Wednesday, November 04, 2009

How to Lobby a Lord

There are 760-odd Lords - with varied backgrounds. We should divide the Lords up amongst us and write us a personal letter along the lines of:

May I come and see you?

Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill, which pertains to the registration and monitoring of home educated children would, if enacted, mean that the state would appropriate responsibility for education entirely to the itself. Parents will no longer be able to freely decide upon the place, form and content of education. Families will be subjected to highly intrusive and subjective judgements without there being any reason to suspect that a suitable education is not being provided and the damage to education of these children will be immense. Money better spent on better targetting interventions will be wasted monitoring and intruding upon perfectly well-functioning families who currently save the state a huge amount by educating many children with special needs out of the schooling system.

I am a home educating parent, and enough of your background to make Lord think he might enjoy meeting you.

Reason why Lord might be interested to meet a real HE-er and talk about HE (e.g. given your background in ...)

Contact details.

Possible dates 2-3 weeks ahead

All on one side of A4

But of course there may be other ways that suit you better.

General points to remember are:

- wait until the Bill is on its way to the Lords, most of us have too much to do to want to deal with next month's problem now

- make it personal and short. Most Lords receive a large pile of mail every day, and have no secretarial support to speak of. Leave the tomes till they're asked for.

- don't be downhearted at refusals; you only need half a dozen of us to decide to spend time on HE. The moral support of all those who are attracted to your cause but have too much else on their plates will suffice.

- keep a good record of who said what to whom. If we need to rally support for an amendment, this will be a great help.

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