Any passing DCSF person reading this: no home educator was coerced to write a response to any consultation. Everyone replied of their own free will. If some people directly copied responses they had read elsewhere, it is highly likely that they did so because they completely agreed with what is being said. It does not invalidate what they said. They said it because they meant it.
Do not continue to discount what was said with some oblique suggestion that people were jostled unwillingly into responding. The strength of feeling against the proposals in the Children, Schools and Families Bill is very, very real. Home educators know that children could well die as a result of them.
Who says they were coerced and why?
ReplyDeleteActually, I can't remember who specifically triggered that outburst of mine - it could have been Balls, Badman, Deech, Soley, or most likely the DCSF.
ReplyDeleteHowever it was really caused by the accumulation of constant references on the part of the above to the "home educating lobbyists"/the "small number of HE activists" who allegedly stir everyone else up and who are responsible for generating a false impression of HE aversion to Schedule 1.
This picture painted by the DCSF et al really is a total misrepresentation of my experience of the situation. Every single HEor in all the groups we go to, (bar one family who actually are well known to the DCSF for putting forward their views), disagree completely with everything in the Badman report and Schedule 1. Most of them don't send letters because they don't have time/don't feel sufficiently up to speed with latest developments, but they are nonetheless EXTREMELY grateful that some do find time to do it.
I was also very interested to see that many, many more HEors had contacted members of the House of Lords than we realised.
Also hundreds of HEors right across the country agreed to organise the petition and to collect signatures from local HEOrs, most of whom are not regular contributors to lists and many of whom I had never heard of ever before.
The DCSF constantly try to underplay the strength of the antipathy to the CSF bill and either need to be put right on this point, or else need to stop lying by innuendo.