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Home Education Review 2009
For immediate release, 21 January 2009
Parents Express Outrage and Disgust at Latest Government Attack on Families
Home educating parents in England are expressing outrage and disgust as the government launches a vicious attack against them with yet another consultation affecting their family choices.
National home education group Action for Home Education today complained to the DCSF about the consultation which includes accusations that home educators are potential child abusers.
“This is not the first time we have had to defend ourselves against wild, unsubstantiated accusations made in an attempt to excuse further interventions into our family lives. We are already regularly questioned about our arrangements and it appears that the government now intend to put us all on permanent enquiry”, said Barbara Stark who is a home educating parent and chair of AHEd.
This consultation, the latest in an endless round of similar vexatious exercises, is part of a review of home education. However, home educators say they are being asked to defend themselves against unwarranted charges of child abuse and/or neglect and "invited to partake in the construction of our own oppression by answering a question asking what the government can do to ensure this abuse does not happen".
Barbara Stark said: "Parents are telling AHEd that they are extremely fed up with the repeated and sustained attacks on them while the state-as-parent continues to fail the country's children in breath-taking fashion.
"Many parents are home educating precisely because the authorities failed their children in school and are offended at the attempts of government to impose their much hyped desired outcomes on their children.
"Children are entitled to have their own desired outcomes. We reject the right of the state to dictate or examine our desires. AHEd stands by the right of parents to enable their children to aim for their own outcomes in their own way.
"Every week we hear that the many and sometimes tragic failures of authorities to educate and protect the children with whose provision they are entrusted are due to lack of resources - so why misappropriate funds to an area of research backed success in order to persecute this minority group, labelling them as potential abusers?"
AHEd supporter Clare Murton added, "If government can produce proper evidence of risk factors in home education, we are more than willing to examine that evidence and respond accordingly. However, whilst all that is put forward is rumour, slander and libel aimed at distracting the focus from their own despicable failures, we refuse to give credence to their leading questions".
One home educating parent blogs: "Your child can be bullied at school until they're suicidal but dare to take them out and the government want to brand you a potential abuser. Your local authority can break the law, dragging their feet or flat out refusing to do anything about your child's Special Education Needs but when you finally decide you've had enough and take them out of school, you're a potential abuser. Stand up for your child when the state fails them and you need watching. Put your children before career and material possessions and there must be something wrong with you".
Home educator Monika Dutta has very personal reasons for challenging this gross inteference. She says this consultation has moved to tears. "All I can think about is how my own family members were investigated by the government for not sending my mother to Hitler Youth meetings. Yes, New Labour's government reminds some people of Hitler who, incidentally, banned home education because of his desire to control all thinking as early as possible".
Home educators do not know precisely what final solution the government has in mind for them but fear that, while expensive routine and abusive checking on the many thousands of home educators will be a red herring that will detract precious time and resources from genuine instances of need, members of their community will be required to tolerate increased state interventions aimed at controlling the choices of law abiding and loving families.
"Why else would government launch their third attempt at revising the law pertaining to education otherwise than at school in as many years, despite previous spectacular failures due to massive opposition and blatant legal inaccuracies", asks Barbara Stark.
"This review is being seen as harassment and a threat by home educators who are tired of being ignored when it comes to their own views on what to do about home education, especially given the preference shown for the views of local authorities who routinely misunderstand education law and home education practice. Not only has the government ignored and tried to sideline us repeatedly, but now they try to silence and exclude us."
AHEd members are asking why only LA staff have been formally notified of the consultation. Home educators, the major stakeholders, discovered this consultation only through their own vigilance and networking, while the consultation response time has been cut to only one third of the usual minimum allowed using the excuse of urgent overriding public interest requiring prompt action. AHEd has made a formal complaint demanding to know what overriding public interest justifies this action.
Barbara Stark added: "To add insult to injury, we find that while we may all answer this 6 question consultation on what to do about home education, local authorities are being sent an additional questionnaire encouraging ultra vires practices and soliciting their detailed views about home education, containing 60 questions".
ENDS
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Home Education Review 2009 Consultation Responses
For immediate release, 22 February 2009
PERSECUTION OF MINORITY GROUP IS "ABUSE OF PUBLIC FUNDS"
Outraged families and support organisations flood the DCFS with 2000+ consultation responses to the elective home education review.
The government's review of elective home education (1), which was announced in January in a blaze of scurrilous spin stating that home education could be used by parents as a cover for abuse and forced marriage, has provoked an unparalleled reaction from home educating families and support organisations, including home education action group AHEd (2) and the home educators' network Home Education Forums. (3) Both have strongly rebutted the government's allegations as "vile and unsubstantiated" in their respective robust responses to the DCSF consultation. (4) and (5)
By the close of the unusually short online consultation last Friday, over 2000 individual and organisational responses had been sent in by 'stakeholders' who have in recent weeks demonstrated their collective outrage at the "irresponsible scaremongering" perpetrated by government minister Delyth Morgan and Vijay Patel of the NSPCC, who was forced to admit on national radio (6) that no evidence exists to support the suggestion that home educated children may be more likely than schooled children to suffer abuse or be coerced into marriage or domestic servitude.
AHEd supporter Clare Murton commented: "Apart from the clear incitement to hatred of home educators that Delyth Morgan's announcement provoked, this review by Graham Badman must represent the straw that breaks the camel's back. Home educators are trying to get on with the important work of bringing up their children, but over the past few years have been repeatedly distracted from that task by unwarranted and vicious attempts to usurp their parental rights.
"Multiple government consultations have concluded that home education is safe, efficient and in no need of tighter legal control and that local authorities need legal guidance. It is astounding, therefore, that they now give credence to slander such as Morgan's. This luckily has not defeated home educators and there will be no 'death by consultation' in our neck of the woods. Instead it has determined the home education community to put a stop to this unprecedented witch hunt.
"No other section of UK community has ever been so impassioned in its response to a DCSF consultation and I am proud to be part of a network of people who really do think that every single child matters."
While there is absolutely no evidence of any link between home education and child abuse, domestic servitude or forced marriage, there is plenty of evidence of the offence caused and anger unleashed within the home education community itself and among non home educating families who perceive the threat to home education as the "thin end of the wedge".
A Downing Street petition submitted by Roxane Featherstone on behalf of AHEd (7) has attracted more than 2000 signatures in a fortnight, while the Stop the Government Stigmatising Home Educators group (8) on the social networking site Facebook has more than 1500 members whose comments demonstrate a deep sense of collective outrage. Home education blogs, including the popular Sometimes It's Peaceful (9), have highlighted what appears to be a state sponsored campaign to persecute a minority group exercising a lawful choice and have strongly criticised some members of the team led by Graham Badman (10) who are to participate in the inquiry as "partial" and "lacking in knowledge or experience of elective home education".
Alison Preuss, spokesperson for Home Education Forums, said: "I have only once witnessed such a mass reaction by the home education community and that was when the former Scottish Executive mounted a similar attack on home educating families north of the border. Overnight, they alienated every home educator across the land - and lost! This latest assault on educational freedom by people for whom child abuse represents a 'nice little earner' has provoked nothing short of fury among law abiding citizens who have in many cases had to remove their children from an unsafe and abusive school environment.
"While the economy tanks, our elderly folk are having to choose between eating and heating and vulnerable children are being left unprotected due to lack of competence in social services, as demonstrated in the case of Victoria Climbie and the children abused by Eunice Spry (who was a Gloucestershire Council approved foster carer), we have to wonder why public funds are being diverted from frontline services into an unnecessary analysis by bureaucrats of 2000+ consultation responses and an equally unnecessary investigation of a non existent issue. In our view, this whole exercise represents an abuse of public funds."
ENDS
For more information contact AHEd ahed@ahed.org.uk or Home Education Forums
info@home-education.biz
NOTES FOR EDITORS
(1) Elective home education review
http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id=2009_0013
(2) Action for Home Education
http://www.ahed.org.uk
(3) Home Education Forums
http://www.home-education.biz/forum
(4) AHEd reponse
http://ahed.pbwiki.com/HomeEducation-YourViewsReview2009AHEdResponse
(5) Home Education Forums response
http://www.home-education.biz/forum/home-education-law-policy/155-hef-response-dcsf-home-ed-review-part-1-a.html
(6) Vijay Patel on BBC Radio
http://sometimesitspeaceful.blogspot.com/2009/01/transcript-of-radio-2-jeremy-vine-show.html
(7) Downing Street petition
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Homeedreview/
(8) Stop the Government Stigmatising Home Educators
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=45453211491&ref=ts
(9) Sometimes It's Peaceful blog
http://sometimesitspeaceful.blogspot.com/
(10)Graham Badman
http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/search/?asset=document&id=129480
~~~~~
Information from Action for Home Education (1)
For immediate release, 20 October 2009
DCSF “… just embarrassing themselves now”
Moments before the deadline, a home-educating parent reported that their submission to the latest consultation on home Education had received the number 5340, an unusually large public response with the previous record for DCSF being only in the hundreds.
One of the respondents, JK, a fifteen year old supporter of Action for Home Education, declared today that Ed Balls and the DCSF are “just embarrassing themselves now” as he battled to understand how the government can be so short sighted about the opposition to the recommendations in the “Badman Report” (2) on home education.
This rather gives the lie to Graham Badman's assertion to the Children, Schools and Families Committee (12 October 2009, Q2) that the opposition to his report comes from "a vociferous minority" that he can actually count. But “why” asks JK, “are they still not listening?”
Diana Johnson (to Children, Schools and Families Select Committee hearing 12 October 2009,) promised that consultation responses will be carefully scrutinised and taken into account before policy is made. “But Ed Balls accepted the widely criticised Badman review in full immediately and dismissed the Cambridge Review, a long term academic study of education that suggested children should start school at six and sit fewer tests out of hand” said Barbara Stark, Chair of the AHEd group, “We are watching to see if even the large number of responses is going to be taken seriously by Ed Balls who, so far, has ridden rough shod over the wishes and needs of home educated children to push forward his own ideas. We think that the review was not really independent and was used by Ed Balls to make up policy-based evidence biased towards a predetermined agenda to bully us and our children.”
Most of these responses will have been from ordinary families who see big government threatening their way of life and their family choices. Clare Murton, AHEd supporter said, “This government has lost sight of the distinction between public and private to the point where even our youngsters are mystified at their ignorance and arrogance.”
Many parents will recognise the frustration these parents feel with the shortcomings of the state schools, but not many will realise that if they chose to decline the state’s humble offerings in any sphere of life, not just education, they may be forced to expose their homes and children to close scrutiny.
Only recently we have seen attempts to screen, control, tax and register mums and dads who choose to share their child care arrangements but things are now going too far. Mr Balls and the DCSF have to be made to understand that normally peaceful home educators who just want to get on with their lives are drawing a line in the sand - the British public are fed up with such interference and we will tolerate it no longer. We will NOT comply with your disgusting agenda for us and our children. If necessary, many of us will choose to go before the courts to fight any criminal sanctions that government may introduce. Does NuLabour really want to be remembered as the government that persecuted law-abiding parents doing their best for their families?
(Chair, AHEd)
Tel:
Email:
NOTES FOR EDITORS
(1) Action for Home Education
http://www.ahed.org.uk
(2) http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatters/ete/independentreviewofhomeeducation/irhomeeducation/
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