I AM THE WORLD’S biggest advocate of home education and, in particular, Christian home education. My husband and I decided to home educate our children when our oldest child was a few months old. Fourteen years and six children later, I can honestly say that, as a family, we are thriving: we learn, we play, we laugh, we cry. We are forming relationships that we hope will last a lifetime. We also live on one income, pay twice for education (once for our children to go to government schools which we don’t use, and again for the books and curricula which we do use), and fail to meet the criteria for Universal Credit because I do not leave my children for paid employment sixteen hours a week.
I never dwell on these factors, since you could not pay me enough money to surrender to the State the quality and quantity of time that I have with my children.
Now Labour’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill was voted through its second reading on January 8 and, with one swoop, the State is intending an overreach into the lives of families and loving parents. This bill could lose us the right to have the ultimate say over one of the most important decisions we will ever make with regard to our children: namely, how they are educated.
Home-educated children are to be registered, and apart from details about the child and any other individuals or organisations that are part of the child’s education, the register can chillingly require any ‘other information the local authority considers appropriate’. Essentially, the local authority can ask for any detail it likes about our child or our family life, without parameters, and we are expected to provide it. If we do not comply, or provide the correct information (perhaps, we take more than fifteen days to inform them that our child has started an online biology class) then we may be fined. If the local authority thinks that our child is not receiving ‘a suitable education’, again based on no criteria whatsoever, they may request to visit our home. If we refuse the visit, this will work as a black mark against us. A ‘school attendance order’ may be issued, and if we do not comply, we may be imprisoned.
I know many people think that a register for home-educated children is simple common sense, but I want you to think about this for a moment: what would you do if your child were being mercilessly bullied at school? What would you do if you found out your child was required to use the pronouns ‘she/her’ in relation to a classmate who was definitely a boy when he joined the school? What would you do if you felt that your child was not learning anything due to disruptive classrooms, or perhaps had a learning difficulty and lacked essential support? Is there a point where your utter devotion to your child would rise to the fore and you felt compelled to take matters into your own hands?
You see, this is really the difference between home educators and the rest of the country. Pretty much everybody complains about their child’s school; we just do something about it. Do you think that a decision made for the well-being of your child should lead to you being automatically treated with suspicion wherever you went? What if your local authority ultimately overruled you and insisted your child must attend school anyway?
Now, I want to be very clear: I have absolutely nothing to hide. If you ask me about how we home educate, you will not be able to stop me. I could tell you about countless precious moments over the years when the sheer joy of the pursuit of knowledge has taken over. At various times, we have dropped everything to learn hieroglyphics, memorise the periodic table and recite all the presidents of the United States (well why not?). We have scoured the internet for videos about volcanoes because volcanoes are amazing. We have grown crystals, learned braille and memorised poems. We learn history (chronologically, imagine that!), Latin and logic, whilst my older children are embarking on a ‘Great Books’ programme. I could also tell you about my twelve-year-old daughter’s thriving earring business and the little yellow book where she keeps a record of her expenditure and income. We are a tightly-knit family. We play Uno, Trivial Pursuit and chess. We also camp, build dens, design birthday cakes and have a house full of bookworms.
However, at the point when the local authority asks to enter my home in order to ascertain whether I am providing my children with what they deem ‘a suitable education’, then every fibre of my being wants to push back. You see, it is not the responsibility of the Government to assess the education that we give to our children and to determine whether it is found wanting. It is the prerogative of the parent to assess the education offered by our local government and to decide whether or not it is up to scratch. If we do not think our local schools are good enough for our children, we should have every right to look to provide something better.
Labour insists this bill is about children’s well-being, but I can tell you that this bill does not care about well-being on three counts. Firstly, the bill insists that every primary school offers breakfast to qualifying pupils, whereas I can tell you that providing our children with breakfast is part and parcel of raising offspring. Breakfast presents those first few moments to express love, offer a hug and fill hungry tummies with something nourishing. Oats and milk do not cost that much and breakfast should not be outsourced to the State. Secondly, Labour says a home education register will prevent child abuse such as in the tragic case of Sara Sharif. That precious little girl should have been removed from her father forever from the moment she was born. Social services did nothing about the countless complaints to which they were privy. A register would have made no difference to her life and would perhaps have only muddied the waters since the local authority would have had thousands of extra families to sift through before dealing with the abuse case it already knew about. Thirdly, and perhaps most tellingly, many children are simply not thriving in government schools. If a company offer a product that people do not want to use, you do not force customers to use the product under threat of fines and imprisonment; you improve your product.
We home educators are fiercely devoted to our children. There is a reason that we vote with our feet and choose not to use the government schools. We have not forgotten that children are a blessing from the Lord, and we can be trusted to make the right decision for the most valuable people in our lives.
