I ask you to imagine the unimaginable.
I ask you to imagine a country where the fabric of society has broken down. I ask you to imagine a place where crime is rife, where the young people roam the streets and schools with knives and guns in their pockets, where the disaffected gather on street corners and terrorise those who wish to walk the streets in safety. I ask you to imagine a place where entire sections of a town or city are no go areas for police, or fire crews or ambulance staff.
I ask you to imagine a place where child after child comes home from a day at school to an empty house. I ask you to imagine a world where it is normal for children to experiment with drugs, where 1 in 4 teenage girls have had at least 1 STD, where teenage pregnancy is rife and where, in an effort to prevent future illness, the government decides to assume all girls will become sexually active some time shortly after their 12th birthday and vaccinate them all against an STD.
I ask you to imagine a place where the latest clothes, trainers, ipods and games are more important than anything else. Where it is normal to find casualty full of blind drunk teenagers in the evening, where to learn or join in with sports or activity is embarrassing and not to be encouraged.
I ask you to imagine a country where 60 social care professionals can argue the toss about who is in charge of protection and whether the human rights of the parent are being infringed, while a child dies quietly in a room everyone knew about, or a baby eventually ends up broken in pieces in front of health professionals who had seen him countless times before. Or imagine a child of 7 starving to death in a street where people had heard her scream, heard her beg and plead for release and mercy, seen her almost naked, scavenging for food left out for birds – but did nothing because they WERE AFRAID TO INTERFERE.
Imagine a world where parents arrive at a government registered, government approved nursery to find that a care worker has been abusing children and making pornographic images of their children.
Imagine a place where children, ready or not, are expected to leave the family home and spend the day with strangers, in a room of children they didn’t know, with people they could not possibly expect to be loved by, or hugged by if they were hurt, or supported when they were frightened. I ask you to imagine a society where truanting is so serious a problem, by children who claim that school is boring and meaningless and a waste of their time, that the government fine and jail the parents who dropped those children off into the care of school that morning.
Imagine a government education system, costing billions of pounds, where 1 in 6 children leave school without basic reading, writing and numeracy skills. Imagine an education system where everyone learns the exact same things. Imagine a system where it is not cool to do well, not cool to get great results, where if you know a subject well and want to prove you do by putting in considerable effort, you are immediately accused of cheating by a disbelieving teacher.
Imagine a status quo where 10’s of children kill themselves each year because of their despair at being bullied.
Imagine a system where the data of every vulnerable child is collected on a database that the government promise is safe and will be responsibly used, but that the CHILDREN OF THE MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT will have their details shielded on, so that no one can check up on them.
And now, i want you to NOT imagine something. I don’t want you to imagine that in the face of this society, they decided that they would spend millions of pounds on a review, then a consultation and then a legislation change to check up on less than 1% of the children in the country, among whom there has never been a reported case of serious abuse, who are largely considered to be happy, well adjusted, interested and meaningful contributors to society. I want you to imagine instead that they celebrated that these people had decided that responsibility for their offspring was entirely their own, that they would bear the full financial responsibility for them, take full responsibility for their education and do their best to ensure that they became enthused, excited, passionate contributors to society, with an eclectic mix of interests and ideas, a broad base of knowledge and a confidence in their self and their path through life.
I want you to imagine that the government did not only speak the rhetoric of parental responsibility and social cohesion, but actively supported those who engaged in that idea.
And now i want you to think on the reverse, the truly unthinkable.
I want you to imagine that this government who supported the home educators had some radical ideas. Imagine the really unthinkable, that they might blame the people who sent children to nursery at 4 weeks old, from 8am-6pm, 5 day a week, who used school and breakfast clubs and after school clubs, who moaned about holidays and despaired at spending time with their children. I want you to imagine that they decided that it was so unnatural for a mother to want to return to work after giving birth that those mothers would have to be inspected on a 3 monthly basis to check they were otherwise engaging properly with their children. I want you to imagine that they set up a database of children in childcare from younger than 4 and insisted on checking the home of those children on a yearly basis to make sure those children were getting enough play, enough good food, enough exercise, enough parental interaction, enough real social skills practise so that they wouldn’t grow into disaffected youth.
This database wouldn’t only trigger a visit if someone suspected a problem, it would be a yearly check, whether any concerns were raised or not. While they were there they would be entitled to speak with those children, without a parent present and ask them if they were happy with the social and educational provisions their parents had made for them and offer alternatives their parents might fundamentally disagree with. While they were there, perhaps they’d check you had the sort of house they approved of – and perhaps do a spot check to make sure you had no stolen goods or illegal drugs in the house. Not that they had any reason to assume you did, but since they were there, since they had been granted the right to enter your house, they might as well do it properly.
If they were happy, if they decided your children were okay in general, they’d allow you to register as a pre-school child care user for another year.
But if your child looked anxious, or was too nervous to speak to them, or cried, or panicked and wet herself, or answered a question about what he or she had done today with “nothing” or “watched tv” or perhaps said “we haven’t had lunch today”, they might have reason to assume something was amiss and investigate you further.
What if we blamed societies ills on parents who choose not to spend their time with their children, or really aren’t emotionally up to it, or love their career as much or more than their children, or who have to work for financial reasons? What if we lived in a society where parents went to prison because they had chosen a school that had failed an Ofsted report. What if we lived in a world where, after the news story broke about the allegedly criminal nursery worker, we came after the parents for sending their children there?
NOT IN MY NAME, MR BROWN. NOT EITHER OF THESE SCENARIOS IN MY NAME.
I declare myself officially opposed to this government and ask them, if they still believe in democracy and freedom, to prove so by calling a General Election.
They came for the home educating parents, but i did not speak out because i was not a home educator. Then they came for the parents who chose a bad school, but i did not speak out, because our school was good. Then they came for the parents who chose the nursery with a sex abuser as a nursery nurse, but i did not speak out, because my children went to a different nursery.
And then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak up for me.
Well said, as dani has said in view from the greenhouse, we need to get together and collate how everyone feels then look at a way forward we are a minority group and if we were a religion we could claim religious hatred and discrimination, Joe our baby is at risk terrible risk of infection and no one will enter my home unless they can prove they have bot been near chicken pox or the like in the last ten days as the pox could be a death sentence, that not to sya we dont go out before anyone uses this (the big bad government I mean) against me, we do to home ed groups to rainbows to dance but they know about Joe and the phone if anythings spreading, free access to my home over my dead body. Just another thought if they want us to be schools at home, I want a teacher salary and all my ancillary costs paid ……. we need to get rid of this government.
I’m still to stunned to collect my thoughts to blog on this yet. And yes, I can see Aprilia saying we don’t do anything, we never have lunch, she never goes anywhere…
My girls both looked horrified at the thought of having to speak to someone. I didn’t even say what sort of questions they might be asking. Is there any chance they might respect the children’s right to choose not to talk to them, do you suppose…?
Do you have to ask?
Re the thing about them speaking to the kids alone … spoken to loads of people, all said the same thing – it’s illegal – they CANNOT do it. Every child being interviewed for any reason has the right to be accompanied by a trusted, appropriate adult. There are many reasons for standing against this review but, my god, the fact that they are trying to do something which is illegal is the biggy!
Brilliant post, I tried and failed to put something like this into words myself.
AMEN. I am not a home educator myself but I am utterly horrified at the implications of this bloody review.
But intrusive face to face interviews like this is one of the things that has got people enraged about Connexions – if they can do it with young teens, what’s to stop them doing it with children too?
Nothing, i would imagine. I’m reasonably sure that when this heads its way into the Commons, it is going to take appealing to Europe and beyond to have any impact on how it all concludes.
Although I am unable to HE myself I am so totally in support of those who do. Hope you don’t mind that I have linked to this in a couple of places
Feeling total solidarity with the home ed community here too, despite not actively home educating at the moment. Good post, Merry. The recommendations have just gone way, way too far past anything reasonable. It’s so outrageous, though, that I really can’t see it becoming legislation, in all reality. Can it?
I’ve no idea. I would seriously hope it would hit plenty of human rights hiccups and perhaps a few people might think it put them in danger of being challenged over school attainment levels.
Personally i think we’ll get the registration and pre-planning but the good stuff, the sops to quiet us all down, will be unfundable. If Mr Badman thought anything else, i think he was naive, but i suspect they were nothing more than sweeteners he hoped we’d be fooled by, or divided by.
I can’t honestly believe they can do any of it without significant legislation changes, but a part of me worries they’ll say “let us in quietly or we’ll charge you with something so you have to let us in” – i wouldn’t be remotely surprised if we find ourselves told to agree or face the possibility of having our children removed. It might not be what they say they’ll do, but i bet it will come to that somewhere.
Brilliantly written and bang on.
This is a fabulous blog 😉
We family of four Home Ed from London NW and this is inspirational.
Drop us a line if you’ve a moment.
x
another superb post, well said Merry.
Excellent post, Merry.
Bravo!
Whilst I am not anti HE at all and am not keen on the proposals, I do have to say that I thought your post was scaremongering. The picture of society that you paint is horrific and not the school community or wider community that I live in, and we are in very urban South London. I’m afraid you come across as an isolationist which is the very thing that many people suspect about home educating. I’m sure the majority of home educators are very much part of society and their local community but your blog suggests that you see urban society as a big, scary place where kids roam the streets with knives – its just not like that.
I think I could probably reference every one of the points in my post with a relevant news story from bbc news.
However, the repeated use of the world ‘imagine’ in the post was used so as to make it clear that it was intended as a work of fiction, not anything else.
It is odd that you see it as close enough to life as to assume it is actually my entire view of society. Could you have missed the point of my piece of writing, do you think?
Bloody hell Merry, you can write woman. I’d vote for you. Go on – be our MP
Wonderful piece!
Thank you so much for putting all this into such perfect words.
Great post.
back in the dim and dark past of 1997 i would have laughed at you and your post. in 2001 i might have sniggered and said it still cant happen. now in 2009 i am worried to say the least.
i dont have to imagone a lot of what was posted as all i have to do is watch the news, read the papers and talk to my kids and their friends to see how far our society has degraded.
we have 4 kids, the eldest is 18 and out of the school system, the 2nd is 15 and ias doing really well at school and the youngest at 6 is loving school. the middle child though is 13 and is home educated. he was remorslesly bullied by a gang of youths in his year. at least 2 times every months sometimes weekly i would have to phone the school and complian to his teacher about the latest spate of attacks on my son.
1 day my son fights back against 1 lad, he faught back after school and out of school grounds, yet the school decided that he was a bully and was going to be excluded over this fight. the deputy head had no record of any phone calls i had made to the school so his opinion was our lad was the bully not this poor unfortunate kids who had a bloody lip and black eye after he picked on our lad.
this just shows how pathetic the managment of the school really is.
under no curcumstances will i allow some busy body government official into our house to assertain if our lad is keeping up with possibly the worste education system in the developed world. it has failed him once we wont fail him a second time.
this new law they want to bring in is just another errosion of our freedoms and liberties that we ussed to take for granted when we were Great Britain.
if gordon brown had a democratic bone in his body he wouldnt be sitting unelected as leader of the labour party and the government of this country, but as labour has shown on numerous occasions the poeple of this country dont matter any more