Hi
I have just come across a very well written analysis of the Statutory Guidance for Children Missing education, that now includes Home Educated children as “vulnerable” to not having a “suitable education”.
Excellent blog!
The shortfalls of the legislation.
With abundant blessings.
Amanda Goldston
Hi
As a home educating parent, I am very curious as to where we will
stand legally when the Lisbon Treaty comes fully into force in January
2009.
As we know, Gordon Brown signed it and ratified it on behalf of the UK
a few weeks ago. As such, he appears to have totally signed away our
sovereign right to make our own laws. (No, I am not trying to get
political here- just my view.)
It is very difficult to find a copy of the actual text. I have found a
few amendment pages and lots of opinion. Several people have kindly pointed me towards a site claiming to have the full text on it. However it is just pages of amendments to existing documents without the actual text itself being available - in plain English- for everyone to read.
Apparently, according to Danish MEP, Jens Peter Bonde, there is a good reason for that. It is called “Sign First, Read after!”
The bits I did manage to find of it make it very clear that the laws
made by the EU in the Treaty completely over-ride any existing laws in
each of the member states.
With the planned method of representation, the countries with the
biggest populations such as Germany have the biggest say in the making
of laws.
The unelected European Commission, which makes most of these laws, is
to be reduced from 27 to 18 and member countries are to be represented
on a rotation basis. This means that countries will have periods of up
to 5 years where they have no representation.
I first wrote this post a few weeks ago and posted it on a few forums, although I forgot all about my own blog.
We are already starting to see this happening, with the French President announcing last week that there were far too many European Commissioners (one for each country) and that the numbers really needed to be reduced. One way, he suggested, of doing that would be for “culturally similar countries” such as Britain and Ireland to share a Commissioner.
In many European countries, home education, is not socially acceptable
and is very difficult for families to do.
In Germany it is totally illegal and families have been fined,
persecuted and threatened with losing their children. In France,
families have to be registered with the police and monitored by
teachers and Belgium is almost as bad as Germany with prosecution of
home-educating families.
Does anyone know how this is likely to work for us in the UK or where
I might be able to find the information?
I might well be getting myself concerned over nothing, but I would
just like to check.
Thanks.
Amanda Goldston
Hi all,
In my view this ” Revised Statutory guidance for local authorities in England to identify children not receiving a suitable education” is very worrying.
As several people have pointed, what
exactly is a “suitable education”, who defines it and who really
comment as to whether a parent can make a better job of educating a
child than a so- called “trained professional?”
Most of us, I think, will testify that our children have been far
happier out of school than they were in it.
If home educated children are now being classed as “vulnerable” and
“missing education”, then, in my view, we are only two words away from
home education being made illegal as it is in Germany and much of the
rest of the European Union.
Those two words are “or otherwise.”
If local authorities are given all the powers this guidance seems to
afford them, then we are not very far away from the situation they
have in Germany where children can be forcibly marched to school or
removed from their parents and taken into care and parents heavily
fined for home educating.
Perhaps this is another step to making home education illegal. The
more cases of child abuse (alleged or proven) while children are being
educated at home or alleged parental incompetence, that they can find,
the easier it becomes to pass more stupid laws which lead to
ultimately making home education totally illegal.
In my view, (and I make no apologies for being controversial because I
find this a very scary situation) it is not just about protesting to
this piece of idiotic legislation.
On a bigger scale, it is also about stopping Britain’s total loss of
sovereignty to the EU. The UK has ratified the treaty and it is all
due to come into force on 1st January 2009.
I wrote about this a few weeks ago when I wrote about the Lisbon
Treaty and its potential effects on Home Education and had several
comments about scare-mongering. However, in light of this new
guidance, I think it is worth repeating.
If I have got it totally wrong, then I apologise for causing
unnecessary upset and I will very gladly be set straight by evidence
that proves me completely wrong.
One of the points raised was about the proposed reduction in numbers
of European Commissioners from 27 to 18 and that each country would
have rotational representation and could have potentially up to five
years without representation. This arrangement appears to exclude
France and Germany, as they do not appear to have to share with anyone.
You may have seen in the news this week that the French President is
now proposing exactly that. He is proposing to reduce the number of
commissioners and that “culturally similar countries” should share a
commissioner. The point of that is that Britain and Ireland would be
likely to have the same commissioner.
My question, perhaps to ponder, would be that if we have limited
representation the EU, what is to stop nations such as France, Germany
, Belgium and other anti-home-ed countries from over-riding us altogether?
None of the MEPs that I have spoken to seem to have read the Lisbon
Treaty. Everyone I have contacted has pointed me to a Europa site,
which supposedly has the full text of the treaty in it and in reality
is over 300 pages of amendments to other documents and treaties,
without having the full text in plain, understandable English.
I had one interesting reply back from Liam Thompson, secretary to
Neena Gill MEP about this and I quote it here for You.
“As far as I can tell the Lisbon treaty will have no effect upon
current UK law regarding the home educating of children. The only
areas in which EU law over-rides that of member states, including the
UK, is in terms of much broader themes such as fundamental freedoms,
common security objectives and competition law.”
So, if they were to decide that families home educating their children
are producing free-thinking, questioning, non-conforming, non sheeple
(sheep + people), could this be considered a threat to “common
security objectives?”
It is in Germany where home education is viewed as being dangerous
because it “creates a parallel society”.
Having had my rant about all this, unfortunately I have very few
actual solutions to offer, apart from shouting from the roof-tops that
this is a totally unacceptable piece of legislation.
Amanda Goldston
Over the last few weeks I have been researching Home Education in other countries and have been quite disturbed by what I have found.
In Germany, for instance, Home Education is completely illegal because it apparently creates a “parallel society”. The cynic in me would say that is divided into those that think as the State teaches them to and those who think for themselves. Families have been heavily fined, had their children forcibly frog-marched to school and even taken away from their parents to stop home education.
Much of the rest of Europe is not much better, with home education either being illegal or socially unacceptable.
In the USA, home educating families have just won a court case to overturn a ruling earlier this year that home education was illegal.
UK Law
I was starting to think that we were fairly lucky in the UK. After all, our right to home educate our children has been clearly defined in section 7 of the Education Act 1996:
“The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full time education suitable:-
(a) to his age, ability and aptitude and
(b) to any special educational needs he may have either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.
The “Or Otherwise” is the bit that has allowed us to choose to educate our child(ren) at home, with varying levels of interference from LEA’s and other regulatory/government people.
It would appear that all that is about to change.
Revised Statutory guidance for local authorities in England to identify children not receiving a suitable education.
When this piece of legislation was presented last year, it appeared to exclude home-educated children from the list of “vulnerable groups” of children who are not receiving a “suitable” education for whatever reason.
The revised and final edition has now been released. You can read the full text of it here.
Essentially this puts home-educated children in the “vulnerable” group. What it does it paves the way for LEAs to decide what is “a suitable education” and to decide whether the parent/guardian/carer who is educating the child is a “suitable person” to undertake that role.
It opens the way to potentially huge amounts of snooping, prying, monitoring and reporting and gives even greater powers for LEAs to issue school attendance orders if they feel the education is not “suitable”.
Quite where they get the very misguided idea that an education in a school is a “suitable education” is quite beyond me. The fact that the school system, both state and private, has so many problems and has not provided what we, as parents, consider to be a “suitable education” for our children is the reason most of us have gone down the home education route.
Please read this consultation document and respond to it. Please pass it onto to other home-ed families who may not be active on Internet forums. Please write to your MP or to Gordon Brown or Ed Balls or anyoen who may be able to influence this stupid piece of legislation.
It is an attack on our fundamental right to educate our children at home, and if we allow this to become enshrined in law, it is only a matter of time before home-education becomes illegal- like it is in Germany and most of the rest of Europe.
As this post is now becoming quite lengthy, I will post my views in another post and also some other very SCARY stuff I found about our forthcoming total loss of sovereignty to the European Union.
Amanda Goldston
It never ceases to amaze me what high standards children can achieve when there are high expectations of them and their abilities. Those expectations do NOT have to be spoken, simply held in mind by the people facilitating activities.
This was brought home to me very clearly last week when the girls did a week-long Stagecoach workshop with other children, some of whom do Stagecoach on a regular basis and some of whom don’t.
At the end of the week, they performed a production which was one and a half hours long, which the singing teacher had written, called Pirates. They learnt this and performed it from a standing start on Monday morning. Each of the three age groups had at least 2-3 songs and 2-3 dances as well as acting parts to learn and the oldest and youngest had at least two costume changes!
All I could say was “WOW!”
Stephanie in Pirates Production
Jacqueline in Pirates production
At no point did anyone say it could not be done or how hard it was going to be. They just got on with the job. I suppose they did lull them into a bit of a false sense of security on day one because they gave the children the scripts but they had not included most of the songs or the dances. These were added in over the next couple of days.
Expectations in schools.
I read an interesting study that was apparently carried out in a school in USA. At the beginning of the school year, a group of teachers were called into the Principal’s office and told that because he was so pleased with their teaching in the last school year, he had decided to allocate them each a class of the best, brightest and most enthusiastic pupils in that year group to teach.
This was an experiment to see what a difference fantastic teachers teaching exceptional children could make to the results at the end of the year.
The only conditions to this were that they not to tell the students that the teachers knew how bright and capable they were and the teachers were not to tell the parents about the experiment. And they were not to teach any differently than they had been doing before.
At the end of the year, these classes of children not only headed up the results for the school, but also for the whole district which included several other schools.
Naturally the teachers were very pleased with themselves when they were called into the Principal’s office at the end of the year. They thanked him profusely for giving them classes of children with such a desire to learn and progress, and what a joy they had been to teach.
And then the truth came out….
The Principal admitted that there had not been anything particularly special or extra-ordinary about these children. They had been picked at random as cross section of the year group.
Understandably the teachers were rather stunned to hear this and decided that the phenomenal results must have been because they were such exceptional teachers.
Again the Principal had to burst their bubble…..
The teachers names had been picked at random out of a hat.
So what changed?
The only thing that changed was the teachers’ expectations of those children. Nothing was ever said to the children. However the teachers expected them to learn quickly, to love learning and to succeed at whatever they did………. and the children responded and delivered the best set of results the school had ever had.
Scary expectations in UK schools.
When Stephanie went into senior school at 11 years old, the school set them a series of tests in the first couple of weeks called MIGES ( I think that is correct as I am not exactly sure what the letters stand for). These tests were mentioned at a parent;s meeting a couple of weeks later and I was STUNNED!
These tests are designed to predict their expected results in their GCSE’s at 16! - Five years later!
Apparently great stock is put on the accuracy of these tests. The results are not discussed with the pupils and parents are NOT allowed to see them! I was horrified.
My daughter had come through the junior school of this particularly school and had experienced a very bad final year in the junior school, due to appalling teaching and a good third of the Maths and English curriculum not even being covered!
It took them until half way through year 7 (1st year of senior school) to cover in Maths what they should have done in year 6. And that was in an expensive fee-paying school!
My daughter’s future was being predicted on the basis of tests she had taken at 11 years old, a couple of weeks into a new term, after an 8 week holiday!
So when I asked whether she was going to be taught during her school life based on the EXPECTATIONS of those tests, I got a lot of muttering and mumbling and evasive answers about how they aim to teach to at least one or possibly two levels above the expectations.
I am not sure they really even understood what I was asking.
Don’t bother wasting your money!
At the last State school the girls attended I fell out with the Headmistress, when she told me not to bother wasting my money on extra tuition to get Stephanie into the Grammar School!
I was furious that she was writing off my 9 year old child and essentially confining her to the educational scrap heap! Just like that! Wave of the hand and a stroke of the pen!
This was the same school that gave 7 year olds and 9 year olds the same spellings to learn and these were spellings that were actually geared towards 4- 5 year olds.
Having moved them into the private sector, a year later Stephanie was in the top 15% of children in the whole country for Maths and English.
Hmm, wonder who had higher expectations for their children!
Be careful what you EXPECT, because that is what you really ATTRACT into your life!
With abundant blessings.
Amanda Goldston
Well, we seem to have wound down with “lessons” for the summer, although the girls have got a busy programme of Drama workshops, as well as continuing with Speech and Drama through the Summer.
Stephanie is starting her BHS (British Horse Society) Stage 1 Horsemanship and Stable Management. She can progress up through the stages and level 3 will count towards UCAS points for University.
GCSE and IGCSE Research.
After researching various options, we have come to the conclusion that we are going to be taking IGCSE’s for all subjects, and they will be spread over 2 years. Stephanie is going to do 4 subjects next year- Maths, ICT, Drama and Biology and another 4 or 5, including English Language and Literature the following year.
We have settled on the IGCSE’s for a number of reasons:
1) We have not been able to find an accommodating exam centre for GCSE.
2) We have not been able to find anyone to validate course work, without spending a lot of money on distance learning courses, which I don’t feel we need.
Validation of coursework for GCSEs for Home Educating families is going to get harder because new policies are being introduced which state that coursework has to be done in controlled conditions in a classroom, under the supervision of a teacher.
3) IGCSEs (International General Certificate of Secondary Education) are exam based, so they do not have any course work.
4) We have found a centre where we can take the exams, which is only 45 minutes drive away. (More on exam centres shortly as this can be a real bug-bear)
5) IGCSE’s are closer to the old O-Level in structure, for those of old enough to remember those qualifications.
6) They are a better preparation for A-Level (Advanced Level) than the current GCSEs because they require the student to have an ability to think and reason for him/herself rather than having most of the information spoon-fed to them.
7) IGCSEs are being adopted by more and more fee-paying, independent schools in order to separate their students with 8-10 A* grades at GCSE from students from state schools with 8-10 A* grades.
Most overseas students who want take English qualifications (the system is different in Scotland and Northern Ireland) take IGCSEs. They are very highly thought of by overseas teaching institutions.
9) Universities like and accept them for the same reasons as number 6. Although the UK government does not recognise IGCSEs in any way shape or form.
Pros and Cons.
There are 2 main exam bodies who offer IGCSE qualifications. They are and CIE (Cambridge International Exams) and Edexcel.
On both websites you can access the syllabus for the current year, as well as past exam papers and the examiners reports. That information can also help you to decide which exam board is better for your child. That may also vary from subject to subject, depending on what you want to do.
There are books, audio and visual materials and other resources available that you can buy or access fairly easily. Some have practice answers with them and some don’t.
There is also a fantastic forum for Home Educating Families looking at GCSEs or alternatives. That has been hugely helpful to us in our research.
Exam Centres.
The biggest challenge is finding an exam centre that is a) willing to take your child as a private candidate, b) is within a reasonable travelling distance from where you live and c) is a reasonable cost per subject.
There is a huge amount of useful information in relation to exam centres in the Home Education GCSEs and Alternatives forum. If this topic is of interest to you,I would strongly suggest you join that forum.
I hope this has been useful to you.
With abundant blessings.
Amanda Goldston
How the time whizzes by!
On Friday evening, we went to see the end of term production of “Honk” ( a variation of the Ugly Duckling) that the girls were part of. This was with the local Stagecoach group.
Jacqueline was a cat and a duck and Stephanie was a Mother Duck, the Farmer and a snowflake.
It was a brilliant production. I am so pleased with the standard in that group. Everyone is included and gets the chance to do something.
There is a huge amount of work goes into putting on these productions, from learning songs and dances to creating costumes.
We had spent a good couple of hours in the afternoon before the show getting Stephanie’s purple and black duck eye make- up right. By the time they had done the rehearsals and actually got to the show, most of it had worn off.
Still I suppose it was a good lesson in face -painting for me!
In a couple of weeks they are doing a week long intensive drama workshop with Stagecoach. In a week they go from a standing start to putting on a fully fledged (and polished) hour long production. That always amazes me how they do that!
More soon.
With abundant blessings.
Amanda Goldston
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With abundant blessings.
Amanda Goldston
Hi all,
Following on from my lengthy ramblings on the subject of GCSE’s and exams, I thought it was time to revisit that subject and update you on our findings to date.
Having done further research, it looks as if taking GCSE’s for home educated children is NOT a particularly easy option.
So much for the government’s mantra of “Every Child Matters” - yes well, I have got a few opinions on that subject which we will return to shortly.
I found that out of the 8-10 possible centres in the town where I live, there was only one school that would even consider taking private candidates (which is what home educated children have to register as) but they could not deal with any coursework.
And I would have to go through the LEA (Local Education Authority). Having not got off to a brilliant start with the Head of the “Elective Home Education” department, I don’t think that is a very viable option for us.
Through the Home Education and GCSE’s/Alternatives forum I have found that a lot of parents looking at their children taking exams seem to opt for the IGCSE (International General Certificate of Secondary Education) route instead.
IGCSE
The reasons behind this are mainly because there is no coursework involved in any of the subjects, with the exception of ICT (Information and Computer Technology), which has a case study with it.
It appears that students usually take an extra written paper instead of practical or oral work. There are courses that you can buy from various organisations, however a lot of people seem to download the specifications and past exam papers, buy the relevant books and study at their own time and pace.
It is then a matter of finding an exam centre, taking the exam and children end up with an internationally recognised qualification, which is held in higher regard than GCSEs by most of the Universities and many employers.
LOL, how funny is that!!!!!
The government makes it hard for home -educated children to take GCSEs, which pushes them towards alternatives. They then end up with the same qualifications as the children from the most expensive private schools (many take IGCSEs) or highly qualified foreign students!!
More on the subject of IGCSE shortly, as this is a topic for discussion in itself.
With abundant blessings.
Amanda Goldston
