I accept all the recommendations in your report that call for urgent action to improve safeguards for home educated children and we will introduce these as soon as possible...(But he is, er... "issuing a consultation.")
The report gives prominence to the concern raised by the British Humanist Association as follows:
“some of those who choose to educate their children at home for religious reasons may not be providing schooling that is adequate, either according to the Every Child Matters agenda or the principles of Article 29 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child”.I did think at the time it was introduced that the "Every Child Matters Agenda" would take on an increasingly sinister tone.
The review's proposals include a national registration scheme for home educators, to be renewed annually. There will be national guidance issued which will include a
clear statement of the statutory basis of elective home education and the rights and responsibilities of parentsHomeschooling is therefore no longer to be considered something that parents have a natural right to do, but something that has to have a "statutory basis."
Parents will have to:
provide a clear statement of their educational approach, intent and desired/planned outcomes for the child over the following twelve months.Designated Local Authority officers will have the right of access to the home and the right to speak with each child alone "if deemed appropriate."
The Badman-Balls approach is a fundamental contradiction of the true relationship between state education and the family. The school should be considered as acting "in loco parentis" (in the place of the parent) because the parents are the first educators and carers for their own children. This latest review and its recommendations assume that the state is the primordial educator and carer and that if parents "elect" to educate their children without the help of the state, they are effectively acting "in loco rei publicae" (in the place of the state) and must therefore be registered, monitored, reviewed...
... pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed and numbered?
"In your heads must still be the remnant of a brain. In your hearts must still be the desire to be a human being again."
"This is a most serious breach of etiquette."
19 comments:
Josef Stalin would have given his right arm to have such control over the children in the USSR... and probably his left one as well.
--Designated Local Authority officers will have the right of access to the home and the right to speak with each child alone "if deemed appropriate."--
In other words, they can come into a home and order the parents to leave their own sitting room while they interrogate the child. Have busybody officials ever been given such powers to interfere with our family lives?
Not for nothing is Mr Balls designated the Minister for Children, Schools and Families - in that order. In New Labour ideology, as in the Soviet Union, the education system is supposed to come between children and their families!
Are the surnames of the two men involved in this report just a coincidence...?
More seriously, please remember in your prayers the repose of the soul of Patrick McGoohan, who died not long ago. I remember him as a parishioner in the North London Vincentian parish of Mill Hill, in the 60's.His home was almost next to the Sisters of Charity mother house. An exemplary Catholic family. RIP
In Brazil,homeschooling is against the law. We also have mandatory vaccination. City Health officials (at least in my city, Curitiba)come to my house during the first 2 years of my children to make SURE I am giving them all the vaccines. If I homeschooled, my children would be taken from me! Sad..... They think they know best and the parents... well, the parents know nothing.
In Christ,
Patricia
You seem to have covered the salient points there, but not the fact that home educators do not accept the legitimacy of this review and are working against it. Have you written to your MP yet?
Kids are listed from the time they enter nursery/infant school. Through this list they can be tracked by social services, and it's all held on one data base. If you decline the nurse checks, saying you'd rather anything like that was done through your own known GP, you are suspected of having something to hide! It's actually horrific.
In our area, there is a 'home visit' before they start infant school. Not, they say, that it's to have a look round your house, you understand, or to 'check you out' - well what the hell are they doing it for then?
No wonder the government control freaks go ape at the thought of a homeschooler! The couple of kids I've come into contact with who were failed by the state education system, are now well-balanced, and happy, and EDUCATED, one home schooled, the other now privately. Funny that.
St Michael the Archangel, Defend us in the day of battle...
This:
“some of those who choose to educate their children at home for religious reasons may not be providing schooling that is adequate"
should read that instead:
some of those who choose to educate their children at home for religious reasons may not be providing **promiscuity, abortion-on-demand, and homosexual agenda** schooling that is adequate to brainwash their children to our specifications...
The education of children is the parents business. It has nothing to do with the government.
Bravo for raising this issue, Father! The late, great Fr Vincent McNabb OP would have had something trenchant to say about this. As a homeschooling father of seven I'm not going to let these people anywhere near my children (not least because those same people are responsible for the truly dreadful State schools in my area).
The awful thing is that we know from friends who are teachers that a lot of groundwork has been laid by "experts" at educational conferences to suggest that home-schooled children are more likely to be abused than other children - something which Badman says without providing any evidential base. We already stand guilty of "more likely abuse". Their minds are made up.
"With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother -- it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak -- 'child hero' was the phrase generally used -- had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police."
George Orwell "1984" Chapter 2
As a teacher, and relative of someone who home-schools I've followed this with interest.
The thought occurred that it might be relatively easy to circumvent by opening 'free private schools'. A few home-schoolers agree (if they can) with the p.p. to use the church hall. This can be the official base, whilst most of the lessons take place at home! Given that no state money is received I'm not really sure what the government can do if, make that 'when', it 'fails' the school.
Father,
Thank you for raising this important story. The mainstream Catholic media have been scandalously silent on the matter.
The one angle you missed (picked up by MH) is abuse. The justification for this report's recommendations is based on the libel that homeschooling parents are more likely to abuse their children than other parents or schools. As I said, that is libellous, or, if you prefer, a calumny.
It's clever of course (in an Ed Balls type of way) to tarnish your opponents as suspected child abusers. That way all rational debate ceases.
But here's a reminder of the kind of thing the abuse-free, regulated, monitored state school system imposes on our children: bullying, sexual abuse by teachers and other children, drug abuse, the sexualisation of 5-year-olds, truancy, poor literacy, continual and pointless testing of children, the peddling of ideological agendas without the parents' knowledge.
It is no accident that homeschooling was outlawed in Germany by the Nazi bill of 1938:
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1389
and is still in force!
Living in this country as a Christina is becoming more difficult as time goes on. The hope is that this government won't exist this time next year.
When will Britian EVER hold another election?
The problem with state schools is that your children end up socialising with others students who normally you would not allow into your house due to their behaviour.
The only people we should be safeguarding our children from is the 'luny quango' led by Mr Balls, calling itself the Department for Children, Schools and Families.
Who is this guy, what are his qualifications and experience giving him authority to tell me and other parents how to bring up our children. And who are the minions carrying out his orders - how do they qualify?
The nerve of this guy beggars belief, just because Gordon Brown has stuck him in this post gives him NO AUTHORITY WHATSOEVER to lecture parents!
Scrap this stupid department and use the money more wisely on something useful, like er... better books for the schools, improving the buildings infrastructure, encouraging sport for the young and building sporting facilities. Etc... etc... etc...
Thanks for covering this, Father. Home schoolers need all the allies they can get. Though I fear that the government has no more intention of listening to us in this 'consultation' than it did in any of the previous ones.
Father, in the Catholic Herald this week is an article re the Badman report, by the education correspondant Hugh David, who says (from reading your blog)
"As Fr Finigan points out, the Church teaches that educating a child is a three way partnership between school, parents and parish."
Surely this is not what you said, and is not Church teaching?
It seems, even in the Catholic press, they are buying in to this nonsense, and haven't a clue that home-educating isn't only done as a knee-jerk reaction to bad schools, by, to quote Hugh David again, "Willing and deluded amateurs" !!! He doesn't seem to realise that most of us are taking our God-given role as primary educators of our children seriously!!
Maggie - It may well be that I have spoken somewhere of the "home-school-parish" partnership. This does apply in the case where parents have chosen to send their children to school but should not be taken to suggest that such is the only proper option. Nor should it imply that the three are equal. As you say (and as I often emphasise in various contexts), the parents are the prime educators of their children.
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