It must now be evident to even the most naive of home educators that Graham Badman's review into elective home education (not to mention related political processes) is at best an absolute whitewash, and at worst a very serious attempt to destroy one of the last remaining freedoms of families.

I wrote this post a little while ago cataloguing the relentless failures in due process that point towards a corrupt system, populated by desperate politicians, civil servants, consultants and fake charities eager to grab and control what is not theirs for the taking.  

Quite frankly, I really don't care whether there are Very Important Independent Reviewers or Very Important Home Educators in our midst who would lump me in with the angry autonomous/tin foil hat conspiracy brigade. Now is not the time to examine the intellectual capacity of people who blindly or otherwise trust in government to behave in a decent and moral manner and do the right thing.

I always write what I believe to be the truth. My perspective does not preclude any other person from holding different views, or practising other beliefs, provided they do not cause harm other people. And what constitutes actual harm should be carefully considered and kept very separate from matters of personal preference, if we are to accommodate the full scale of human diversity. After all, what richness - spiritual or material - can be found in a world of strict homogeneity and blind conformance?

That is why our current law, which sets out that parents are responsible for causing their child to receive full-time education that is suitable and efficient, according to that child's age, ability and aptitude, is a good thing, which can be tested in court if actual harm is suspected. As with the individuality of our children, the liberal nature of this law is something to be protected, not reviewed and adjusted at the whim of a power-obsessed individual or two. As Jax said recently, we should aspire to be as safe as neccessary, not as safe as possible and this is something that the general public are, one hopes, finally waking up to.

Despite increasingly vehement protests, Badman, Balls et al. are continuing to ride roughshod over all people (for the machinations of the the DCSF no longer affect parents alone); people who they assume will lie back in a sheeple-stricken stupor without so much as a murmur of protest. I think not. Increasingly, people are starting to recognise that, as with ContactPoint and the ISA, the government is using our children as an excuse to ferret into the very heart of our privacy, ripping it open for those who would abuse it to their own ends.

So, let us return briefly to the sham that is this most review into elective home education.

• It was inititiated as a consultation after several such similar consultations in as many years.
• It was hastily changed into a review when it was found that it did not meet the criteria for a consultation.
• It was based on false accusations of child abuse (as confirmed by a key member of the review panel, who described the accusations as a "red herring").
• Its remit inexplicably expanded to include educational provision after the child abuse slurs were effectively challenged.
• Its panel included someone who enagaged with home educators on their blogs in an extremely unprofessional manner.
• It had a predetermined outcome (its author stated that the "status quo" would not remain before the report was written).
• It was conducted by an individual who cannot be considered independent, or indeed an expert in elective home education.
• It displays a profound lack of academic rigour, riddled as it is with inconsistencies, subjective and ignorant pronouncements, selective quotations, failures to reference, misrepresentation of key statistical information and blatant disregard for the views of many of the home educators and home educated children its author was known to have met with or received supporting information from.     
• It makes a number of recommendations that, if to be implemented, will require significant legislative change. This could:
  
  • Enshrine the principle of guilty until proven innocent.
    
  • Require the regular (and quite possibly unsupervised) access to and inspection of all children who are not in regular contact with state provided services.
    
  • Fundamentally change the relationship between citizen and state.
    
  • Make the state the arbiter of educational suitability - in essence the state will, to some extent at least, determine the future shape of the mind of your child.
• It uses select parts of the questionable UNCRC to support its overall thrust, whilst its recommendations breach other key aspects of the UNCRC.
• It was accepted in full by Gordon Brown and Ed Balls, who have consistently refused to move beyond the shallow contemporary rhetoric of safeguarding speak and engage in a real discussion of the constitutional issues at stake.
• It was conducted without an impact assessment, which Delyth Morgan airily claimed was unneccessary, given that local authorities already undertake work in this area. This has left some social workers - who are under more pressure than ever to protect reputations, rather than children - incensed at her sheer ignorance.
• It encouraged a number of unhelpful reports in the mainstream media, fuelled by the inaccurate statistics that Graham Badman was reported to have given out verbally at a press conference, which were subsequently further misrepresented by lazy journalists.
• It was published on the very same day that a formal consultation into elective home education was launched.
• Its far-reaching recommendations already appear as a clause in the draft "Improving Schools and Safeguarding Children Bill", although the consultation does not end until the end of this month.
• It prompted Lord Lucas to seek information from home educators, and then disregard it in favour of tabling an amendment of dangerous compromise. This amendment details a national-level, representative body to influence future policy and legislative development, whose members would be decided upon by Ed Balls.
• It was so lacking in meaningful data that, months after its publication, its author put out a plea for more information from local authorities, presumably in a woeful attempt to bolster his policy-based evidence making.  
• It has prompted a deluge of legitimate Freedom of Information requests from quick-witted home educators, the more searching of which (asking for evidence, Badman's invoices, etc.) have been continually refused despite internal reviews. On occasion the reason given for this refusal has been the "campaign of harrassment and villification" against its author (evidence for which include one spoof blog, one animation by a home educated child and one accusation of being a liar by omission).
• It has prompted a select committee inquiry, whose line up of witnesses called to present oral evidence is simply laughable.
• It has prompted a further consultation into the legal definiton of "full-time education".
• It has prompted a further review into the legal definiton of "suitable and efficient education".

In other words, the purpose of this particular review was not only to identify and define the key areas for attack, but also to pave the way for those changes to be implemented as quickly and quietly as possible without anyone really noticing. It was always going to happen in this way, regardless of petitions and protests and pieces of paper.

We could argue how easy it is for a parent to deliver what constitutes a "full-time education" in schools to their home-educated child in a handful of hours a week, or that the experience of daily life is in itself sufficient. We could all define what constitutes a "suitable and efficient education" and argue as to whether it is the parent, the child or an expert who is best placed to assess this.

BUT. It's irrelevant. Those are issues of personal preference. What is clear is that it has nothing to do with the state. YOU are responsible for YOUR child's education. It's up to YOU.

We could pull the DCSF up for not thinking through the legal implications of this direction of travel.

BUT. I strongly suspect that thinking through the legal implications of their actions is exactly what they have done.

Note that they have studiously avoided the definition of "responsibility" and indeed "cause to receive". They will, however, be able to say: We have defined a full-time, suitable and efficient education in law to be precisely what we say it is - now try testing that in court!

If a "suitable and efficient education" becomes legally defined as no more than, say, the standard delivery of a core set of national curriculum subjects, then what better way of ensuring parity and surveillance than providing it through an inititative such as Notschool (at a cost to the taxpayer of £5k/family at least) direct into people's homes?

This will be the real bargaining tool. Complete a set amount of (Not)school hours at home, or the DCSF will send your child back to school. Provided you comply, there won't even be inspections (and the simple people now breathe a sigh of relief).

Of course, there never was to be a universal inspection programme, was there? We know there's no money to pay for it. We know it wouldn't work. And after all, what is there to inspect if the DCSF knows as well as you do that the child protection argument is a red herring and home educated children are statistically safer than their peers? What is there to inspect if the DCSF knows that YOU are still taking responsibility (at gunpoint) for causing YOUR child to receive a suitable and efficient education according to ITS definition - and IT can have access to YOUR child whenever IT wants to? 

Tell me to pick up my tinfoil hat on the way out, but the DCSF is not interested in actually protecting children and it is not interested in what actually constitutes an effective education. "suitable", yes. "efficient", naturally. But not effective. Because they already know as well as anyone else that for almost all of the children who are educated in this way, home education is at least as effective as school - and for the vast majority it is infinitely more so.

Make no mistake, there are a number of agendas at play here:

• Government ensures that legal responsibility for education remains at all time with parents - check.
  
• Full-time education (a certain number of state education hours per week) - check.
• Suitable and efficient education (guaranteed delivery of a state curriculum) - check.
• A cheap and easy way to deliver the "support" they are so desperate for home educators to accept - check.
• A foot in the door to ensure an unbroken link between children and "joined-up" state provision - check.
• A foot in the door for a brave new world of "school at home" - the Next Big Thing the government will "discover" - check.
  
• A foot in the door to work on ensuring the "online safety" of children - check.
• A foot in the door to work on ensuring the "online safety" of everyone - check.
• Greedy IT, learning and child protection consultants, power freaks and paedophiles fed and watered for the next several decades - check.

And YOU are paying for it.

There is far more stitching up to come. So, people, what are you going to do? Continue this futile game of playing by the rules that Badman and Balls break every day?

Or you could consider JUST SAYING NO!

Other commentary: Making it up, Dare to Know, Educating Outside the Box, Three Degrees of Freedom