Successive education acts in the UK have contained the very sensible provision that a child must be educated but that education does not have to be provided in a school setting. It has long been recognised that parents have a right to educate their children in the way that they see fit and in line with the parents philosophical and religious values and because for some children school is not the right place for them. Some kids, including some kids with special needs, learn better at home and with a curriculum that is more suited to their needs than the one size fits all National Curriculum.
But now there is a threat to that consensus about parental rights in education. That threat comes in the form of the Schools Bill that is making its way through Parliament. Ostensibly this Bill is phrased as intending to better safeguard children and bring more equitable funding to schools but it poses a number of threats to educational freedom of choice. These threats are outlined by the author of a brilliant and extremely concerning piece on the Schools Bill by Dr Caroline Palmer, a home schooler and academic editor writing on Medium.
Dr Palmer looked beyond the broadly acceptable phrases about safeguarding, funding and strengthening the disciplinary regime for teachers and discovered a whole load of threats to parental rights when it comes to education. These include giving local authorities what could end up as draconian powers to interfere in families that have elected to home educate and allowing the councils and others to apply for School Attendance Orders about which the parent will have little or no right to appeal. The National Curriculum, an entity that many people including myself have valid concerns about as it is a bit of a one size fits all one, will I’ve no doubt end up being imposed on home educating parents and most likely against the wishes of the parent or the needs of the child.
This is a massive power grab by the Department of Education. It will force parents to send their children to schools even if those schools are not right for their child or which may not be allied with their personal, religious or philosophical views. There are also massive data management, privacy and security issues with the content of the Schools Bill. It will end up with home educated children having records kept of their home education until the child is 80 years old.
Home education has been growing. It is not something that has suddenly started up because of the pandemic when schools were closed, it was growing before that. Kids and parents were voting with their feet and opting out of the education system that the State provides for years, the pandemic only really helped encourage more parents to realise that some kids do better outside the state education system than in it and opt for home schooling. Even if you don’t intend to home school the Schools Bill is something that you should be concerned about as who knows what the future may bring to your child’s school or your child’s experience of school, that might make you consider home schooling.
Please read the article by Dr Palmer by the link below.
https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-schools-bill-57d7707264c2
Interesting, but I don’t really think the Tories want to ban home education, but we have faux victim hysteria on many levels.
For a start there are businesses thriving in the home education market, promoting curricula, support etc and the Tories are not going to go against them.
It seems more like a panic that home schooling is growing, and so wanting to weed out the minority of really weird parents or illegal schools.
I don’t quite get the argument either about home schooled children being put on a database, children in school would be on one also?
As to giving more power to local authorities, most are so inefficient would they really be up to taking on extra tasks?
I don’t agree with you that this is faux hysteria after all the Tories have not exactly excelled themselves in supporting the freedoms of the individual as can be seen by the Tories enthusiasm for the Online Safety Bill that will most likely further gut freedom of speech. The devil as the author of the quoted piece is in the detail. As for not interfering in home ed businesses it helps to remember that although the Tories may ostensibly be favourable to business it is the Education department, which leans heavily Left who will be administering the monitoring of home educators.
I agree that there is a panic about home schooling among professional educators just as there would be a panic in any other business that suddenly found that the potential customers were no longer interested in buying their product.
The pandemic and its aftermath could have been a great opportunity to create hybrid learning environments that could combine some aspects of home schooling and some aspects of school based learning with each other in order to provide genuinely personalised education for Britain’s children. Unfortunately that opportunity has been missed and what we’ve got is more authoritarianism from the DoE.
I certainly agree that extremist religious schools are an issue and there should have been found a way to deal with the sorts of schools that for example encourage the idea of jihad but which left individual home schooling families alone.
As with the database it is about what it contains and the length of time the data is held. Also the idea of school attendance orders without proper means of appeal are a dangerous idea especially if we have an education system that is even more biased than it is already.
I do not trust local authorities one little bit although they are as you say monstrously inefficient. However the combination of local authority inefficiency and politically bent staff who might be ideologically opposed to home schooling creates the perfect environment for home schooling parents to end up being unduly targeted for state harassment by local council staff.