From page 113 of the Department for Work and Pensions' Ready for Work document:
"It was strongly felt that increased conditionality was not appropriate for...parents who choose to home educate".
This from the section on the consultation responses to the new welfare reform proposals whereby lone parents who can work will be required to actively seek work once their youngest child is 12 or over from October 2008, 10 or over from 2009 or 7 or over from October 2010.
However, as far as we can see, there is no news on whether the government will take this part of the response to their consultation seriously.
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That is better than the tories proposal that lone parents work from age of 4, of course, leaving significantly more time to H.E.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't have thought, though, that enough single parents home educated at the moment for them to feel they couldn't make allowances, although they might be anxious that single parents would use the exception as an excuse to receive benefits without genuinely wishing to HE.
Also it is very unlikely that single parents could make enough money at work to pay some one else to home educate for them, so it would effectively remove that option - increasing inequality in educational options even further.
Will be interesting to see what they propose.
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The "otherwise" clause was never intended for ordinary folks, it was designed to ensure that the preferences of the upper classes were not removed by making schooling, rather than education, compulsory. Until now, Govt has never been able to achieve the desired effect of allowing "desirables" to educate otherwise whilst preventing "undesirables" from doing so. To openly legislate would have sparked mass outrage. This assault on single parent families is social engineering plain and simple. I wonder how long before we see stealth legislation that removes the ability of disabled people, travelers or other ethnic groups to home educate?
ReplyDeleteWhat makes you think the legislation is intended to be so manipulative? Isn't it just an ignorant, knee jerk reaction to statistics that appear to indicate that single mothers are apparently more likely to have criminal youngsters and especially if the mother doesn't work. By forcing single mothers in to work they hope to kill two birds with one stone: reduce criminality and save money and as an extra bonus be voted in again by the two parent family voters.
ReplyDeleteI know that Marie Stopes, rather horrifically, wished to help poor people have abortions purely to stop them reproducing, but surely this sort of Nazism is not prevalent...
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