Couldn't face posting the articles from Guardian and Daily Mail about the x*!!$! Ofsted Report , but here's a more soothing response:
http://www.cypnow.co.uk/news/1010795
'The new chair of the House of Commons education select committee, Graham Stuart, has slammed a report by Ofsted on home education.
The report, Local Authorities and Home Education, was published today and calls for more legal rights for local authorities to access home-educated children and monitor their progress.
But Stuart criticised the report and said that comments made by Osted's chief inspector Christine Gilbert in response to the report were "deeply concerning".
"It is astonishing that the chief inspector of schools should stray onto home education and get it so wrong. In Ofsted's official press release she [Gilbert] says that 'it is extremely challenging for local authorities to meet their statutory duty to ensure children have a suitable education', when they have no such duty," he said. "Parents, not the state, have the statutory duty to ensure that their children have a suitable education."
The report claims that many local authorities struggle to obtain comprehensive information on home-educated children in their area, accusing some families of being uncooperative. It recommends that parents should be legally required to register with local authorities if they home educate, and should be subject to compulsory annual home visits.
But Stuart argued that in order to ensure all children get a suitable education local authorities should "serve and support" home educators rather than "catalogue and moniter" them.
"The obvious and correct answer is for local authorities to improve their support for families so that more families make contact with them voluntarily," he added. "If they did this and made sure that they employed sympathetic staff who built good reputations, then the number of 'unknown' children would be reduced." '
Support? Good reputations? Methinks it's a bit late for that now. home edders are a reasonable bunch, but after the past couple of years...Pah! Like we'd welcome the Local Authority back!The LA could be offering me free beer and chocolate and exotic holidays (or even free exams and books for the kids) and I still wouldn't touch em with a barge pole (though I could think of an interesting place to stick that barge pole). Whatever the LA say, whatever they offer, I don't - wont - trust them. And I don't think I'm alone among the more experienced home edders. I trust the LA, and all the polititians, as far as I can tiddle. And even after alot of free beer, that wouldn't be very far.
So, much as I respect you, Graham Stuart for your support of home edders, I think you could be way off on this one. And Ofsted...BUTT out of home education. IT AINT YOUR JOB! Go away! We don't want you! You seem to forget...we are not some nursery or educational establishment providing a service for parents...we ARE the parents.
2 comments:
Love it, spot on!
It's so difficult to know in advance whether to trust or not to trust people in authority.
I have just had 2 recent experiences dealing with ed professionals that simply couldn't have been more different - one was co-operative, knowledgeable and helpful, the other completely ignorant even of things which I would assume as basic knowledge. This person was also preachy, bullying and apparently deaf, since they didn't listen when I tried to correct them.
I suspect that we are always going to come across the second sort of person in authority positions who might well have the power to completely change and indeed ruin our lives and I too question whether changing their job description will mean that they behave better?
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