HomeSchooler.org.uk

"The meeting HEYC had with the DCSF in August was filmed, but unfortunately we have been prevented from distributing the resulting video by the Department. You may confirm this with them if you wish."

"Thank you for your email raising your concerns over the recommendations
in the Badman Report. Apologies in the delay in getting back to you but
we have been extremely busy.

Liberty is aware of the Review and the recommendations contained within
it. We are concerned about Recommendation 7, which suggests that
designated local authority officers should have a right of access to the
home. The Report contains little explanation of what these home visits
will actually entail and why such an intrusive power is necessary. 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. We await the
Government's full response to the Badman Report which will be published
in September. Any power of access to the home must be tightly regulated
and a full explanation as to the power's necessity should be given.

The Draft Legislative Programme for 2009/10 included the Improving
Schools and Safeguarding Children Bill. This will contain provisions for
the monitoring of home educated children. If, when this Bill is
introduced in Parliament, it includes the recommendation put forward in
the Badman Report for local authority officials to have access to the
home, we will be lobbying parliamentarians on this and our briefings
will be available on our website.

Kind regards

Ellen Berry
Campaigns Assistant"

The son of a member of the Badman Review Action Group has very kindly given me permission to reproduce his correspondence with the Children's Commissioner...

***********************First Letter***********************

Dear Children's Commissioner,

I and my brother are electively home educated. My Dad has told me
that should the Badman recommendations become law, I may have to see
and speak to employees of the Local Authority. My brother and I do not
want to do this and we do not want strangers to have the right of
entrance to our house. A recent poll of home educated children found
that 77% of them felt the same way. Could you confirm whether or not we have
the right not to meet or speak with local officials and whether, if we don't
want them in our house, we have to have them in anyway. I understand that Human
Rights legislation protects children from this sort of thing.

Yours sincerely,

LM

***********************Follow Up***********************

Dear Children's Commissioner,

I wrote to you last night saying that Mr Badman's review would let
inspectors come into my house, take me away from my parents and
question me. This will happen even when nothing is wrong. My
brother and I don't want this to happen. This morning we have been looking at
the UNHCR website. Article 16 says that: 'No child shall be subjected to
arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or
correspondence.' And Article 12 says that children have the right to express
their views freely in all matters affecting themselves and that 'the views of
the child be given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the
child.'

Under Articles 12 and 16, my brother and I hereby state that we do
not want strangers breaking into our house, taking us away and
interrogating us. We believe that since our mum and dad are not
suspected of abuse, such interference would be arbitrary and
unlawful.

"On Saturday July 4th representatives from Education Otherwise and the Home Education Advisory Service met with barrister Ian Dowty to discuss the Badman Report on Home Education. Here are some extracts from our notes:
"Argument against registration is harvesting all the data and sharing all the data. Includes hearsay and concerns about child. Having a licence to home educate implies that it is the state who registers the child, not the parent.""...more...

"In the UK, home education, or home-schooling, is an issue that has attracted little public, governmental or academic attention. Yet the number of children who are home educated is steadily increasing and the phenomenon has been referred to as a 'quiet revolution'. This paper neither celebrates nor denigrates home educators; its aim rather, is to identify and critically examine the two dominant discourses that define the way in which the issue is currently understood. First, the legal discourse of parental rights, which forms the basis of the legal framework and, secondly, a child psychology/common-sense discourse of 'socialisation', within which school attendance is perceived as necessary for healthy child development..."

..."This article reviews the current law, highlights the practical issues requiring clarification and identifies the connections with other policy developments such as Every Child Matters and the increasing regulation of the independent education sector."...

Anthony Grayling MA, DPhil (Oxon) FRSL, FRSA is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited many books on philosophy and other subjects; among his most recent are a biography of William Hazlitt and a collection of essays. For several years he wrote the "Last Word" column for the Guardian newspaper and is a regular reviewer for the Literary Review and the Financial Times. He also often writes for the Observer, Economist, Times Literary Supplement, Independent on Sunday and New Statesman, and is a frequent broadcaster on BBC Radios 4, 3 and the World Service. He is the Editor of Online Review London, Contributing Editor of Prospect magazine. In addition he sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals, and for nearly ten years was the Honorary Secretary of the principal British Philosophical Association, the Aristotelian Society. He is a past chairman of June Fourth, a human rights group concerned with China, and has been involved in UN human rights initiative. Anthony Grayling is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum, and a member of its C-100 group on relations between the West and the Islamic world. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and in 2003 was a Booker Prize judge.

Thank you to Ceri for this:

My hubby is French, so we've been checking out the situation there. Although we
knew they already had compulsory registration & monitoring, we were completely
unaware of the recent developments. In March 09 a new education bill was passed,
which dictates the curriculum to be followed. If that's not bad enough, it seems
to be dictating the method of delivery of said curriculum. Age related targets
therefore come into play, and obviously any form of autonomy goes out of the
window.

The three main HE orgs in France are outraged by the lack of proper consultation
before imposing the new legislation, and are basically feeling that it marks the
end of any form of diversity in French education. (It seems this will all also
apply to previously exempt private schools too - but I haven't read all the
details yet).

As I haven't spotted anything about this on any of the lists I lurk on (blush -
sorry, always too busy to post!), I thought I should flag this up, as it is
making us wonder if some of the pressure for the Badman review etc. might be
coming from Europe, and we're also wondering if we should be launching a wider
European campaign or if there is anything we can do to help our neighbours in
France? We will continue looking into this.

The freedom we have enjoyed until now is getting rare. We need to persuade
people that diversity is something to be proud of & to cherish. By quashing all
forms of education other than those imposed by the state we risk losing so much.
It would be nothing short of irresponsible to allow this to happen.

Jennie Bristow, is not a home-educator but gets the civil rights issue...

"Speaking personally, I find it hard to imagine a worse way of educating my children than trying to do it myself, at home. I don’t have the patience, inclination or energy for that kind of thing; and I also think state education, in principle, is brilliant....

...The more ground that is lost in the argument as to why state education is better for children than its alternatives, the more the state attempts to bully families and professionals into compulsory inclusion in its agenda. This is an expression of the state’s weakness rather than its ‘totalitarian’ intentions, but it is no less damaging for that. When the state resorts to bully tactics to make people toe the line, it destroys the basis for positive support.

As for parents: whatever our own views about home schooling, the principle of parental autonomy in relation to education is crucial for all of us, for the simple reason that it provides a clear demarcation between being able to do what we think is best for our children, and having to do what officials decree is best for them. For all the nonsense talked about choice in education, our only real choice as parents comes from the knowledge that if our children’s schooling becomes really bad, we can always pull them out of it."