New Labour's attack on Home Education

It was inevitable. New Labour can't bear anything happening in society which it is not controlling. Every Child Matters is just about this - control and surveillance, New Labour putting its stamp on things, and an element of electoral gimickery.

The review into Home Education was conducted by an ex director of the 'Children, Families and Education' Directorate for Kent County Council; so someone who is likely to have already got a strong buy-in to ECM. The terms of the review mention child abuse so much that one would be forgiven for thinking that the government thinks all home educators are abusers. The problem with justifying interventions into Home Education on 'safeguarding' grounds is that it undermines the government's claim to actually care about child protection. This is an intrusion justified on spurious grounds; spurious not because there may be some cases of child abuse where home education is a factor but spurious in that it links home education with abuse. The principal of home education is about parents prefering not to let the state 'educate' their children (or whatever it is the government does with children in mass public education these days) and to bring them up differently; to tar home educators with the 'abuse' tag is pretty nasty. That some people who want to abuse children keep them away from school may well be true - but this has nothing to do with the principals behind home education; but, then, principals are something that New Labour, which is an entirely philistine movement, are never likely to understand.

If the government was really concerned about home education being used as a cover by child abusers they could use existing powers of social services to investigate. The review in fact proposes a meddling mix of totalitarian state interventions under the cover of 'safeguarding'. There is the sinister interview withe child to which the parents are not invited. The proposed requirement for parents to work to a plan of work - thus in one stroke undermining the freedom which many home educators no doubt prize to go with the child's instincts and dreams as they arise, durring the year. The oppressive 'school attendance order' is outrageous of course. It is worth remembering that the UN rapporteur on the Rights of the Child in 2003 critisised the government for breaching the convention by the testing regime in schools. The curriculum approach to education - packaged education forced on young people in schools, not to mention the compulsory emotional training now part of the curriculum (See our review of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education - Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education) is effectively being forced on everyone. Yet it is an abuse of childrens' rights.

If you say to home educating parents 'educate your child in this approved way or we will take them and force them to attend a school - and then of course prosecute you if they don't attend' - you are thereby forcing this kind of education on everyone. If these proposals are implemented it would indeed be the death of home education.

Why is New Labour so afraid of people living their lives outside of their control? It seems to betray some kind of insecurity - a lack of any actual principals just a desire for power and control for its own sake. And home educated children are the latest line in the litany of New Labour's casualities, added to misbehaving children on council estates committing suicide after being asboed, the children in Jack Straw's child jails, and all the children growing up in a society devoid of values other than dreary ones of political conformity.

There is an interesting article on Spiked about this by Jennie Bristow. I disagree with Jennie's adultation of state education 'trained professionals who specialise in their subject knowledge', but she makes one very very salient point (and indeed the article is sensible overall); this proposed new regulation of home education shifts the ground concerning state education. State education is no longer construed as a service offered by the state which people can take up or not. It is a formal requirment of the state and applies to all. If you don't take up the offer you still have to educate your children in a manner in line with what happens in schools. State schooling thus becomes no longer a boon but a compulsory regime for all. Thus New Labour are subtly redefining the relationship of the state to chldren. In this new regime the state has a right to educate all children as it sees fit. This is consistent with other measures - Home School Agreements, Parenting classes etc. Gradually New Labour is taking over management of the nation's children and parents are increasingly being displaced as parents and re-instated as stooges for New Labour's view of how children should be educated. This, of course, is just how Marx envisaged education in the Communist Manifesto.

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