Monster & Teeny

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.