Parents should educate children as they wish

The Telegraph, 11th June 2009

Labour is meddling where it is not wanted over home-schooling

Even in its current decrepit state, the Government has not lost its unappealing appetite for control. It has given Douglas Jay's notorious aphorism, "the gentleman in Whitehall is usually right", a wholly unwarranted lease of life, long after it should have been consigned to the political graveyard. Nowhere has this been more true than in how we raise our young. In Labour's view, the primary responsibility for this most elemental human activity rests not with the parent, but with the state.

That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the indefensible decision of Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, to accept the recommendations of Graham Badman's Review of Elective Home Education in England. Mr Badman appears to have concluded that parents are not safe to be trusted with the education of their children and that those who decide to school their children at home must become, in effect, subsidiaries of the state. They will have to register annually, be subjected to inspection visits by the local authority and submit a statement of their intended approach to their child's education.

Put to one side the fact that a costly new bureaucratic machinery will have to be created to deliver this meddlesome nonsense. The proposal is wrong in principle because it arrogantly assumes that state functionaries are better qualified than parents to decide what is right for their children. The Government seems routinely to assume that parents will do the wrong thing and must be protected from themselves. In fact, the true motivation for this snooping into family life is even more sinister than that and was given away by Baroness Morgan, the Children's Minister, when she said that home education "could be used as a cover for abuse". As Ann Newstead, of the campaign group Education Otherwise, rightly observed, 99.99 per cent of abused children attend school and to suggest that those taught at home are more vulnerable is "not just flawed and inaccurate, it is downright insulting".

Of course, one of the reasons so many parents – an estimated 50,000 of them – are choosing to educate their children at home is that they have lost faith in the ability of the state system to deliver a high quality education. With four out of 10 children leaving primary school without having mastered the three Rs, who can blame them? This is the real educational scandal that Mr Balls should be addressing, instead of persecuting parents who invariably do a far better job of schooling than the state, and at no cost to the taxpayer. The Government has yet to find the funding for this vindictive scheme. We can only hope it will be booted out of office before it does.