Has anyone here heard of the home ed review?

[ailbhe]

I've written something about it in Who Teaches Whom. I did honestly try to give it my most charitable interpretation but at some point in the next few days I expect I'll post something else too. I do feel that if I want anyone who agrees with the review to listen to me I can't point out its worst and most damaging flaws, which hurts somewhat.

Comments

[sashajwolf]

I've heard of it and read bits of it. It strikes me as overly bureaucratic, and on the issue of whether inspection powers are needed to ensure that home-educated children are safe, it seems to confuse correlation with causation (and the correlation itself is at the authority level, not the family level, i.e. authorities with high home ed rates also have high rates of children-at-risk, which could have all sorts of other causes.) I think some degree of checking that children are being reasonably well cared for and educated is appropriate, but the report strikes me as going too far. We used to have education visitors in Waltham Forest before Labour got in and scrapped them, a bit like health visitors, who visited all families (home ed or not) at certain intervals to offer advice on child development, library services etc until the child was eight, IIRC. The younger the child, the more frequent the visits were, since they develop at such a furious rate when they're very small. If I was in charge of this policy area, I'd restore funding for that and extend it to higher age groups as well. Home-educating families would have the option of more frequent visits, since they could reasonably be expected to have greater needs, but it wouldn't be compulsory.

[ailbhe]

Thank you for this comment, to which I have been clinging during far more difficult discussions.

[sashajwolf]

I'm sorry people are being difficult. Thanks for taking the time to say that this helped - that means a lot.