Meeting with Mr Badman

Yesterday, a number of home educating families met with Graham Badman who is heading the review of home education and Liz Green of the DCSF at one of our local meeting places near Bromsgrove. It was a beautiful day, and the meeting was congenial throughout. Mr Badman, who was constantly surrounded by HEing parents and HEks, asked many incisive questions, received many incisive answers and provided some clues as to his current thinking.

Several other HEors also spoke along similar lines to Liz Green and reported that they received a sympathetic hearing.

In brief on the matter of clues provided by Mr Badman as to his current thinking: he says he hasn't made up his mind about anything as yet, but that the status quo is not acceptable, and things will have to change. He stressed that he is independent, that he would take on board all comments and his report would reflect his own independently formed view. He also pointed out that he is only there to make recommendations, and that it is ultimately up to government to decide what they do.

Home educators, including myself, talked about how we cannot see how monitoring can possibly be constructive, that standards do not apply to HEks, they are unique in their learning, and that coercive monitoring of autonomous educators makes it impossible for inspectors to monitor what they are meant to be looking at since coercion prevents autonomous learning. Mr Badman was provided with the link with the results of the recent poll about HE children's preference not to see LA personnel. I didn't flesh out the full implications of this, ie: that it would be coercive to monitor these children, and that you therefore won't be able to assess the autonomous education of these children as it will not be in evidence. I imagine that this point would be clear to Mr B though.

We tried to explain why autonomous education is so precious, that it is a matter of being able to liberate creativity and rationality, that children thrive on being trusted, and being able control their lives and pursue their interests.

I talked at some point about how HE was integral to family life, and that to have inspection meant that my most private and precious part of my life would be open for all to see. Mr Badman continuing in what I saw as the spirit of genuine questioning, said that our pictures are
taken by 14 CCTV pretty much as soon as we step out the door, but after challenge quickly appeared to concede that this was not right, and that privacy was an important component in people's lives.

I said that generally speaking we, as a society seem to have little faith that children will be rational, responsible and eager to learn from a young age, and that in my experience, it is astonishing how responsible and self-motivated they can be. He mentioned that he thought that it is possible to be autonomous within the school system, and I did agree, though said that for some children who did not fit the school system, this wasn't an option. Another HEing parent at this point said she thought it would be better if schools became resource centres.

He asked about my personal reasons for HEing and my philosophical inspiration. I told him that my theories were inspired by Karl Popper. Mr Badman, who clearly knows his stuff, knew that Popper had said that children do need to be able to read and write, and that from that point on, children could be helped to pursue whatever interests they have. I think I explained that most HE parents would agree that children need to be literate in this day and age, though they would contest that a child has to do this by a certain age.

On this sort of topic, he slightly later mentioned his liking for Isaiah Berlin, and talked of limits to freedom, ie: that one should not coerce others, and I did add, in favour of not having limits upon
our freedom, that for many, Berlin's apparent qualification was not in fact a genuine limitation as not coercing others is seen as a freely chosen, rational choice.

I mentioned that we see that LAs are pulling funds from all sorts of things, including after-school provision (not specifically aimed at HEors but which are often used very productively by HEors) and that this is annoying when they want to replace this type of useful stuff with monitoring.

I also mentioned that we hear that social services are really stretched, understaffed and underfunded, with dealing with at risk children they already know about. I asked how can they possibly waste all that money inspecting well-functioning families who will only be damaged by inspection?

He asked me how I felt that children could be protected, and I mentioned the fact that ContactPoint will be up and running, they already have the new guidance on identifying Children Missing from Education, we should see how that works before we do anything more. Someone else reports that he appeared to agree with this point at some later stage in the morning.

I explained that the informal network of HEors and the community refer far more HEors to services than actually need to be referred at all, and any family we know of who is in dire straights has definitely already been referred...sometimes on multiple occasions.

I talked briefly about how the ECM agenda was meant to be for LAs and not as a compulsory imposition upon families, and that though of course, most families would want to help their children achieve many if not all of these ambitions, it really must remain with families to decide upon their own ambitions. I reiterated the point that parents must be allowed to parent as the parent of first resort and that the state should only intervene if they fail. He said that the state has duties under the UN charter, and I simply said that these duties MUST come second to parental responsibilities to meet the needs of the child. Frustratingly I didn't get a chance to explain why this is so, but am just hoping that this is obvious. Just as frustratingly, I failed to mention the petition here, and am hoping that others will take this forward.

A home educating ex-child protection social worker then spoke eloquently on the unnecessary alarmism of the review, about how all HEors who have abused seem to be known about, but were missed, and how many rights to intrusion would be necessary for every risk to be eliminated? He again eluded to several cases where abuse has not been detected early enough and the HEor reiterated the point about it being impossible to make life entirely risk free.

An ex HEor was then introduced to Mr Badman. He has recently completed a first class honours in Maths and Computing and had never done a formal maths lesson in his life before school at age 15 and that he had been entirely autonomously educated.

Another HEor mentioned that they had a good relationship with their LA and their inspector. I did qualify this by explaining that what may be deemed good by one family will not be experienced in a similar way by another family, that inspections can change in the blink of an eye, with a change of policy or personnel or with the general subjectivity of such assessments.

Mr Badman then mentioned the Tasmanian model of monitoring of HEors as being something of interest. We didn't know anything about it at the time and therefore could not comment, and research into the subject continues as we write, but we gather that this kind of solution has been used as a model for the monitoring of Home Educators in the Republic of Ireland.

I had to leave to attend to other things at this point and am relying on third party reporting for this bit. From what we hear, Mr Badman is said to have indicated that he knows of one local authority which uses ex-home educators as EHE Advisors rather than ex-head teachers. He is also reported to have said that he is impressed with the Open University, on which point he has my unequivocal agreement.

More controversially perhaps, it is reported that he believes that Local Authorities should pay for exams for HEks. I do not know how this point was received by those present, though clearly we would be worried if strings were attached. The issue of tax rebates came up too and he received the answer "well, in an ideal world, but only if there were no strings. Otherwise, we'll manage." The Dudley model came up several times, as did Milton Keynes, [pdf] which Mr Badman clearly knew about already, but again the emphasis came back over and over - only so long as support is only offered and is not compulsory.

He also asked us if we had seen the curriculum set out by the RSA. We were not familiar with this, but it appears that this too will be another method of controlling the form and content of education, and another way of trying to shoe-horn learning to fit the National Curriculum.

I rejoined the group just at the end to hear one HEK explain that even if Mr Badman had given her a special keyboard to learn to read age seven (as he said he would have done), she would still not have been ready to learn to read until much, much later when she started to use MSN. After her withdrawal from school when she was still completely unable to read, her parents never once harassed her to start to learn to read. It just happened spontaneously when she was ready. She also explained that she had gone from reading her first book: Oscar Wilde's "Portrait of Dorian Gray" to completing an OU course in a very short space of time!

At some stage, Mr Badman had said that the status quo was not an acceptable option, and I am guessing that the Tasmanian model is currently Mr Badman's preferred method of going about this, and that we will need to put our case yet again before it is really understood. I don't think he has really understood how autonomous education can work. Let's face it, this can be difficult! Even some now fully-fledged autonomous home educators started out very coercively and took up to several years to work out that AE works! We just have to keep at it. AE is precious, it does work and it shouldn't be obliterated as an option in this country.