Nothing to hide?
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.
