West Yorkshire Home Education and Learning
Sharing information for home educators and home schoolers in West Yorkshire WYHEALAHEd (Action for Home Education) Press Release
For immediate release, 22 February 2009
PERSECUTION OF MINORITY GROUP IS “ABUSE OF PUBLIC FUNDS”
Outraged families and support organisations flood the DCFS with 2000+ consultation responses to the elective home education review
The government’s review of elective home education (1), which was announced in January in a blaze of scurrilous spin stating that home education could be used by parents as a cover for abuse and forced marriage, has provoked an unparalleled reaction from home educating families and support organisations, including home education action group AHEd (2) and the home educators’ network Home Education Forums. (3) Both AHEd and Home Education Forums have strongly rebutted the government’s allegations as “vile and unsubstantiated” in their respective robust responses to the DCSF consultation. (4) and (5)By the close of the unusually short online consultation last Friday, over 2000 individual and organisational responses had been sent in by ’stakeholders’ who have in recent weeks demonstrated their collective outrage at the “irresponsible scaremongering” perpetrated by government minister Delyth Morgan and Vijay Patel of the NSPCC, who was forced to admit on national radio (6) that no evidence exists to support the suggestion that home educated children may be more likely than schooled children to suffer abuse or be coerced into marriage or domestic servitude.
AHEd supporter Clare Murton commented: “Apart from the clear incitement to hatred of home educators that Delyth Morgan’s announcement provoked, this review by Graham Badman must represent the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Home educators are trying to get on with the important work of bringing up their children, but over the past few years have been repeatedly distracted from that task by unwarranted and vicious attempts to usurp their parental rights.
“Multiple government consultations have concluded that home education is safe, efficient and in no need of tighter legal control and that local authorities need legal guidance. It is astounding, therefore, that they now give credence to slander such as Morgan’s. This luckily has not defeated home educators and there will be no ‘death by consultation’ in our neck of the woods. Instead it has determined the home education community to put a stop to this unprecedented witch hunt.
“No other section of UK community has ever been so impassioned in its response to a DCSF consultation and I am proud to be part of a network of people who really do think that every single child matters.”
While there is absolutely no evidence of any link between home education and child abuse, domestic servitude or forced marriage, there is plenty of evidence of the offence caused and anger unleashed within the home education community itself and among non home educating families who perceive the threat to home education as the “thin end of the wedge”.
A Downing Street petition submitted by Roxane Featherstone on behalf of AHEd (7) has attracted more than 2000 signatures in a fortnight, while the Stop the Government Stigmatising Home Educators group (8) on the social networking site Facebook has more than 1500 members whose comments demonstrate a deep sense of collective outrage. Home education blogs, including the popular Sometimes It’s Peaceful (9), have highlighted what appears to be a state sponsored campaign to persecute a minority group exercising a lawful choice and have strongly criticised some members of the team led by Graham Badman (10) who are to participate in the inquiry as “partial” and “lacking in knowledge or experience of elective home education”.
Alison Preuss, spokesperson for Home Education Forums, said: “I have only once witnessed such a mass reaction by the home education community and that was when the former Scottish Executive mounted a similar attack on home educating families north of the border. Overnight, they alienated every home educator across the land – and lost! This latest assault on educational freedom by people for whom child abuse represents a ‘nice little earner’ has provoked nothing short of fury among law abiding citizens who have in many cases had to remove their children from an unsafe and abusive school environment.
“While the economy tanks, our elderly folk are having to choose between eating and heating and vulnerable children are being left unprotected due to lack of competence in social services, as demonstrated in the case of Victoria Climbie and the children abused by Eunice Spry (who was a Gloucestershire Council approved foster carer), we have to wonder why public funds are being diverted from frontline services into an unnecessary analysis by bureaucrats of 2000+ consultation responses and an equally unnecessary investigation of a non existent issue. In our view, this whole exercise represents an abuse of public funds.”
ENDS
For more information contact AHEd ahed@ahed.org.uk or Home Education Forums info@home-education.biz
NOTES FOR EDITORS
(1) Elective home education review http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id=2009_0013
(2) Action for Home Education http://www.ahed.org.uk
(3) Home Education Forums http://www.home-education.biz/forum
(4) AHEd reponse http://ahed.pbwiki.com/HomeEducation-YourViewsReview2009AHEdResponse
(5) Home Education Forums response http://www.home-education.biz/forum/home-education-law-policy/155-hef-response-dcsf-home-ed-review-part-1-a.html
(6) Vijay Patel on BBC Radio http://sometimesitspeaceful.blogspot.com/2009/01/transcript-of-radio-2-jeremy-vine-show.html
(7) Downing Street petition http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Homeedreview/
(8) Stop the Government Stigmatising Home Educators http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=45453211491&ref=ts
(9) Sometimes It’s Peaceful blog http://sometimesitspeaceful.blogspot.com/
(10)Graham Badman http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/search/?asset=document&id=129480
A message to all parents now and future parents too.
The time has come for all parents to wake up and become aware of the massive legal changes to UK law that are being rolled out and will affect us all. Even parents who live outside of the UK should look out for this coming to their country and try to stop it before it happens. Here, the new system is called Every Child Matters (http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/) and it seeks to monitor and control every aspect of every child’s life. The ECM regime is centred around five ‘outcomes’, with which every child is expected to comply, but the outcomes don’t mean what they imply.
“Be healthy,”
“Stay safe,”
“Enjoy and achieve,”
”Make a positive contribution,” and
“Achieve economic well-being,” all sound quite harmless and beneficial, but when you scratch the surface they actually mean something quite different.
The five outcomes are all measured by a whole raft of indicators, and if your child is seen to be failing in any outcome, he or she will be put through an eCAF (http://tinyurl.com/ag6686) which is a long and extremely invasive questionnaire that collects information about every aspect of the child’s life, and lodges the answers in the child’s file on the new ContactPoint database. If you look at the end of the questions, you will see the requirement for an ‘action plan’, the progress of which is to be tracked, monitored and recorded on the child’s file. The thing is, the criteria for the outcomes is going to be so tight that it will be almost impossible for every child to reach them all the time. For example, the draft guidance for anyone coming into contact with children on ‘When to suspect child maltreatment’ (http://tinyurl.com/bv23r2) includes things like inappropriate, or ill-fitting clothes, not taking prescribed medicine, ‘excessive clinginess’, temper tantrums, or other ‘inappropriate behaviour’.
If you’ve got children, you will know that most can and will fall foul of at least one of those points in stressful circumstances.
The ‘Stay Safe’ outcome is then breached and an eCAF carried out.
But the most worrying outcome is the last one. ‘Achieve economic wellbeing’ actually means that any child whose family on a lower than average income (which is actually quite high: http://tinyurl.com/b76f2r and is worked out *after* housing costs and tax) who is receiving Child Tax Credits, when both parents are not in full-time employment, will fail to meet the outcome and be made the subject of an eCAF and associated action plan. Causing a child to live in [relative] poverty is now seen as abusive and this may not affect you now, but hardly anyone’s position is 100% safe in the current economic climate. To address the issue of lack of jobs, the government is working with corporate ‘partners’ to bring in a full-time compulsory workfare programme.
The ‘Every Child Matters’ and Anti-Child Poverty programmes are not designed only to help children in real need.
Systems are already in place to help those children and our state welfare system ensures that nobody ever needs to go hungry in this country. The intention – and the result, if we do nothing – will be to completely change the nature of normal family life forever. So what can we do? This is difficult. Most of the changes are happening by Statutory Instrument, which is not voted on in Parliament, so your MP is probably unable to make a difference although it might help to write to them with your concerns (http://www.writetothem.com/). Petitions are usually ignored in matters of major reform programmes such as these, and protest marches seem to have very little effect. Voting for a different political party will not help: all the main parties are committed to doing the same thing, or worse. Perhaps the most powerful thing you can do just now is to talk to other parents. Pass this message around, post it on forums, send it in emails.
If you know anyone who works with children or is likely to come into contact with them in a professional capacity, talk to them especially about it. Ask them if they realise the full extent of the planned changes and consequences, so that pressure can be put on the relevant trade unions to try to resist the process. As a parent, you would be wise to consider your family’s position in the light of the changes, and possibly also to advise or warn your children accordingly. But long-term, these new and invasive laws and systems need to be repealed. The political party system will not do it. We need independent MPs with the strength and integrity to work together in reversing all of the recent seismic legal attacks on our civil liberty. Do you know anyone who would be willing to stand as an independent MP on this issue? It might be the one thing that actually gets people out to vote.
Please share this information widely, all copyright has been waived.
Home Education Government Review – New
There is now less than one week left to send in your reponse to the current Government consultation on Home Education.
The deadline is Friday 20th February, only online responses are permitted.
Please consider responding to it.
1. Do you think the current system for safeguarding children who are educated at home is adequate? Please let us know why you think that.
2. Do you think that home educated children are able to achieve the following five Every Child Matters outcomes? Please let us know why you think that.
3. Do you think that Government and local authorities have an obligation to ensure that all children in this country are able to achieve the five outcomes? If you answered yes, how do you think Government should ensure this?. If you answered no, why do you think that?
4. Do you think there should be any changes made to the current system for supporting home educating families? If you answered yes, what should they be? If you answered no, why do you think that?
5. Do you think there should be any changes made to the current system for monitoring home educating families? If you answered yes, what should they be? If you answered no, why do you think that?
6. Some people have expressed concern that home education could be used as a cover for child abuse, forced marriage, domestic servitude or other forms of child neglect. What do you think Government should do to ensure this does not happen?
The online form is available here.
A link to a history of the man responsible for leading this supposedly independent review: Graham Badman
Petition to raise awareness on Parental Responsibility to Children’s Education
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to remind his government that parents must remain responsible in law for ensuring the welfare and education of their children and that the state should not seek to appropriate these responsibilities.
Contact details for anyone interested in educating otherwise
Please do send an email to wyhealatyahoo.co.uk if you would like to find out more about home educating/home schooling/home learning in West Yorkshire today.
Education Education Education
Just to be clear that as PARENTS it is OUR SOLE LEGAL DUTY to: cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable—(a) to his age, ability and aptitude, and (b) to any special educational needs he may have.
Compulsory education
7 Duty of parents to secure education of children of compulsory school age
The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable—
(a) to his age, ability and aptitude, and
(b) to any special educational needs he may have,
either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.
Meetings in November
Apart from the publically known informal meeting at the Fun House in Halifax next week, there are several other meetings for home educators arranged in the county in the next couple of weeks, aimed at the wide variety of ages of children who are home educated here.
