Choosing our children's education is best done by our children with guidance from their parents. Poverty limits such choice severely. Usually children must attend a state school, if they are to attend a school at all, because school fees paid from already taxed income are beyond most families' means.
Yet many families use the state system offered to them less and less, or even not at all. State education offers appalling teaching in music, mathematics, art, languages other than English (and often in English too), and no education in a range of less central disciplines. Yet it takes all day from the age of five to eighteen, dressed in polyester clothes, for much of the year. No wonder people are simply walking away and making more appropriate arrangements.
It is difficult to think of any reason why the consumption of a proffered service should be compulsory. Nor why refusal to consume it should be rendered particularly difficult. We are not obliged to use the National Health Service. It would be thought very strange if those who have not seen their GP because they had no need to do so were required to submit themselves for inspection on a regular basis regardless of their health condition. The examination system provides regular checks on achievement in learning. You try taking Grade Eight without years of work, or A-level German for that matter. And the incentive to gain the qualifications offered by the examination boards is there too. Universities and conservatoires look first at high passes in controlled standards exams. Anyone seeking a successful working life will need a degree or diploma. And anyone leading a happy and fruitful life will voluntarily seek out the skills and knowledge to help them do so.
A compulsory consumption of a service might be imagined in the military, indeed is more than imagined for the generation before mine. But education .
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State schooling was the first bit of the Welfare State to be implemented - it would be fitting if it were the first to be abandoned.
It doesn't need vast amounts of money. Just textbooks and exercise books and an insistence that the children get on with it. Ditch Ofsted and all the other (giving thanks daily that they don't actually have to do the job themselves) interferers.
Two families with 5 children between them @ £6k standard State education expenditure per child could afford a full-time teacher in one of their houses.
There is not an educational purpose in Labour's proposals to interfere in children's education outside the state system. There doesn't seem much educational purpose inside it either, but that's a different argument. When there are examination boards and entry requirements to higher education governed by those boards, then there is a system in place for ensuring standards and work levels.
Why should social workers be endowed with powers of entry into the houses of those children who decline a state 'education'? This monstrous presumption has been long a-growing. Any child studying in the various schools provided by their country of origin for after school hours and on Saturdays will meet disruptive and unhelpful action in their state school, whose hours seem to expand to fill every waking moment. Incidentally this is a characteristic only of England's state schools.
Posing as being a good thing when often being a very bad thing indeed is typical of state provision. There are no technical reasons why opting out and accessing the taxes paid per head cannot be implemented. Such provision would solve the inappropriateness of state education for many, if not most, at a stroke.
We have friends who have banded together to educate the children, but they are just well off enough to bear the cost. Once again poor people get deprived simply because they haven't an independence.
New Labour's much vaunted choice is nothing but centralisation.
You are free to choose your childs school,providing you can move house to the catchment area and providing there are places.
You can choose your GP, providing there are places, at the local and only polyclinic for all gps in your region.
You are free to join any dentist in the UK, as long as your are a private patient as NHS places are full.
You can visit your local library, swimming pool and post office except where they have been closed. But you still have the choice to visit the one many miles away.
You can have a Scottish power company or a French one deliver electricity to your home.But it won't be much cheaper than another one. You can take a variety of different train companies but not to the same destination.
I've had enough of this choice. It doesn't seem to be making much difference.
State education is for the purpose of propaganda - just ask Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini and Lloyd George.
" It would be thought very strange if those who have not seen their GP because they had no need to do so were required to submit themselves for inspection on a regular basis regardless of their health condition. "
Careful, you will be giving them bad ideas.
It's not about education, but state imposed socialist propaganda. The less educated they are the more easily people accept such nonsense.Families are to be replaced by state officials. Children are to be brought up accepting socialist dogma. Dissenters will be dispatched to gulags.
When I first heard of homeschoolers being hassled (by the NSPCC of all people) I was tempted to do an "Angry of Enfield" myself, but on further reading it does seem as if there is some supporting evidence for the state's position.
In the recent case of the seven year old Khyra Ishaq being starved to death, the mother did explain the child's absence from school by saying she would be home schooled.
Given the presence of such nutters in the world, the obligation to produce one's children on demand to prove they are happy and healthy is not unreasonable.
On the subject of education, the state's results are so poor in many cases that it's hard to know how far back in time you would have to go to reach a point when privately educated children were worse educated than publicly educated children are today.
Child care has nothing to do with formal education Roue. And lying about what you are doing to your children hssn't either.
Children who are NEVER seen might be presumed to be at risk. But what has private education to do with isolation and maltreatment?
Children go to Mass on Sundays, join the St John's Ambulance, learn a musical instrument, sing in choirs, go swimming, play outside, visit shops, have aunties and uncles, go on holiday.....
You might be pretending to sound reasonable when you want to justify gross interference in the lives of families too poor to defend themselves.
Mr Quango, The literature on vouchers is extensive, technical, often counter intuitive and usually a bit dull. So it's not my field, but why shouldn't social wages be consumed by voucher? Not just education, all sectors of social provision.
Roue Le Jour-
Then if your concern is child abuse, introduce a universal child inspection scheme- have every child compulsorily inspected every six months, or three months. The issue of the statistical outliers- the black swan parents who hate their own flesh- has no significance in regards to educational choices for children.
The abuse narrative is being used as a quite disgusting wedge to force through an agenda of forcing parents out of homeschooling. It is an utterly scurrilous slander. One may as well say that people who live in remote locations do so in order to perpetrate horrendous crimes against their children, and thus demand something be done about farmhouses, implying the most awful insult against farmers in the process.
Hatfield Girl's post is a very good one and I'm glad I'm not the only person who has dared to doubt this fundamental belief that mass "factory" schooling is automatically a Good Thing, or even necessary. I think it's time from the endless discussions about how we can have "good schools" and ask the deeper question of, "should we have schools at all?" Are these strange institutional arrangements really the best way we can treat children? Or is this whole idea an idea whose time has passed?
I too have a problem with the idea that the State can force it's way into peoples homes, using home education as an excuse for yet another accusation that th parent knows nothing and the state is all knowing.
But let's not lose sight of the real goal: Decent state education.
State education does not change the life prospects of those who start with little, it rarely succeeds where parents have failed.
Conversely, it has a much greater effect on children who start strongly, especially where the school is poor.
This should not be the case. Good state schools should be able to promote learning to those who get little encouragement at home, and certainly should not damage the life chances of the bright by wearing them down into a stupor with awful sylabus' and terrible teaching methods.
How far back in time to go to get a decent state education? I would suggest 1960 would be a good place, to the days before Barbara Castle got her sticky paws on what was, if not good, then certainly adequate for most people's needs. Even the thickest dolt left school being able to read, write and do basic arithmetic reasonably competently. The problem now is that the teachers we have (with the obvious exception of the large majority of those in private schools) are all victims of the appalling standards of the teacher training colleges. We may have to start all over again.
Anon 23.09: Welcome to the club! Some of us are having difficulty in restraining our hostess from providing ideas for those who do not need them. Remain vigilant.
hatfield girl, let me be clear then, I absolutely support the right of parents to home school their children without state interference.
I do not believe that children should be regularly inspected by the state, nor do I believe that living in a remote location is automatically grounds for suspicion.
I am merely pointing out that it is a matter of record that child abusers do play the homeschooling card and homeschoolers have to accept this unpleasant fact.
I would also like to repeat my last point. A child lucky enough to receive a full schooling a century ago would have received a better education than a state pupil does today. If you made the same claim about the NHS there would be outrage.
And Batteredstrat, I don't think state education can be improved. It was poor when I experienced it nearly fifty years ago and it's only gone down hill since then.
Oops... On reflection, I think I may have meant Shirley Williams and not Barbara Castle. If so, apologies to all concerned.
"could afford a full-time teacher in one of their houses....": that was what used to be meant by a "private education".
"1960 ...Even the thickest dolt left school being able to read, write and do basic arithmetic reasonably competently": it was much better, true, but not every dolt learned to read. But there was a fallback - the illiterate dolt would be taught to read during his National Service. When it was (quite rightly) abolished, no provision was made to replace the rescue education that it had provided.
Home schooling has gone well for me, with almost no state involvement, and the idea of the social services' imminent invasion of my pupil's home is a scary one. The post reminds me that many people I know thought home schooling to be illegal when I told them what I was doing. They also didn't see how I could teach when I don't have any formal teacher training although I understand that bemusement a little better- which is why I say that I'm a governess, as I don't think that they had to have endured bureaucratic nightmares to be considered eligible.
plenty of private schools are shite as well.
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