UK
home educators are currently threatened with the draconian recommendations
of Graham Badman's report to the government - link below
Included are compulsory registration, monitoring including automatic right
of entry into the home on pain of criminal charges, and the enforcement of
a 'suitable education' (whatever that's supposed to mean). And the
recommendations are particularly short-sighted and plain ill-informed with regard
to autonomous approaches. Worse still is the conflation of home education
with child welfare issues - we're all being smeared as abusers, and the
onus seems to be on us to prove our innocence.
I wonder if the delightful (!?!) Mr Badman might appreciate an invite to
the London Unschooling Conference to hear some properly informed debate.
This is not the link Jude sent; this is a summary from the government press release site:
http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id=2009_0105
What Jude sent is a PDF of the entire "Report to the Secretary of State on the review of Elective Home Education in England by Graham Badman"
http://www.freedomforchildrentogrow.org/8318-DCSF-HomeEdReviewBMK.PDF
These seem to be still at the level of formal recommendations, but if people have follow-ups, please do leave comments. Also, clarification of whether this will affect other parts of the UK or just England itself would be good. —Sandra
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4 comments:
This does not apply to "UK home educators". It applies only to home educators in England. Scotland has its own SNP Government.
Thanks. It looked to me that that was the case. I'll change the blog title. ( I used what someone sent to me.)
The report itself doesn't apply to "UK home educators" but the threat to our autonomy does. On all the UK lists I've seen (a lot in the past few days!), home educators from Scotland, Wales and N Ireland are aware that we could fall like dominoes. There are rumours of similar consultations in the pipeline for England's neighbours. The SNP are probably least likely to follow England's lead, but if these recommendations become law and have the effect of reducing the numbers educated outside of school, who knows?
I would like to recommend The Struggle for Family Freedoms in England by Keven Swanson for more about this topic. Just google in Generations with Vision and go to his sight to play this brodcast.
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