrote:
“I am advised that this [the fourfold foundation] is more effective in securing the right than would be a free-standing right to education in English law. Not only is it flexible enough to allow for various different arrangements for education (for example, education provided by LEAs, by the independent sector, by Academies or at home), but it also places clear and positive duties on the various parties (parents, local education authorities, Secretary of State and governing bodies) which are much more easily enforceable.”

I have seen no evidence that the proposals would "improve the quality of education" received by my children. On the contrary, the imposition of a considerable amount of bureaucracy and interference, by people who do not know the children personally or understand the educational approach we have chosen as a family, is very likely to damage their education.

I am also opposed to the proposed additional review of the definition of ‘suitable education’. I do not think a further review would result in a better definition of a suitable education than the one contained in s7 of the Education Act 1996: “suitable to the age, aptitude and ability of the child, and any special educational needs he may have”.

This definition, and the additional interpretations provided by case law, have in common that they are centred on the needs of an individual child in the context of their whole life. They are tools that a reasonable person could use when making their personal or professional judgment in a particular case. They are not a list of tick boxes. This is a sensible and appropriate approach, when considering the learning needs of a large and diverse population of children.

As with the legal framework surrounding education as a whole, there is no problem with the definition of ‘suitable’, and no need to fix it.

2. Do you agree that a register should be kept?

I do not see why parents who make a minority choice about their children’s education should be obliged to register with the local authority.

I have made numerous choices about how I live my life, some of which put me in a minority in the UK. For example, I choose not to eat meat, and I choose not to own a car. Both of these choices have a direct impact on the daily lives of my children, just as the choice to educate them without using the school system does. But I am not obliged to put my name on a register of vegetarians or pedestrians – these things are accepted as valid, legal choices, and my freedom to make them is acknowledged, because they do not impinge on anyone else’s freedom to make their own dietary or transport choices.

As things stand, my valid, legal choice to educate my children outside the school system is treated similarly. I can see no evidence for the proposal to change this state of affairs.

3. Do you agree with the information to be provided for registration?

I do not agree with registration.

The consultation document does not clearly state what information would be required. It says that:
“Regulations will specify the information that parents must provide which is likely to be child's name, date of birth, address, the same information for adults with parental responsibility; a statement of approach to education, and the location where education is conducted if not the home”.

It is not clear whether “a statement of approach to education” is the same thing as “an initial statement of educational intent forming the basis for subsequent educational monitoring arrangements”, mentioned earlier in the document, nor whether both of these are the same as the “clear statement of their educational approach, intent and desired/planned outcomes for the child over the following twelve months” recommended by Graham Badman.

Because of the way we have chosen to approach education in our family, it is impossible for us to provide an annual statement of intended outcomes for each child. We cannot and do not want to predict what our children will choose to learn in the coming year. That is up to them. We will not interfere with their motivation to learn what they need to learn, in an attempt to force their learning to coincide with a pre-determined plan.

My children have the freedom to direct their own education. Any plans or intentions regarding their education belong to them, not to their parents, and certainly not to the local authority. As facilitators of their education, we are accountable to the children, not the local authority.

Annual monitoring against a meaningless statement would add nothing to our children’s rich and varied education.

The fact that the list of information likely to be required includes “the location where education is conducted if not the home” is a clear indication to me that the authors of the document have no knowledge about home education. My children learn wherever they are. The location of their education is in their own minds. I will not comply with a system designed by people who think education is so narrow that it can be conducted in just one place.

4. Do you agree that home educating parents should be required to keep the register up to date?

I do not agree with registration.

The ‘register’, as described in the Badman report and in this consultation document, is not a register as this would be commonly understood, but is in fact a licensing scheme.

Educating my children at home is not dangerous, for them or anyone else. It does not cost society anything, and requires no specific support or services from the local authority. There is no need for the state to licence this activity. We should remain at liberty to choose to do it or not.

5. Do you agree that it should be a criminal offence to fail to register or to provide inadequate or false information?

I do not agree with registration.

In what way would it help children to criminalise their parents for something as ridiculous as failing to register as home educators?

6a. Do you agree that home educated children should stay on the roll of their former school for 20 days after parents notify that they intend to home educate?

Schools are under pressure to ensure attendance by all pupils on their roll. If children are on roll but actually being educated at home, the school’s attendance figures would be affected. They would therefore put pressure on parents and children who have decided to home educate, to attend school for an additional 4 weeks.

Many children who are withdrawn from school have suffered months or years of bullying or inadequate educational provision. To expect these children to continue attending school for 4 more weeks under such circumstances would be cruel.

Schools and local authorities would use this time to put pressure on parents to change their minds about choosing home education. There should be no presumption in the law that one form of education is preferable for all children. Why is there no proposal of a 20 day tryout period for children who start school, during which the truancy laws do not apply, and after which the child may return to home education without further bureaucracy?

6b. Do you agree that the school should provide the local authority with achievement and future attainment data?

The local authority has no responsibility for the education of home educated children, and therefore would have no need of achievement and future attainment data.

If this information is to be given to anybody, it should be the parents.

In fact, the opinions of the school about the future attainment of a child who is no longer being educated by them are largely irrelevant when the child and her parents have the freedom to achieve and attain whatever they want, and are no longer restricted by a narrow curriculum and a standardised testing regime.

7. Do you agree that DCSF should take powers to issue statutory guidance in relation to the registration and monitoring of home education?

I do not agree with the registration and monitoring of home education.

8. Do you agree that children about whom there are substantial safeguarding concerns should not be home educated?

It is not possible to make a prima facie statement about this. Each case needs to be considered individually.

If a child has a child protection plan and the parents want to deregister, and if *in that case* the social workers involved with the child think that would be a bad thing to do, they already have powers to prevent it. They could apply for an Education Supervision Order, which removes parental responsibility for education and gives it to the local authority.

For some children, home education can significantly improve stressful and damaging situations, and lead to a more harmonious family lifestyle. Bullying at school is a significant safeguarding concern. For many home educated children, being withdrawn from school has vastly improved their safety and well-being.

I would not suggest that in all cases where children are under stress, home education is going to be the right course of action for a particular child or family. Likewise, it should not be presumed that school education is always the best thing for an individual child.

9. Do you agree that the local authority should visit the premises where home education is taking place provided 2 weeks notice is given?

In the last seven days, my children have been educated in many different places, including (but not limited to) a swimming pool, two different libraries, a community garden, our living room, the function room of a pub, a community centre, two different youth centres, two parks, a playbase used for out of school activities, an optician's surgery, several different buses, our kitchen, the Houses of Parliament, two trains, their own bedrooms, beside a garden pond, a second hand bookshop, a houseboat, and a museum.

Next week, we will visit a similar number of different places and they will continue to find learning opportunities everywhere they go.

What exactly do you mean by "the premises where home education is taking place"?

If you think local authorities have the time and money to visit all the places home educated children learn, you are sadly mistaken.

10. Do you agree that the local authority should have the power to interview the child, alone if this is judged appropriate, or if not in the presence of a trusted person who is not the parent/carer?

There is no benefit to our children in being required to demonstrate what they have learned. We reject a model of education that expects children to regurgitate facts on demand. This is the main reason why we have chosen home education and not school.

A short conversation once a year is not going to reveal anything to the local authority officer about either the education or well-being of home educated children. It is, however, likely to result in a significant number of ‘false positives’ where, through misunderstanding or prejudice, officers conclude that there is cause for concern and further action, when in fact there is no problem in the family. This real risk to the well-being of children does not appear to have been considered at all.

11. Do you agree that the local authority should visit the premises and interview the child within four weeks of home education starting, after 6 months has elapsed, at the anniversary of home education starting, and thereafter at least on an annual basis? This would not preclude more frequent monitoring if the local authority thought that was necessary.

My home is not the ‘premises’ of an educational institution. It is not a workplace. It is a family home.

Educating our children is part and parcel of our everyday family life. It is not open to inspection by state officials.

As a council taxpayer and an active citizen, I am appalled at the waste of public money involved in arranging frequent home visits to thousands of happy, well-functioning families, when children’s services are overstretched and unable to provide adequate support to families with urgent and serious needs.

Honouring our children

2009-10-16T00:09:00.002+01:00

“It seems timely on the 20th anniversary of the UN convention that we seek to examine whether or not this sector of the community actually honours children as expressed in the UN convention.”

Graham Badman
Uncorrected Transcript of Oral Evidence, To be published as HC 999-i
House of Commons
Minutes of evidence taken before the Children, Schools and Families Committee
Elective Home Education
Monday 12 October 2009

Which “sector of the community” do you imagine Graham Badman is referring to here? Yes, it’s us – home educators. Something about us, about what we do or perhaps about who we are, means that we should be “examined” to see if we “honour our children”.

This hurts more than just as a passing insult. This hurts on behalf of all the children failed, so badly failed, by our government. A government signed up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

No, I will not be taking lessons in honouring children’s rights from this government.

"Article 22 (Refugee children): Children have the right to special protection and help if they are refugees (if they have been forced to leave their home and live in another country), as well as all the rights in this Convention."

It seems that this government interprets “special protection and help” to mean a special low rate of benefits, a ban on their families earning money and years on end waiting to find out if they really are safe or will be deported back to danger. That’s if those children don’t find themselves imprisoned.

I wonder if Graham Badman, with his concern for children, ever questions his priorities? Rather than worrying about the details of what my children (well loved, well fed, intellectually stimulated, free children) know,

“I cannot conceive of a situation where, for example, a child of middle secondary years does not know something about oriental history, given the world as it is now; does not know something about carbon sequestration, if they are interested in science; and does not know something about the nature of the economy.” (Graham Badman, evidence to Select Committee, as above)

he might look at what should be done for children in genuine need and whose rights under the UN Convention are far from “actually honoured”.

Autonomous home educators - what's that then?

2009-10-05T18:02:00.005+01:00

I have always been pretty happy with the label of autonomous home educators. How people respond to that tends to depend on who they are. Most people who don't home educate don't look beyond the home educator bit, which is more than weird enough and quite enough to be getting along with thank you... In real life home ed circles I don't often have much of a need to define us, as people tend to get to know us and then they figure out what we do. In the often over-intense world of the internet, where home educators can analyse themselves and each other for more hours than is really sensible, the labels matter more. And, of course, they matter more when you feel under attack. That's always true.

So, what do I mean by autonomous home educators? It's been a bit more than five years since we announced, on another blog, that that was what we were about. Are we still? Well, I'd say so. I think that autonomous home education is often misunderstood. People sometimes contrast it with structured home education, but that is a misunderstanding. The point of the autonomous bit, for us, is that the children are directing their education. Does this mean they never do anything strucured? No, why should it? I suppose it might, if they chose never to undertake any structured learning, but it certainly doesn't have to. They aren't confined to just informal learning experiences. They aren't confined to *anything*.

So, it might be (and is, in fact) that sometimes the children choose to undertake some structured and externally assessed course of study. At other times they are busy with things of their own devising. How they make their decisions is their business, but I think it's fair to say that, in our family, people (adults and children) often make announcements about what they're planning to do. Other family members will then chip in with something as insightful as,
"oh, yeah? That's nice/cool/weird..."
At other times people might ask,
"What do I need to have studied/exams do I need to have passed to do X thing?"
That's when having adults, who have a bit of life experience (and have sat rather more exams than anyone needs to) is handy. Children can then make their choices based on that extra knowledge, as well as their own enjoyment.

I suppose that the autonomy bit is really more about how we live, as a family, than anything else. One of the parts of parenting that I never felt comfortable with was the bit about making children do things 'for their own good'. I wasn't brought up by someone who liked doing that either, so I don't really have a model. It doesn't come naturally to me and when I have done it it has generally upset me, children and anyone else within a five mile radius. I just can't imagine telling someone that they had to do their maths any more than I can imagine telling them that they had to eat their spinach. So I haven't done either. Strangely, or perhaps not, they both do maths and eat spinach. Maybe it's because I'd be just as happy if they were playing the recorder through their noses and eating baked beans?

That's not to say that I don't ever encourage people to do things, because I do. Trying to treat other people decently is necessary for family life and friendships and I'm not shy of saying so... But if what you're doing isn't hurting anyone else then it's probably fine and dandy as far as I'm concerned.

Sometimes I have wondered if we have found it easy to stick with this path because we do see lots of evidence of our children's 'academic' development as well as all other sorts. If we didn't see that then would we start 'making' them do certain things? I don't know. I can only know that we are fine as we are, thanks. I genuinely don't see any need to decide on goals for my children as they appear to be rather good at identifying their own goals and doing what they need to do to reach them. More than anything else, that's the thing I'd like to get across to the DCSF. If what we do is evidently working fine *for us* why should we change it?

A snapshot

2009-09-29T22:18:00.002+01:00

As I am failing to come up with well argued and interesting posts for this blog and I am also unable keep the thing up to date, I've decided to post a snapshot. Here's what happened today.

Dani went off to work and I got up and offered children breakfast. P had eaten and showered already and settled down in her room to do get on with something she's working on at the moment. Leo was waiting for a book to arrive from Amazon, so he spent quite a while writing and drawing in his spell book, on the hallway floor by the letterbox! It didn't come today - but he has high hopes for tomorrow.

I pottered about doing bits of housework and answering P's occasional questions. Leo did his laundry and I helped him to peg it out on the line. The weather has been amazing.

I had a coffee and did some maths with Pearl. Leo was pottering happily in the garden. He managed to bang a nail into a bouncy ball and then tied string to it, so he could play with it without losing it over the garden wall.

The morning got a bit frantic when I got simultaneous phone calls from the delivery driver saying our grocery shop would be late and one from a BBC journalist looking for someone to watch the PMs speech with her and then comment on it. I couldn't help the journalist because (is this surprising?) our day was rather busy with home education... The shopping turned up but not until after lunch.

I cobbled together a lunch (lots of mash and one quorn sausage each!) and then the shopping arrived just as we had to leave the house for Squeezebox. The kids had a band session, while I waited and read my book. I am finding this book a bit of a struggle as it's darker and more grizzly than I usually read. P and L's band is working towards a gig at Christmas and, after that, they have decided to stop. Both the kids have really enjoyed being in the band but now want to drop that commitment to free up the time and money for other things.

After Squeezebox, we went up to the park for an hour. There was a really large group of home edders there this week. Both the children found people to chat to and play with and I had a quick cuppa with friends. Then it was time for Leo's Little Green Pig session. I dropped him off and then went home to put away the shopping because we were expecting a plumber to arrive later on and the hall was full of bags.

Pearl's Little Green Pig group was meeting in town this week, to work on some podcasts, so she went off to that. Dani picked up Leo after she finished at work and they came home. The plumber turned up and fixed our shower and the tap in Pearl's bathroom - all very quick and good value. I was just serving up some pasta when Pearl got in from town.

The evening has been quiet. Leo discovered series three of Black Books on the channel four website and Pearl watched Friends in her room. Pearl is now typing in her room (her manual typewriter makes a heck of a clunk!) and I left Leo reading in bed. I think D wants this computer now, so I'm off to flop on the sofa.

Tomorrow will be very different but I don't imagine I'll get round to blogging that...

Sunny morning

2009-09-22T11:19:00.002+01:00

The sun shines into this basement in the mornings - just slipping in across the kitchen table. P and L are sitting there doing some stuff with fimo. The Indigo Girls are singing in the corner. So far this morning, children have read, written, calculated, played in the street, chatted, made food and drink - lived and learned. So have I. I will just keep doing this, whatever the govt decrees.

In the end, we will have to have the courage of our convictions, but that's nothing new is it? Haven't we all done this many a time? Amy Ray says this in the song I'm listening to now,
"Here's what I find about compromise - don't do it if it hurts inside,
cause either way you're screwed,
eventually you'll find you may as well feel good: you may as well have some pride."

I think most people know that if they'd stuck to just the approved paths in life they'd have missed out a hell of a lot of living. I know I would.

September

2009-09-09T08:17:00.002+01:00

OK, so it seems I have lost the blogging bug. But I don't really want to stop, so let's see if I can manage something - anything! Dani is mostly spending computer time doing things related to the Badman review. If I get a substantial chunk of time then I'm trying to work on short stories etc.

September has arrived and things here are slowing transforming themselves into the more group-orientated life we have during 'terms'. It is odd how very different 'holiday' time is for us. It is partly because most of the children's group activities stop and also because we see more of schooled cousins. Once the term starts that all changes.

This term has some interesting things ahead for P. She is going to be doing a first aid course over four sessions, starting this week. That's going to be followed by some ohotography and probably basket weaving. There's her learning group (fortnightly) run by South Downs Learning College. Little Green Pig starts again, which both the children are going back to. P has various other plans but she doesn't want me wittering on about them all on here! Busy life, though.

Yesterday was a sudden return of summer, which seems to have vanished again now. P has got involved with some people campaigning for cleaner air around the nearest main road and she went out to do an hour surveying the traffic with them. She had to cadge some suncream from someone!

Leo is happy that Kids' Club is starting again today. He is not as into group settings as P but he really likes the chance to have a good play with a gang of friends. He has fond memories of the Merlin inspired 'show' they did last Christmas and is keen to do something similar this year. I have mentioned that a narrator would be a big help as the audience did find it challening to follow last year. The beheading was very well done though...

Right, today is a busy day. D and I still have the same work pattern so we have a tight changeover in the middle of today. D is meeting with a councillor later too. Now must get dressed and get going!

Summer stuff

2009-08-19T11:47:00.004+01:00

In an attempt to keep this blog alive, here's another post! Since returning from St Ives, we have been enjoying some lovely weather at home.

On Monday, Dani took the kids on a bike ride. They got the train to Polegate and then rode about nine miles on the Cuckoo Trail. Leo fell off rather dramatically but got off lightly with just a skinned knee. They saw excellent wildlife but I'm not allowed to give you any details because they want to.

There's been lots going on at home as well as out and about. Both the children have been writing letters. Once again, I can give you no details but will say that it is great to see them getting their opinions out there. They are both fans of snail mail. Leo was thrilled to hear that a letter to the US would go airmail. The fact that an email whizzes about the world in a flash is not exciting to him - just normal. Isn't it odd how we have such different ideas about 'normal' to those of our children?

Also going on at home - more zine making, drawing, making a string bag (P) and sewing (L) and some maths stuff (both). Recent conversations have been good - lots about current affairs.

Yesterday, Pearl, Leo and I went to the beach hut with an auntie, two cousins and a grandmother. It was a beautiful day and just right for some swimming in the sea. A neighbour from across the road, who happens to have a beach hut a few doors away from ours (yes, weird!) was there with a canoe. He took each child out for a little paddle, which cousin D declared to be,

"the experience of a lifetime!"

The sea in Brighton (Hove actually) is far less cold than the sea in Cornwall, so it felt like a bath to me. After lunch, the sea was a bit more choppy (not at all dangerously so, just some bigger waves) and several of the kids had fun letting waves break over their heads and so forth!

A sparkly day on the beach

A happy Leo

Pearl and cousin B finding interesting stones.

The kids have just popped to the post office and to Dani's work to do some important photocopying. Then we're off out again - to a favourite park.

Follow up letter to our MP

2009-08-17T00:27:00.005+01:00

I've just sent this, after receiving a forwarded letter, apparently from Delyth Morgan but actually containing the same wording as this blog post by Ed Balls:

Dear David,

Thank you for forwarding to us the pro forma letter you received from Baroness Morgan, dated 29th July 2009.

As we had already received an identically worded letter from a DCSF official, and had seen the same text on Ed Balls' blog, published on 27th July (http://www.edballs.co.uk/index.jsp?i=4210&s=1111), the content of the letter was no surprise to us.

We are sure you will appreciate that we are in no way reassured or satisfied by this letter. We made several very specific points in our letter to you, and we think Baroness Morgan could have at least done us (and you) the courtesy of reading and directly addressing the letter she was purporting to reply to.

We do not accept the logic of the letter's third paragraph, which outlines the government's stated reason for commissioning the Badman Review in the first place. There is no inherent conflict between the principle of parents having the right to decide how and where their children should be educated and the principle of children being safe and receiving the education they need. The two things do not therefore need to be balanced against each other.

In fact, parents do not, in English law, have a "right to decide how and where their children should be educated" except that which is conferred by Section 7 of the 1996 Education Act. The rights of parents, in this context, are entirely bound up with the parental *duty* to ensure that children receive an education suitable to their age, aptitude and ability and any special educational needs they may have.

Parents do not have a right to choose to deny their children the education they need, nor do they have a right to choose to put their children in danger. There is no conflict between the parent's duty to provide an education and the child's right to receive an education; these are both enshrined in the very same piece of statute law.

We remain extremely concerned at the prospect of hasty legislation on the basis of the flimsy logic displayed both in this letter and in the Badman Review report. The letter you have forwarded to us includes a statement of the government's intention to legislate "at the first possible opportunity this year".

This seems to us to be another clear indication that the current consultation is a sham, as the consultation results are unlikely to be published until January 2010. As we mentioned when we met at your surgery, the government has already made a commitment to "improve monitoring arrangements for home education" in the Improving Schools and Safeguarding Children Bill, which has been included in the Draft Legislative Programme for the next Parliamentary Session.

Clearly, then, the consultation contravenes Criterion 1 of the BERR Code of Practice on consultations (http://www.berr.gov.uk/whatwedo/bre/consultation-guidance/page44420.html) which states that consultations must be undertaken when there is time for the consultation result to influence policy outcome.

Similarly, we fail to see how the Parliamentary Select Committee's inquiry into the Badman Review and the associated consultation can have any meaningful outcome, if the consultation and legislation proceed on their current timescales. The Committee has called for evidence to be submitted by 22nd September, less than a month before the closing date of the consultation. By the time the evidence has been considered, and a conclusion reached by the Committee, the consultation will have finished, and the process of drafting the Bill will presumably be well advanced.

As you may be aware, Liberty are concerned about the prospect of legislation to implement Graham Badman's Recommendation 7, giving local authority officers the right of access to private homes. As they explained in letters to home educators last week, "A right of access to the home engages Article 8 of the Human Rights Act 1998 - the right to respect for family and private life. Interference with the right to privacy will only be justified if it can be shown to be necessary and proportionate in all the circumstances."

With such serious concerns surrounding the proposals, we think the most sensible thing for the government to do would be to halt the consultation, withdraw the proposal to legislate this year, and take some time to give these issues appropriate consideration.

The Select Committee should be allowed to complete its inquiry, and there should be a full Impact Assessment carried out, before a new consultation (lasting at least 12 weeks) is started. In accordance with the BERR Code of Practice, there should be a possibility for the consultation to influence policy, so it is not acceptable for legislation to be drafted while a consultation is underway.

We would appreciate it if you would pass this letter on to the relevant ministers, and we look forward to receiving a reply which actually addresses our concerns.

Finally, we are intending to visit Parliament on 13th October, as part of a mass lobby being organised on this issue. We are planning to arrive at 2.30pm, and would greatly appreciate the opportunity to meet with you again and discuss this matter further. We expect that there will be around 6 of your constituents taking part in the lobby, accompanied by their children. Please can you let us know whether you will be able to meet us on that day?

Yours sincerely,

***********************************

As ever, feel free to link to, use or adapt this if you find it useful.

OK, so what happened to blogging?

2009-08-15T23:49:00.005+01:00

I have no real excuse for the total lack of activity on this blog. I could blame it all on the Badman Review (tempting to blame everything on that really...) but the truth is that we've been doing other things. Here's what we've been up to in the last week - our family holiday to St Ives!

St Ives is my second favourite place in the world. I love the beaches and the way the town is almost surrounded by sea. I love the light and the hills and the damp air. I love the ease with which the local economy relieves you of your money without you ever feeling ripped off. Whenever I am there I feel free to read and think and cut off from the demands of life at home. I think we all get different things from the place but it works very well as a holiday destination for us. Here's why...

We arrived on Saturday, after a fairly trouble free journey from Brighton. The train down to the west country does tend to suffer from random (usually fairly minor) delays, and this one was no exception - twenty minutes, for some reason. On the whole, train journeys are a total pleasure these days. The children have books and paper and pens and Leo's portable dvd player. I read most of a Barbara Vine book I'd borrowed from my friend, E. Dani knitted and was quizzed on her knitting. Pearlie went off to explore the train a bit and found that a woman was travelling with a large, placid rabbit in a holdall on the seat beside her.

After picking up the keys to our apartment (expensive but with lovely view) we went out to get some pasties for tea and began the work of relaxing...

View from the balcony of our flat.

We had our first swim on Porthminster beach on Sunday and then pottered around the shops buying books and so on. The tv reception is awful in St Ives and we soon gave up on the tv and played lots of games of Bananagrams instead. Then we all tended to read in bed - so much more relaxing than being shackled to screens... In the evening, Leo and I went on a lantern ghost story walk. This was a very good example of such walks - being led by a man who was a local historian, so we did get some history in with the usual apocryphal tales.

On Monday we went to the local museum, which is very odd! Leo was in search of the bible of James Wallace, the last ghost-layer of the town. We looked at that and the other, bizarre assortment of objects they have on display. It is one of those museums that has photographs of nameless people in unusual costumes. My favourite was of a middle aged man in some druid-like get-up, with a campervan in the background, in which a young, bearded fellow was smirking. I'd say it was about 1975 - judging by the young fellow's cheesecloth shirt...

Tuesday was warm and sunny, so we went to the beach again. The sea down there is certainly colder than the channel and I had to talk firmly to myself to get my shoulders under the water. I tend to remind myself that I got through childbirth, so I really can't shy away from a moment of discomfort on getting into the cold sea... Once in, it was lovely. Layers of mum podge mean that I no longer turn blue and shudder - unlike our poor children, who do an impressive line in full-body shivering. We bought them some towelling robes, which proved useful.

On Tuesday night we went on a trip to the beautiful Minack Theatre. I had never been there before and it was as lovely as I'd always hoped it would be. The seagulls and the waves just embed you in the play in some way. It was the Ilkley Players doing The Crucible and I was very impressed. We'd actually watched the film version with the children the night before, which I think was a good idea. They were both total stars, sitting though the whole play in virtual silence. I would guess they were the youngest people there by about three years in P's case and more like six in Leo's! Unfortunately, both kids fell asleep on the minibus back to St Ives and, on waking, Leo threw up rather dramatically down a steep pavement as we walked home. He startled a woman the next day by exclaiming, with some delight, "that's my sick!" when we walked past the splat! It had been a long day - lots of sea swimming and then not in bed until well after midnight.

We were all rather tired on Wednesday and took things easy. We decided to go to the Tate. I have a rather edgy relationship with art galleries - unlike D, or the children, I think. I often feel rather boxed in by the pressure of looking at the art and get nagging thoughts that I'm not looking at it 'properly' or not getting what I might from it. This time I had a surprising and joyous experience when we entered the gallery with the work of Laurence Weiner. Instead of feeling tense and unsure, I felt like my head was exploding with images, characters and stories. I wonder if this is what people generally experience in art galleries? If so, then maybe I do 'get it' after all... The children declared that they had enjoyed the exhibition and we discussed the artists. Both Dani and Pearl like Barbara Hepworth's stuff a great deal.

We popped in at the library that afternoon, just to browse around a little. I read some of the story of the creation of the Minack Theatre and felt I'd like to know a bit more about Rowena Cade. We had tea at Blas Burgerworks - yum.

Thursday turned out to be another beautiful day, so we went to Porthgwidden beach cafe for an extravagant breakfast. After a bit of swimming there, we popped home for lunch and then went over to Porthminster for more swimming.

Leo sets off across the Atlantic.

Pearlie in a hole.

As the tide went out, Dani and the kids managed to get right across to the harbour.

They are the little people right in the middle of this beach shot!

I was devouring the latest Patrick Gale book.

Friday was a bit grey. We set off on a walk along the South West Coast Path. We ended up doing the whole six miles to Zennor. Six miles doesn't sound like much of a walk, does it?

We looked a bit less tidy than this on arrival at Zennor!

Well, on downland or ambling through the weald, it isn't a long walk. But when those six miles are clambering on rocky cliff top paths, in sandals because we hadn't taken our walking boots, it was plenty long enough... We had failed to pack enough water and virtually fell into a backpackers hostel at Zennor, gasping for a drink. Dani and I have something of a history of being over-prepared for minor excursions (full first aid kit in the park...) and then under-prepared for tough walks like this. We were reminded of a giant starway in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney, which we failed to notice was marked 'strenuous.' On setting off for Zennor, I had one plaster in my pocket and lack of boots was really rather silly. A turned ankle might well have demanded a helicopter rescue, which would have been embarassing to say the least! The children took it all very happily and tended to scamper on like mountain goats while we lumbered up the rocks... The scenery was wonderful, as was the wildlife, but I think the children will want to be the ones to tell about that.

We got the bus back into St Ives, which took all of twenty minutes. The walk had taken us four hours!

The train journey home ran a little late owing to "being held up in the west country". That was the official explanation, though there were no highwaymen that I saw.

So, that was St Ives this time. Reading, beaches, walking, beauty, art, games, talking - all sorts. Leo is into a new series of books - the Spooks books by Joseph Delaney. Pearlie has taken to reading the Guardian. Dani bought some lovely new yarn. I wonder if I will find time to blog real life now?

But, you know, we don't get to do enough of this sort of thing in real life. If things are quiet here then maybe we're all reading...

Busy

2009-07-08T09:24:00.003+01:00

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...

2009-06-12T17:25:00.002+01:00

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

2009-06-11T15:53:00.003+01:00

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

2009-06-08T09:59:00.002+01:00

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

2009-05-22T00:16:00.001+01:00

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

2009-05-12T11:22:00.002+01:00

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

2009-05-03T11:07:00.001+01:00

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?

2009-04-23T23:56:00.002+01:00

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

2009-04-14T08:52:00.001+01:00

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

2009-04-07T23:18:00.001+01:00

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???

Dani's side of A4

2009-04-05T23:51:00.001+01:00

Dear Home Education Review Team,

It seems to me that the government has asked you to undertake this review because they see home education as an anomaly. It is untidy. It cannot be slotted neatly into the system of assessment, targets, outcomes and league tables. It is uncontrolled. The government sees all this as a problem.

I would like you to consider a shift in perspective. I agree that home education is untidy, but I do not think this means it is a problem. Learning is a human process, a natural and integral part of being human. As such it is bound to be messy, creative, diverse and unpredictable.
Like all natural processes, learning by human children is affected by the environment in which it takes place. For my autonomously educated children, any change in the direction of more control, assessment or regulation of home education would be a damaging restriction of their learning environment.

One of the reasons our family chooses home education is because we do not think compulsory attendance at school, the national curriculum, SATs and league tables offer a free enough environment for children’s learning. Since becoming involved in the home education community in our town, it has become clear to me that the diverse and uncontrolled nature of home education is what makes it a much needed refuge for many children whose needs are simply not catered for by the school system as it is.

English law deliberately and expressly permits diversity in education, and home education is for many parents the only way they can ensure their children receive an education suited to their specific needs, as the law requires. However, many local authorities see this flexibility as a ‘loophole’. Families and educationalists alike have a feeling that home educators are somehow getting away with something. This in itself leads to a lack of easy and honest communication. Home educators often wish to preserve their freedom by staying ‘under the radar’ while local authorities perceive this as unwholesome secrecy.

If the review is to change anything, I would like this atmosphere of mistrust to be broken down. This will have to be a gradual process, but there are several simple things the government and local authorities could do to begin it.

National government should:

Reissue the November 2007 guidelines on Elective Home Education as statutory guidance.
Rewrite the statutory guidance for local authorities in England to identify children not receiving a suitable education issued in January 2009, so that the conflict between this guidance and the Elective Home Education guidelines is removed. Paragraph 87 of the January 2009 guidance is directly at odds with the paragraphs in the Elective Home Education guidelines to which it refers. This contradiction must be resolved, and the correct procedures (as set out in the EHE guidelines) should be made clear to local authorities. It is not surprising that local authorities find the law confusing if they are given contradictory guidance. However, the law is quite clear that there is no duty or power for local authorities to routinely interrogate home educating families as to the suitability of their education.

Local authorities should:

View work with home educating families as an exercise in offering universal services to everyone on an equal basis, rather than a regime of inspection and assessment. I think it would be a big improvement if this work were done by staff with expertise in Equalities and Diversity, not by education professionals.
Examine the services they provide to school pupils (such as free daytime access to swimming pools, educational library services for schools, bikeability training, etc) to see if there are ways to extend these services on an invitational basis to home educating families
Invite local home education communities to advise on policy development, staff training and appropriate service provision.

Allie's side of A4 to the home ed review team

2009-04-01T08:15:00.005+01:00

I heard that Graham Badman had promised to read any individual submissions that were no longer than one side of A4. As it seems he will not, personally, see each completed questionnaire, I though it was worth sending something. I sent the following to the team:

I should like to submit the following to the team conducting the review into home education.

My partner and I have been home educating our two children since September 2004. Our children are now aged eleven and nine.

Our children’s education is autonomous and we do not differentiate between learning and life. This is, as I am sure you are aware, the case for a great many home educators in this country. We are lucky enough to live in Brighton, which has a large and thriving community of home educators and much of our children’s time is spent outside of the home. We are confident that our children are being educated in accordance with the law.

The role of the local authority in our children’s lives is primarily that of a service provider and this is the way we would like it to remain. Our children make extensive use of public parks, swimming pools, libraries and museums. These things are invaluable to us as a home educating family. However, it would be fair to say that the local authority’s EOTAS (education otherwise than at school) department is largely irrelevant to our lives – except as an occasional irritant. Our daughter chose to come out of school at the age of seven (after three years of schooling) and we accepted one visit from the local authority. It was clear to us that this visit was not being conducted as a service to our child or our family. While I do not mean this as a criticism of the individual employed by the local authority to conduct such visits, it was clear that the visit was essentially an inspection and a test. Since that time we have chosen to send written reports to our local authority and have declined any further visits.

We have been fortunate in the fact that our local authority has not questioned our right to decline a visit by a member of their staff. This is not always the case in this city – or across the country. The guidelines published by the DCSF in 2007 are not being followed by many local authorities, who prefer to create their own interpretations of the law. I am sure that many other home educators have been able to give you examples of this. I think it is high time that the current situation was changed. I would suggest that the guidelines issued in 2007 be re-issued as statutory guidance. These guidelines were largely positively received by home educators and contain valuable advice to local authorities on their role.

I understand that part of the concern that has led to this review has related to safeguarding. I do not assume that all home educated children are necessarily always thriving. Support services may be needed by home educating families as much as by any other. However, ignorance of the legality of home education and the way it works in practice is widespread in many of these services. If home educating families could believe that they would not be met with suspicion and ignorance when they access support services, more may well do so. At the moment, there is often woeful ignorance, which I have heard reported by many friends and on national email lists. Training for social services, health services and, of course, education staff should include information about home education. If local authorities run services that offer support to families and children then they should be marketed to home educating families as well as to families whose children attend school. I would be more than happy to see home educated children considered in the publicity for everything from summer sports courses to help lines and advice services. I must admit that I find it frustrating that local authorities are usually more than ready to assume the role of inspector (a role they do not have in law) and simultaneously reluctant to fulfil their role as service provider to all sections of the local population, including home educators.

It is probably not as good as it could have been was I less pre-occupied with our roof and other things. But I got a very polite response assuring me it would be read by Graham Badman, so I'm glad I sent something. It is what I would genuinely like to see, which I think we should be putting to the review team. You can bet that the LAs who are pushing for change are not hesitating to present their wish-list.

Opinions wanted

2009-03-31T10:22:00.001+01:00

So, we had a super trip to the zoo on Sunday, which Leo has blogged. It was his chosen birthday excursion and it was surprisingly enjoyable. We haven’t been for years and I felt that the whole place was much better. The elephants are no longer there which is good. They clearly didn’t have the space they needed. There is a super rainforest space, which is big and open, where we got to see sloths. I’d certainly recommend it. We got the kids in for free using some vouchers off the internet.

While we were there we got a call to tell us that my mum had broken her ankle. She is in a temporary plaster until next Monday and then a cast. She is doing her best to get about but not really managing the crutches. Has anyone ever hear of these trolleys? Anyone else had a similar injury and think they would work? Or not?
Roof work is continuing here thanks to the dry weather. Of course, nothing is ever really simple and little niggles crop up as we go. Old houses = cans of worms. But fingers crossed it will all progress ok now.

Right, I have people wanting this pc and wanting me to do some maths with them, so I shall go.

Still here

2009-03-27T23:11:00.001Z

We are still here but rather pre-occupied with all things roof related at the moment. All is ok but been somewhat delayed by weather etc. so we still have plastic for our roof at the moment. I can’t tell you how relieved I will be when it is all done and sound. I am not sleeping very well and that, coupled with getting up early, is making me very tired by the end of the day. I fell asleep on the sofa most nights this week.

I did manage to get a page of my thoughts off to the home ed review team this evening. It really wasn’t good enough to share with everyone! My main point was that the current situation is unsatisfactory what with LAs making up the law as they see fit and the best thing would be to re-issue the 2007 guidelines as statutory guidance. I also advised that properly trained LA staff would remove a barrier to service use by home ed families and that they should market all their services to home educating families as well as families using schools. I stressed that the LA’s role in our family life is that of service provider and that is how we want it to stay. I was inspired by Gill’s post to actually say what I’d like to see, rather than get drawn into arguing with the things we think they are thinking!

Anyway, we shall see.

Everyone in the family is pootling on with their stuff. I am trying not to blog details of what the kids are up to – unless they ask me to – but they are both highly productive at the moment. Dani has been working on a funding application for one of the home ed groups we are part of and being very busy at her work. I have signed up for a ten week creative writing course next term, which I’m very pleased about. It runs on the only weekday morning that neither of us is at work and the kids both have group things, so I’m hoping I can follow it properly. I’m quite excited.

OK, flagging here, better stop!

Boy with birthday and house with no roof

2009-03-20T09:00:00.001Z

Yesterday was Leo’s ninth birthday and we spent most of the day at home – at his request – apart from a short trip to the park. Pearlie also went to her Sussex Wildlife Trust course in the morning, where they made soup with nettles etc. and cooked it on a fire. She has really enjoyed this course – making wooden cutlery and other nice things – and it was lovely for her to go on a day with some warmth.
Leo got his presents from us and P and was very happy with those. I won’t blog details in case he wants to. He’s having a family gathering at the weekend where he will get more pressies, so the joy is spread! We went to the Muesli Mountain Market on the way to the park (Muesli Mountain is a nickname for this part of town – dates back twenty or thirty years and is a pop at the sort of folk who live round here) so that Leo could consider the purchase of a writing case. He decided to buy it. I love it and am quite jealous!

Meanwhile, the house was having its old and saggy roof removed. The huge weight of the roof and all its tiles was effectively sitting on the joists (not how a roof should be supported!) and once it was taken off, those joists started to wobble. As the builders walked on them they bounced up and down and so did the upstairs ceilings! Builder has decided that these joists need supporting with new timbers so those will be coming on Monday. The lifted weight has meant that cracks have appeared around the edges of Leo’s bedroom ceiling as it moved with the wobbly joists. I suddenly got anxious when it was time for Leo to go to bed and put him in our bed (no worrying cracks) and slept on P’s bedroom floor on (actually, rather more off) a camping mat. Builder has popped in this morning to re-assure me that the ceiling is not going to fall down on anyone and that all will be stable when new timbers are fitted and fixed to old joists.

This house is nearly 150 years old and has clearly suffered from bad decisions in the past. I just hope we are making good ones now. I think we are. But it is not fun going through this process. At the moment our roof is effectively some sheets of tin and some plastic sheeting so I hope the ‘drizzle’ forecast for Sunday is light.

I should be, and am, grateful that we are in position to be getting this work done now. I am aware that other people are facing decidedly dodgy times at the moment. As we went past a newspaper advertising board yesterday, Leo spotted this:

“Recession has grip on Sussex”.

Leo said, “It can’t have a grip on us because it doesn’t have a solid form. If it was incarnated as some kind of monster it could have a grip on us.”

I think it probably is turning into some kind of monster for a lot of people.

Right, we have to keep an eye on the time today because of various commitments. I shall be trying to stay calm and enjoy a day without the scary banging from overhead!

P has asked me to ask here if anyone has any advice about how long flowers should be pressed fo. How does she know when they are really done?

Up and doing

2009-03-17T09:02:00.002Z

I think we’re expecting builders and/or building inspector this morning, so I’m dressed. Getting up early means there’s time to fit in a short conversation about academic research, blogging and the advancement of human knowledge, with Dani, before she leaves for work. The kids are certainly awake and I suspect watching tv, with every intention of getting dressed in a minute!

Things are busy here. Leo’s birthday approaches and we are having a little family gathering at the weekend. He wants to go to London Zoo for a birthday trip, which is not cheap, so we’re doing that as a family trip in a week or two.

There have been some excellent and cheering things happening. The council has decided to build a new building in the park where we have Kids’ Club. Hopefully they will site it in a different bit of the park so we can continue using the old building while they construct the new one. That’s a huge relief. The search for venues for home ed groups is never easy, is it?

The fabulous John Fardell sent the children a signed copy of his new book. We had contacted him a while ago to try to find out more about the proposed publication date of his new book and he felt we deserved a free copy. Hoorah! Everyone wants to read it so we’re trying to find half an hour a day when we can all be together and enjoy it as a family book.

We got our HESFES ticket in the post. We have had an offer, from a grandmother, to drive us to the site with our gear this year and I think we’ll take her up on that. It will mean we can take better cooking stuff, which looks like it will be necessary this year. I’m considering splashing out on air beds too as my old bones complain a bit about tatty foam camping mats. Mustn’t get carried away though!

I am currently reading Leo Brisingr, which is very wordy! I find that I do like these fantasy books but they are not for the fainthearted. You have to be up for the 700 pages and enjoy every detailed description. Pearl and Dani are reading Noughts and Crosses. Pearlie has also been enjoying some new historical novels. I can’t remember what they are but they are set in the 1600s.

People reading Leo’s blog/s may have noticed that he is rather into The X Files at the moment. There are FBI ID cards all around the house.

I’m waiting to hear if I have got onto a writing course at CCE next term. It happens to run in a two hour time slot which is just about the only moment in the week when both D and I are not at work – so it looks just possible. I like to do a course every now and then because it beings me into contact with new people who write fiction.

Right. I hear the sound of padding feet and think it is time to make toast. Hope the building people arrive before we have to go to Squeezebox.

Balls in the air

2009-03-07T10:47:00.002Z

And balls to most of them! I can remember my grandmother, post-stroke, who would struggle to find a word but who never seemed to have a problem with “Balls!”

This week we have had big scaffolding put up before the work starts on our roof. That’s a good thing. The fact that it has entirely blocked one of our neighbour’s satellite signals is a bad thing. This is embarrassing though, of course, there is nothing we can do except offer a financial contribution towards getting their dish re-sited. It is one of the drawbacks of these little terraced houses that anything anyone does has implications for their neighbours. Big trucks block the road, building noise is heard in both adjoining houses etc. One of our next door neighbours has been a great help and allowed a ‘foot’ of the scaffolding to come down on her side of the garden wall. People are great round here because we all live with the reality, but it doesn’t stop it being worrying. I am also nervous about such major work being done on the structure of the house. I can’t help thinking about one of the houses opposite, where they took out a window in the front to replace it with double glazing and the whole bay fell off the house... Must stop that kind of thinking.

As well as irritating us with their review response, the local council has declared a possible plan to demolish the crummy (but much relied upon) building in which Kids’ Club runs – instead of using money already earmarked to improve it. It is primarily used by an organisation that runs an after-school club and playscheme – and we use it two mornings a week. It is in a little park so it is ideal. Kids’ Club (for any readers recently arrived here) is a play based, co-operative learning group for home ed kids of about 6-11. A play worker is there to act as a facilitator and help the kids manage the business of being in a group – along with a parent on a rota basis. Leo gets four hours a week (over two mornings) playing with his friends and doing other cool things. The other day I was looking at some fantastic dinosaur ‘top trumps’ that two dino-fans had made and this week there was a bit of filming going on. The council looks like it will propose that the after-school club/playscheme organisation can re-locate itself into the school next door. This obviously isn’t an option for us. Kids’ Club has been running for more than six years now and currently has seventeen kids attending at least one of the sessions. I do so hope that they change their minds on this as it would be nightmare to find another venue...

Our council’s review response had, in common with others that I seen, a ‘poor us, we have no powers’ theme, which is extremely irritating. They just seem to be denying the legal powers they have. It’s clearly a tactic. We have written to Mr Badman and copied it back to the council pointing out the fact that they do, in fact, have powers...

I have recently had some sad news regarding someone in my extended family. I have since been plagued by extremely vivid dreams – always the way when things are on my mind. It’s been many a year since I woke up sobbing but I did it this week. It startled poor old D. I have a lot of trouble shaking off such dreams.

In amongst such worries we have been getting on with life. The kids and I had a good day yesterday because the sun was shining and we managed to have no commitments. We had a gentle morning at home getting various things done and time in the park with a skateboard and a scooter. We bought gorgeous bread for lunch from the Muesli Mountain Market. It costs an arm and a leg but Dani always defends it as a quality product, which it certainly is. I made choccy cake in the afternoon.

The kids are happy with all their group stuff at the moment and we seem to have a routine that is working well. This is probably what makes the council plan all the more stressing. Have you noticed how it’s always when things are just balanced that they get shaken up? Little Green Pig, in particular, continues to be wonderful. Pearlie has moved up to the older group and is really enjoying it. I can’t sing its praises enough. It costs us just £4 a week for Leo to go the 7-11 group and Pearl to go to the 12-16 group. Creative writing doesn’t *require* a group, of course, but I know from my own experiences that a supportive group can be really inspiring and motivating.

We’re enjoying a morning where no-one is off to work, so everyone is lounging about in pjs reading, listening to audio books, knitting and so on. We’re off to the museum in a bit. It isn’t so sunny today but spring is definitely springing, isn’t it? That’s good.

At cross purposes

2009-03-02T23:19:00.002Z

Well, this has been an odd day. It was all set to be a usual(ish) kind of Monday with D at work in the morning, me in the afternoon, L off to art group and P going round to see the grandmothers. Then the scaffolders came. While I was in my dressing gown... We had misunderstood in a recent conversation with the builder and weren’t expecting them this week at all!

I seem to keep finding myself in situations where I feel like I’m failing to communicate properly at the moment – and not just about scaffolding. I suspect that a lot of it comes from that gulf you get when you’re standing somewhere with your particular life experiences and someone else is standing in their spot, with their life experiences, and what you mean goes down the gap. I have long suspected that this is what happens to a great mass of human communication. And then, of course, we take umbrage. ( I like “take umbrage” BTW.) I am certainly someone who takes it but I don’t tend to hold it very long.

In my quest to narrow gaps and spend less time grabbing hold of that umbrage thing, I have long wished for a few alternative lives to lead. These would be good to visit for a day or two every couple of months, maybe. Or perhaps I should look more closely at reincarnation?

So, here are two favourite songs that address the theme of reincarnation. For any Victoria Wood aficionados – then yes, there is a verse missing...

And this one is very enjoyable too but I can't embed it.

Why it’s a mistake to say ‘If we were any other minority, this wouldn’t be allowed’

2009-02-28T20:01:00.001Z

I have noticed this line of argument coming up with increasing frequency on home education lists and blogs. AHEd included a version of it in their recent press release about the Home Education review.

I can certainly understand the temptation to respond in this way to the repeated government consultations, apparently fuelled by the desire to limit our freedom to home educate in the wonderful and diverse ways required by our individual children.

I am quite used to being in a minority. Indeed, looking at my life choices, you would think I preferred it (maybe I do, subconsciously). I’m a mother who is a lesbian, and a lesbian who is a mother. A middle class parent without a car. A home educator who supports vaccination. Most of these things are a result of my free choices, and I’ve made those choices because they make me happy. If other people misunderstand or disagree with me, that’s up to them. I’m extremely lucky that I live in a place and at a moment in history where I have the freedom to make some of these choices.

Still, being in a minority is sometimes hard, and it does sometimes feel as though nobody understands and everyone is out to get you. When the difference that puts you in a minority is something you passionately identify with, questions and challenges can feel like attacks on your very being.

But I think that for home educators to compare our current predicament unfavourably with the situation of unspecified but better protected “other minorities” is a mistaken and dangerous argument.

First of all, it’s not true. There is no legal protection for all minorities in this country. Some groups have legal protection because of historical injustice, but not all of these are minorities. The Sex Discrimination Act gives some protection to women, but women are not a minority. The legislation was part of a struggle to alter the historical imbalance of power between men and women. It was a question of power, not numbers. There is also no protection in place for most minorities - for example, the minority of people who voted Labour at last general election, or the minority who choose a vegan diet.

When people talk vaguely about “other minorities”, they are of course not talking about pigeon fanciers or ballroom dancers, but about groups whose legal protection against hatred and discrimination has been hard won after decades of struggle. That protection has not been achieved because lawmakers think minorities need protection per se, but because the specific history of those struggles has led to a political recognition of the need to make a stand against racism, homophobia, or prejudice against disabled people.

If we claim that we need protection, just like those other groups, we are not only belittling their specific histories, but also losing an opportunity to talk about our own particular issue. This is my second problem with the argument. When people misunderstand or criticise home educators, it is an opportunity for us to say important things about education, about privacy, and about freedom. Whether they listen or understand what we say is up to them, of course. But if our response is merely to claim special concessions on the grounds of being a minority, we deprive ourselves of the chance to explain why the freedom to home educate is important for every parent.

Keeping educational options open and free of state control is something of immense value to parents who currently use schools, as well as to those of us who are currently home educating. It’s not really about us being treated unfairly, but about everyone’s future choices being restricted.

I think what I am trying to say has been said better in this post, by a talented US blogger I read regularly.

There is an important point to be made about acceptance of difference and diversity, but claiming we are an oppressed minority is not the way to make it. Freedom of choice is not the same as freedom from hatred.

It wasn’t us! Honest!

2009-02-22T22:48:00.002Z

I am sitting here with wonderfully toasty feet, because D has finished a pair of woolly slipper socks for me.

Yesterday we had the most glorious weather and a good day. We went to the Brighton Science Festival Bright Sparks day. There were lots of things to do and see. Pearl was very taken with the robot hoover (latest model apparently) that would do your hoovering all by itself while you were out. I wasn’t convinced it would cope with the grot that ends up on our carpets and I think it could be killed by sucking up a Sylvanian shoe. Leo liked the fossils, bones, hooves and skins brought by some people from the Grant Museum. The kids were very good at getting themselves through the crowd to do the things they wanted to do. Pearlie did the egg challenge. She gave her egg some good wrapping but, when she dropped it from a stairwell, it still broke! Leo did a mammal detective thing which he thought was a bit slow but they did give him a mini magnifying glass, so he was happy. He also made a dummy ‘sneeze’ and did a quiz about marine life. I asked him if was interested in the quiz in the microbes room but he told me he was ‘quizzed out’ by that time.

The day was held in the senior bit of a secondary school, so that was quite interesting to nose about. The weather was so good we took chairs from the canteen and ate our packed lunch outside.

After the science festival we went down to the sea. I found I had a desperate urge to be on the beach, which was no doubt brought on by the sun and which appeared to be shared with hundreds of other people. We bought the kids some chips and sat on a groyne looking at the sad hulk of the West Pier. We walked part of the way home along the beach and then hopped on a bus.
Leo had picked up a pebble with a hole, inside which is a little crystal cave. As we were sitting around tonight he was looking at it with a torch when he said,
“Would this be classified as a geode?”

Leo also blogged about Darwin today, so he must be having a science kick.

I went to work today and came home to the smell of cleaning products. P is on a mission to earn herself jobs money for more materials for mobiles. On my way along the street I had noticed that there was some ‘no cars’ chalking on the pavement. In previous months and years this has been done by our kids but the writing/spelling etc. suggested that this time it was not. The kids confirmed this. Then, this evening, we had a knock on the door from a neighbour who was angry about a ‘no cars’ leaflet – hand drawn by a child – that had come through her door. She was rather deflated when Dani told her it was nothing to do with us! I wish I’d answered the door because I had some bottled indignation from some workplace dealings that I would have liked to vent. I don’t see how any adult could take offence at a leaflet written by a seven year old, for goodness sake. We got one of these leaflets posted back through the door from another neighbour, with the message that he had sold his car and would not be buying another. Well, that’s nice to know but it how can we spread the word that it wasn’t P and L this time? I think it’s really funny how this has caught on with other kids in the street. P and L say they know who it was – some younger kids from across the road.

Right, we have a busy week ahead, so time for a cuppa and then some sleep, I think.

Oh, the irony

2009-02-20T17:56:00.001Z

Today I am struck today by the fact that our primary reason for home educating our children is out of respect for their choice, for their individuality and for their right to self-determination. Alongside this is our respect for their right to privacy and ownership of their intellectual property. What is bizarre is that this latest review is (apparently) about children’s rights. I could laugh, or possibly weep, or maybe a bit of both. You see, I am not a ‘family rights’ advocate. I don’t think that children are owned by their parents – children are their own people and they deserve the care of all adults who come into contact with them. I think children’s rights as human beings should come first in any civilised society. Trouble is we don’t live in one of those.

So, I’m angry and I’ll just chuck the gloves off for a bit. Who is it who has to send out the police (the POLICE) to capture children back to their place of learning? Is it home educators who are chasing their children through the street with the law in tow? No, it isn’t. It is the local authorities who send out teams of adults to capture children like the childcatcher. And, are these children committing an offence? No, they are not. They have not broken a law.

Oh, but I can hear them say... “The children have a right to an education and they have to be caught and put back in the schools so they can get what’s good for them.” Like animals running wild? “They have to be saved from themselves – before they become ‘failures’. And if that doesn’t work then we’ll offer them the ultimate support of sending their parents to jail.” Yes, that’s great for children, isn’t it? What humanity, what understanding, what ‘care’.

So, let me put it plainly. Don’t come to me talking about children’s rights. I don’t need your lecture. I don’t ride roughshod over the needs, desires, dreams of my children. They are precious and I know it. And, you know what? When children live with that respect they learn like plants growing in fertile soil. They learn with a hunger and joy. Your tick boxes and statistics aren’t needed. But thanks all the same...

Accentuate the Positive

2009-02-20T00:41:00.001Z

Ok, so I’m feeling that it might be a good time to write something about the good things that have come to our family, and in particular our children, through home education.

1. The opportunity to get to know babies/toddlers/children/teens and adults and spend time in mixed groups of all ages. In our home ed community in this town, my kids know other adults they can turn to for help and support. They can watch older kids and teens and learn by example. I am often struck by the kindly intervention of teens when little ones are in trouble. It is rather lovely to see a boy of thirteen or fourteen pick up a toddler and return him to his mum or dad. Leo likes to talk about the babies he will have and how he will care for them – prompted by seeing the care of babies and toddlers in the home ed community. Pearl can be at a home ed gathering without one of us and I know there are caring adults there who will look out for her.

2. Time for the children to really indulge the things they love. We have a lot of group and social commitments but there is still plenty of ‘spare’ time, in which the children are happily occupied and productive. P is currently really into making mobiles of different kinds – designing, costing, buying and making. L is still a drawing and writing machine. When I got in from work tonight he presented me with a new book he’d written. This one was produced on the pc – typed (pretty speedily now) and illustrated with a mixture of images found on the internet and his own drawings scanned in. Does it need saying that these autonomous activities are crammed with learning? I’m not standing over them saying, “now it’s time for maths/art/ict/literacy”. They are learning in the same way they did as little children playing with a posting box or finger paints – driven by curiosity and creative urges. They work on these things to their own satisfaction and they have high standards.

3. The opportunity to afford trips and holidays at cheaper times of the year. Trips like our recent one to York (which we took at the cheapest time of year possible!) are great opportunities to broaden the children’s horizons. Our children get to go to museums without clipboards. This might sound a bit silly and a bit smug but it really matters in our family. We always feel a bit sad for the kids on school trips who race through, snatching up answers for their worksheets, with no time to just stop and stare. I will never forget the school children aboard little boats in the Isles of Scilly. Every day they had a sheet to note down the name of the boat, the weather, their destination – and so on. I was mesmerised by the light and the sun on the water and our children were always on the lookout for seals or puffins. We saw both. Our children just love to get out in the world and see things. We do a lot of that.

4. The fact that our children can choose from a range of educational opportunities day to day, month to month and year to year. Sometimes they will enjoy a one-off event at a museum, park or theatre. Sometimes they commit to a short course of sessions in something. P is currently loving a ten week course with the Sussex Wildlife Trust, making fires, whittling a butter knife and creating fairy worlds in the tree stumps and moss. Sometimes they commit to something for months or years. Their band is going strong in its third year. But they can change anything they want to change. They are reflective and serious about the things they do. They learn to deal with the waxing and waning of enthusiasm and differentiate between a tough moment to be worked through and an ending of interest and commitment. I wish I’d got more experience of that when I was young.

This is just a few of the positives. I could go on all night but I’m tired now. In this moment of some stress for home edders in this country, let’s try to share some of the good stuff at the heart of what we do. Let’s point out to anyone from the dcsf who might drop by, what it is that’s so good that we are all prepared to defend it so vociferously.

(And, if that didn’t convince them, here’s a moment from yesterday... L was dismayed to find that I was leaving for work as he really wanted to do some maths with me. This morning he made sure he asked me nice and early so he wouldn’t miss his chance again. How many eight year olds in school come running to their teacher waving a maths book and asking to work on it with the teacher’s support? How many school teachers would be able to make a cup of tea and spend a happy half hour giving one to one support to such a child?)

Conspiracy or cock-up?

2009-02-19T00:51:00.002Z

What is going on with the HE review? Is there a master plan dreamed up by a secret cabal somewhere, or are we just being caught in the crossfire of conflicting demands and pressures? Are the millions who work for local councils powerless drones, unknowingly doing the bidding of their faceless masters, or people with the best of intentions trying to make sure the next tragedy or scandal doesn’t happen on their watch? Are “they” trying to bludgeon us into submission with repeated consultations until they get the answer they want, or does the left hand not really know what the right hand is doing?

I think, strangely enough, that the truth is a complex blend of all these things.

The ECM agenda is a powerful idea, which is being strongly pushed by central government, but which has also taken on a life of its own. Anyone who works in any children’s service must by now have the five outcomes virtually tattooed on the inside of their eyelids.

This kind of thing is always happening in local government – new jargon, new buzzwords. One year, it’s all about positive images of minority communities, and a few years later the important thing is mainstreaming equalities initiatives. People who want to get on in the system soon learn to pick up this year’s key phrases and repeat them with conviction. People who’ve been around the block a few times soon learn how to take it all with a pinch of salt, and get on with doing the actual work.

People who don’t fit in with the prevailing orthodoxy are always a problem. It’s unfortunate for home educators that the prevailing orthodoxy of the moment has a lot to do with tracking, counting, checking, and meeting targets (all with reference to the outcomes, of course). I imagine that the people who have been tasked with doing all this counting find the existence of some people who are legitimately not on any list, really rather irritating. How are you supposed to identify the children who are *not* receiving an education if you can’t be sure you know about everyone who *is* receiving one. You’re never going to get your books to balance, and it’s all a bit untidy.

I’ve no doubt that *somebody* is determined to iron out some of these annoying wrinkles, and is hoping the review will enable that to happen. Maybe a group of LAs with the ear of a civil servant at the DCSF. But I’d be extremely surprised if the aims underlying the Enjoy and Achieve outcome were drafted in order to pressurise HE children into schools. It seems clear to me that they were drafted by people who weren’t thinking about HE at all.

Why has ECM pervaded children’s services so thoroughly? Is it because it has been decreed from above? Yes, partly. But also because people who work hard, providing things that families do need and want – like outpatient clinics for children with cystic fibrosis, toddler groups on estates with no other community spaces, or after school clubs for kids whose parents need to go to work – want to be able to offer those families some semblance of a co-ordinated *service*, rather than a disorganised hotch-potch where you have to explain your story over and over again to each new person you meet.

I don’t think those people are interested in persecuting home educators. I’m sure they’d rather the funding for the review was being spent on some more staff. I think they’ve been sold ContactPoint as the answer to their problems and I’m sure most of them know it will be nothing of the kind. I think they’ve been sold ECM as a way to get everybody pulling together for some evidently worthy aims, and they have more urgent things to do than to wonder whether some awkward oddballs are not convinced by the whole concept of ‘outcomes’.

In some ways, this is an ideological attack on us, and we do need to continue to make clear our objections to the ECM orthodoxy. But it’s not really possible to win or lose this kind of ideological struggle in a straightforward way. I cut my campaigning teeth on Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, which said:

“A local authority shall not:
a) Intentionally promote homosexuality
b) Intentionally promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.”

It was entirely ideological, and made its way onto the statute books as part of some complicated horse trading within the Conservative Party, I think.

At the height of the campaign against this, people were genuinely fearful that books by gay authors would be removed from public libraries, gay teachers would be sacked, and lesbian mothers would lose custody of their children. But what happened in the end was that the law had no real teeth, partly just because our time had come. Putting this hate speech in the Local Government Act was horrible, but in the end, it wasn’t enough to stop the change that was coming anyway.

I think the review is partly an attempt to slow down the rapid increase in home education. I suspect that the recommendations, when they eventually come, will include compulsory registration, prior consent for deregistration, and annual visits with a right of access to HE children. All of these are the opportunities already taken by unfriendly Local Authority staff to dissuade, intimidate or harass families they think should not be home educating.

While we certainly need to continue to state our objections to the ECM orthodoxy, I think we also need to give some thought to ways in which we as a community can effectively resist and subvert this attempt to keep HE confined to those of us with backgrounds deemed acceptable by the educational establishment.

Pearl's Mobile

2009-02-16T23:46:00.003Z

Pearlie has asked us to blog about the mobile she has made recently. She’s now working on another one – fish based. Anyway here is her lovely spoon mobile. She conceived, designed and made this entirely independently, including buying the necessary things like wire and spoons. You can't tell from the picture, but each spoon has a glass 'pebble' glued into the bowl. I think this looks like each spoon contains a drop of some magic liquid. Cool, eh?

stuff

2009-02-16T09:42:00.000Z

Gosh, is anyone else feeling the need of spring? I have been getting off the bus early on my way to work, so I can seek out buds and those little blunt, green knives of spring bulbs popping up. I need to know warmth and light are on their way. It was certainly heartening to find it still light when leaving work this weekend.

We’ve been back in the swing again since returning from York but are now having a different week because it’s half-term and several of the kids’ groups stop during school holidays. The grandmothers are also away on an exciting trip to Vietnam and Cambodia, so no-one is going to see them. The kids seem to be starting this week with a lie in as they haven’t appeared yet.

Everyone in the family is really busy these days. There is a lot going on and a lot being produced in the way of art, craft, writing and blogging. Dani, I and some other local home edders have been reading and commenting on a new draft EHE policy from the local authority. We feed back to the local community regularly and don’t claim to be representing anyone, BTW. We are also independent of any national home ed organisation. It’s taken more than three years since we first asked to see the policy and were told it was all going to be updated. With the new review in the air we have no way of knowing if it will ever be adopted or if it will be changed again. It is all very tedious. I have reason to be believe that what happens IRL is only ever vaguely related to policies anyway, so it does feel a little frustrating, to say the least.

Work on our roof is going to start in a couple of weeks, which is good, if a little frightening. I am hoping for a dry, mild spring to make it easier for the people doing the work.

Dani finished my new cardigan, which is lovely and warm and fits me really well. It is lovely to have something that fits my shoulders and arms as most garments dangle off my hands by several inches. Have a look at her knitting notes for photos.

Right, well I guess I should get on with something more useful than this.

We went to York

2009-02-08T11:14:00.003Z

We got back, yesterday, from a week in York. It was cold and snowy – much like the rest of the country - but we had a good time. Here’s a selection of the things we did there. We didn’t take loads of photos because it was too cold and/or snowy to stop and get out the camera!

We were staying in a house with a table tennis table in the cellar, so we played with that. The games were not played to any rules – you just had to keep the ball in play. So it involved much leaping about getting the ball off the floor, steps or other family members.

We played in the snow. I discovered that my middle aged bum, clad in waterproof trousers, negates the need for any type of sledge.

We went to the York Castle Museum twice. This was great. It has a reconstructed Victorian Street – all brilliantly lit and with sound and people dressed up in character. It also had a Sixties exhibition which the children really enjoyed. I spent a long while listening to peoples’ memories of that decade. It also had weaponry and cells – including the one Dick Turpin was held in. A room furnished in Fifties style was full of things I remembered from my grandparents’ house and that has given me an urge to write about that house.

We went to the Minster. We climbed the 275 steps of the main tower to look down on snow covered York. This made me and Dani feel quite sick! Leo is nervous of heights but he was brave. P counted all the steps, of course, but was not able to confirm that it was 275 – she made it 261. The crypt was great, with bits of Roman remains on display and original Norman Minster building etc. The Minster had tombs of Archbishops who all seem to be portrayed lounging about – very odd.

Dani and Pearl went to the Quilt Museum, which they enjoyed, while Leo and I went to York Dungeon. I must say I was unimpressed with the Dungeon. They are a chain and we went to the one in Edinburgh, which didn’t really impress me either, but Leo wanted to go. I don’t mind all the spooky stuff (though Leo claims I was trembling throughout) but I don’t like all the silly, suggestive humour.

We went to Jorvik. The kids both loved this and I thought it was good too. We managed to largely avoid a school trip, which meant there was more peace and space to look around.

We spent a lot of time in bookshops, where people spent money and browsed.
We went to Clifford’s Tower, which has a grim and grisly past.

We spent too much money eating in cafes and escaping the cold. The real drawback of a trip at this time of year is that, I think. We usually do a lot of eating outside when we’re in a city. But it was just too cold to contemplate that.

We watched a lot of The Simpsons and Friends. Pearlie is really into Friends at the moment. I must confess I can’t stand it, so I got lots of time reading. I finished Unless, by Carol Shields, which I have been reading rather cautiously, fearful of what might be revealed. Dani was reading a book about Pi (also A Mathematician's Apology by G.H. Hardy and Lyra's Oxford by Phillip Pullman) and Pearlie finished the latest Lady Grace book – Keys. Leo is still ploughing his way through Inkheart but was also reading a new book he bought in York – Encyclopedia Horrifica. I read him some stuff about UFOs when he was in the bath and it took me back to the kind of books enjoyed by one of my brothers, when we were kids. We also got the Terry Deary book about York and shared bits of that.

We had a great time at the National Railway Museum. I was very taken with the carriages from Royal Trains and decided I’d like to go home that way. Pearlie and Leo got lots out of it too. While sitting in the Japanese Bullet Train, watching a wordless film of people sitting in a Bullet Train, we reminded Pearlie of a video she loved when tiny. I can’t remember what it was called – we just called it the trains video – and we had it over and over again from the Mobile Library. It consisted of about an hour of facts and film about trains all over the world – narrated in a lovely ‘documentary’ voice. Pearlie was able to remember it – vaguely. I think D and I will remember it forever!

Leo made a lovely book about ghosts, while we were there. Pearlie did some fab drawings too. Dani got close to finishing my new cardy. I fell asleep on the sofa a few times! I was plagued by nightmares while we were there, as I have bad memories of York, but I am glad I went.

Things we couldn’t do because of time of year and weather were a boat trip and a ghost walk. I would have liked to have been able to walk more slowly and look up more – but a face full of snow/sleet makes that tricky! It was annoying that the walls were closed for the whole week, once the snow had fallen. Little bits were open but we wanted to do a complete walk around.

One of the things we realised is how quickly we can get to York by train – it’s only two hours from London – so we could even do a day trip. Certainly, a single night away would fit in quite a lot, so we can go back.

The journey home was a bit tough because we were next to a frustrated toddler. He didn’t have anything much to do and was very into throwing things, which was hard for his mum and sister – but he did an awful lot of miserable crying for about two hours. We also got very slow because people were trespassing on the line to see a steam train that was due to go by! But we were home soon enough and the grandmothers had been in to leave us bread, butter and milk and turn up our thermostat. That was lovely.

Here are a selection of photos. I hope these are all taken by me and apologies to P if I've used any taken by her.

On Dick Turpin's bed - in the condemned cell.

At Railway Museum.

Pretty, eh?

York Castle Museum, weaponry displays. Some people enjoyed this more than others!

Closer to fine?

2009-01-30T00:14:00.003Z

I’ve had a few days of wanting to listen to the Indigo Girls and not engage with people. But I have, in fact, been going to work and so on, so I must have managed not to succumb to this desire.

So, what’s brought this on? Several things, I guess. Culminating in that feeling of being in a bubble.

Personally, I was dismayed to find Peter Hitchens leaping to the defence of home education as I find the man’s view generally objectionable and I loathe the Daily Mail. In fact, on the same day that Hitchins was writing about home ed, Melanie Phillips (that fount of all bile) was contributing this piece to the world’s understanding of lesbian and gay parents. This bit really put me back in touch with who I am, I must say.

“The prevailing argument that all types of family are as good as each other as far as the children are concerned simply isn’t true. While some children emerge relatively unscathed from irregular households, children need to be brought up by the two people ‘who made me’ - or, in adoptive households, in a family which closely replicates that arrangement.
Where that does not happen, the child’s deepest sense of his or her identity as a human being is at some level damaged.”

What a relief, to find that I am still a malign influence in the eyes of the Daily Mail. Not much of an accusation really - that D and I are damaging our children’s deepest sense of their identity as human beings! Maybe I need to keep in mind that my enemy’s enemy is not always my friend.

The thing is, I imagine that some people home educate partly to keep their children free from the corrupting influence of material that would tell them about people like me and families like mine. Some home educate because they think that schools are a hotbed of ‘political correctness’. So I guess they’re happy to get the Hitchens seal of approval. But I know that when Hitchens says,

“What the modern left really don't like about homeschooling is that it is independent of the state, and threatens its egalitarian monopoly from below. If it became a mass movement, it would be very dangerous to their project of enforcing equality of outcome, while using the schools to push radical ideas on sex, drugs, morality and politics.”

he has no idea that he’s being read by a ‘homeschooler’ with ideas on sex, drugs, morality and politics that are way more radical than anything the Nu Labour state schools teach. I take it he thinks that this govt is the “modern left” but I can’t quite imagine what it’s left of these days. But then, maybe I’m just one of those “few retired hippies and eccentrics”. Guess so.

Back to Indigo Girls, I think.

Dani's response to the HE review

2009-01-28T00:02:00.004Z

Now sent (slightly amended - the final version is now shown here). Response number 624.

Question 1: Do you think the current system for safeguarding children who are educated at home is adequate? Please let us know why you think that.

No Response

I am not prepared to answer this question as written, as it presumes that there are specific issues to do with the welfare of home educated children as a group, and I do not accept this premise.

As the questions on this review are so ambiguous and confusing, I think it will be difficult for many respondents to give yes/no answers which accurately reflect their opinions. I hope you will therefore give due weight to the actual content of the responses, and not attempt to draw inferences from the statistics.

If you are asking whether home educated children are as well protected as school children by the current safeguarding system, my answer is yes. You cannot presume that children are kept safe if they attend school, and there is no reason to presume that home educated children are seen by fewer trustworthy people in the course of their day to day lives than schooled children are. My home educated children, for example, spend time with dozens of other children every week, and are regularly cared for at clubs, classes and groups by ten different trusted adults outside their immediate family. Home education, in itself, is not a significant risk factor, and does not merit this kind of special attention.

As I understand it, the current system for safeguarding children who are educated at home is the same as the system for safeguarding children who are educated at school. Unless there is reason to believe otherwise, parents (whatever their educational choices) are presumed to be caring for their children properly. If anyone (teacher, neighbour, friend, member of the public, health professional) has concerns about a child's welfare, they may report their concerns to the relevant local authority, who are supposed to investigate and offer support and services to help the family. In cases of severe abuse or neglect, local authorities have powers to become very closely involved with children's upbringing, including to the extent of removing children from their families.

If you are asking whether this current system is doing an adequate job for children (whatever their place of education) who experience abuse, I would say no. I don't think the current system addresses the root causes of child abuse. There are numerous cases of children who were well known to the relevant authorities but who nonetheless suffered serious harm at the hands of their parents. There are also numerous cases of children who have suffered serious harm within the care system, and many others who have suffered harm as a result of the system's unwarranted scrutiny of their families. Yet more children face abuse at home or at school, without being able to get any help from 'the system'. Either their carers do not notice their distress or do not care enough to take action, or the children themselves are silenced by shame or fear of worse consequences if they speak out.

Underlying all these failings of the current system is not a lack of information about home educating families, but a lack of respect for children's rights and freedoms. These rights include the right to be heard and listened to with regard to their education and all aspects of their lives, the right to privacy, and the right to freedom from harm and abuse of all kinds. I do not think that the current system for safeguarding children is actually based on a commitment to respect these rights, and so it fails to keep children safe.

It seems to me that if you want to improve the current system for safeguarding children, you should make a fundamental shift away from imposing a single set of values on everyone, and put serious resources into offering real, responsive and sympathetic support to families who are having difficulties. You should give children a real voice in society, so that they are more likely to speak about abuse wherever it occurs. You should look at the abuse that happens every day in schools, and break down the ingrained power structures that enable it to survive and thrive there. You should stop wasting energy and resources trying to micromanage every aspect of the lives of law abiding families, and accept that there is value in difference and diversity.

2. Do you think that home educated children are able to achieve the following five Every Child Matters outcomes? Please let us know why you think that.

2 a) Be healthy

No Response

I am not able to answer yes or no to any of the parts of this question as written, for two reasons. Firstly, I do not accept the notion of 'outcomes' to be 'achieved' by children. I understand that local authorities like to be able to measure the impact of their own activities by asking the public if they have benefited or if their lives have been improved. This is a very far cry from setting these 'outcomes' out as if they are hurdles for individual children to jump. This is completely at odds with my approach to raising my children. I do not have ambitions for my children, other than ones they choose for themselves. I am not prepared to measure them up against someone else's ambitions for them.

Secondly, even within this flawed framework, the question does not make sense, because home educated children are not a homogenous group. As I understand it, the question is not asking about my own children, but about home educated children in general. I have included some specific comments regarding each outcome.

Of course home educated children can be healthy, if their health is good. If they are ill, then they are not able to be healthy. Being home educated has no relationship with whether people are able to be healthy. This is like saying "do you think that bus drivers are able to be healthy?"

I find it offensive that children who are living with ill health, and their families, should be portrayed as being some kind of failures by the glib phrasing of this "outcome".

2 b) Stay safe

No Response

This is like saying "do you think children who go to Girls Brigade are able to stay safe?" Whether a child is safe depends on the individual circumstances of their life, not some incidental factor like whether or not they are home educated. My home educated children, like all other people, make decisions about risk and safety every day. As their parents, we give them information which we hope will help them to make wise decisions. Sometimes they have accidents and hurt themselves. Sometimes they make wrong decisions and learn from this experience. They are loved and supported, whatever they do. I think "stay safe" is a simplistic and meaningless phrase when applied to the complex business of living a life.

2 c) Enjoy and achieve

No response

This is like saying "do you think local government officers are able to enjoy and achieve?" What on earth does it mean? Enjoy what? Achieve what? All the home educated children I know (some hundreds of children) enjoy their lives for a good proportion of the time, and achieve a wide range of amazing and impressive things they have chosen for themselves to do. Nobody enjoys every single day of their life, but again, this has very little to do with whether or not they are home educated, go to Girls Brigade, like toffee, or any other incidental fact about them.

2 d) Make a positive contribution.

No response

I don't understand what this means. Make a positive contribution to what? Who defines 'positive'?

2 e) Achieve economic well-being

No response

Are children supposed to 'achieve' this while still children? Is this not actually about measuring the levels of child poverty in the country? If so, there is little any individual child can do about it, home educated or not.

3. Do you think that Government and local authorities have an obligation to ensure that all children in this country are able to achieve the five outcomes? If you answered yes, how do you think Government should ensure this?

No

The Government does not have an obligation to ensure anything of the kind. The Government's obligations are set out in law. The relevant section of the Children Act 2004 is Section 10, which obliges local authorities to "make arrangements to promote co-operation between—
(a)
the authority;
(b)
each of the authority’s relevant partners; and
(c)
such other persons or bodies as the authority consider appropriate, being persons or bodies of any nature who exercise functions or are engaged in activities in relation to children in the authority’s area."

These arrangements are to be made "with a view to improving the well-being of children in the authority’s area so far as relating to—
(a)
physical and mental health and emotional well-being;
(b)
protection from harm and neglect;
(c)
education, training and recreation;
(d)
the contribution made by them to society;
(e)
social and economic well-being."

This is not the same as ensuring that all children are able to achieve the five outcomes.

The act goes on to say:

"In making arrangements under this section a children’s services authority in England must have regard to the importance of parents and other persons caring for children in improving the well-being of children."

So the obligations of Government and local authorities are *not* to ensure any particular outcomes for individual children, but to cooperate with partners in order to improve children's well-being, having regard to the importance of parents.

Section 11 of the same Act requires local authorities to carry out their *existing* duties with regard to the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. It does not give them additional duties or powers. Nor does Section 175 of the Education Act 2002.

If the government did have an obligation to ensure that all children were able to achieve these five 'outcomes', the government would be in big trouble.

When my local authority installed a zebra crossing on the busy road between my house and the nearest park, this improved the well being of all the local children with regard to their safety and gave them easier access to the park, thus making it easier for them to be healthy.

But it did not *ensure* that my children are able to "be healthy" or "stay safe". If my children don't use the zebra crossing to get to the park, or don't want to go to the park at all, or if a driver ignores the zebra crossing and my children are injured on the road, I would have no claim against the local authority or the government for failing to ensure their safety or health.

Nobody can ensure these things. That is not to say we should not think about them, but ultimately each person is responsible for their own decisions and the consequences of their choices and actions. I cannot control the future for my children, and nor can the government. It is a waste of everyone's energy trying to come up with ways for the government to achieve something that is impossible.

4. Do you think there should be any changes made to the current system for supporting home educating families? If you answered yes, what should they be? If you answered no, why do you think that?

Yes

I think local authorities should give supporting home educating families a try. They might find it helps them to fulfil their obligations. As things stand, very few authorities offer real support, which I would define as services that assist families to achieve their own aims. Some home educators would like easier access to public exams. Some would like a free venue in which to hold group meetings. Both these things are easy for local authorities to provide, and difficult for individual families to arrange for themselves. But very few local authorities even ask home educators what they would like in the way of services. Instead, they send letters inviting themselves to visit, in order to assess the suitability of our children's education (something that is well beyond their remit). This is not support. Support is something that is offered, without strings, in response to an expressed need or request from the recipient of the support.

5. Do you think there should be any changes made to the current system for monitoring home educating families? If you answered yes, what should they be? If you answered no, why do you think that?

No response

I can't answer this, as there is no "current system for monitoring home educating families". I don't want to see a change to this situation, as nobody has the authority to monitor us and I think this is how it should stay.

However, most local authorities, and apparently the author of this review document, seem to think that there is a system for monitoring us and that local authorities have a duty to do so. This is frustrating, as we all spent a lot of time and energy on the 2007 consultation leading to the publication of the DCSF guildelines on home education, which clearly state at paragraph 2.7 that "Local authorities have no statutory duties in relation to monitoring the quality of home education on a routine basis."

I would not want you to think that answering No to this question meant that I was happy with the current situation. What I would like is for local authorities to understand the law on home education, offer real support where it is required, and otherwise to leave home educating parents alone to get on with raising and educating our children, as is *our* duty under section 7 of the Education Act 1996.

6. 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?

Abuse of children occurs in all kinds of homes. Any family *could* be used as a cover for child abuse. Having read extensively and thought seriously about this issue for many years, I believe that the key thing which enables adults to harm and abuse children is the fact that adults are able to control many aspects of children's lives, through a complicated web of practical and emotional relationships and structures. Because we generally live in small family groups, where all the economic resources are controlled by adults, and because children rely in the first instance on their parents to meet their emotional needs, parents have a lot of power over children in all families. Most parents have no wish to harm their children, and take care not to use their power to do so, even unintentionally. Some parents who have been damaged by their own life experiences, do cause harm to their children in a variety of different ways. When this happens, the very structures which give parents power and control over children also make it possible for the abuse to be concealed or explained away.

I don't think the government can ensure that this does not happen in home educating families, any more than it can ensure it does not happen in families where the children attend school. I think there are things the government could and should do, but unless the power relationships between children and adults change, and people who have been emotionally damaged are supported through appropriate therapy to acknowledge and control their behaviour as adults, there is no way the government can ensure that abuse is prevented in any group or community.

Having said that, there are valuable practical steps that can be taken to support children who are facing abuse, and there are things the authorities could learn from home educators about how to provide services that would actually be of help to home educated children who experience abuse, whether this is in their home or elsewhere.

The first thing is to provide training for local authority staff with responsibility for child protection, so that these staff have a better understanding of home education. Home educating families are often erroneously or maliciously reported to social services because their children are visibly not at school, and it can be extremely distressing for perfectly law-abiding parents and their children if they are visited by a social worker who approaches home education from a position of ignorance and prejudice. Home education *in itself* is not a cause for concern, and if social workers were more knowledgeable about the law and about home education methods, there would be a much better basis for communication between home educators and local authorities. This in itself would, over time, enable home educators to feel more able to communicate with the local authority if they have concerns or fears about a child.

Secondly, local authorities should offer universal services for children, regardless of their educational setting, and should make an effort to publicise these to home educated children as well as schooled children. Many areas have active networks of home educators, with regular meetings and gatherings. If approached politely and respectfully, HE group organisers may well be willing to distribute information about an open access helpline or children's advocate, if this were something available to all children in an area.

At a national level, the government could clearly indicate support for a shift in the unequal power relationships between adults and children by changing the law to give children equal protection from assault, and abolishing the archaic and unjust defence of "reasonable punishment". This government's persistent refusal to take this step gives the lie to their claims of being concerned above all with keeping children safe.

Finally, I think the government should put more resources into talking therapies for people who have experienced abuse and anyone who abuses their power over children. I think this would be a much more valuable and effective use of funds than attempting to track every child and tick boxes for the simplistic 'outcomes' discussed in documents like this review.

Meme - 8 random facts about me

2009-01-26T08:31:00.002Z

We've been tagged by Gill and I'll give this a go as I'm up and waiting for the supermarket shop to arrive. I think I've done something similar before, so I'll try not to duplicate.

1. My mum was born in the street behind the one in which I grew up.
2. My first independent swimming happened when I fell in a river. Nothing like an incentive!
3. A sabotaged bomb saved my mum's life in childhood and so, you could say, I'm here thanks to the actions of some brave resistance in Nazi occupied Europe somewhere.
4. I can fall asleep anywhere.
5. I love a Torch Song.
6. I was born as the youngest of four in a boy, girl, boy, girl pattern.
7. I once bleached my hair to a very unappealing colour and shaved it all off to a number one buzz cut. That was a cold winter in Yorkshire.
8. I wanted to be five foot eight inches tall when I was a kid. This was never going to happen and I see the world from about seven inches shorter than that.

Tagging? I don't really do that. But, if you're reading and you want to tell us something about you - please do.

Families, children and the state

2009-01-25T23:00:00.001Z

All this review stuff has had me thinking a lot about children, families and the state. I’m not someone who believes that the state has no place in family life. I believe that the family home is not a safe place for far too many children – and indeed women. I should probably say men too but the figures do reveal that it’s far more often women and children who bear the brunt of abusive family relationships. I am aware that the NSPCC might not be the most trusted of organisations among home educators at the moment, but I’m prepared to accept their figures as they’re properly sourced. I’m no fan of this government and I think they have control freaky tendencies but I also think that we need to be honest about the fact that family homes are not always a refuge from the harsh world outside – sometimes they are a prison. That is, I imagine, as likely to be true in home educating families as any other.

So, if I accept this, why don’t I like the premise of the current home education ‘review’? Well, for a start there is the assumption that home educated children are *more* at risk of living in an abusive background than schooled children. But what really worries me is that the ‘solution’ that the government will likely propose will be based on inspection – by people who will probably be fairly ignorant of the theories and practice of home education. If I were to suggest one thing to the government that would increase the likelihood of home educating families engaging with state services – of all kinds – it would be to ensure that the relevant staff have been given proper training with regard to home education.

In short, I believe that the government could do a great deal to increase trust in its already existing social services, if it were to train its staff properly and challenge the prejudiced and suspicious attitudes that many of them display when they encounter home educating families. People won’t come and ask for support if they know that their choice of education will be under threat and/or seen as a symptom of a dysfunctional family. Should a home educator have a concern about another home educating family, they will be wary of services staffed by people taught that ‘regular school attendance’ is the key to healthy child development. They may also be aware that the reputation of home educators as a whole can be at stake when social services staff, or others, generalise from a position of ignorance. I think it is this ignorance – something the government could certainly attempt to rectify – that they should sort out, before they start to suggest that increased *inspection* will be in anyone’s best interest.

Latest govt consultation

2009-01-20T23:43:00.002Z

Oh, blimey, here we go again. It seems that there are people in govt. who will not rest until they have managed to secure more powers for the local authorities, in regard to home educated children. The latest govt consultation can be found here. I think this is the third consultation that we have had to respond to in less than two years.

The consultation document is a rather sorry little thing that reminds me of an undergrad student’s hurried first attempt at writing a questionnaire. To find out rather more about the consultation you need to read the terms of reference document.

I do have sympathy with the desire to provide safeguards for young people forced into marriage or domestic servitude. I also think that there are things badly wrong with the way we (as a society) attempt to ensure the safety of children from neglect and other forms of abuse. But, when the consultation document says:

“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?”

I’m somewhat mystified. It seems to me that all kinds of things ‘could’ be used to cover such scenarios. But *is* home education being used in this way? Given the tiny number of home educated children – as a proportion of the population – and the far larger numbers of abused children – as a proportion of the population – is this really a major problem? Many things are used as a cover for the abuse of children, I suspect. How about moving house frequently? Couldn't this be used as a way of keeping abuse secret? If so, should we introduce special monitoring for families that move house frequently? Of course not. That would be a ridiculous waste of resources, wouldn't it? Yes, some abuse may be uncovered, but much more might go uninvestigated while time and money was wasted contacting people about whom there was no concern, other than their choice to move house several times. It seems to me that our choice of educational provision is the same - not relevant in itself.

No, I suspect that there is another agenda here. There are people who are frustrated by their lack of power to swan into the homes of their fellow citizens and tell them how to bring up their children. It’s not about supporting children and young people – far less about empowering them. You can tell how much our govt respects the rights of our children by the fact that it is still legal to assault a child in this country (under the ‘cover’ of ‘reasonable chastisement’) and that our children are subject to police sweeps on the streets (called ‘truancy patrols’). No, it’s not for the children that they keep pushing for more powers. It’s about setting up procedures and making sure that families can’t stray too far from the state-sanctioned norm. It’s about keeping us all in the Five Outcomes Fold.

The consultation document loves the ‘Five Outcomes’ – those banal, mantra like statements of supposed universal desire.

“Do you think that home educated children are able to achieve the following five Every Child Matters outcomes? Please let us know why you think that.

Be healthy

Stay safe

Enjoy and acheive (their spelling mistake BTW)

Make a positive contribution.

achieve economic well-being”

I don’t like the ‘outcomes’ – as I may have mentioned before... I find some of them downright offensive. How about ‘Be healthy’? Is it a failing to be ill? Should someone have prevented it? If your child has ME, or leukaemia, or even just a common cold, is this a sign of poor care? No. Even worse, is it a failing of the child? Never mind your suffering, kid, why aren’t you achieving health? I mean, I know the government likes to feel in control but how about a bit of humility here? We don’t control these things for our children – much as we might wish we could.

What do they mean by ‘outcomes’ anyway? Are these things to be experienced constantly as day to day outcomes – or at a given age – or at the ‘end’ of childhood? I can’t imagine that children are expected to ‘achieve economic wellbeing’ at the age of eight, are they?

It’s hard to even read this document so it makes sense. Are home educated children able to achieve ‘Stay safe’? Can anyone explain to me what this means? Stay safe? In what way is this an outcome? Is this not a state of being? And does anyone want unqualified safety for their child? On Saturday, our son fell off his bike in the park and grazed his knee. If we had left the bike at home then he wouldn’t have had that accident. He would have ‘stayed safe’. Of course, he wouldn’t have had the enjoyment and achievement of riding eight times round the cycle track either.

These matters are not a list of bullet points to be checked off. A child’s life, anyone’s life, is a patchwork of pleasure, pain, safety, risk, health and illness, achievement and failure. My children, everyone’s children, will sometimes ‘achieve’ their silly ‘outcomes’ and sometimes not. This is called life and, so far, I have found no-one – parent, teacher or government – who is able to weed out the ‘bad’ bits and leave the ‘good’. And, in honesty, it’s not what I’d want for my children. My children need to fail, suffer loss, illness, struggle financially, let others down, put up with things they don’t enjoy and take silly risks. It is through these things that we learn and grow and appreciate what we have. Of course, in common with the vast majority of parents, I do my best and hope for the best for my children. But I’m not stupid enough to think that I can tick boxes and get guarantees.

Once again I am being asked to respond to their agenda, or let them make their own assumptions. So I’ll do my best to answer their questions. I know that those who have not had to think about the relationship between home educating families and the state may think this is all a bit of a fuss over nothing. But the view from here is that this lot are determined to get us ‘better regulated’ and they’ll keep on with their damn consultations until they get the answer they want.

Winter in the park with bikes

2009-01-17T21:05:00.005Z

We went to Preston Park today.

The dogs' graveyard.

Anyone know what this is? It was papery, so I thought maybe a wasps nest. Not sure why it was lying on the grass.

The manor is no longer open in the winter.

Pearlie did a lot of this.

The church was open today.

These paintings date from the thirteenth century. It's the murder of Thomas a Becket.

The kids both did eight laps of the cycle track. Dani did a couple and I borrowed P's bike just to prove that I could still do it too! The batteries died in the camera then, so there is no proof.

Buzzing about

2009-01-16T22:46:00.002Z

We're having a busy time again now all the groups etc. have started back. Pearl is doing a course of weekly sessions run by the Sussex Wildlife Trust. One of the local home ed mums has arranged this and it's a great opportunity for P to do some fun stuff. The first session was this week and they learned how to make fires and then they made toast and hot chocolate over them. P and her friends A and R were so inspired that they repeated the exercise this afternoon, in A's garden. They were watched through the window by impressed parents!

Leo's continuing to blog a lot. Check out the latest part of one of his stories, complete with cool illustrations done on the drawing application on the pc. He's also been back at groups where he has been playing long imaginary games with his friends and making pizza.

Dani and I have been at work too, of course. Busy times there - for both of us.

The whole family is also really into playing Bananagrams. It was one of Leo's Christmas pressies and its a great game.

I am aware that this blog may be morphing into the old one. Such is life.

A surprise visitor

2009-01-09T23:49:00.000Z

Check out one of Leo's many blogs, for details...

The long view – a better view

2009-01-09T11:04:00.001Z

Just recently, I have been struck by the fact that, in the last four and half (or so) years of home educating both the children, it has been almost impossible to see the moments of change and growth, while we were in them. I suspect that this may be particularly so if you take an autonomous approach and don’t make much use of graded and structured resources that can provide a framework for measure. I tend to notice one small incident, creation or discussion and then look back and realise that there has been a great development in skill, competence or understanding. And I’m not just talking about the children here! I think I’ve learned some important things over the years and I suspect that they may be more useful as insights into our home ed than the children’s development.

I’ve learned:

Change, generally, is the one constant in childhood. It is not a problem that we cannot predict what our children will choose, enjoy or dislike – it is important that we remember this fact if we are going to avoid conflict and respect our children’s right to define themselves.

That it is always better to abandon something than turn it into a battle. This goes for activities, games, conversations – whatever. Walking away and giving people space is something I’ve done more and more as the children get older. It’s important in my parenting, as a whole, but even more so because we home ed. I don’t want a home that’s full of tension and fights. Sometimes rows cannot be avoided, but, very often, they can. Problems can still be dealt with. But it amazes me how there are far fewer problems when you don’t approach the issue when angry.

When people are angry, they need time. This is not five minutes. In our family, it is more like an hour. An hour spent calming down – even if it delays your departure to the library or whatever – is an hour well spent.

People changing their minds about what they are doing or want to do is a good thing. It shows that they are reflecting on things. I find this a bit of a challenge because I have always been very much “stick with it and see it through”.

Self-motivation, in enough quantity, leads to a flow and warmth in the house. It is like the movement of a river. People will pick up, engage, put down, wander, re-engage. They may be doing things for five minutes, five hours or five weeks, but the feeling of flow will be similar. When people are feeling under pressure, it will feel like trying to wade through glue. I do not claim that nothing can be achieved by wading through glue, I just know that I don’t like living with that atmosphere.

Modelling concentration, enjoyment, relaxation and commitment is important. I do not just have a right to my own interests and hobbies – I have a duty to show that adults can be passionate about learning. This, for me, covers reading, writing , tv and pc time. It doesn’t mean I spend hours ignoring the children!

Because children’s brains are making new connections and their bodies are improving in co-ordination, as they grow up, a new skill will often emerge like someone pulling a rabbit from a hat. There will be a right moment for someone to learn or understand something and if you are not at that moment it may be counterproductive to be trying. Of course, people need to try things, but they also need every opportunity to say “enough!” or “that’s all I wanted to know” or “I don’t feel ready for/interested in this at the moment, even if you think you know I could do it.”

People often know and understand far more than they are willing to reveal. This depends on the person, of course, but it is always worth bearing in mind. Children are not obliged to share the inner workings of their brain with us just so we can feel well-informed. A respect for privacy is key for me. I need it for myself so I must give it to others.

Sharing our knowledge about the world, in all senses, is education. In our family this is mainly about conversation. But there is as much ‘educational value’ in discussing why it is that someone had an argument with their friend as there is in a conversation about local history.

Children will make linkages you never considered before. This has been a real eye-opener for me. When the children learn something, they will often make a comparison or link that never occurred to me. These can be highly educational!

If people aren’t happy then make changes. I have always believed this but I’ve learned that it is vital in our home ed lives. The last thing I want is for anyone to feel trapped by the choice we’ve made to home ed, which, for me, is about maximising freedom.

So, there we are. Looking back on the last few years, I think these are some of the things I’ve learned. I couldn’t necessarily pin-point the moment I learned any of them. Sometimes I’ve learned them, forgotten them, and re-learned them. But I hope, each time, they’ve got that bit deeper into my brain! I also hope that I can look back on this post to remind myself of these insights if I have moments of getting stuck, in the future.

Missing the old Greenhouse

2009-01-09T01:02:00.002Z

I’ve been writing our annual LEA report and I’ve been missing the old Greenhouse blog, which served as a great reminder of what we’d been up to. But our diaries were just about ok.

This has been a week of slowly returning to regular life. I’m sure Leo won’t mind if I mention that he has become a blogging whirlwind and is also working on an extended piece of fiction – 4000 words so far. He was thinking of including some of it in our report to the LEA but decided against – in case his ideas were stolen... He’s reading Inkheart and loving it. I helped him to make a cardboard box castle last week, which was good fun. He dug out all the small figures who should be living in and battling around it – and bought a new knight and a wizard.

Pearlie has been happily pottering and we’ve been doing some logic puzzles that are leading on to stuff about sets. We have looked at it before but are now doing more. We are continuing to use the free MEP resources available on the internet. Oops, this is getting a bit LEA reporty, isn’t it? Shuddup, Allie.

We’ve been shifting stuff around our living room a bit so that we can all see the pc screen for watching things on i-player etc. We took down the periodic table for a bit (yes, we have a map of the world too!) and the children requested a re-showing of the poster of British Prime Ministers. I find it a tad sinister to have Thatcher staring over the pc monitor at me...

Both the kids tidied their rooms today and Leo washed up. We’ve just re-organised our jobs sheet and boosted the pay for certain tasks. I’ve blogged about this before – we all note down little tasks and get paid for them. Washing up after tea pays 25p and tidying a bedroom 50p. I hope we don’t bankrupt ourselves. I’m going to save all my jobs money to pay for entering short story competitions this year. I got another story longlisted in a competition and am determined to keep plugging away. Sadly, that magazine has now gone bust and a prose petry workshop I was hoping to go on has also been cancelled after the organisation stopped running. It seems that the economic downturn is having impacts I hadn’t expected.

Pearl is reading something called “The Bad Spy’s Guide”, which looks like a humorous book. She is still into all things funny.

Dani is knitting away at a new cardy for me. I’m very honoured as she spent all her Christmas C&H vouchers on the yarn for it. She won us a new dictionary in the Guardian Christmas cryptic crossword competition. She’s a clever one, that Dani.

There's been lots of talking here recently. The whole Gaza business has led to many conversations and today we were somehow all discussing Charles 1, Cromwell, The French Revolution and the unification of Germany... Then I left for work, so i don't know what else got discussed.

Same as it ever was

2009-01-06T09:14:00.000Z

Sorry for the silence. I have little to say at the moment as the situation in Gaza is so awful and that is pre-occupying me. Chat about my safe, warm and whole children feels somewhat sickening while I see others in such straits. I wish I understood what an earth it was for. When Peres speaks of a “real and serious lesson” and I see those little bodies, I could throw up. There is a vile brutality in this species. I have been wondering why it is, if we have the capacity to understand each other’s suffering, we do not have the capacity to stop behaving in this way. It’s not like we don’t know what we do. The lure of dominance, of being the one with the big stick making others cower, it is always there. We achieve such heights of cleverness, with our gadgets and gizmos, but we acquire no wisdom. Generation on generation we are the same thuggish beasts. What is there to stay our hands, if not ourselves? The evidence is there. There is nothing.

And, relax...

2008-12-26T22:57:00.003Z

We are having a lovely, relaxing Christmas break. On Christmas Eve we went round to the grandmothers’ house for the traditional tea time gathering. The kids do like traditions and the girls have developed one of their own – the devising of a treasure hunt for the boys. Presents were exchanged and good food eaten and then all five grandchildren walked back across town together. P and L watched the Gavin and Stacey Christmas special in their beds – with one of us on each bed with them. L was very attracted to the Crooked House ghost story trailers but I watched them and advised him to steer clear – a bit too terrifying, I think.

Christmas Day started at the agreed, and civilised, hour of 8am. The kids came and opened their pillowcases on our bed. Then we got up and did the presents under the tree. We were all pleased with our presents - so thanks are due to all. We tend to do a few medium/large presents for the kids, rather than any one huge thing – and that worked particularly well this year. P looks gorgeous in the purple Boden jacket she had been wanting for a while and L’s collector’s edition Mohawk has not left his side. After a late morning gathering at the house of one set of cousins (two mins from us) we had a quiet day at home with just the four of us. I think it must rank as about the calmest and most enjoyably relaxing family Christmas day we’ve ever had. P was pleased to get Sims 2 (at last – she has been wanting it for a while but we never had a good enough computer until this year) and L was very happy with the leather notebook with clasp that we found from an online shop. D was settled on the sofa with the Guardian Araucaria Christmas Prize Crossword. We also watched several episodes of Outnumbered series one (one of L’s gifts from my mum) and Beautiful People (one of P’s gifts from us) and feasted well. We made a puff pastry leek parcel and mountains of roast spuds, carrots, parsnips, peas and sprouts. Then we had meringues with strawberries and cream, which P loves. I made a trifle for tea time. We ate it while watching Doctor Who. The addition of Dervla Kirwan was a welcome one for me.

Today we had my dad and his wife over for lunch and the afternoon. This was also lovely but made rather tricky by the lack of crockery and cutlery in the house! I also cooked lasagne in a new, and enormous, tin. This took far more sauce than I had expected and longer to cook. But it was quite nice when it was done. The kids got more presents – all lovely and exciting. Cousins S and D popped in with both their parents and we drank tea and ate sweets – before a lively game of cheat. Cousin B was not around as he is a football fan and had gone to the match with his dad. When my dad and his wife had gone, the kids started making riotous movies with cousin S’s Flip Camera – her present from her parents. Then it was back to quiet pursuits for the evening.

Tomorrow, we have D’s parents, sister, her partner and their kids arriving for a few days. They will be staying at a holiday house quite nearby, which should work well – we hope!

It has been a wonderful few days and I feel so very lucky. I hope everyone reading is having a good time – wherever you are and whatever you’re doing.

P making Sims

Mohawk supervises the writing of spells

The beautiful book gets beautiful writing

Lost to the world in the depths of the crossword. I'm not much help, except for the occasional book title or song lyric!

Duck Rock

2008-12-22T20:51:00.003Z

Here is a bit of video of P and L with friends B and M playing in their band, Duck Rock. This was at the Squeezebox Rocks gig on 20th December. Quality isn't great but it gives you an idea! Their two original songs are called Turquoise Skies and What Are You Doing? This link doesn't have a picture at the moment but do click it and it will play!

Burning the Clocks in Brighton

2008-12-22T00:52:00.003Z

Here in Brighton we have a wonderful Solstice celebration. We have been going since before the kids were born and have participated almost every year since. It gets easier each time. The evening starts with a couple of hours of waiting in the corn exchange but this is well worth it because, as official participants, we get stamps on our hands that give us access to the best area for watching the show at the end.

This is what happened when we went along this year with cousins S and D and their mum. This is also an experiment with the new Flip camera! The original quality is much better but too big to share easily. There is no sound track on here - the music is the music played at the final show. It is a weird and wonderful Brighton event. I love it.

Festive stuff

2008-12-16T22:52:00.001Z

We are really into the swing now. The tree is up and looking gorgeous. We got one delivered this year and it was wonderful. Instead of an increasingly bad tempered slog to the garden centre with the old buggy, only to find they are sold out or have straggly old remnants only, we got to stay in our cosy house and wait for a friendly man to ring the doorbell and hand over a plump and perfect tree. It was worth every penny.

We have had some lovely family card making sessions. Sticky foam is excellent stuff! I have eaten my first mince pie. Sadly, the morning after that I woke with a violent migraine. I hope it was only a coincidence. Whatever the cause, I managed to improve my symptoms a great deal by doing a strange thing – wrapping up warm and walking slowly around the block chewing spearmint gum. Dani was at work and the children were lovely to me – buying my gum and being gentle. It was so cold that they went in and carried on the important business of playing Card-Jitsu on Club Penguin. I carried on walking up and down outside the house and the nausea abated. I don’t know why that helped but I thought it was worth a try after I did something similar on a day when I had to work with a migraine. I guess mint is good for nausea and maybe the chewing gets my gut going again so the drugs can get into my system. My throat has come back to life but I am blowing glue out of my head every few minutes tonight. Hopefully that is the end of it.

We are all pottering away at our own stuff. Leo is into communal blogging with a friend and P has made the most beautiful Christmas window display. She is very much on top of all our Christmas preparations and her own commitments. Dani is knitting lots of lovely things at the moment and I’ve been wasting time playing silly games on Facebook. I’ve also been busy with shopping and some tidying. One of the up sides of having to get our roof re-built in the spring is that we are planning a decent storage space – something these little terraced houses really lack. I’m planning some bookshelves and games and toy boxes up there. It would be good to have an archive of the stuff we aren’t currently using but want to keep. The down side of the roof work is, of course, the money. But I reckon that a sound roof is worth spending money on. Probably better to spend it on a roof than put it in a bank!

Ooh, our little Flip camera is a fun thing. We still need to explore it more but it will be just the job for the sort of short, impromptu films we are likely to make. Right, now we must do some list updating.

A hard week

2008-12-13T10:08:00.002Z

It has been a week of a bit too much. The pace of festive stuff has been hotting up and I seem to have spent the week rushing from one place to the next. Dani has been laid low with a cold and Leo, too, has a horrible cough that makes him sound rather like a walrus. Dani had a couple of days off work and did a good job of fighting off the lurgy. Leo ploughed on regardless. So, what have we been up to?

There was a launch of the Little Green Pig anthology. That was a nice event down at the library. Friends were there in number and a very pleasing book has been produced. Leo is proud to be in print.

I had to spend rather too much time scouring the town for cloves and red ribbon. Note to self: don’t expect to find either of these things in the shops in mid-December next year. I could have got cloves in a supermarket but I needed them for pomander making with children was so wasn’t looking for a dainty little pot at a high price. I did find them, in the end. I did the pomander making at a very relaxed craft session with 10-13 year old home edded kids. Purple and blue ribbon looked fine! The living room now smells delicious.

Meanwhile it has been my last week at work before my off-contract weeks over Christmas. This is usually a week of winding down and clearing things but there was a certain amount of disruption (*cough*) when a construction worker drove a digger through a main power cable. We didn’t lose power at the site where I work but spent a day with *no* networked services. It is hard to convey the effect of this on a university library in the last week of term, or, indeed, the effect of the services coming back. We run a back-up system when the network is down but all stock that had been returned that day had to go through the system, and be checked for reservations and so on, when it was back. This happened in the evening, when we were running on a team of two... Suffice to say that it was tiring.

I now have my common throat infection again. This makes me want to sit quietly under a duvet and not talk. Instead of this, I am off to the kids’ club Christmas fair. This is going to be a triumph (we hope!) with grotto, cake stall, craft activities – fun and games for all the family etc. Shame it is pissing down. Hope someone shows up! It’s meant to be a fundraiser for the group, which Leo goes to a couple of times a week.

The saddest part of this rather overstretched week was that poor Bunny, the guinea pig, died. He didn’t respond to any of the treatment he had and just seemed to shrink away before our eyes. But he was eating grass and dandelions right up until the last day, and drinking probiotic solution and vitamin C, so I think we did all we could to make his last days comfortable. We also got him treated for skin mites so at least he wasn’t itchy. I suspect he had cancer or some failing of a major organ – he just got thinner and thinner. The kids were upset but we’d had plenty of time to warn them that he was dying and he went very peacefully in his little fleecy bed in a warm living room. That’s not a bad death.

Right... Get up! Get busy! I’m looking forward to tomorrow, which is a family day at home – apart from a brief shopping trip. Dani and I are buying ourselves/each other a Flip Video Camera as our Christmas present. We’re having it early so we can film at the kids’ gig. We haven’t really done presents for each other for a few years so this is a big extravagance. But I hope it’ll be something we get a lot of use from. Oh, yeah, and the tree is coming tomorrow. The tree is my favourite thing about Christmas. That and the cheese... Must go.

Fantasy, imagination, lies

2008-12-08T00:24:00.001Z

OK, so here’s a real contentious issue for you. We never did Father Christmas. Our kids never believed that FC was anything other than a story. Not a story they particularly bonded with, TBH, but part of our mishmash Christmas Yule Solstice thing. The other day, I read something that suggested that parents who didn’t ‘do’ FC were somehow depriving their children of the ‘magic’ of childhood. This seemed to be something about lack of fantasy and imagination.

I find this rather bizarre. Having now lived eleven years with two kids, I can say that fantasy and imagination are always there. Both the children have engaged in different types of fantasy play over the years. These are things in which we have often colluded – building the fantasy through discussion and play. One example is a glove puppet that we had when the kids were little. He was a passed on toy from a neighbour and rather old and grubby. He was a king – called King, imaginatively enough ;-) He was ‘naughty’ and was responsible for all the knots on the wooden kitchen cupboards. These were caused by him hurling fruit (one of his favourite wicked activities, which were called King’s Naughty Jobs) and he talked in a haughty, bossy voice. His best friend was a small, plastic, ray fish – called Ray... They had a wild time together and went on holiday to Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, where King was arrested for shoplifting. It was all very strange and organic. I’d throw things in and the children would build and change it. They would go and find the puppet and demand, “Do King!” So, it is true, of course, that they knew King was not a real being. They didn’t really think he did these things. But it was magic. He would come alive. They were able to suspend their disbelief and address themselves to him, in a way that most adults would struggle to do.

I think that children are capable of a remarkable level of sophistication when it comes to fantasy. They know all about pretending. Leo invented his own magical creature to bring him tooth money and Christmas pressies – the Golden Dragon. It came out of him – wasn’t planted in his head as any kind of explanation for the appearance of money and gifts. And, of course, he knew (on some level) that it wasn’t real, but was inviting us to join him in this fantasy – in this bit of magic of his own creation. And, of course, we did. It was play. It was pretend. It was as real as he wanted to make it.

For me, there is a difference between the invented and evolving fantasy play of children and an imposed piece of pretend like FC. FC has always seemed, to me, more like a big joke being played on children. I’m sure that it can be done as a kind of ‘tongue in cheek’ shared pretend. But, for many kids, I think it is presented as FACT. That is a different thing altogether. It must be a loss when the child learns that FC is not real. Why do people want to set their children up for that? Anyone?

Children don’t need their heads stocked with fantasy. It bubbles up out of them. They can spin their own tales. Of course, those tales are fed by the culture in which they live. I love story and love sharing it with my children. But I’m not keen on lies. I could never line myself up with the adults and spin my kids a special ‘kiddie lie’. That just isn’t magical to me.

A week of mistakes and hoohas

2008-11-28T00:03:00.001Z

We have been moving rather too fast this week. I have been feeling low level ill (have I been saying this since Autumn began? It feels like it) and trying to stay on top of things. So, there have been minor mishaps aplenty. I washed my phone in the washing machine. I forgot what year we were in and so bought the wrong dvd for someone. P and I slogged to the sorting office to pick up a parcel that the postie had tried to deliver and were disappointed to find that it was not our lovely Christmas craft bits but some free lightbulbs... That sort of thing. It also turned out that our credit card details had been stolen from some online retailer. The card company knew this but hadn’t got round to mentioning it to us. They had, instead, decided the sensible thing to do was to trigger a security thing every time we used the card – and block it until we’d confirmed the transaction. What with washed phones and the approaching festive season, we’d used the card three times in as many days and were spending half our life on the phone to the credit card company. In the end, D managed to speak to someone who knew what was going on and arrange for new cards.

I will spare you any more mishap tales but let’s just say that it is being a very tiring week.

The kids and I are off to the vet with Bunny in the morning. He’s not really improving but he’s still with us. Wish us luck...

Futures

2008-11-23T15:41:00.001Z

There’s an advert on TV at the moment in which parents identify their motivation to give up smoking. In one case, a dad looks at a baby boy and says he wants to see him score a goal. In another, a dad wants to “walk her up the aisle.” She is a little girl of about four years old – dressing up and looking at herself in the mirror. Every time I see it I want to scream at the TV.
“He might loathe football and bake a mean soufflé!”
“She might be into open relationships and ride a big motorbike across America!”

I think it is so unhelpful to us all, as we try to work out how to be parents, that it is implied that we should have these kinds of dreams. The way I see it, we’re just not entitled to dream our children’s futures for them. I have had many friends over the years who had to deal with a whole load of unnecessary guilt and pain because they chose lives that weren’t the ones that their parents had dreamed for them. Sometimes they spent years hiding themselves from their parents because to be open would have meant shattering their parents’ dreams. It is so unnecessary.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with playing football or getting married. But there are so many futures. If we dream of happy futures for our children then we cannot help but define them with reference to our own ideas of happiness. We cannot help but factor in what we think is fun or fulfilling. How can we know what they will feel? I am often surprised by my children’s choices, day to day, as I live with them. They change and grow and find new passions. If this is the case in the day to day, it seems insane to me to let myself dream of any future for them. Who is to say what they might want? I suppose I do allow myself the occasional moment when I wonder what it will be like to hug a grown man who was our baby. Or how it might be to see a woman from a train window, as we pull in at a station, and know that she was our little girl. But I don’t dream them up aisles, collecting certificates, owning houses or winning Nobel Prizes. I don’t dream them partners or babies. These will be their choices to make and all I am entitled to do is to keep loving them, no matter what they choose to do with their lives.

What I also dislike about that advert is that I think that it links the notion of responsible parent (who gives up smoking) with the kind of ‘good’ parent who ‘wants nice things’ for their child. It is clear that this is something parents should aspire to. All those ‘hopeless’ parents who don’t give up smoking clearly don’t care enough about their children’s happy futures, do they? Oh, I do dislike that scripted stuff. Good people want certain things and bad people don’t care. Hasn’t everyone figured out that life is rather more complicated than that? And, of course, because these people are ‘good’ they want nice, unchallenging and respectable futures for their children. He’ll play football and she’ll get married and all will be right with the world. It is so patronising. Will these be the rewards for doing the right thing? No, because there are no guarantees. All any of us can do is live our lives the best way we know how. The tomorrow we find ourselves living in will not be the one we expected. That’s about the only thing we can guarantee.

Back again

2008-11-21T21:26:00.002Z

I have been hopeless about blogging recently. I wanted this blog to be a place for our intelligent and considered thoughts but I think we must be a bit short of those.

We have been busy with real and demanding life. Poor old Bunny, the guinea pig, has been ill. He has been to the vet twice, where they have weighed, prodded and prescribed. I don’t want to tempt fate but in the last day he’s been picking up a bit. A couple of days ago we thought he wouldn’t last long and the vet might advise we speed him on his way. So, please send healing vibes to the old piggy! The kids have been very worried and sad at the thought of losing him. We have no real idea how old he is (he came from the RSPCA as an adult pig) but he could be anything from four years up. I guess he is a fair bit older.

The kids and I went on a home ed trip today – to the Herstmonceux science centre. A local home ed mum had booked a Big Lemon Bus for us to travel on and that gave the day a lovely feel of a Grand Day Out. There was a bridge building exercise for the kids and a show all about sound. We had a great time.

I’ve been doing some extra hours at work too – various meetings and training. I could do with a veg out day but I don’t have one on the horizon.

We had a slight wobble recently, with the number and sorts of commitments we had going on in the family. But everyone had a think about it and decided what they wanted to pursue and what not – and I think we’re all happier now. I know I am! We all have to home ed in whatever way we like but, personally, I’ve never wanted the role of nagger in chief. When everyone in the family is happy with their activities and commitments then the self-motivation kicks in and that nice warm buzz re-emerges. I’m happy when I can feel that. Any other home edders know what I’m talking about? This does seems a tad waffly.

Right, tired now, so off to read some King Arthur to the boy, before I fall asleep at the keyboard.

BBC Four programme about picture books

2008-11-10T23:47:00.003Z

We've just watched this on i-player. If you love picture books, and you didn't see it on tv, it's worth a watch.

It had lots of our favourites from years gone by. It even had that picture from Dogger that makes my eyes fill with tears because it is the spit of our two when they were about four and seven years old.

I've wittered on about picture books before but I never feel like I've really expressed the importance of picture books in our lives - back when they were little. I can walk past a hundred babies in buggies or see the fuzzed head of a newborn breastfeeder and never get a twinge of broodiness. But show me a child of somewhere between one and three, looking at a book with a grown up, and I get swamped with a wave of nostalgia that swamps good sense. I loved *LOVED* reading books with our two when they were tiny. I think the most powerful times were before they could talk much. They would hand me a book and off we would go.

And it was nothing to do with teaching them to read. When we were there I wasn't wondering if they were noticing text, or pointing out rhyme or letter shape. I was just swimming in the story with them. And it brought back memories to me, memories of pictures that I studied so closely - in my own infancy.

Life with really little children is tiring. I often found it bewildering and sometimes overwhelming. For me, the picture books were like life rafts on choppy days. We could all cling on and Alfie or Frog or The Elephant and the Bad Baby, would get us to calmer waters.

My favourite shelf

2008-11-09T22:46:00.002Z

at work is labelled "Books that do not exist". It is rather full at the moment.

L writes Gremlins 3

2008-11-08T22:33:00.002Z

Leo has been spending a lot of time on the computer recently, blogging and working on a story. Today the story appeared on his blog. He'd be very glad if people would go and have a read of his story - Gremlins 3.

Married, qualified and otherwise approved

2008-11-07T16:15:00.000Z

The stuff about prop 8, in California, has sparked with some other floating thoughts about qualifications and made some connections in my head.

Marriage has always seemed strange to me. I shocked my grandmother when (at about L’s age) I announced that I wasn’t going to get married as it was just a nuisance to have to get divorced later. On the whole, I think I had a point. For me, there has been no moment of walking up an aisle or even standing with my beloved in matching tuxedos at a civil partnership ceremony. The moments that have marked commitment in my relationship with D have been largely private. But, for me, commitment is not about standing up and saying something before witnesses. It is about doing it. It is about time and tests and patience and trust. It is about communication and flexibility and, more than anything else probably, respect. I know what our relationship is and what it means. I can’t see that it makes the relationship any stronger to get it stamped and classified. OK, so there are some practical advantages in getting your relationship approved. But, personally, I think it would make me feel more vulnerable. I have never asked the PTB to ‘approve’ us and they never have. So they can’t withdraw that approval. They can’t tell me what my relationship is, or isn’t.

I wonder if part of the reason why people strive to get married is that they want to be approved? They want to get the stamp and have the photos. It is strange that there are certain occasions when photos must be taken. One is at a wedding and another is at a graduation ceremony. I wonder if marriage and qualifications are largely about the same thing – getting validated? I did do the qualification thing but I never went to a ceremony and don’t have that photo with the hat as the idea made me squirm. Once again, there are practical advantages in getting qualifications (sometimes) but I wonder if they carry the same danger as marriage. The bit of paper tells you you’re clever like the bit of paper tells you you’re loved. The bit of paper validates your life. The bit of paper gives you a place in the world, some status, some identity. And that identity bit is, for me, the most risky. Because that given identity is like a veneer over a real person.

I don’t have anything against people living in loving, long-term relationships and I don’t have anything against people studying. (That’s a good job as I live in such a relationship and make a living out of other people’s study!) But I do think that, for me, it is important to remember that content is what counts – not badges.

Hello

2008-11-06T23:15:00.002Z

Well, this has been a weird week, in many ways. The Obama news was gooood. The news about prop 8 in California was depressing. I have been wondering about many a thing and getting little snippets of time to write creatively. We finished off our history course with six ten to thirteen year olds, today. It was a learning experience for us and I think they all thought it was ok too. Did you know that the world’s deepest hand dug well is in Brighton? No? Well, you do now...

I was prompted to comment on a blog on which I have lurked for many a year, attempting to understand the mindset and lifestyle of a US, fundamentalist homeschooler. I wouldn’t have done so (as I never have before) but I was referred to by the blogger, who knew that this ‘homosexual’ was reading... I had gone to see what she made of Obama’s election and she was, of course, horrified. I asked her if she read my blog but she said that once she’d realised that we were both women she’d stopped reading. So, there we go. Jesus, I have been led to believe, wasn’t bothered about associating with the most reviled of sinners. But I guess it isn’t documented whether he would have read the blogs of homosexuals.

I took a brief break from Patrick Gale (seven in a row and I was in need of someone else’s style) and read Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy, which has been waiting, patiently, on my bookshelf. It was gorgeous and left me feeling all invigorated and not nearly forty. Actually, I’m not forty for a couple of years but D will reach that big zero next month.

Well, off to drink some more tea and watch Michael and Diane. I have a strange fascination for them, sitting on their little sofa with the ghosts of their past selves screaming in horror from the shadows.

Laughs and what counts

2008-11-04T23:07:00.002Z

Dani and I watched Beautiful People the other night and then found P watching it on i-player. She loves it. It has a few rather risqué jokes but is basically good stuff and I’m glad she’s enjoying it. Dani and I watched a programme about Jake Thackeray on BBC 2 last night and discovered that his songs were part of both our childhoods. My mum and her dad were both fans. If a bit of risqué humour was ok for us then I guess it’s ok for our kids too!

I’ve just had a joyful reunion with a song I LOVED at about the age of fifteen and was reminded of by a homework drama on another blog. It has made me feel so happy that I had to share it. It just about sums up what is important to me in our family life. What counts for me, more than anything, is that my kids know that we are on their side in this rather bizarre world. Whatever they choose to do I hope that they have fun and laughter in their lives and that they are never afraid to go their own way. So, here’s Bowie singing Kooks.

New blog recommendation

2008-11-01T16:04:00.002Z

L has started a new blog. Have a look at Mohawk World.

Some of my favourite voices for a cold day

2008-10-31T15:52:00.001Z

Singing some favourite songs

kd singing something by a better songwriter (shhhh, I didn't really say that...)

Sarah Jane Morris

The gorgeous Heather Small

Annie sings the only vaguely positive one off that depressing album

Tracy Chapman. Love this song.

Gotta have some Dusty if it's all about voices today.

Good voices. Good sentiment.

We are still here

2008-10-29T12:13:00.000Z

just not much to blog. P came back from her weekend away, having done lots of terrifying things. She’d had a great time. Leo enjoyed the chance to spend a lot of time in the house doing his sort of stuff - imaginative play, reading, writing, eating... Dani got some pc and knitting time and I went to work a lot.

I went to my writing group last night, which was good, as usual. I took along a piece I’d written down in Cornwall and then re-worked. Reading Patrick Gale is making me long for Cornwall, so it’s good to indulge that in my writing.

We had found a nice looking, cheap holiday flat in York for the week we’re planning at the end of January. But they decided from my email enquiry that I am a Mrs (this is based on nothing but my mentioning that my family and I would like to stay in the flat) and sent us the booking forms addressed to Mr and Mrs. The accompanying letter was also very chatty. Putting the two together, I am inclined to find somewhere else. We had a horrible arrival in a house once, when the woman had her little welcome chocolates ready – addressed to me and my husband... It just gets a holiday off to such an uncomfortable start, when you have to get through a whole load of assumption shattering before you can relax. The holiday firm we use down in St Ives are nothing like that. They just ask for the names of people in the party and don’t invent you husbands... I did think of actually telling this firm that we won’t be using them, and why, and hoping this wakes them up to the amazing reality that not everyone in the world is part of a hetero couple.

Our local prospective Tory candidate has just done the very same thing – sent us a leaflet each, assuming that D is a man. What’s rather funny is that his leaflet is rather full of mentions of Brighton’s diverse population and so on and he, himself, looks rather light in the loafers... He hasn’t lost our votes though, so I don’t suppose he’d care if he’s p’d us off.

Right, better eat something before I leave for work. Isn’t it cold? The whole town seems to be a mass of coughing, sneezing people at the moment. I think I’ll add some extra vit C before I face the germy hordes...

Music

2008-10-25T23:52:00.003+01:00

Bit of a different weekend here as we are one child down. P is off at an adventure/activity weekend camp with about forty other local home ed kids. We’ve had a couple of phone calls and all appears to be going well. I had to work extra hours today because it was an open day at work. Dani and L had a quiet day at home. Dani, L and I have been working together at this silly word game on Facebook. Leo’s typing is really coming on. He’s also great at this game. It’s rather like Boggle so he has played it before. The other night, after I’d been playing it, I was trying to sleep. I realised that my brain was working on a set of letters and the words that kept popping into my brain were the results! That was very weird. Rather like those moments when reading aloud to the children and I become aware that I can hear my own voice reading the words while I’m thinking about something completely different.

Life has been pootling along here. I was very impressed with our Local History centre this week. I’d given them a quick call several weeks ago to let them know that we would be coming in with a group of six children and the sorts of things we were interested in. We arrived to find a big table full of stuff they’d looked out for us – census returns, maps and old photographs and so on. They were very helpful – scanning old newspapers for us and helping the kids with the microfilm readers. One of those moments when you realise that the council tax is rather good value for money!

I have also been thinking about music today after reading something on someone else’s blog about giving up music for religious reasons. Some people are not that bothered about music but I realised today that I have always needed music in my life. I’d miss it desperately.

In my early childhood I learned a strange selection of songs. My mum was in an old time music hall group and so I sang all those songs with her. Then I learned all the songs from the small selection of albums my mum had – Oliver! Bridge Over Troubled Waters and Sergeant Pepper. My four year old interpretations of the various lyrics gave me much to think about! I sang at school and played instruments. Then, in my teens, I abandoned all that classical stuff. For two or three years I probably bought an album every week or two, with my Saturday job money. Sadly, I’ve now lost most of that.

When my sister died I inherited most of her tapes. She’d taped her entire album collection to take to university and I spent hours and hours listening to it. She had made a particular compilation tape that I have put away safely. It had Northern Lights and Don’t Stop and See You. That tape was a connection with her and could get me to cry when I just couldn't.

Then there were all those years of making my own tapes and giving and sharing music with friends and lovers. There are songs that have lifted me and songs that have allowed me to let go.

I am always humming and whistling and being reminded of lyrics. Life with kids means that I haven't had much money to buy music and far less time. But now the kids are increasingly into music too and I love that. I'm not a music anorak and I can't stand music snobbery. I am not *serious* about music. I just seriously love it.

Purely for my own entertainment (because other people’s music choices are rather like other people’s dreams and are of little interest unless you love the person in question) here are just a very few of the songs that I have loved.

Joan Armatrading – Me Myself I. This meant a lot. A song about what a woman wants for herself and not all about luurve...

Erasure – Sometimes. This is just fun. Reminds me of a girl I knew. Girl who was sometimes mistaken for a beautiful boy in the gay clubs where we were dancing to this.

Pet Shop Boys – Only the Wind. This one was important when I realised that things that hurt need more than time, sometimes...

Kate Bush – Moments of Pleasure

Tracy Chapman – Heaven’s here on earth. This one was a baby-rocking song when P was newborn. I felt like Tracy was singing it right to our precious baby and it said everything I wanted to say.

Eurythmics - Seventeen Again. This was a song for L's babyhood and all the unforeseen challenges of life with a new baby and a toddler. Yes, this is my cracked nipples song, I guess...

Ten Thousand Maniacs - These are the Days. I'd always loved this song and then suddenly it felt very real. It talks about "the miracles you see in every hour" and that was (and still is) how I feel about life with children.

Right. Must stop as this is just self-indulgence.

Hurry up and wait

2008-10-20T09:06:00.001+01:00

I have been thinking, recently, about the expansion of the teenage state and the effect of this on childhood today.

From the moment our children are born there is pressure for them to progress onto the ‘next stage’. Most of this is, I suspect, about marketing objects to parents. A nice example is the kind of ‘pre-walking’ shoes you can now buy in any Clarks shop. Even ten years ago, when we went to get P her first shoes, these didn’t exist. In fact, while we were there the saleswoman sent away a family with a barely standing little boy, telling them to bring him back when he was walking. Now they’d have been advised to part with a few quid for shoes for the ‘cruising’ stage. These apparently ‘help’. It seems to me that childhood is now crammed with objects that are there to ‘support’ or ‘entice’ children into being someone older than they are.
When I was a child there were ‘teenagers’ and up until that point there was ‘childhood’. Now it seems that children are ‘tweens’ almost as soon as childhood begins. It may just be that we have a girl of eleven but I feel that the culture is particularly loaded with such stuff for girls. There is underwear that mimics that of women, for little girls of single digit ages. Why does a four year old need a ‘crop top’ more than a vest? Why are girls given the idea (from adverts to tv to children’s fiction) that they have outgrown childhood, when they’re in the very heart of those few precious years?

But, what strikes me as rather ironic is that, for all our children are hurried into their teenage years, they are then held in that ‘not yet adult’ state for longer than ever before. Why the rush to get them out of childhood if they’re not to be admitted to the adult world until they are at least eighteen? When I was young, most of my contemporaries left school at sixteen and went out to work. Those entry level jobs aren’t available to sixteen year olds now. It seems that time in college is ‘necessary’. The ‘school leaving age’ (which we all know isn’t really that!) gets higher and higher. Why do we push children to grow up fast and then clap a lid on it and tell them they’re not really grown up until they hit twenty? What is that about? Anyone?

In this house we go our own sweet way as much as possible. But the air we breathe is full of ‘shoulds’, isn’t it?
In this house childhood sometimes sounds like this,
L: Can I have a wormery?
D: Mmm? Yes, I suppose so.
L: Good, because I’ve got one.
A: Where?
L: In my bedroom in a cardboard box.
Said worms are now in the back porch and soon to be in a more permanent box. We finally all agreed that making worms live beside a de-humidifier wouldn’t be good for their health. This worm thing is a challenge to me. L didn’t help by adding the following comment, “I hope they breed and when I take off the lid there’ll be a writhing mass of worms!” Anyway, we got out the Wildlife Fact File that a colleague gave me and I realised I knew nothing about reproduction in worms. Now I do.

My voice is now returning and I am looking forward to a less busy week. We finished watching ‘Life on Mars’. It was excellent entertainment. I turned three in 1973 and it has amazed me how often (while watching) I have found myself picturing the house where I grew up and remembering certain images and sensations – the phone, cupboard doors, patterned carpet, long party dresses with big frills, bearded dad and uncle, the way the tv buttons felt when we pressed them in, cooking by candlelight in the powercut, nylon clothes. When I was little, in the 1970s, I would ask my mum for stories from her childhood. My mum was nearly four when the Second World War broke out and nearly ten by the time it was over so she had a lot of dramatic, childhood tales. It was so clearly ‘history’ to me – another world. Now I realise that it had all happened only thirty years before. It is strange how the things we lived through are never quite ‘history’ to us. Time plays funny tricks. I suspect I’m not the only person who finds it hard to remember these 20something dates. They just don’t seem real to me.

Right, off to eat some toast and not get stressed. There is plenty of time!

Rather gloomy

2008-10-17T10:19:00.001+01:00

Bum. Feeling like rubbish, with Rula Lenska voice again. Don’t know why it’s always Rula Lenska who springs to mind. Obviously made some deep impression on me in the late seventies, I guess. The week picked up pace after Monday and I just haven’t been able to shake this off. Got a day off work tomorrow, though, and I’m intending to rest a good deal. But Dani looked decidedly pink of nose last night, so I think she’s probably coming down with it too.

Tuesday the kids had things all afternoon and I needed to be out dropping them off, waiting around and collecting them again, from 1 until about half five. Wednesday included a Kids’ Club meeting and then a strange journey to work. I had to go up to the station to avoid a demo on the road. Good job I did, as the road was finally closed in both directions. Road was open again for my journey home but the buses were still a bit disrupted. Mine was packed with students going out to a club night who were singing rousing drinking songs. Dani had her work AGM in the evening so, when I finished work at 8pm, I had to go round to collect the kids from their cousins’ place. I extracted them quietly, so as not to wake their little cousin D, and we went home. Yesterday was the first day of the history sessions D and I are facilitating for a group of six 10 to 13 year old home edders. I think this went quite well. Then I had to go straight to work for the rest of the day.
By the time I got home last night I was feeling very miserable. I’m just so tired. Poor kids are getting a very grumpy me at the mo. Having one of those days when experiment remnants and the half finished creations are closing in on me and I just haven’t got the energy to deal with it. There never seems to be any less on the list of things that need doing, even though I feel like I never stop. This is why I’m sitting here whining on the keyboard, I guess, instead of actually getting something done. Luckily, we’re off to a home ed group soon, so the kids can get away from me for a bit!

Think I’d better stop there as I don’t seem able to lift this to a happier place. Back another day with a happier post. Will now listen to music, wash up and remember that I really have nothing to moan about.

Keeping on

2008-10-14T09:52:00.000+01:00

In the early hours of Monday I was woken by a throbbing tonsil. I always forget that this term tends to bring coughs and colds aplenty. The students return and share about their germs in the close confines of young lives in halls of residence. Then they come and cough at us over the enquiry desk! Honestly, sometimes I find myself wanting to escort them home with a Lemsip. I struggled to get back to sleep and felt lousy in the morning, so I phoned in sick.

I don’t often do that but it was wise, as I crashed out for about two hours in the afternoon – right when I should have been arriving at work. The rest of the day I lolled about. I devoured nearly all of my latest Patrick Gale book. I loved it. It took me right there, everywhere. I was transported.

Today is going to involve much more going out and about. I could really do without it but these are things the children enjoy and are committed to, so I’ll pop some painkillers and get on with it. I have had a reasonable night’s sleep, so it should be possible. Need to buy some cheap joggers for P, who has an adventure weekend coming up. Need to buy some cheap joggers for L who is displaying his ankles rather a lot. Need to get my head around the demands of a day later in the week when our little history course is starting – check bus times and so on. Need to reply to the CME consultation. Oh no, I feel a list coming on. Now, I must not pick up that new Patrick Gale that I’ve borrowed from E!

Back again

2008-10-12T11:12:00.001+01:00

Well, it’s been a while and I don’t know why. I have been prioritising story writing, I guess. Work is also very busy at this time of year and I don’t feel much like sitting at a computer in the evening. Instead, Dani and I have been watching series one of Life on Mars, which we borrowed from the library. We missed it first time around but we loved Ashes to Ashes, so we thought we’d give it a go. It doesn’t have Keely Hawes, which is a shame, but we really enjoyed it. I did find it a bit painful from time to time and I found myself dealing with flashes of hospital memory that I could have done without. But I guess that shows it was well written.

On Friday we went to the Planetarium at Chichester. Dani had made a booking for a home ed visit and we ended up being a group of forty six. Thinking about the stars is rather good for putting things in perspective. When the papers and tv never stop about the end of the world as we know it, it is rather soothing to look at the constellations in the company of a man who loves his subject.

Sadly, Leo came down with a ferocious migraine. We tried food and managed to find half a paracetamol, but it was too late. The pain got worse and then, in a packed train carriage, the poor boy threw up. He managed to get it all in an empty Tupperware, which was very clever of him, and he then dozed a bit. He got off the train ok but then threw up again (in another Tupperware!) right at the ticket barriers in Brighton station. It’s probably one of the most hectic spots in the whole town. But it’s amazing how people can manage to avoid you if you’re accompanied by a vomiting child! He rallied a bit after that so we splashed out on a cab home from the station. We had a cold-ridden Pearlie with us too and she was pretty tired by then. She started to feel car-sick in the cab but, luckily, nothing came of it! The children retired to their respective rooms and rested. I phoned the doctor because I’d like to know if there is some better drug we could give him at the first sign of a migraine. I hope she’ll take my word for it that that is what is going on for him, without wanting to spend time and money on a load of tests and so on. Honestly, he is like a text book case and watching him has made me realise that I had migraines as a child, even though I never had them diagnosed until I was about twenty two and had one that involved my falling on the floor repeatedly! There is a certain amount we can do with rest and food, to reduce the incidence, but migraine management is tricky for an adult sometimes – let alone someone of eight. And the dread and panic that he feels when one of coming on just makes things worse, I suspect.

The kids have been busy with things and we’re all getting into the stride with our routine for the term. We shall review things at Christmas, I think, and see how everyone is feeling with the things they’re doing.

I am finding all this financial crisis stuff rather hard to understand. I understand it for about five minutes and then forget again and it all just seems like nonsense. Something will happen. No doubt, the people with least will end up suffering the most as that is what usually happens, isn’t it?

We are loved

2008-10-11T14:41:00.002+01:00

Thanks very much for this award, Peri. We love you too!

More than

2008-10-01T12:42:00.001+01:00

I’m going to break my own rule and share a snippet from some time I spent with Leo, yesterday, doing maths. (Entirely voluntary maths, for those who may be wondering!) We were looking at something that thought it was introducing the symbols for less than, more than and equal to. (Actually, I guess it thought you knew equals... Mind you, I never really saw that symbol as that, for many years. I thought it was more like a piece of mathematical punctuation – the thing you write before the answer!) Anyway, I was surprised by the way Leo was jotting down these symbols like he’d known them for years.

Allie: “Have you seen these symbols before, Leo?”
Leo: “Well, that one (points to more than) I have.”
Allie: “Yes?” (perplexed)
Leo: “Well it’s from that company, More Than, isn’t it?”
Allie: "Is it?"

And, of course, he is right. It was one of those lovely moments when I am reminded that children are always noticing and absorbing and making connections. I must have seen as many adverts for that company as Leo has but he likes design and I'm not usually paying much attention to it. He notices the look of a thing. He must have noted that strange thing they’d done with the letter A and then slotted that together with the maths page he was looking at. I do like home ed – I learn so much about learning.

No faith

2008-09-30T22:09:00.001+01:00

These days I seem to spend a lot of time, IRL and online, with people who have a variety of religious and/or spiritual beliefs. I often wonder why I have no beliefs along these lines and others do. Then I wonder how it can be that so many people get so much from these beliefs and yet I feel no lack.

I often wonder if some of the framework of morality and ethics that a religious upbringing provides, I got from the atheist, politically aware family that I was raised in. We didn’t have faith but we did have beliefs and these, I think, are why I felt so secure in knowing right from wrong, in my childhood. I was certainly brought up to think that we all have duties towards each other – as well as rights. This is one of the things that irritates me when people blame the ‘breakdown of society’ on the decline of religious observance. There was an article along those lines in our local paper today. I object to the notion that my children will be inherently 'worse' than children raised with faith.

But, for many of my friends, their beliefs are about way more than a code of conduct. They feel immense comfort in the notion of a divine or cosmic being or essence that is watching over them. I’ve never felt that to be anything other than a creepy notion. I certainly do have moments of despair about the self-destructive impulses of my species but I feel comforted by the thought of the vast universe. We are just one little rock. It is sad that we can cause ourselves, each other and other creatures such pain. It is rather shameful that we appear intent on destroying our planet. But the planet will adapt and something else will happen.

My personal fate is of little importance. I find death a rather comforting thought. I am a little creature that lives for a very short time and then I’m gone. Everlasting life sounds exhausting to me! I’m not after heaven or salvation. Let me be gone when I’ve had my time. I find it re-assuring that just as there is a limit to the pleasure any human can experience, so there is to the pain – for me and for everyone else. I miss people that I have lost but they are dead. I have a human brain, which means I have a bank of memories and the people I have loved are in my mind. Over generations they will be forgotten and that’s ok too.

Maybe I’m shallow. Maybe the fact that a beautiful sunset or a flawless beach are just that to me, shows that I’m lacking something. But they are just that and they can still move me to tears. They don’t move me to tears as evidence of divine creation or cosmic energy but as the place I’m lucky enough to call home. I’m an animal with the capacity to appreciate beauty. How cool is that? (as my dd would say...)

My lack of spiritual beliefs means that I do believe that there are people entirely alone, suffering. It is a harsh world, in many ways. But there are also many, many examples of what a Christian friend of mine would call fellowship. I’m frequently amazed by people’s goodwill towards each other and their capacity for empathy when others are going through a hard time.

I do understand the offence caused by people who condemn religion – even if I have my moments of nodding along with them sometimes. There is nothing to be gained from ranting at people about all the things you find offensive, or plain ridiculous, about their beliefs. It’s not like anyone is going to suddenly throw up their hands and say, “hey, you’re right, it’s a silly idea.” It’s arrogant and unpleasant to listen to. Mind you, I say the same about people who want to accost me in the street, or on my doorstep, to let me know I’m doomed to everlasting hell unless I agree with them. Oh yeah, and most of them would like me to live a celibate life and renounce the love of my life too.

I sometimes have to cough down a comment or two when I fear that people I care about are damaging themselves through adherence to a spiritual or religious belief I don’t share. But I remind myself that they are probably doing the same thing when watching me go my merry way. In the end, I believe in freedom more than ‘being right’ – way more.

One of the things that age has changed in me is the fact that I now have far more faith in human capacity to get things wrong than I ever did when I was a young woman. I wanted to find a formula that could be applied to ensure a better world and for me that was a political quest. Now I believe that one of the few things we can rely on is that whatever we do, there will be unintended consequences. This has killed the revolutionary in me (she was always rather tentative anyway!) and made me feel that the best change is done in small steps with plenty of opportunity to rectify the messes that you will, inevitably, make along the way. But that’s all dependent on there being a will in the first place and that demands the recognition that we will be best served by caring for each other and the world around us – rather than seeking to win the race or get the biggest heap of gold. But, just as I no longer believe in a political formula for a better world, so I don’t believe in a religious one. Because I don’t believe in God/spiritual forces I think that religions are human constructions and so they will be full of error. Unintended consequences abound! If we start with an idea that the first thing that must happen is that everyone adopt the exact same belief system we’re off on the merry path to witch burning and stoning. I don’t want to go there.

I don’t anticipate a death-bed conversion to any religion. But I never say never. That’s something else that I think I’ve learned over the last twenty years or so. We are changing creatures and people do the most surprising things. But I think that spending a childhood with no God, no religion, makes it more likely I’ll live and die that way. People who are raised with faith often do tend to miss it if they go without later on, I’ve observed. We’ll see.

This evening we’ve all been talking about religion. I was trying to explain that Jesus is both God and the Son of God. Pearlie raised an eyebrow and said, “that must have been a complicated family tree.”

Migraine

2008-09-27T10:33:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I woke with a migraine. It is always bad when I wake with one. I had a cluster of triggers the day before – hormonal, got too hungry between meals, didn’t drink enough – and I’m also wondering if the twister wasn’t the last straw...

Dani went off to work and I got up slowly and tried to function. I sat with P, who was doing some maths, but I was more a grim, occasionally groaning presence than any help. Leo was writing in his spell book and watching Merlin clips on i-player. I told the kids I was going to lie down and I did but it really isn’t possible to shake a migraine unless I sleep deeply. I can do that thing of holding myself in light sleep (I think I learned it when they were babies) but the pain just goes on. I phoned D and asked her to come in at lunchtime (bringing bread for kids’ lunches) and she agreed. When she saw how grim I was she arranged to work from home for the afternoon. Then I felt I could really sleep. I know the kids are really fine these days if I do crash out but I just can’t relax properly if it’s daytime and I’m the only adult in the house.

After a sleep I was no longer feeling like I was about to throw up or cry, so I lay on the sofa for the rest of the day. I’m so lucky that D appreciates how incapacitated I am by migraine. It’s also lucky that technology can help with working at home.

Right, D and P are off at a wedding and I’ve things to arrange for Leo before I can go to work. The weather here is amazing - far better than it was for most of the summer. I’ve got to work today and tomorrow – ho hum.

Twister

2008-09-25T23:22:00.000+01:00

We went to the fair this evening. Now, when I was a child and a teen I could go on the twister and come running off feeling excited and energised. I took the kids on the twister tonight and could barely stagger off the ride! I still enjoyed it but my head seemed to take several minutes to re-adjust. It was the children’s first time on a more scary, grown up ride. They usually want to stick with the giant inflatable slides and flying chairs. They loved it and have decided they will definitely go on it next time the fair comes down.

Leo took a lot of cleaning at bedtime as he appeared to have varnished himself with a thin layer of toffee apple. Pearlie had a luminous pink tongue from consumption of candy floss. There is something magic about taking them to the fair. I can still remember the gut leaping thrill of seeing the fair arriving in town, back when I was Leo’s age.

Yesterday, while I was at work, Dani and the kids went to London to see a show. This was thanks to some free tickets that another home edder was offering on one of the national lists. It was Joseph and his Amazing so on, starring one of the runners up from the BBC Saturday evening show. As it turned out, he wasn’t actually in it but they said the show was excellent. Leo woke me this morning singing - Aaah, Aaah, Aah! - like a member of the chorus. Many thanks are due to the home edder who supplied the tickets.

Hoping

2008-09-25T12:27:00.004+01:00

I've been keeping up with some goings on in California - via Lesbian Dad. I have also recently got back in touch with a great friend from my student days, who lives out there and has just married her beloved. I hope for her, and the many others like her, that the proposition is defeated. It would re-write the California Constitution to provide that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

It is clear from just a bit of reading that this is a hugely emotional matter for many people - and some of what I've read (and watched) has had me in tears. This surprised me a bit as getting married has always seemed like a rather odd thing to me and I've never felt in the least deprived - on a personal level. I wouldn't do it if I could and the whole civil partnership thingy doesn't appeal. But this touches me because it is about whether or not people are prepared to afford the same respect to same-sex unions as they do to heterosexual ones. It is making people say what they really feel and (because it is directly about the very heart of the experience of being lesbian or gay) it chips off some of the shell that I suspect many lesbian and gay people (and our friends and families) have around us.

Back when I was young it was the era of the Tories and Section 28. I found a thriving lesbian and gay community here and it was, in many ways, a good time to come out. But part of what I learned was to glory in my life's experiences in spite of what the world might say. I learned to find support where it was offered and shut out the rest. And there was, of course, a lot of sh*t. I was very lucky compared to many other people and I often stop to reflect on my good fortune at being born in this place and time and into a birth family of such warmth and love. But it would be a lie to say that the negativity never got to me. I knew I wanted a partner and children and I knew that there were plenty of people who did then, and still do now, deem that 'wrong'. None of us can live our day to day life dwelling on the fact that the most precious part of our existence is thought sick, dirty or even just 'lesser' by some others. I know it is so but I try not to think about it. It's corrosive to peace of mind and does no good.

But, when something like this Prop 8 thing happens in a community, it breaks the shell a bit. This is because people have allowed themselves hope and joy. They have been seen beaming and crying and glorying in their love. To have this experience taken away, written off or downgraded, would be a boot to that exposed heart. I hope they don't have to bear that.

2008-09-24T11:14:00.003+01:00

It’s raining and our son is off at home ed group wearing a dressing up cloak with a fur fabric trim. For those in the know, it is Westphalian Trim.

P and I had plans for this morning but, thanks to the library service prize of a free DVD loan for completing the summer reading scheme, I’m doing my best to tune out Totally Spies! It is probably my least favourite programme. The high pitched American teeny voices make me want to scream. OK, got headphones on now – that’s better! It has to be watched now because it’ll be overdue again tomorrow.

We had a nice trip to see D’s parents at the weekend. D’s dad had set up his moth lamp and we all had a look at some of the moths who’d been attracted during the night. Then the kids made friends with the frogs in the pond. We had a yummy lunch and came away with a DVD player that they didn’t need, which is great because P could do with one in her room. If we’d got it set up now then I wouldn’t be having to endure Totally Spies!

It was my birthday recently and I got lots of nice things – thanks to all. Dani got me some old Miss Marple videos (1980s, Joan Hickson ,BBC ones) which I’d been coveting. They’d been in the second-hand shop since March and when they finally disappeared I thought, “well, they’ve gone now...” in a gloomy way. I was thrilled when I opened this big parcel and they spilled out all over the bed. She got me thirteen tapes for £20, which is a real bargain and I’m enjoying watching them.

I’m still on a Patrick Gale kick and have an Ali Smith and book of Vanessa Gebbie’s short stories lined up too. My mum got me a book of Jackie Kay’s poetry that I’ve been wanting. I’m reading a lot at the moment and writing a lot too. It feels very good. Making the time isn’t easy but I am determined. I also got myself lots of nice bath and hair stuff with birthday vouchers – and as presents – so I’m preparing for the winter with cocoa butter and lip creams, and so on. It’s been years since I have had much of that sort of stuff. It’s lovely to feel so pampered. Reading in the bath is one of my all time favourite activities.

Dani and I went out for the evening in honour of my birthday. We saw Clare Teal and her voice is even more impressive live. She was very witty and down-to-earth too. We had a drink or two and wandered home – a good night.

The rest of life is feeling rather overly busy and complicated. A slight mix-up over venue booking has thrown one of the home ed group things into a certain amount of chaos. I’m sure everything will settle down but we have a few things that are still not started and, until we’re living the complete routine, it’s hard to know how it will work.

P and I have just had a lovely surprise. My dad turns seventy in a week or two and he has decided that, instead of being given present, he is treating everyone else in the family. So, some little brown envelopes have just appeared through the door – one for each of us. He enclosed a note with the wise observation,
“You don’t have to last for seventy years to realise that a lot of little treats (even very little ones) is better than one big one.”
I agree, wholeheartedly!

A day in the life of the Greenhouse family

2008-09-19T16:30:00.002+01:00

I have been interested to read some ‘days in the life of’ blog posts at people’s blogs recently. It is so interesting, the way the internet can introduce us to people we’d never meet in our day to day lives. I’m sure it’s a good thing.

One of the reasons we moved to this blog was because I don’t feel comfortable talking in detail about what the children are doing. So, let’s see if I can give you a rough idea of our days that doesn’t break my own rule ;-)

The most notable feature in the way we live our family life is probably the fact that it is rather structured for people who purport to be autonomous home educators! This is because the children have a lot of commitments. It is also because both D and I work outside the home so we have to make sure that we can get to work and be at work without it interfering with the children’s things. We have timetables on the big noticeboard in our kitchen. This is useful in reminding us where we’re meant to be – and when – but is also so that we don’t add in impossible things.

Because we have these timetables, each day of the week has a distinct character. Fridays are pretty laid back, for example, whereas Mondays involve a lot of coming and going – as do Thursdays. If something swaps from one day to another then we’re often in total chaos.

So, on one of the days of the week, this might happen...

Dani gets up and heads off to work at about 8.40am. Sometimes both children are awake by then, but often L is still asleep. If he is, he usually wakes when she opens the door.

I will shower and dress and be offering breakfasts or making packed lunches, by nine. Children appear when they want and either make their own food or ask me to do it. I pay attention to what is eaten because I know it will influence ability to cope with whatever the day may throw at us! Leo copes better with a substantial whack of protein in the morning so he might have egg or vege sausage. If someone doesn’t have much breakfast, and they’ll be out for lunch, then I add more to their pack and remind them to raid it mid-morning.

P might head off to a local home ed group, leaving me and L with a couple of hours at home. I will take my cue from him and we’ll either do things together or separately. I’ll be trying to fit in things like getting washing on the line and washing up dishes. We might read our books side by side or he might be on the computer or pottering about. We might work together on his maths book or write stories. He might have a creation on the go and spend time in the re-cycling collecting materials. There’s always some drawing and sometimes things like fimo or watercolour painting. I’ll give him a hand with his keyboard practice if he wants me to – acting as music stand and occasional metronome! We talk and also enjoy silent time. The tv isn’t really on in the mornings here. In years gone by we used to watch schools tv but this isn’t very popular now.

It is equally possible that L might head off to a group and P and I will be at home. We have some scheduled slots for things she’s decided to concentrate on at the moment – but these are, of course, changeable if we feel like it. We also play cards or other games and chat and drink tea.

P might re-appear, or she might have something else to get to. I suppose I can tell you the bare bones of what these things might be! Maybe it’ll be art, or French with my mum or a sewing workshop. Soon it’ll be a self-managed learning group. She will be in touch with us throughout the day if she’s not with us.

D and I may ‘change mummies’ at lunchtime. If it’s what we call ‘tight changeover’ then I will be ready for work and on the doorstep as she comes along the road. We will exchange a few words. If we need to say more then I’ll be on the phone to her as I walk to the bus stop.

I find my journeys to work a very restful time. I will listen to music or have a read through of a story I’ve written and do some editing. Sometimes I listen to other people’s conversations. At work I do worky things until 7pm during vacations or 8pm during the term, when I head home.

The afternoon at home might involve a group activity for someone, or a visit to the grandmothers’, or time together. If Dani has time alone with L she’ll do some stuff with him – often his chemistry set or another messy experiment type thing. She’s very good at helping with materials and so on. If she and P are alone they’ll often do something outdoorsy – a bike ride or trip to town for something. When she has both of them for an afternoon – and there’s no groups or other social stuff – she often takes them to the swimming pool and/or library.

Whoever is around, later afternoons tend to involve some tv watching and/or quiet time for people. If the sun is shining, the kids may play in the street for a while – chalking on the pavements or dangling hulk from the upstairs window and swinging him about... If we’ve ended up in the park with other home edders (which happens most weeks) then we might be there until quite late.

We eat together when we can. When I’m at work until eight then the other three will usually have eaten before I get in. Evenings are actually rather lovely now. If no-one is going out – I go to writing, Dani to knitting and P to a bookgroup and Woodcraft– we’ll usually be together in the living room. Saturdays often seem to involve a roast dinner. We have some favourite family programmes – lots of comedy, Doctor Who (of course) other dramas and some factual stuff. We also watch stuff like X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing. At the moment we all like to watch Who Do You Think You Are?

Kids usually go to bed at 9.30pm and have half an hour of the book they’re currently sharing with a parent. After ten they are in their rooms until morning – reading or sleeping. D and I will talk, watch programmes on tv or computer, plan things we need to plan, do banking and so on. There might be some fundraising or other admin for a home ed group. There’s cups of tea in the evening too. We often go to sleep way too late – way after midnight. Sometimes I fall asleep under a woollen blanket on the sofa and D wakes me to go to bed.

That could be any weekday. Some weekdays the kids are with me all day because D’s doing 9 to 5 at work. Weekends are a bit different because the kids don’t have any groups at weekends. I work a lot of weekends, which means D and the kids are usually together and they often see cousins.

We do a lot of groupy stuff but it is important to the way we home ed. I’m happy that the children have autonomy in their learning but, for me, it is necessary that they are offered lots of interesting opportunities. I also think that being able to get along with other people is probably the most vital life skill there is. That doesn’t mean you have to live in a social whirl – I often crave time at home – but no-one lives in a complete social vacuum.

We often have days that are a break with every routine. Today, P went on a five mile nature walk with other older HE kids – led by rangers from a nature reserve. One day soon we’re going on a biggish home ed trip to a planetarium. When groups aren’t happening much (over the summer) we do quite a few days out.

I rarely get a whole day at home. I would do that more if I could but it’s impossible at the moment. We are very lucky that we’re generally a healthy bunch (migraines aside) and so we can stand the pace. The children get time at home – but mostly in chunks here and there. It amazes me how much they get done when they’re here! Mess making, especially...

Stuff

2008-09-17T22:50:00.002+01:00

Well, it’s very odd having a blog where I’m not blogging the children’s comings and goings. It makes me realise how much of that we do! Not that I’m complaining because it suits us just fine – but, still, is there much else to say?

Yes, there is, because we parents also have lives! Honest, we do... Yesterday I went to my writing group. I spent a fab two or three hours round a kitchen table, drinking wine and reading and talking and gasping and laughing and all that. There is something so inspiring and refreshing in meeting up for a limited time to focus just on that one thing –our writing. I’ve been introduced to these people through my friend, E. They are not a group of people I’d have met in my day to day life, so it’s interesting to find myself sharing this thing with them. This thing that I love.

Dani made some fingerless gloves for L’s latest incarnation – Barnaby Grimes. She’s now working on some of those fingerless gloves with a flap, for P.

We are also planning a short local history course, which we’re going to offer to one of the home ed groups that P is going to. Neither of us has ever offered anything like that to anyone before – but we’re quite excited to be doing it. I have to confess to browsing at work and borrowing things like 100 ideas for teaching history. The course is going to be four sessions based around a rather bizarre bit of our local history.

I threw L by going to work this morning for a staff forum. He is used to waking up when he hears Dani opening the front door to leave and rushing, bleary eyed, down the stairs to kiss her goodbye. This morning it was me standing there! P is nearly always up before other people. She has never needed much sleep and that doesn’t seem to be changing.

I have decided to keep blogging books. Dani and L are currently reading Percy Jackson and the Battle of the Labyrinth, which they are enjoying. P and I are reading Fly by Night. This is good but fairly heavy going. We have to re-cap from time to time because, as P said, there’s so many similes! The other night I made the awful discovery that it doesn’t belong to us! So, P, M and J, if you’re reading – we’ll pop it in the post as soon as we’ve finished. I’m mortified as I don’t like it when people don’t return my books... I’m still into Patrick Gale and Dani is reading a book about the South Downs.

Oh, and one little moment with children... I came home from work the other night to find hideous bloody werewolf footprints on the pavement. Dani had helped to find a fake blood recipe on the internet and sacrificed the end of a tin of golden syrup – very realistic!

First draft of response to CME Guidance Consultation

2008-09-15T14:47:00.001+01:00

Update 18/9/08: I sent it in, with a couple of very minor amendments, and got an acknowledgement with Response Identifier no. 23. Deadline is October 24th, so plenty of time still to get yours in!

----------------------------------------------------

Whew! I finally got to the end of the questions. Don't feel you have to read all this if you don't want to, but if anyone does have the stamina to plough through it all I would appreciate any comments. I'll probably leave this up here to look at all in one piece for a few days before sending it in, so if there are glaring errors here it's not too late to correct them.

For those who have no idea what this is about, have a look at EO's campaign page on it, and if you are thinking of composing your own response, you might want to check out Carlotta's response too.

Respondent Information Questions

Please tick the box that best describes you as a respondent

Local Authority

School/College

Central Government Department

Youth Justice Service

Health/PCT/SHA

Social Services

Police

Parent/Carer

Voluntary/Community Sector

Connexions

Children's Trust

Other

I found the guidance to be muddled, highly ambiguous, and incoherent.

11 a) We have developed standard data definitions at Appendix 1 of the guidance. These were developed in consultation with several local authorities. Do you agree with these definitions?

Agree

Disagree

Not sure

No Response

Answer/Comments

I do not agree with the definition of children who are not receiving a suitable education. It is perfectly possible for a child not to be receiving an education suitable to his/her age, aptitude and ability while on the roll of a school. Given that education at school and otherwise are legally equivalent, there is no reason for this definition to include a specific statement about the education being provided at home not being "suitable" when this is not included for education being provided at school.

I also don't agree with the proposed 'subsets', as it seems to me that these could be understood to include children who are in fact lawfully educated at home. Children who are never registered at school or whose parents choose to home educate them at a point of transition between one school and another are not necessarily missing education, nor are they necessarily 'refusing' to attend school or accept a school place.

I think the references throughout the document, and in these data definitions, to "Elective home education that is unsuitable in accordance with Section 7 of the 1996 Education Act;" are confusing and unhelpful. Either somebody is being educated in accordance with Section 7 or they are not. Whether or not they are registered at a school is irrelevant.

11 b) If not, what amendments would you suggest and why?

Answer/Comments

I think the first definition should say " "A compulsory school-age child who is not receiving efficient full-time education suitable—

(a) to his age, ability and aptitude, and

(b) to any special educational needs he may have,

either by regular attendance at school or otherwise."

When the sun shines

2008-09-12T14:59:00.000+01:00

I feel we really have to grab it. We spent a lovely hour in the park this morning. L is being Barnaby Grimes at the moment and he was having a good time chasing squirrels and so on – in full costume minus the topper, which we can’t afford. Pearlie was whizzing down the slope on the skateboard – working in tricks like high fiving Leo and picking up things off the ground as she passed. It made me very grateful to be home edding.

It struck me that the recent piece in the Independent was very sad, for several reasons. The fact of children kept locked up in institutions, in this country, while my children are free to play in the sunshine, is sickening enough on its own. The awful tragedy of children withdrawn from school and kept in starving isolation –in a street of terraced houses not unlike our own – is another bitter indication of the place and times in which we live. And the leap from these awful things to the journalist’s view that only regular local authority checks can ensure the safety and education of my own children, is depressing. These are, presumably, the same local authorities that he calls to account for abandoning permanently excluded children to wander the streets. This is what Johann Hari had to say,
“The law here needs to be altered so local authorities regularly interview home-schooled kids.”

Why? Are we to believe that this would keep children safe and ensure that they thrive? Another news story this week indicates that state ‘checking’ can be a woefully inadequate way of dealing with the plight of children being abused. If a consultant paediatrician can fail to notice grave injuries, including a broken back, in a toddler known to be at risk of abuse, what else can go unnoticed? I don’t have any easy answers. But I don’t see how pouring money into mass monitoring exercise would be anything other than a waste of resources that could be used where they are really needed – in saving children.

I realised when reading the article that it is likely that I would agree with Johann Hari on many things. I do believe that many children in this country are abandoned, in one way or another. I don’t have a rosy notion that family life always means love and care. Adults, including parents, fail to care for children – hurt them, abuse them, neglect them and sometimes kill them. But I am appalled (like Johann Hari) at the way children are failed by the state too. So, why does he think this state is to be relied on to ensure the safety of yet more children? It does a pretty lousy job looking out for those who are relying on it for a start in life. People in prison are thirteen times more likely than those in the general population to have been in local authority care as a child. State intervention often doesn’t (in spite of the best intentions of those who work in social services) result in an improvement in a child’s well-being, especially in the long term.

Sometimes children will be saved by state intervention. Sometimes families need access to professional services for therapy of all sorts, which the state provides. These are the realities of the world we live in and I don’t deny them. I’m glad those services exist. But, do I think the state should waste my money and the time of over-stretched social workers or education welfare staff on routinely interviewing my children? No. My kids have had a busy day today. At the moment they are running a stall on the doorstep. They’re selling old toys and cheese straws that they made together. They’re fine. You can believe that because I love them. I would never knowingly fail them. That is the case with the majority of all parents and home educating parents are no different.

Hats

2008-09-10T23:12:00.000+01:00

Today was one of those days when I wear different hats. I was the parent helper on rota at Kids’ Club. It was the first session back after the hols and new children came along. That was all very calm and lovely, but I was quite absorbed and when Dani appeared to take over from me, I was shocked at the time.

I left there and set off for the bus stop at a jog as I had less than an hour before I was due to be sitting at the enquiry desk at work. Then I discovered I’d forgotten my sandwich and so had to buy some rubbish food from a corner shop. Dani found my sandwich in the bag I’d left with Leo at Kids’ Club.

I did two hours on the desk at work – reading emails, catching up on routine things and answering queries about books, journals and passwords - as well as answering phones and directing throngs of PGCE students to a library induction session being run by a colleague. Then I went straight to a meeting, before snatching my first sit down and cup of tea – at 4.30pm. I then worked the rest of the day until we shut up shop at 7pm. My bus had decided to leave the stop early, so I waited for the next one and got home just before 8pm.

A working day that involves being out of the house from 9.30am to 8pm isn’t really that long and many people work longer days, but I find the shift from home ed group to work very tiring. I end up feeling like I’ve lived two days in one.

I am very lucky, in many ways, that I can keep my work life neatly parcelled up in the hours when I’m there. The different bits of my life don’t tend to overlap and that is better for me than a life where my money earning activities were enmeshed in my family or child time. But I do sometimes feel like I’m always about to rush off somewhere!

The swift swapping of hats is one of the key features of my life as a parent. It is something I have learned to do far better than I would ever have believed possible, before we had children. When I was working nine to five, Monday to Friday, before we had kids, I used to need a whole routine to prepare for the working week. I can remember ironing a week’s worth of shirts on Sunday night! I really had no idea...

Reports

2008-09-08T18:43:00.000+01:00

I went round to my mum’s place today and picked up a bag full of school work and reports. I’ve read it through and deposited most in the recycling. TBH, most of it was exercise books of neat writing covered in ticks and reports that said I was clever and good. All a bit sick making! I kept three things.

The first is a report from what is now called year three, but which was my last year in something called first school. I went through the system during a brief period when they chopped the years about a bit round here. I kept this because it is dated July 1979 and, though it is very brief, it contains this:
Language – Good at all aspects of this subject, but writes particularly interesting stories.
It pleases me that twenty nine years ago, at the age of eight, I was doing something that I still love to do today. I guess it’s in deep.

The second is my English book from what is now called year seven, but which was my last year in middle school. That year I had a teacher who clashed with my emerging political awareness. He had a large union flag on the classroom wall and a poster of Churchill. History with him involved copying down accounts of battles and weaponry and so on! In English, I wrote a lot of opinionated pieces and he hated them! In the back of the book is an essay called “To make a change in the country”. I can remember taking a deep breath and writing a piece that advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament. It was 1983 and my family were very involved in local CND activities. I didn’t do a bad job. I answered the deterrence argument and talked about the money spent on weaponry that could save starving people and included stats about the proportion of the population against the placing of US cruise missiles on UK soil. He gave me a B minus and a page of rant about how I wouldn’t like to live under a totalitarian regime! I’ve kept that to remind me of the power of a teacher and the start of my frustrations in the system.

The third thing I have kept is the front page of my school report for 1985/6 – the school year that followed my sister’s death and the year in which I came to recognise my lesbianism. That was one of the hardest years of my life. I have blogged before about my feelings in school at that time. I’m not exaggerating to say that I was clinging on at times – counting minutes, seconds, until the school day ended. I was keeping my head low and often despairing. My form tutor had this to day about me,
“Annalie is a quiet, hardworking member of the form. Always neatly dressed.”
So, there we are. I might have been falling apart inside but at least I was neatly dressed!
My head of year noted,
“Attendance could certainly be improved”.
Actually, it couldn’t be improved and no-one ever took the time to ask me why I was ill so much – what was going on. I did have one teacher who supported me wonderfully but this was all done on a personal basis – in spite of the system. She is someone I count as a friend forever. But I’ve kept that page as a reminder of being in a bad place – a place where I had no control over my day to day life and where I felt battered by the end of every day. I never want to be in such a place again.

Most of my old school work and reports reminded me of what it was to be so approved! So many pats on the head... Why didn’t they help me more when times were hard? Why did they mean so little inside? I guess because they weren’t for the real me. They were for the facade.

I had some good teachers along the way and some who were kind people. When my maths teacher said I deserved an “A in my O level as few he had ever taught” I realise now that he wasn’t talking about the way I’d applied myself to maths, but the way I’d struggled to get through the last two years of school.

There’s nothing in those teenage reports that touches the reality of how I was living. The gobbing and shoving and bra strap tugging that was the reality of every lesson change. The foul, violent language littered with homophobia and shaming sexual comments. The horror of the showers and the baying mob that pursued anyone ‘different’. There’s no mention of that in my secondary school reports and so I think I’ll chuck them in the recycling. Just in case I start believing in the fiction of that neatly dressed girl who was “working hard”.

Too much STUFF!

2008-09-06T22:41:00.001+01:00

I’m very full of apple crumble and custard. The grandmothers have a tree and we get windfalls and more.

Today we spent a family day together at a local community festival type thing. The kids had had a clear out and we’d got various toddler age toys out of the loft so that we could have a stall. P and L made a few quid each and we made the odd donation to worthy causes. It was rather strange to spend the afternoon in a school hall, but there you go. We would have been out on a playing field, but the weather was unpredictable.

When we were in the loft (trying not to notice the damp and crumbly bits) we found a marble run that we put up there a few years ago. It is, as I recall, a bit wobbly and it was frustrating for the kids when they were little but I’m hoping it will be fun now.

It amazes me how much stuff we accumulate in this little house. I don’t think of us as hugely extravagant in terms of the objects we buy (our extravagances tend to be more to do with trips and shows and group activities) but both the kids rooms fairly groan with toys and books. I was feeling quite superior about the few boxes of stuff that D and I have in our room, but then my mum called to tell me that she’d found a whole trunk of my stuff in her loft. That wasn’t the house I grew up in so my mum must have moved it all there when they moved in to their current house – about fifteen years ago. They’re clearing their loft because they’re getting some free insulation done by virtue of being pensioners. I went and got the few bits I wanted. These included some cuddly toys from my childhood. I gave Leo my lovely hedgey (a hedgehog dressed in shirt, trousers and apron) and his baby and I gave Pearlie a pair of rabbits – one black and one white – who were a couple, I think. I also gave a creature to each local cousin.

Now my mum has phoned to say that she’s found all my school reports! I will have to go and get them, just to give the kids a laugh. My mum’s own reports were there too and I remembered her comment for rounders at grammar school, “her batting is weak and she could improve it.” She always told us there was no chance of her improving because they made her take off her glasses and she couldn’t see the ball!

We don’t buy anything much in terms of special home ed resources. We have tons of books but we’d have them anyway. As well as owning books, we have access to the library where I work, which is very lucky. It contains a library of books for education students to use in school with children and has a good children’s fiction section too. If the kids want something in the way of a ‘workbooky’ thing, we use free stuff off the internet. Things like science kits, they’ve tended to get as birthday and Christmas presents. Leo got a chemistry set last year and he and Dani have done lots of cool stuff with that. But we don’t have shelves full of resources and I’m glad I had Dani to stay my hand in the first few years of home ed, when I was often to be found browsing catalogues of stuff! I did once waste quite a lot of money on an onset and rime set that Leo never showed any interest in as he merrily learned to read from the books in the house.

But, we still have too much stuff. There are boxes in the kids rooms that contain toys that everyone forgets we even own. We did manage to sell quite a few games today and dent our stock of things that need batteries. But the kids entered a competition to make a clay creation and P’s won. Guess what her prize was? Yes, a game requiring batteries!