HED0181

Written evidence submitted by [a member of the public]

[Note: This evidence has been redacted by the Committee. Text in square brackets has been inserted where text has been redacted.]

 

I was sitting with my [age]-year-old granddaughter in Macdonald's in Paris, where we were visiting for a couple of days, and we began to talk intelligently about Shakespeare. At this point, I could see the point of all the home lessons I had given her – and all the time, she had not been subjected to “relationships” education (sic) that was not approved by her parents, and against which they seemed to have no redress or protection.

 

I felt that Home Schooling, at its best, enables parents to share their values and inform in areas of practical application, such as helping with the care of siblings, some of the realities of the adult world, and so on.

 

I also feel that it is an infringement of the liberty the citizen seeks, to attend to the education of his or her own offspring, if Home Schooling is to be monitored by nanny bureaucracy – as if there isn't quite enough intrusion into family life already. Not least in the UK abortion regime which kills a quarter of children before they even have a chance to be born, and where Members of Parliament refuse even to respond to urgent submissions for these legislators to do better.  Where democracy is constantly thwarted in this callous way, we can hardly blame parents for mistrusting public authorities in general, and those involved in education in particular, and for having no confidence in any genuinely democratic process taking place. 

 

If the close monitoring of Home Schooling is designed to correct abuses and inefficiencies, it is only fair that enforcement of an effective sort should be in action against bad and ineffective schools, or ones which, in contravention of an established principle, pig-headedly defy the wishes of parents in regard to the education of their children. We feel sometimes that arrogant head teachers, who invoke police to disperse parents demonstrating outside their school because of their concern about inappropriate lesson content, ought to be disciplined and if necessary dismissed, rather than supported by administrations – this kind of corrupt public servant, and the injustice meted out to those who pay their wages, you may realise, becomes one of the factors in persuading parents to tackle Home Schooling.  Some head teachers are not as anti-parent as this, but rather arrogant all the same, and there are far too many cases of where the administration fails to act in parents' interests – this, I submit, is where monitoring and nannying might be better employed, if the administration is really determined to act in the real interests of the children involved. Where parents are really listened to, Home Schooling might become less necessary.

 

October 2020