Ofsted...go boil your head...or something else more constructive than what you are doing right now.

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.

Ok, not 'what do you do', but 'how do you do it?'

So, how DO you home educate three very different children who are at three very different stages of development, with very different needs and an unpredictable, sulky and disorganised mother?

The truth is, I don't know.

For a while, when I had a baby, a toddler and a young child, it was horrendous and to be honest no observable home education took place (although miraculously lots of learning did). Then, finally, when I had a 5, 7 and 10 year old, it became manageable: the youngest was old enough not to be a constant drain, the 7 and 10 year old were reasonably interested in some things some of the time and we could do stuff, whatever that 'stuff' was.

But now I have a 6 yr old girl who is very precise about what she will and wont do, an 8 year old boy who is at the right age to be led to the water to drink, but is lacking from maternal time and focus to feed the sponge-brain, and I also have a slightly sulky, show-off, but lovely really, 11 year old teen-child who is beyond being 'led' to the water to drink and wants everyone to know it.

As a friend of mine said - as soon as you focus on one child and take your eye off another they stop thriving. It's true. I am constantly flickering like a manic torch from one child to another trying to fulfil unmet needs (or work out what those needs might be), while putting the others on hold.

Now if I was a rigid, non-autonomous, or even slightly more structured home educator, then perhaps it would be easier. But though I like the idea of routines, somehow, according to some unwritten law, my routines, systems, timetables, plans etc always go udders-up. Sometimes it is because my stubborn group of goats are digging their hoofs in and refusing to budge. And often it is because of my inability to screen out all the other distractions of life. I wonder...do I really want to supervise, half an hour of maths, half an hour of literacy, half an hour of French etc especially when it takes certain children exactly 1.5 hours to find a pencil, sharpen it, lose it, break it and go looking for another pencil, then lose the piece of paper, tip over the chair, feel hungry, raid the kitchen, then burst into tears when I ask them why they haven't written anything... No this is not what I want.

But neither can I, with my natural unpredictable personality, easily accommodate total autonomous education. I don't want to be on call 24/7, ready and willing to be interrupted (whatever I'm doing) and keen to provide an answer to a question, help to make a cardboard looroll tower, fix the pc, find a missing jigsaw piece, play snap, make chocolat muffins with a child (arggh!), discuss whether Roman Centurians wore underwear, buy wax for candlemaking, or play football. I like my children to discreetly disappear for at least part of the day, so that I can have some semblance of a life. GIVE ME A MINUTE, I'M THINKING! is a common phrase that emits from my lips. Is that too much to ask? I mean, even in paid employment it is a legal requirement to have a break during a working day.

Anyway, a while back I came across this article about Eclectic Home Education, which is a way of describing that place on the spectrum between autonomous and non-autonomous. And the article struck a familiar chord with me. Of course I aspire to have wonderfully autonomously-educated children, but I just can't seem to achieve it. It's not through lack of trying, or even lack of not trying. And I have for the most part deschooled now (apart from the occasional psychotic twitch).

Anyway, here is an excerpt from the above article:

"Our detour into "school at home" nearly derailed us entirely as homeschoolers. By the time all was said and done, I was ready and willing to send my kids to school, any school, just so long as I no longer had to be responsible for their education. Disillusioned and weary, I was completely confused about homeschool in general, and my own methods of homeschooling in particular.

Right about now I hear the chorus of voices crying, "Unschool! You needed to unschool! Relax and let life take over and allow things to proceed naturally. Allow your children to be responsible for their own education!"

But the problem was I had tried unschooling. While it may be natural education for many, for my family it was a natural disaster. I am not by nature an interactive person. People, including my own children, get in the way of thinking and creating. I begin writing, and everything else goes out the window. The house is a mess; the kids are unwashed and unfed. My husband wonders if and when his wife will check back in. It's not natural for me to focus on providing educational and learning moments for my children any more than it's natural for me to stop and clean the toilet the first or fifth time I notice, vaguely, it needs scouring.

Nor am I able to leave my own pursuits and follow someone else's at the drop of a hat. That sort of demand tends to make me cranky. My kids, curious as they are, given the choice to be responsible for their own education would quickly choose Lego blocks and computer games over biographies of great world leaders. In short, nothing about me or my family translated well into an unschooling lifestyle.

In my desperation and guilt--after all, I'd now failed at two of the "best" methods of homeschooling, albeit at opposite ends of the spectrum - I took Hermione's advice and went to the library...

...And when I was done, I had drawn what was for me a clear generalization of unschoolers. Most folks who adhere to a true or complete unschooling method are naturally outgoing, with entrepreneurial personalities. They're organized and scheduled from within, not without. Me, if I don't draw up a schedule for basics like housework and cooking, they never get done. If they're not highly scheduled people, unschoolers are flexible, able to go with the flow, adapt their course and accomplish necessary tasks without a schedule. (See above comment on my life without a schedule.) In many ways, I believe unschoolers are born, not made. And the evidence from my life and my five years of homeschooling was irrefutable: I was not born an unschooler...

...My trip back to the homeschool drawing board took well over a year. In the end, as is usual for such trips, I wound up about where I began. A little higher up the spiral, and a little more confident of my decision to honor my own personality and my children's, more certain of my ability to create a method of homeschooling that fit my family's individual learning styles and beliefs.

...Despite conventional wisdom, unschooling isn't the answer for all homeschoolers. Most families better define their method of homeschooling along a spectrum than in a box. Many unschoolers use curriculum here and there with their children; many structured schoolers study at least one or two subjects that are completely driven by the child's interest. There's no shame in not unschooling, and there's nothing wrong with not using a school-from-a-box program. The only shame is when homeschoolers are left feeling like they are less than other families because they follow a different path for their learning adventure."

A serious case of "Excerptitis": please define and analyse, using full sentences. Marks will be deducted for incorrect spelling and grammar.

Just found this from earlier on this month:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6819979.ece


An obsession with “excerptitis” in primary schools means young children rarely read a whole book, research suggests today.

A quarter of primary school children read just one complete book a year in the classroom, and do not discover the endings of classics such as Treasure Island or Goodnight Mr Tom.
Instead they are frequently given passages or “bite-sized” extracts of books to read. The survey found that one in eight primary school teachers had never read a whole book with their class.
A lack of time caused by the pressure of squeezing many subjects into the curriculum is thought to be to blame.

Michael Rosen, the poet and former Children’s Laureate, said: “I think of it as an illness called excerptitis. The consequence of excerptitis is boredom. We have bored thousands of children and put them off reading. I mean, what a tragedy.

“This research shows that in thousands of classrooms children are not reading books or talking about books, I think it will shock the public that so few whole books are being taught in class.
“There are going to be children who will only be taught about three or four books as part of their literacy education in the whole of their primary careers. For the thousands of children who don’t read books at home, it is a travesty. That’s three books they might have come across in the whole of their infant lives.

“The idea that children can’t manage whole stories or whole books is a nonsense,” Rosen added. “No extract in the world has the power of books. Extracts deny children the meat of the story.”
The survey of more than 500 primary staff and 1,000 parents of schoolchildren was commissioned by Heinemann, an educational publisher. It claims to be the first wide-scale research into the use of whole books in literacy teaching.

Researchers said that, if the findings were extrapolated to all primaries across the country, it would mean 600,000 children would never read a book in class with their teacher. More than 1.1 million would study only one whole book a year.

Teachers said books not finished in class included The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Roald Dahl’s popular novels.

Half of teachers could think of at least one occasion where pupils were left ignorant about the narrative of a novel, because teaching the whole book was not a priority in class.

Almost 85 per cent said children missed out on finding out “what happens next” because they did not read a whole book.

Three quarters of teachers said children’s “reading stamina” and concentration levels were being damaged by the lack of whole book reading.

Nearly two thirds of teachers feared the absence of teaching literacy using entire books could turn children off reading. One in five said they had seen evidence of this already, with many believing there was a greater negative impact on boys.

State primary classes were almost twice as likely to not finish a whole book as their independent school counterparts - 13 per cent compared with just eight per cent in private schools.

Michael Morpurgo, the children’s author, said: “When a book is written, it’s written whole.
“The point of a book is that it should be fun, it should be exciting, it should tell you more about the world around you, it should open your eyes and open your heart, it should make you joyful, it should make you sad - and you can't get this from just taking little snippets from it.”

Classic books remembered most fondly by parents in the survey were Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Hobbit, Stig of the Dump, Swallows and Amazons, and Watership Down.

"Not how intelligent is the child but rather how is the child intelligent?"

Interesting article...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/08/abolish-league-tables-seldon

Soulless schools cursed by league tables and dominated by "formulaic" exams are squeezing the lifeblood out of education, leading headteacher and political commentator Anthony Seldon will warn tomorrow.

The 21st-century obsession with teaching "facts" harks back to Thomas Gradgrind's utilitarian values in Dickens's Hard Times, he will say in a hard-hitting lecture to the College of Teachers. The result is a system that stifles imagination, individuality and flair.

In an extraordinary indictment of the national examination system, Dr Seldon, master of Wellington College and biographer of former prime minister Tony Blair, will claim that we are forgetting the very purpose of education. "Many parents, many teachers, will recognise it. Schools need to be liberating places, but it is very hard to do it with the utter throttling, choking straitjacket of the national examination system curriculum," he told the Observer

In Britain, he advocates a severe cut-back of external testing and examinations, which he claims have increased because of a lack of trust of schools, heads and teachers.

One option would be banishing national external exams until the age of 18, as they do in the United States. He also argues that GCSEs and A-levels, should be "swept away" in favour of exams, such as the International Baccalaureate, with its primary years, middle years, and diploma-level programmes.

Schools are "dancing to Gradgrind's drum-beat of facts, facts, facts more than ever", he will say in his inaugural lecture on his appointment as professor of education to the College of Teachers. And the spectres of the Victorian Gradgrind and his unimaginative but aptly named schoolteacher, Mr M'Choackumchild, still "strut the classrooms of the world".
School authorities, schools and teachers are now valued for one thing alone: their success at achieving exam passes, says Seldon, who introduced happiness classes to Wellington College, one of Britain's leading public schools. "We have embraced dullness and so close are we to it, we do not even see what has happened," he will tell the college.

He will also criticise faith schools, claiming "all too often they have narrowed, not opened, children's minds and hearts".

In Britain, universities wield huge power over the sixth-form curriculum, yet do not encourage students to stretch themselves beyond their A-level requirements, he will allege. "A tutor of admissions at an Oxford college recently admitted to one of my colleagues at Wellington: 'We are not looking for broad-achieving and rounded students at this college. In fact , we are not rounded people ourselves.' "

University and school teachers are not themselves to blame, he will argue. But, he will add, the rigid system is having a negative impact on pupils and university students: "They are showing more signs of depression, eating disorders, self-harming, and alcohol/drug abuse, than at any point in recorded history. But they also have better resources, more computers, better buildings, and more money in their pockets than at any point in their history.

"What has been lost? Why has affluence and knowledge not brought us wonderful schools and remarkable universities?"

He will claim that schools have concentrated on a very narrow definition of intelligence: the logical and the linguistic, at the expense of cultural, physical, social, personal, moral and spiritual intelligence. He will add that we should be asking: "Not how intelligent is a child but rather, how is the child intelligent?"

Seldon will argue the case for bringing back playing fields, placing orchestras and music at the heart of the curriculum, and offering dance, physical exercise, outdoor adventure and challenge to everyone.

League tables are "the biggest curse", and have inflicted more damage on British education than anything else, he will claim. The well-being of students needs to be taken "far more seriously", and school sizes should be cut.

"Dickens's message is as timely and urgent for us in 2009 as it was in 1854," Seldon will argue. "It is that soulless, loveless, desiccated education damages children for a lifetime. Education should be an opening of the heart and mind. That is what education means; it is this, or it is nothing."

He will conclude: "Walk on every head teacher, inspector and every local and central bureaucrat who has squeezed the lifeblood out of education."

Clause 152 - do you want everyone to know your business???

I've been alerted on one of the home ed email lists to Clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill, which appears to give the government exemption from the Data Protection Act and will allow them to share data without restriction. Although Jack Straw has been wavering about it, and there are suggestions it may be rewritten/diluted, it seems like a dangerous thing to have clause 152 at all.

Here are some of the articles:


'http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/feb/28/convention-modern-liberty-information
'Clause 152 must go. A clause in the new coroners and justice bill will allow the sharing of your personal information. Write to your MP now'

http://www.cockspiracy.com/

' 1. Summary
Buried among the numerous complicated and controversial provisions of this legislation is a single clause, clause 152 in the first draft of the Bill, which is a profound threat to privacy, liberty and the rule of law. It is enabling legislation that converts the Data Protection Act into a machine for massively increasing the dealing by government in information of all kinds. It is designed to allow ministers to use a fast-track regulatory procedure to sweep away
data protection, human-rights considerations, confidentiality, legal privilege, and ultra vires when they would stand in the way of any use, acquisition or dissemination of information in pursuit of departmental policy. The availability of broad data-sharing along these lines would be a profound change in the way the country is governed, potentially altering the function of almost all other legislation. It should not be introduced at all, but certainly not without proper public debate. There has been no such debate. It would be a disaster if the “information sharing order” (ISO in what follows) were to be successfully smuggled
through parliament in this manner.'

So please write to your MP! I've just emailed mine and it was surprisingly easy (I think it's the first time I've contacted my MP about ANYTHING!) You can find out your MP and email them through http://www.writetothem.com/.

This is the letter I wrote to my MP:

"I am writing to you to convey my extreme concern over clause 152 of the Coroners and Justice Bill. I refuse consent to having my information, taken for one purpose, arbitrarily used for any other purpose.

I ask you to work to prevent this clause being passed and to vote it off the bill. "

I'm sure others could do a much better job, but mine was short and sweet cause I knew otherwise I'd never get around to writing it.