The government does not appear to have taken the thrust of the last petition seriously. (No surprise there then!) They wrote in response to the petition:
"The review of home education does not threaten a parent’s right to educate their child at home."
Well, no, but it does threaten to take away parental responsibility for the education and welfare of children, since the state looks as if it is about to dictate the standards that HE children must meet in these regards. It must therefore accept liability when these standards are not met.
However that petition did serve to raise awareness amongst plenty of otherwise less engaged HEors as well as some members of the wider population and therefore served a quite considerable purpose.
Hot on the heels of the review, we see some more petitions being created, the best of these being this one which needs your signature:
"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to reject the Report to the Secretary of State on the Review of Elective Home Education in England by Graham Badman.
"This report is a totally disproportionate response to a 'perceived' problem full of unsubstantiated allegations that home educated children are more at risk than those at school. This is simply not true and enacting the recommendations in this report would establish the state as parent of first resort. To allow LA staff access to private homes to interview children without their parents when there is no reason to suspect abuse is outrageous."
5 comments:
Signed. Thanks for the link :)
What is this petition going to accomplish? There is no promise that if you get X number of signatories that the recommendations will be dropped; in fact there are no promises of anything whatsoever. Do you remember the previous road pricing petition? Over one million people signed that one and all the government did was shrug. This petition is going to be ignored too, even if you could match the road pricing petitions numbers, which you will certainly not. This is a complete waste of time.
As I said, I do think it raises awareness of the issue amongst at many others...other than government that is, and at the very least, is useful in that regard.
Plus, it is SO quick to do, even for the petition organiser, that in terms of a waste of time, it barely registers.
We've both just signed. It had about 220 responses as of 9:30pm.
Hi Anon,
There is a pledge to put money in to pay for a PR company, should you be interested. Sum currently approaching the £6000 mark which will pay for the second month of a PR company's discounted rates.
You could pledge through facebook here:
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=45453211491&topic=10186
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