A tragic death of a child, social services under fire, and homeschooling is being blamed:

UK Government’s Education Expert Blames Homeschooling for Death of Child

The British government’s lead expert on education is pointing to the tragic death of a Birmingham child, who had been taken out of school by her mother, as an illustration of the need for more government regulation of homeschooling.
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Khyra weighed just 37 pounds when she was rescued from her home by paramedics, along with five of her siblings. She and her brothers and sisters had been subjected to a regime of beatings, starvation and torture by their mother Angela Gordon, and her live-in “partner” Junaid Abuhamza. The court proceedings revealed that the mother, a convert to Islam, believed the abuse would drive out an “evil spirit” from the children. Both Gordon and Abuhamza have been convicted of manslaughter in the case.

Graham Badman, the former Director of Children’s Services at Kent County Council, said on Friday that, “What this tragedy points out is the need for absolute clarity about the roles and responsibilities of local authorities in intervening and supporting families who move children into elective home education.”
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However, a judge involved in the case of Khyra Ishaq and her siblings, wrote last year that it was the failure of local social services that contributed to the child’s death. Mrs. Justice King said, “Had there been an adequate initial assessment and proper adherence by the educational welfare services to its guidance, she would not have died.”

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Fiona Nicholson, trustee of home education charity Education Otherwise, told the Guardian newspaper, “Ofsted [the government education authority] has already found that Birmingham is failing to protect children and questions have been raised over the high number of child deaths in the last few years. For anyone to blame home education is a red herring designed to distract attention from Birmingham’s lamentable child protection record.”

Hard cases make bad law.

Not so fast: Home schooling trumps full-day kindergarten Jun. 18, 2009 The Globe and Mail Amira Elghawaby
Research shows home-schooled kids outperform their public-school peers. So why so is there little or no financial encouragement for parents to take it on?

Seated beside a mom with coiffed hair, polished nails and an elegant suit, I listened wide-eyed as audience members talked about a world I had totally misunderstood and stereotyped.

They talked about children who weren’t being challenged at school – one daughter came home crying, begging her mom to let her stay home and “teach” herself. Another parent described a school that just didn’t know what to do with her rambunctious boy, so she decided to take over. He excelled.

While I’m not so interested in governmental “financial encouragement” (strings are always involved), I’d rather ask, why is there little encouragement for homeschoolers from the official educational world? Home education means parental involvement is at its max, children are interested in learning….everything a teacher would want in their classroom. That is the point, right?

It works at home, so why the attempts to interfere, as in Graham Badman’s Report to the Secretary of State on the Review of Elective Home Education in England ?

Headcounts via compulsory national registration, along with vested interests monitoring and analyzing why families home educate seems oppressive. As Badman acknowledges “England is the most liberal in its approach to elective home education“, he’s doing everything in his power to change that with his recommendations.

His suggestion of a “statutory definition of what constitutes a “suitable” and “efficient” education” seems very limiting and unimaginative, at best. Following that recommendation with a demand for “the right of access to the home” and “the right to speak with each child alone if deemed appropriate ” would be formidable to one’s personal living space. (That space also serving as the safe place for families to land.)

In Elghawaby’s article, she asks a logical question about the Canadian government’s Early Learning Advisor wanting drastic governmental actions such as daycares moved into the schools for a “seamless day” . (By the way, what would sustain and improve an employee’s chances of staying in the government industry? Could it be more “Early Learning” programs funded by taxpayers? Just sayin’….) From The Globe and Mail:

In England, a three-year study concluded that home-schoolers achieved better results in both literacy and mathematics. Home-schooling movements are growing there, as well as in Germany, Japan and Switzerland.

So why isn’t any of this mentioned in Charles Pascal’s report on full-day kindergarten?

That question should be asked since there is a persistent drumbeat for birth to 5 year old programs by world leaders (and other interested proponents). If the agenda is for government oversight of babies and little ones prior to compulsory attendance ages, then families can start touting the glories of not starting academic training too early.

Much Too Early!
by David Elkind, Ph.D.

Although David Elkind is a professional educator rather than a “homeschooler,” his writing offers the wisdom of experience and research that can be of great benefit to any parents concerned about providing the right start for their children.

“Children must master the language of things before they master the language of words”
—Friedrich Froebel, Pedagogics of the Kindergarten, 1895

It works well when our little ones are nurtured by their families and other loved ones to live and learn. Those young ones have questions by the mile. They deserve the freedom to seek answers outside a classroom.

Lillian Jones’ thoughts ring true in her article: A Homeschool Curriculum for Preschool and Kindergarten

If you’ve been raising a child up to the age of “pre-school” or “kindergarten,” you’ve already begun homeschooling. In those early years, the most appropriate homeschooling activities are things that gently introduce a child into the wonders of his immediate world and the imagination. As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge” – and those early years are the perfect time to provide an atmosphere where the child can freely dream and play and explore and grow in both body and imagination.

These are lots of things a parent can do to help a child develop a love of learning and searching – things that will carry through as a foundation for a life of joyful and successful learning. Most of these are things a parent does at one time or other anyway. A bonus is that your child will be getting a good foundation for later studies, even picking up some elements of reading, writing, and math!

If you read on in her article, her suggestions are educational and positive fun! As she concludes, childhood is short, fleeting, and so very important. Families can (and should be able to) do what works for their children’s learning needs. It should not be for a bureaucratic stranger’s satisfaction.

There you have it.

I caught an article by Adharanand Finn yesterday in the UK Guardian’s Mortarboard blog.  Finn pointed out an August ‘o8 article [No School Like Home] about 2 authors who had followed some homeschoolers around.  They discovered this :

Alan Thomas, a visiting fellow in the institute’s department of psychology and human development, and Harriet Pattison, a research associate, conclude that informal learning at home is an “astonishingly efficient way to learn”, as good if not better than school for many children.

“The ease, naturalness and immense intellectual potential of informal learning up to the age of middle secondary school means they can learn certainly as much if not more,” they say in How Children Learn at Home.

But back to Finn’s post, he reported that next week, Graham Badman (former Managing Director of Children’s Services at Kent Council) will release a government initiated Department for Children, Schools and Families “Independent Review of Home Education“.

(Home) school’s out forever? If Graham Badman’s recommendations for home tuition are adopted by the government, a whole way of life is under threat
Home educators have been feeling nervous ever since Graham Badman began his review of home education earlier this year.

The government’s announcement of the review came wrapped in sinister language about the need to investigate “claims that home education could be used as a ‘cover’ for child abuse such as neglect, forced marriage, sexual exploitation or domestic servitude”.

The Freedom for Children to Grow (Education Otherwise) site provides more details below, and that “Many home educators have a problem with the premise of the Review questions” mentioned below.  The purpose does seem a bit unsettling:

The government says that there may be safeguarding concerns around home educated children and that some people have said home education could be a cover for abuse and forced marriage. The question has been raised over whether home educated children can meet the 5 outcomes of Every Child Matters ie to be safe, to be healthy, to enjoy and achieve, to achieve economic wellbeing and to make a positive contribution.

No parent I know (homeschooling or otherwise), would think in terms of  5 outcomes for their child. Seems incredibly limiting, even as it could be a dangerously vague determination from a stranger wielding some power.

These Outcomes remind me of Northwestern University’s Kim Yuracko ditty on Illiberal Education: Constitutional Constraints on Homeschooling.  Her premise was this:

Modern day homeschooling raises then in stark form questions about the obligations that states have toward children being raised in illiberal subgroups. Surprisingly, the legal and philosophical issues raised by homeschooling have been almost entirely ignored by scholars. This paper seeks to begin to fill this void by making a novel constitutional argument. The paper relies on federal state action doctrine and state constitution education clauses to argue that states must — not may or should — regulate homeschooling to ensure that parents provide their children with a basic minimum education and check rampant forms of sexism.

My first reaction has generally been that these people need to get a real life, as their concerns certainly don’t seem to coincide with homeschooling families’ realities.  Finn also pointed out that: “Ironically, the very reason some parents take their children out of school is because they suffer abuse, through bullying, within the school system”.

Seems like the school folks would have better things to do with their time?  But yet, this review could recommend compulsory registration, along with minimal standards of education for homeschoolers.  That doesn’t seem likely with the strong network of United Kingdom homeschoolers pushing back.  But it will certainly take precious time away from their families contending with the issue.

Irony=Bureaucracy?