Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Consultation on Definition of Full-Time

Good grief...if ever there was need for a definition of full-time, you could successfully go by the hours it takes to keep up with DfES-initiated Consultation Processes.

So yes, you guessed it...there is yet another consultation up at the DfES, this time looking at defining the notion of "full time education". The nominal intention behind this one is to bring small educational institutions which take children in on a more casual basis back into the grasp of OFSTED. So yes, some home educators could be affected in that quite a few of us have looked to leave our children in informal school-type settings, though experience with such ideas round this way suggests that these ideas fizzle out quickly at the prospect of government intrusion.

Whilst it doesn't look as if the primary purpose of the consultation is to take home educators to task for not obviously schooling their kids for a set number of hours, I sure think we should keep an eye on this in order to ensure that it doesn't sneak by us.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hm. I'm supposed to be signed up to that site to be informed of future consultations. Wonder how come I don't get informed? I'll try registering again :/

Thanks for letting me know about it.

dottyspots said...

Snap - and I wasn't informed either :(

Anonymous said...

Only people with a very closed minded view of education, can have such a concept. My offspring's education is 24/7. Even when offspring dream, they learn.

How to make them understand?

Carlotta said...

I was signed up too Jax but only found out about it via an HE list. Hmm.

and that touched a nerve Leo re the dream thing. Have just woken from my worst nightmare in years...knife crimes, ASBOs with my son/brother character as the victim. It was awful...and woke up thinking how far removed our lives are from this atm, even though our local secondary school is a hotbed of knife carrying vandals and potentially violent drug users and dealers. (Not that these kids have been caught so far...and not that I wouldn't even have some of them in my home...where they are very well behaved, courteous and kind, for some odd reason.)

Can't think of a single HE kid with an ASBO, but am I tempting fate here?

Anyhow, not to give away the punchline but the dream really has made me put several ideas together for the first time, so I agree...dreams can be hugely useful learning experience.

Anonymous said...

I would say there are probably as many drug using/dealing, knife carrying HE teens!

Carlotta said...

Actually, now you say it, am thinking that it could be said of some of the HE camps...but that this seems very different from our local group, where none of the teens even smoke.

Seems to me to be all to do with degree of parental good advise and support...but that often in the HE community you do get parents who self-consciously commit to providing this, so that the percentage of ASBO kids in HE communities where this happens is pretty minimal.