JACKIE TURNER: Education system has a lot to learn

ON the same day that a group of countryside protesters on horseback were prevented from staging a demonstration outside the Scottish Parliament and accused the police of unnecessary confrontation, a demonstration of a rather different nature took place along Princes Street and up the Mound.

Mothers shoved pushchairs and held banners, teenagers held the hands of four-year-olds they had never met before to keep them safe, policemen joked and played with the children .

"I’ve never seen such a well-behaved, happy bunch of children", one officer said to a mum when she went to thank him after the march.

The passers-by on Princes Street clapped and cheered the marchers, who seemed to lift their hearts by their colourful energy. Most of the marchers had never demonstrated about anything in their lives before.

This was certainly a demonstration with a difference.

So what had driven all these families from all corners of Scotland and beyond to march on the Scottish Parliament? The reason was that these families choose to exercise their right to educate their children at home, a right they feel is being severely compromised by new proposals from the Executive.

The proposals include enforced monitoring of all home-educated children individually to assess their progress according to state school criteria .

Educational inspectors employed by local authorities are trained only in the crowd-instruction and crowd-control form of education required for school teaching, and are not equipped to judge home education, which tends to be very personalised to each particular child’s aptitudes and abilities.

We are often reading of the perceived risks to the welfare of home-educated children. What if they’re being abused and being hidden in the house away from prying eyes? Wouldn’t regular monitoring pick up on potential abusers and safeguard children?

The 2000 NSPCC report, Child Maltreatment in the United Kingdom, found that seven per cent of children had suffered serious abuse from their parents, three per cent suffering it on a regular basis. This translates to two abused children in every classroom in Scotland. It is clear that children being in school and under the eye of "experts" does not prevent abuse.

FRED and Rosemary West’s children were abused whilst at school, their mother sometimes dragging them away during classtime to "punish" them at home. And social workers knew what was happening to Victoria Climbie, yet nothing was done.

Looked-after children can be victims of the most horrifying systematic abuse of all children, whilst in local authority care. There is no reason to believe that the monitoring of home-educated children will pick up on abused children any more than in schools, and indeed no reason to believe that home-educated children are under any more threat of abuse than any other group.

Most parents home educate their children because they feel strongly about respecting their children’s dignity, autonomy and right to a choice in matters which directly affect them. Children are empowered by giving them the choice of where their education takes place.

Home-educated children are not encouraged to defer to adults simply because they are children, as happens in the authoritarian school system. Such a system actually promotes abuse, leaving children vulnerable to being pushed around by any adult just because that is what they have been led to believe is expected of children.

The welfare issues surrounding schooled children are chilling; more than 20 youngsters in Britain take their own lives each year as a result of school bullying and the stress of the ever-increasing number of assessments and exams they have to sit in order to ensure school "success".

Many families with children under severe stress at school are deliberately led to believe by education authorities and health professionals that they had no choice but to attend school. This level of misinformation is abusive to children and has in the past had tragically fatal consequences.

There are many home-educated children who have attempted suicide whilst previously at school. These are the lucky ones who found out there was another option.

Since the law changed in England and Wales in 1996 to allow parents to de-register their children from school without requiring consent from their local education authority, there has been no mass exodus from school or heightened welfare concerns.

There is no evidence of abuse of home-educated children, and no cases at all of unknown home-educated children who have been abused have ever come to light.

The children most at risk from abusive parents are the under-fives, yet there is no compulsory monitoring of this group of children. There is no requirement for parents of under-fives to attend checks or have health visitors come to their homes. There is no reasonable argument for monitoring to start at five merely because their children are not attending school.

In the absence of any evidence to suggest why monitoring should be made compulsory for the children’s benefit, why does the Executive still insist monitoring is not negotiable? It seems clear their interest is in forcing as many children back into school as possible, through intimidating parents or putting so many constraints in their way that it seems impossible to a parent that they can all be met.

THE Scottish Executive admit that they believe the best place for children to be educated is in school, yet school fails many more children than home education does. In law, education other than at school is equally valid to education in school, so home educators do not accept that a self-confessed biased Scottish Executive should be writing a document on how local authorities should treat home educators.

The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, which has clearly had much input into the document, has a position of vested interest; they say "the more children educated at home, the less funding made available for the local authority".

Rather than trying to force us to put our children into an inherently abusive school system, or making us bully our children into studying things in which they have no interest, the education system should look at us and ask how it is we manage to educate our children so successfully whilst preserving their dignity and autonomy.

Jackie Turner is a campaigner for Freedom in Education Scotland