The Home Education Review has now been published

The Home Education Review led by Mr Badman has now been published and it looks like it's bad news.

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatter ... education/

Graham Badman’s key recommendations include:

• that local authorities should provide more support to home educating families, eg. through helping provide access to the national examination system, sports facilities, libraries and music tuition;

• a compulsory annual registration scheme, in which all parents who plan to home educate have to inform their local authority. While around 20,000 children are already registered, the actual number being home educated is unknown and could be more than double this number;

• at the time of registration, parents being asked to submit a statement of their intended approach to the child’s education including what they aim to achieve over the following 12 months;

• giving properly trained local authority officials the right of access to the home, following a minimum two week notification to the parents. They will check that the child is making progress against their learning statement. They will also have the right to speak to the child, to ensure they are safe and well. A written report must then be produced and shared with the parents and child; and

• that local authorities can refuse registration to home educate if there is clear evidence of safeguarding concerns.

All this is for safeguarding children educated at home - despite the fact that social services already have these powers and have failed to protect children who attend school full time.

UKIP have slammed this review

http://www.ukip.org/content/latest-news ... ion-review

The review has also been given media coverage by the BBC

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8093796.stm

I find it very funny how a rep from the discredited and traitorous Education Otherwise gets publicity but nobody from other HE organisations does.

Including CBBC Newsround. Even the kids get to know all about it.



Because Education Otherwise has been hijacked by the government and will side with their objectives whilst deceiving the masses it's also what most home educators approve of. It's become the home education equivalent of the National Autistic Society.

The basis for implementing the changes in legislation have nothing to do with HE or significant evidence that HE parents are failing to provide an education in accordance the with the 1996 Education Act. HE was totally irrelevant in starting the review in the first place. It was initiated because of allegations of child abuse and forced marriages in the HE community, despite the government being unable to prove any had taken place. In January an NSPCC spokesman was asked if there was any evidence to back up the claim that home education is being used as a cover for child abuse. He admitted that there was no evidence whatsoever to back up the claims with.

The reality of the matter is that it's got sod all to do with child abuse and everything to do with the government fearing that HE is getting too popular and needs to be curtailed in order that children continue to be indoctrinated in NuLab ideology at decrepit state schools.

Here is the disgusting piece of government sponsored propaganda complete with totalitarian recommendations called the Report to the Secretary of State on the Review of Elective Home Education in England by Graham Badman. Here is an equally odious response by Ed Balls MP, Secretary of State.

After being swamped in a torrent of information on blogs and forums, I have finally got round to fisking these documents for information and will report on the findings.

The review has spawned a consultation which ends in October 2009. After the consultation closes, it will be debated in Parliament and has to be approved by both houses before it becomes law. It appears that the changes will be made to local government legislation and central government legislation will remain unchanged.

My advice is to slow down and take things in steadily rather than rushing to take action now because further useful information is bound to surface in the meantime. I recommend that you delay submitting your reply to the consultation until close to the closing date. It seems plausible that the DCSF and the government read replies as they receive them and use the information in them to formulate their media responses in a way that undermines us further as we go.

A question that needs answering is why Education Otherwise was given privileged access to a DCSF document before it was made public?

I'm reading through the report and certain sections strike me as alarming. Amongst its many recommendations, some come across to me as deeply distressing. One of which appears to give inspectors more powers than the police, another having to produce 12 monthly plans complete with outcomes.

Reading between the lines, I am getting the impression that this is not purely a HE issue but an outright attack on civil liberties. It is not just an assault on HE families, but on the rights of all parents and children. There is a possibility that certain pieces of legislation will end up violating Human Rights Act, Protocol 1, Article 2 which says the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.

There doesn't appear to be a verdict on the review from the NAS yet. Has anybody got any information or ideas what they think about the changes in legislation? Beth Reid from the NAS was one of the 12 members of the Home Education Review panel who was included for her knowledge of SEN. Her previous work seems to be mostly involved with schools and their provision of services for children with ASD. Beth Reid co-wrote the well known report Make School Make Sense, published in 2006, about inclusion of children with ASD in schools. Criticisms of Make School Make Sense include the omission of information about how parents can deregister their child from a mainstream school, and describing alternative LA provided education such as home tuition as home education.

Certain members of another AS forum I use appear to underestimate the severity of the new legislation at the moment. EO was mentioned so perhaps the message has yet to be hammered fully home in the AS community that EO are discredited as traitors by large sections of the home education community.

I'm convinced that the EU are behind this Review of Home Education and changes in legislation. Accepted wisdom by most HE parents are that allegation of child abuse were responsible for sparking off the review in the first place, and used as a smokescreen to cover up the government's real agenda of virtually outlawing HE, but has anybody questioned where the Every Child Matters (ECM) agenda really originates from. A superb investigation into the ECM programme by Gill Kilner has highlighted that the EU is behind it. Many sections of the document LISBON EUROPEAN COUNCIL 23 AND 24 MARCH 2000: PRESIDENCY CONCLUSIONS echo the points of the ECM programme. The official government line on the ECM programme, including the Contactpoint database, is that it originated from ideas contained in Lord Laming's 2003 Victoria Climbie Inquiry. This inquiry certainly did contain those ideas, but is being used as a convenient smokescreen by the government to fool the British public into thinking that the leigislation had come from Westminster rather than the EU.

The ICT initiative isn't coming from the goverment or Micro$oft for that matter. Read LISBON EUROPEAN COUNCIL 23 AND 24 MARCH 2000: PRESIDENCY CONCLUSIONS Section 8 on the positioning of Europe as a 'knowledge-based economy' for more information.

Overall, the EU is not supportive of HE so the Home Education Review may well be a cunningly concealed tactic by the government as the first step towards bringing Britain inline with the European countries who are less generous towards the rights of HE than we are. Home education is officially banned in Germany and Cyprus, and heavily restricted in Sweden and the Netherlands.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has this to say:

According to the Commission’s research only 25 per cent of public sector directors 'felt they received sufficient information about human rights cases, or that their operational managers and front-line staff received sufficient, timely access to such information'. Only seven out of 11 of the inspectorates examined set out their commitment to human rights in their strategies and corporate plans, suggesting inspectorates could be doing more to drive forward change in the public sector and hold service providers to account.

There is some talk on a Facebook group about employing professional lobbyists.

AHEd are considering establishing a legal defence fund.

The Homeschooler.org.uk is one of the most comprehensive yet to the point websites about this Home Education Review.

If you happen to need to phone the DCSF to make a comment, complaint or whatever about the Home Education Report, then the alternative to the 0870 000 2288 number is: 01928 794446.

My advice is to email or write to your MP as a matter of urgency. The easiest way to send an email is via the WriteToThem website. You don't even need to know your MP's name - just your postcode. Parliament goes into recess on July 21st and does not resit until October 12th - the consultation closes October 19th. So it is important that we get lobbying our MPs before they go on their summer breaks.

I just received a scrap of information about the situation in France from the AHEd list.

France already has compulsory registration and monitoring of HE families. In March 2009 a new education bill was passed, which dictates the curriculum to be followed; the method of delivery of said curriculum; and age related targets that must be complied with. The three main HE organisations in France are outraged by the lack of proper consultation before imposing the new legislation, and are basically feeling that it marks the end of any form of diversity in French education.

NAS is definitely biased towards inclusion. They were unhelpful when I was considering HE and needed more information and advice.



This is a very interesting finding. If it can be confirmed that the EU is behind the changes in legislation then we have a completely different battle to fight. At the moment the HE community are pointing their fingers at child welfare reforms, but if the above really is true, then they are barking up the wrong tree.