ARTICLE
What if the inspector calls?
by Karen Luckhurst
Daily Telegraph, 24th December 2005, Page ?
To stop unwanted LEA interference, home educators should be regulated, says Karen Luckhurst.
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I recently heard a radio programme about abused children and the need for a national child register that has me wobbling dangerously on a particular fence on which I am stuck.
That fence is: "Should I inform my local education authority that I am home educating?"
Had I taken Sam out of school, the school would have informed the LEA. But since he has never been to school this is not the case, and I am under no legal obligation to inform it myself.
My gut instinct is to tell the authority. Honesty is usually the best policy and it is better I tell it than some nosy neighbours ring up and say, "That woman's children never seem to be in school," thereby putting me on the back foot.
The trouble is that many LEA inspectors are at best stuck in a national curriculum mindset, or at worst opposed to home education. Because of this, there is frequently tension between inspectors and home educators.
Other parents have advised me not to inform the LEA. "Why jump through hoops when you don't have to?" said one.
The "hoops" to which she was referring are timetables, lesson plans, written work and tests. All of these are necessary if you are teaching children in classes of 30 in large schools, but not when you are home educating. In fact, many home educators do very little formal schooling, particularly when children are young. But the children learn - and learn well - because they get a lot of one-to-one attention and their parents find inventive ways of imparting information.
It is this that attracts me and many others to the idea of teaching at home; if we wanted an "it's Friday, it's 10.45am, so it must be double geography" approach, we would put our children in school.
But this does not sit well with some of the more intransigent inspectors. The rumour mill is alive with worrying anecdotes: one family taken to court because it was unable to produce lesson plans, even though the 11-year-old son had just passed GCSE maths; another threatened with an Asbo. One inspector allegedly said he wanted to "stamp out all home education on his patch".
But the freedom of one group must be balanced with the rights of another - and that is the right of children to be educated and to be free from abuse. The trouble with opting out of the education system is that children can simply disappear. While all the home educators I have met are well-intentioned and devoted to their children and their education, the system is obviously open to abuse.
Therefore, and I won't make any friends among other home educators here, I favour some sort of regulation. The number of children being taught at home is rising - it is better we seek a form of assessment that works for us, than have one imposed.
However, that doesn't help me at the moment because the inspector for my particular LEA is notoriously difficult. So I'll just stay sitting on the fence for now - but it's getting increasingly uncomfortable.