The View of a Schooling Parent

Jennie Bristow, writing in Spiked On-line, explains the importance of the implications of the Badman recommendations for every parent everywhere.

"...the idea that there should be no opt-out available – that all parents have no choice but to submit to official control over their children’s education – cuts to the heart of the question of parental autonomy. The acceptance that parents can choose to educate their children themselves if they want to is a tacit recognition that state education is a service that parents can access for the benefit of their families. The new proposals shift that balance of power, so that state-monitored education becomes something that all children must receive – and in the case of home schooling, parents are mere practitioners, delivering an officially approved scheme of work. This means that the scope for parents to decide that, actually, the curriculum or teaching practice on offer within schools is not the best for their child, becomes much more limited."

and:

"For all the nonsense talked about choice in education, our only real choice as parents comes from the knowledge that if our children’s schooling becomes really bad, we can always pull them out of it."