...were published yesterday.
The TES has the story.
Schoolhouse has once again done admirable work on this. Hopefully they will continue to campaign for the unequivocal freedom for parents to educate their children as they see fit. It has sadly proved to be the case that Scottish LAs have caused considerable heartache and stress to prospective Scottish HEors by abusing their role in delivering consent for children to deregister from schools. In so doing, local authorities are in effect acting in loco parentis. They should think rather more carefully about the consequences to themselves when they do this.
On the same theme, the BBC reports that
"Some education directors, meanwhile, have been concerned a fast decision would amount to a rubber stamp - and lay them open to legal action from children who in later life feel their education has been lacking."
Sigh. Once again, IF YOU TAKE OVER AS PARENT and become RESPONSIBLE FOR EDUCATION AND WELFARE, you will be in BIG TROUBLE. Ergo...don't do it.
5 comments:
"...a quarter of children leaving school illiterate..."
That's is terrible, given the government claims and the fact that those children have spent an awful lot of school hours focusing on that and nothing else! However, out of interest, isn't this similar to the home ed children statistics (as many learn late too), only the children have the advantage of not feeling bad about it and spending will have spent their time doing other things?
D
It would be interesting to compare. My feeling is that whilst many HE children start to learn to read later than is expected in school, they usually catch up with expected levels very quickly, and then often overtake their schooled peers, and that they usually do this before the age of 10.
Of course, many HE children come to be HEd because they have had problems learning to read in school, so it would be perhaps best to exclude these for a fair comparison.
Even these children usually find that when left to their own devices, and with resources thrown at them to see which ones stick (as David Friedman would say), they also usually catch up very quickly.
However, if you have a school minded LA inspector turning up at the door and you appear utterly unperturbed by the fact that your 8year old is only just starting on phonics...the whole sensible process could be totally undermined.
Thanks for posting this info, Carlotta. Sadly, prior to the link published here, the BBC had seen fit to give a platform to the anti HE bigot Judith Gillespie of the SPTC, who was given free rein to rant about home educators being potential child abusers, and a picture of murdered *school pupil* Danielle Reid appeared at the top of the piece. Meanwhile, Judith had been a very busy interviewee on the BBC news throughout the day, ranting about home educators delivering a 'slanted' and 'creationist' view of the world to their children and not being qualified to teach all subjects (!), while comment from Schoolhouse (which had been given to the BBC journalist) was completely shelved. A flurry of complaints to the BBC resulted in the website news piece being edited, but the damage had been done and Judith ranted her way through the day despite the SPTC having no locus to comment. Schoolhouse is sending a formal complaint to both the BBC and the SPTC and is grateful for the support received from AHEd and other voluntary organisations who expressed horror at the partiality of the BBC's reporting of the guidance publication. A few more complaints wouldn't go amiss, of course - sptc@sptc.info and/or http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/
Consider it done. Thanks Anon.
A truly terrible act of defamation, since as I understand it, Danielle was registered as a pupil at a school and was already widely known to be at risk. The truly terrible situation that ensued is now (quite extrordinarily) being blamed on home education rather than the fact that she wasn't followed up by services.
"ranting about home educators delivering a 'slanted' and 'creationist' view of the world to their children and not being qualified to teach all subjects"
Two mistakes here. One is this person is skeptical about home education is and is looking for easy scare arguments to invalidate it, so after she met one or a few families of home-educators that would be generally considered anti-progress and outdated, she generalized.
Second, she has the slanted view that children need education.
"We don't need no education" is right.
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