Thursday, October 29, 2009

More on the Unexamined Complexities of the Badman Proposals

Lifted (with permission) from comments below:

If Dr. Maggie Atkinson thinks local authorities should check that the materials used by home educated children are "age appropriate", as she said she used to check in Birmingham, then she is also out of touch with government education strategy, which emphasises 'stage not age'.

How do the LAs propose to determine what stage each home educated child is at? Even if they determine it once, it is recognised by experts in child development that children do not develop in a nice even fashion, and intellectual growth spurts and lags occur at different ages in different children, as well as being different for different academic skills. They'll have to determine it every time they see a child, for each aspect of academic study, before they even start to think about whether the materials the child has are 'suitable'.

On a side point, how are they going to find out whether a child who is studying A level and undergraduate material (online, for free :-)) has learnt what they 'should' have done over the last 12 months? Are they going to bring in Uni staff? Are all LA inspectors competent to assess attainment at A level in all subjects? Perhaps they are assuming that every home educated child is either over 16 years old or goes to college to study at this level, but if so, they are wrong, yet again.

I wait with bated breath for the next installment of this nonsense ....

2 comments:

Baz said...

Another great example of why the 'proposals' are unworkable.

I wonder, will inspectors be checking the entire contents of the indexes of Google?

Timeshare Resales said...

I agree with you.They'll have to determine it every time they see a child, for each aspect of academic study.
Timeshare Resales