Monster & Teeny

Here is what I owe my children:

• Unconditional love. Always and forever. The knowlegde that nothing they can ever do will ever change the way I feel about them. I will always take their side, support their cause, fight their corner. Noone else owes them this but it is most certainly their right from me.
• To provide for their most basic needs; to feed them, clothe them, shelter them, to protect them from harm.

• To listen to them, always. From their first cries as moments old infants when all they could do was articulate hunger, discomfort or pain, to knowing when to hold their tiny hand in mine so they could toddle, to knowing when the time was right to let go so they could walk alone. To recognising an interest and a passsion and introducing new ideas, facilitating their learning, answering their questions, to one day toasting their independance as they move out of my care, meet their life partner, become parents themselves, climb a mountain, sail a sea, hell flip a burger if that’s what they’ve chosen to do! I will hear them.
• To teach them, not necessarily right from wrong but how to make that differentiation for themselves. To give them choices and help them see how to use them. To show them they have wings, tell them they can fly and to stand back while they spread them, then cheer them on from below.

Here is what you owe my children:

• To allow me to do all of the above. Use the funds that come from MY taxes to provide the services to pick up the slack where I cannot. Give me doctors, nurses, hospitals, schools and teachers, law and justice, refuse collection, library services, social services, pensions, healthcare, defence, safe roads, decent public transport, street lights, clean parks and beaches, free museums. Where I need them I will use them, where I don’t I will not. Allow me to make those choices.

The children who are vulnerable worry us all. I cry to think of children not being properly cared for, being abused, being neglected, being failed by both their parents and by you. I feel sick at the thought of just one child suffering and knowing the fate of all those high profile cases of children failed by Social Services. Known to them, visited by them, reported on by them but not saved by them.

The children who are not getting an education make me so very sad. For them, for their parents who trusted you to deliver when they delegated to your schools to educate their children. The children coming out the other end of years of state education lacking not just formal qualifications but basic literacy and numeracy skills. The children tested by your exams,  sat in classrooms run by your teachers but not educated by them.

Your models do not work for all who need them. You are failing. This is where time, funds, energy, resources, reviews and revolutions are required. You are not achieving all you set out to do.

I on the other hand am. I am meeting all my targets despite having my bar set really very high. My model is working. Here is my evidence, now move along, there is nothing to see here and I believe you have plenty to keep you busy elsewhere.

Monster and Teeny have never been to school or nursery. We’ve never hidden our Home Ed status when directly asked but we’re not ‘known’ either. When the forms came for school places I chucked them in the recycling. A reminder came for Monster, cautioning that if we didn’t return them we might not get a place in our favoured school. As we didn’t want a place in any school I recycled that too. If at any point we’d been asked to clarify exactly what we were doing with regard to the children’s education then we’d have replied that we were making private arrangements, but noone ever asked so we never told.

I remember myself asking incredulously about testing, checking, someone making sure we were doing it properly when we first started researching Home Ed, which just goes to show how indoctrinated I had been in the ‘nanny knows best’ mentality of the UK. It seemed amazing that we were allowed to do this and didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Whilst I am now a very long, very enlightened way from that thinking (I’m choosing to blame it on having a newborn and a toddler at the time ) I have always thought it would be naive to imagine we will retain such freedom all the way to Teeny reaching 18 and the end of formal education age. I never gave much thought to how things might change however and enjoyed the freedom of allowing Monster and Teeny to discover  how Home Education would best suit them and through a journey of discovery, constant reevaluation, conversation and experimentation we are achieving just that.

In our opinion.

Which is where it begins to get scary really. Because up to this point it has only been our opinion that counted. For me, it still is and that is precisely as it should be. But thanks to Ed Balls’ Home Education review and Graham Badman’s report and recommendations our opinion is looking likely to count for less and less.

I firmly believe that all of life is experimental. I believe parenting is incredibly experimental and the many, many manuals, approaches and pieces of advice available on the subject back this up really. There is no set way to rear a child because children are people and people are individuals. There is nature and nurture at play, a whole load of demographic variables, different experiences, fate, accident, health, wealth, intellect and much, much more which makes up the sum total of who we are at the end of our childhood, let alone at the end of our lives. As such education should be the same, a voyage of discovery, predominantly self-directed, never ending, constantly tangenting and evolving depending on all those external influences I just mentioned.

This works for us. Monster and Teeny are stimulated, interested, engaged, curious, busy, motivated, open to any and all new experience, full of questions and the ability to find answers to them. For them, for us and for pretty much everyone who comes across us our Home Ed is deemed to be a success. Very subjective I know, but then isn’t everything in life? Subjective and relative - wealth, health, happiness, intellect, appearance, education. Is that not what makes humans so very fascinating and interesting? Our diversity and differences? Our varied perspective and opinions? Our diverse experiences and dreams?

Fingers crossed the Select Committee will debunk the Badman report and see all that is wrong with it. Fingers crossed the sterling work of so many of the Home Educators I am proud to be one of will enlighten the government and maybe the public at large that we’re doing fine and don’t need to have any of the ridiculous and downright terrifying restrictions and regulations enforced on us. May the picnics, the mass lobby, the letters and visits to our MPs, the press coverage, the bloggers, the fab work of HEYC and all of the other amazing positives that have come about as a result of this will do their job and we’ll be left alone to continue doing what we do, answering to ourselves and making it work for us, in our opinion.

If not I guess we just fight and deal with one point at a time. In theory there is no need to register, they can simply merge their databases and by elimination put us on a register as Home Educators. If not, if we need to queue up somewhere to add our names what will happen if we don’t? Will we be prosecuted? Will our children be taken away into care? Will they be forced into schools? How will this be managed? If they can’t create the register without us registering how will they find us anyway? What punishment will be levied for not complying and how will they find all those additional school places anyway?

If they want to visit us in our homes will they need search warrants? On what legal basis will they have right of entry? What if we’re not home? How will they find enough staff and get them properly trained to come and visit us all anyway? A quick google shows there are about 20,000 schools in the UK (private and state) which even at conservative estimates of HE families means there are more homes in which children are educated than schools in this country - that’s a hell of a lot of homes to get round.

If we submit an annual plan to be held accountable to who will read it? How will they measure us against it? We cannot and will not forward plan our lives in that way. I will detail what we’ve learnt this past year and state that we plan more of the same for the coming year. That will surely suffice given the richness and breadth and balance of a year in our lives and all the opportunities it offers. 

As an optimist I have to believe that this madness will be halted before it goes further. I have to believe that no matter how crazy or unreasonable the hoops we asked to jump through become there will be a way through them while retaining what is important to us. We are resouceful, creative people with imagination and passion for what we believe in, we will find the way to navigate a new path through, even if the landscape becomes steeper, harder and stonier.

My favourite season is always the one we’re just about to go into and the changing of the seasons is a perpetual source of wonder and inspiration for me. I love the newness of spring - the buds of flowers, the hatching eggs of birds, the lambs, the bluebells. I love the long evenings of summer, the camping, the ourdoorsyness of the season, I love the colours of autumn, the smell of bonfires in the air and that crunchy sound of leaves under your feet. In winter I adore the cold brightness of it, the excitement of Christmas and the dark evenings snuggled up round the fire. I love the puddle splashing opportunities of rain, the warmth on your back of sunshine. The climate in the UK and the very definite feelings of the four seasons is one of my favourite things about living in this country.

But today, today was for me what our lifestyle choices are all about. Yes it was September, late September at that but the sun shone bright enough to give me slight sunburn and instead of being at school or work we spent the morning on the beach. We were with friends and while I drank tea and put the world to rights with some of my favourite people in the world Monster and Teeny frolicked in the sea, built experimental sea defences and made up games with some of their favourite people in the world. It was blissful, idyllic and made us all wonder quite why anyone would choose to be doing anything else really.

So not back to school, but loving every minute of our own version of the start of a new term.

But if I disregard my fickle loving everything for it’s own sake-ness I would probably have to nominate September for my favourite month. It’s the month I married in, the month I became a mother in so there are always celebrations. As a child I liked the start of the new school year, the new stationery, shiny new shoes, as a Home Educator I like everyone else going back to school and freeing up the musuems, the parks, the beaches for us lucky few who have no better place to be on a Monday morning.

Our weeks do have a certain amount of term time structure to them - evening activities four out of five weekdays for Monster or Teeny or both which we always enjoy the summer holiday break from and always enjoy the September return to. Most years we have a family holiday in September and this year was no exception; we rounded off what has been a fab summers camping with a last week in our favourite campsite and were joined by some of our very best friends too.

We had a local Not Back to School Picnic in line with other Home Educators around the country. We loved being part of this event, for me it cemented all that is great about what we do - locally it involved children of all ages playing together in the park, having fun, while the adults sat and chatted. We are from all sorts of parenting / religious philosophies, various socio-economic groups from the family who are paying for private tuition to ensure their children get the very best education money can buy to the traveller who lives in a truck and HEs her small daughter, the very school-at-home to the totally free range and autonomous. This was replicated up and down the country with people coming together to celebrate our right to Home Educate, defend it against the threats facing these freedoms and prove, yet again, that we are not hidden, unsocialised people who have stepped outside of society.

I’ve been reading back over some of my previous posts on here recently. Around this time last year I did a ’school report’ style round up of what Monster and Teeny had been up to and I have previously talked a fair bit about what we do and how we do it so if you are a new visitor here then please do have a dig through the archives. I have good intentions to fix something in the sidebar to make it easier to find the posts on certain topics but I have quite a long list with the title ‘good intentions’ so it may not happen any time soon!

So, How and Why then? I think I’ll go with ‘why’ first.

I’ve written a bit about how we found out about Home Education here. I think our approach to life has always been try something, see if it works and if it doesn’t try something else. I’ve never wanted to make a choice I can’t later change and I’d always rather regret doing something than regret not doing it. Starting our Home Ed journey was in reaction to knowing pre-school would be the wrong choice for Monster when he was 3, continuing it has been a series of choices at various stages about it remaining the right path for both Monster and Teeny, aswell as my husband and I. I’ve written a bit about choices here so I won’t rehash that either.

I began with fairly clear ideas about how I would Home Educate, but over the last 6 years I’ve come to realise that actually I don’t really Home Educate at all, I’m simply one of the members of a Home Educating family and there is a difference. Our initial why has long since been lost in the passage of time and now our why is far more about this post, along with this one.

Before I ever had children I was always insistent that I would celebrate them as individuals, love them for who they were not who I wanted them to be, help them find out what made them happy. Home Education seems the logical extension of that for us, which leads me rather nicely to How?

Again, I’ve already written essays on this before so I’ll direct you first to learning, learning everywhere which I wrote 18 months ago but is still a fair representation of how our days pan out. Go and teach yourselves is a pretty good account of how a day could go around here and in terms of planning ahead and where my role is in all of this (before you start assuming I simply drink tea, chat to friends or spend all my time on the internet ) is there in Hopes and Dreams which I wrote at the beginning of this year and is as close to orgo-planning as you’ll ever find me being. Unfortunately none of it requires me buying stationery - I feel this could be my greatest failing as a Home Educator .

Just incase any of you have missed this on various lists…

There is a plan for a national Not Back to School Picnic event with bubble blowing at 2pm throughout the UK on Wednesday 16th September.

A yahoo group has been set up to coordinate and plan events across the UK and we already have several confirmed planned events in parks across the country.

The plan is to celebrate not going back to school, to create a united front across the country, raise awareness of Home Ed generally and of course continue to protest about the review.

To see if anything has been set up in your area or indeed to start setting one up (’old hands’ of the Brighton Bubble event around to help with planning/ contacting media etc.) please come and join the group at <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/notbacktoschoolpicnic/">notbacktoschoolpicnic</a>

I’ve always been fairly cautious about revealing too much about my family and I on my public blog. I have various reasons for this but protecting the children’s anonymity, avoiding clashes between my private and working life and simply not laying out all out life on a plate for anyone who happens to stumble across it to pick over are among those reasons.

This week I have compromised some of my anonymity by participating in a local event to raise awareness of Home Education and the review. It was with full consent of Monster and Teeny obviously but for us this was a fight worth risking privacy for at this stage in the hopes it would safeguard our whole lifestyle.

We were part of the group of Home Educators blowing bubbles, handing out leaflets and talking to passers by and the media at large about what we do, why we do it and how it is under threat.

We were featured on the local and regional news, the radio, the local press, linked to on youtube, facebook, national Home Ed lists, blogs and more. 

As a result of the media coverage a dialogue happened with my parents who are now if not wholly supportive at least better informed about Home Ed. There has been the inevitable backlash of negative comments, which whilst I’d love to discount as nutters do worry me. But not nearly as much as the apathy and sense of ‘what will be will be’ or ‘I’m sure you’re doing it right but what about all those people who aren’t’.

If you read this blog, if you know a Home Educator, if you’ve heard anything at all about the review. If you are a parent, if you place any value at all on the rights of the individual in this country, freedom and liberty, please, please, please join our voices in fighting against the rules and regulations the government want to impose upon us against our will.

If you’ve nothing to hide then you’ve nothing to be worried about?

We don’t have anything to hide but we do have plenty to protect and that’s what we’ll be fighting for. 

To protect against registration.

Registers are for keeping tabs on people - sex offenders, children in a classroom or for those who wish to access a service - doctors, dentists. We are neither of these. 

To protect against annual review of remaining on the register

We don’t want to be on it in the first place so we certainly don’t need to be jumping through any hoops to remain on it.

To protect against visits to our home

Maybe Home Educated is a misleading term in as much as actually home is simply the base for our living and we do all our learning through living. But we also do a lot of living in other places where learning happens too. Unlike school where learning is restricted to a desk in a classroom with the odd field trip we know no restrictions and learning takes places in the car, on the train or bus, walking down the road, at the beach, the park, a camping field, at a friends’ house, in the library, the museums, the art galleries, the cinema, the theatre, the allotment, the supermarket, the woods…. you name it, we learn there. Visits to our home are unnecessary, unwanted and an invasion of our privacy.

To protect against yearly plans to be held accountable to

We often don’t know what we’re going to do today until after it’s happened, we certainly can’t plan what we’ll learn. My children’s only goals should be self made and involve satisfying their own curiosity and finding the answers to their own questions. It’s almost impossible to quantify what they have learnt on a daily or even hourly basis even after it’s happened let alone plan it in advance. Yet learn they do in a diverse, broad, balanced and ’suitable’ way gaining knowledge and insight with every forward step.

One of my biggest criticisms of school is the prescriptiveness of it all, the way education is ‘delivered to’ rather than ‘learnt by’.One does not need an educator in order to be educated. I would not dare to presume what my children need to learn, in what order and by when and I will protect them from having that enforced upon them.

To protect against unsupervised questionning by strangers

This is possibly the most shocking suggestion of the lot and certainly the one that makes me feel the most protective of my children. Quite aside from all of the safety and welfare issues the very thought of allowing access to my children without me there to be assessed, questioned or judged is a terrifying one. It suggests that either I or my children have done something wrong and need to be interviewed seperately in the style of co-criminals under police investigation.

To protect from a minimum standard

How to even set a minimum standard? Whilst there is no denying literacy and numeracy are important schools which deliver these areas as a matter of priority fail to achieve a consistent end result and then how is it measured, how is it proved?

In schools one of the ways of proving it is testing the children. This seems to work if the objective is filling children’s heads with the National Curriculum and then testing to see how much of it has gone in. Is very effective in checking a standard bare minimum level, quality control departments in factories all around the country probably use similar methods; set a standard, test to see it’s being met, weed out any falling below the standard. It’s fairly irrelevant whether I think that works for the children in our schools. I most passionately believe it wouldn’t work for the children who aren’t.

There is mention made of SEN (Special Educational Needs). In my opinion every single individual has special educational needs - special and individual and unique to them. As adults we concede this and many of us are pretty good at identifying them and working in that way. But we forget that during our most intense period of learning, our childhood, we don’t get to work that way. This is not about being on a spectrum, having a diagnosis or requiring funding, it’s about being able to learn in our own way, at our own pace, things that we want to learn. A tailor made education, individual to the learner and driven by them.

We don’t have anything to hide but we have much to be frightened of. We have to protect our freedom, our right of choice over our childrens’ education and our right to be viewed as innocent until proven guilty rather than being made to prove our own innocence of crimes there is no evidence to suggest we have even committed.