The Draft Home Education Guidance: What's being said in FB groups:

From a discussion in a Facebook Group, on the matter of the Draft EHE Guidelines:

The assumption that parents cannot be trusted is based upon statistical outliers and false thinking that arises from the availability heuristic. Since the press reports stories of terrible parents with such glee, we falsely end up thinking that these sorts of parents are two a penny and that all parents should be held in constant state of suspicion. 

We have to take a step back from this and get a grip on reality.

These terrible parents are statistical outliers. Most parents do a good enough job...certainly FAR better than anything the state manages, and yet the story that the state fails a huge percentage of "looked after" children is just a non-story and doesn't therefore get the same attention. 

The fact is, parents are the ones who have a genuine vested interest in caring for their offspring and who rightfully should be the people who ensure the safety and welfare of their children. When the state takes this over, it messes it up - repeatedly. 

If registration and monitoring goes through, it would change the assumption that parents (and therefore the people) are in charge here, and puts the state firmly in the position of the parent. It alters the important assumption expressed in S7, that parents are the ones with the duty to ensure their children are in receipt of a suitable education. With registration and monitoring, it will become the duty of the state as they become the ultimate arbiter of a suitable education. 

Not only that, but because home education is built in to the fabric of family life in a way that is not obvious to much of the rest of the population, it will be that the state will have given itself the right to pry into the most intimate aspects of family life in a way that is honestly the last signing over of any hope of privacy for a family. The state will have taken over completely. 

The state is meant to be the servant of the people, not the other way round. Despite the fact that this guidelines consultation appears to be affecting only a tiny, tiny minority of families, it actually has HUGE constitutional significance because it represents who is actually controlling who in this country and it won't be the people! 

And all for what...

Nothing. Those bad parents we know about were known to the authorities, and those even MORE evil parents who are SO rare that all of us could name them in a heartbeat, who have eventually been found to have kept their children in shored up basements for years and years, will not register anyhow. So the proposed solution is totally useless, whilst at the same time results in the complete destruction of privacy, and the complete take over of the whole of family life by the state.