The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is making its way through Parliament post haste. Notably, it was introduced just a few days after the sentencing of Sara Sharif’s father and two other family members for her murder. This enabled Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the Children’s Commissioner to lead a chorus of voices suggesting that Sara would have been alive today had her parents been prevented from removing her from school by saying they were going to home educate her. Is this true, or was it political opportunism?
I should declare an interest in this question. We have been home educators from the 1990s onwards. Our children are now all adults, but once bitten by the home ed ‘bug’ it changes one’s understanding of life, the world and just about everything else. Therefore over a decade after our youngest left home for a gap year, Mum and Dad remain involved in one of the most diverse communities there could be.
Before lockdowns the numbers of parents ‘throwing the towel in’ on the school system was already increasing. This not only because some had met home educated young people and seen the positive differences between them and their schooled peers, but also because schools were inadequately protecting their children from bullying or failing to make suitable provision for their special educational needs.
Whilst in state-enforced incarceration at home during Covid, many families began to function in ways which people had forgotten was ‘normal’. Supervising their children’s online lessons opened many parents’ eyes to what their children were actually experiencing in school. Yes, many families did find being in the house together day after day in those circumstances utterly awful, but a significant number found it liberating. For the latter, formal learning by rote was exchanged for a variety of approaches, many of which allowed their children’s interests to inspire their learning. It wasn’t just in Britain that family-based learning gained new impetus; today it’s one of the fastest growing global social movements.
However, whilst home ed reduces government expenditure, most politicians are alarmed by any move on the part of parents to reclaim their historic responsibilities for their own children. Before the 1800s that’s largely the way it was: the majority of parents prepared their children for adulthood by teaching them in the course of everyday life. But while Western societies were industrialising, learning was also being reshaped, and with it parenthood. Education through real life was exchanged for classroom instruction. In time, ‘schooling’ became the new normal. In Britain it was recognised from the outset that salaried teachers operated in loco parentis – as representatives of a child’s parents, not in their place. In recent years that foundation has been undermined – you need look no further than fines for unauthorised absence. When I was in school it was my parents who authorised any days I didn’t attend, not the school!
At this point, let me add a word of explanation. In recent years, the media and politicians have come to describe family-based learning as ‘home schooling’, having picked up the term from the US and elsewhere. The majority of British home ed families reject that label, in part because it’s an import, but mainly because most have ditched the narrow confines of the idea of ‘schooling’, with some considering that to be education of the masses for the benefit of the bosses, not for the good of the children themselves. Instead, they regard education ‘otherwise than in school’ as essential for the wellbeing of their budding adults. Hence, ‘class-rooming’ is in short supply amongst home ed families, though not totally extinct.
The other side of the coin is that institutional unease about parents who take parenting seriously has been a political feature in England for a decade and a half now. It has also spread to other parts of the UK, with the Welsh Government being particularly mistrustful of parents. Right now, it’s Labour’s plans with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill which are causing alarm in England. These include demands for the fine details of family life from home educators, which any democratic, liberal society would decry had proper respect for educational freedom not already been masked by years of problematising home ed families, culminating recently with the introduction of the bill in the wake of the Sharif verdicts.
If the bill is passed in its current form, home ed parents will be required, amongst other things, to place on a Local Authority register the names and address of any person or organisation that has input into their child’s learning. No matter if this is within or outside school hours, extensive data will have to be handed over to the ‘safekeeping’ of the local authority. Scout leaders, dance instructors, swimming coaches, Sunday school teachers, private tutors and, it seems, grandparents who engage in any way with their grandchildren’s learning will all have to be included in one of the biggest data grabs in British history. All this marketed to the general public as ‘necessary’ in order to protect children from being hidden.
Whilst many were shocked by the headlines that followed the Sharif verdicts, seasoned home educators had a good idea what was coming. When Sara’s tragic death was first announced in August 2023, the BBC reported ‘Girl known to authorities, council says‘. Three days later there was a different emphasis, ‘Murdered girl was being home schooled, says neighbour‘. Then, when the trial began, home ed was again under the microscope. Even if not following proceedings closely, some sensed its climax must be imminent when they saw the negative background noises from the media and political lobbyists intensifying. Indeed, the timing was so convenient for the Government that many suspect the schools bill was timed to deliberately coincided with the announcement of the Sharif verdicts.
This pattern of political exploitation of the heart-breaking deaths of young children had been established with the equally distressing case of a seven year-old girl, Kyhra Ishaq, who starved to death in her Birmingham home in May 2008. Like Sara, Khyra had been in school, but when staff began to raise concerns about her and some of her five siblings, her mother and partner withdrew them from school in December 2007. In January 2009 Ed Balls’s Department of Children, Schools and Families launched a review of home education which, for the first time, applied ‘safeguarding’ to the monitoring of home educated children.
I don’t remember when I first heard a politician mention Khyra’s name in connection with the ‘dangers’ of home education, but I do remember sitting in a Portcullis House Committee Room one day in October 2009 listening to the Children, Schools and Families Committee interviewing Maggie Atkinson, Ed Balls’s favoured candidate for the next Children’s Commissioner. Paul Holmes MP asked about “the Badman report, and whether it is protecting children’s interests or trampling all over the interests of home-educated children”. Without further ado Atkinson replied, “I would give you two words, and they are the first and second names of the child who died – Khyra Ishaq.” That was some time before Khyra’s mother and her partner admitted manslaughter at Birmingham Crown Court in March the following year. It was also eight months before the Serious Case Review was published, in response to which the Daily Mail asserted, “A girl of seven was starved to death by her mother and stepfather after a series of failures by public officials.“
One has to wonder if the conclusion of the Sara Sharif Child Safeguarding Practice Review will be a déjà vu moment for those of us who have witnessed such alarmism. The information which emerged during the recent trial could not be clearer – Sara was known to Children’s Services from before her birth and throughout her life. On multiple occasions her welfare was the subject of family court hearings. The cracks which Phillipson says she fell through were those which failed her long before she was home educated. A shiny new coat of red paint won’t seal them up despite the now familiar mantras in the Minister’s speeches. The question which must be answered therefore is, why is the Government rushing this piece of legislation through at top speed and utilising Sara’s name to create a clear passage for it?
The similarity between the deaths of Khyra Ishaq and Sara Sharif are striking. Not so much the circumstances in which they died, but in the way politicians have appealed to their memory to seek to take away parental responsibilities through legislation. If the intentions and methods being proposed were proportional and guaranteed to do what is claimed, would they not stand up to proper scrutiny without the need to manufacture a public outcry? To use this cynical tactic once may just be bad judgement, but twice indicates a nasty habit. Are home educating parents so dangerous that the state needs to know everything about every child, including when their aunt or uncle take them on an educational visit to a museum?
In February 2010, author and commentator Gerald Warner, writing in the Telegraph, described Ed Balls’s efforts thus: ‘Totalitarian propagandists exploit Khyra Ishaq case to discredit homeschooling.’ Now we have a Bill being overseen by Balls’s Labour successor, and this time it is Lord Frost, commenting in the same paper, who declares: ‘Home-schooling helps us resist indoctrination.’ He is in no doubt that “the education Blob, in both parties, has seized the moment. Spotting the judge’s comment in the appalling Sara Sharif murder case about ‘the dangers of unsupervised home-schooling for vulnerable children’, they have sensed an opportunity to shift the debate”.
Home-educating families – youngsters as much as their parents – are hoping that others will perceive the implicit dangers of this bill and cry ‘foul’ with us. Without doubt these proposals spell danger to every family and the British education system as a whole. It is only the right to refuse, without penalty, the state’s offer of free education which restrains schools from becoming institutions of undiluted indoctrination. Allowing young people to learn outside the school system is apparently too much of a threat to be tolerated in Britain any longer.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The tosser!
17 quid will get me four pints of best bitter ……..choices, choices!!
Purely in the spirit of livening up a non-thread, because the article is evidently uninteresting AF to everyone, I will unapologetically do another off-territory dump here.
This is a cracking round-up of memes and links, old and new. Something for everyone, which I hope is a tad more interesting than ’50 shades of drab’ Harry;
https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/mikes-antivax-grab-bag-memes-blurbs-and-links/
Wow! Thanks for the link Mogs. What a library. I’ve bookmarked it.
YW
Spare me Prince Harry
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
“99.9% of us on planet Earth are carrying round some form of grief, trauma or loss – the sooner we realise that, the sooner we can all get along.”
– One of whom is his own brother, with whom he can’t get along.
Guess the book isn’t selling too well?
South Park got it about right.
What a desperately silly boy.
If he’d called his biography “Up Yours, Ma’am”, I would’ve bought that. And a few more for Christmas presents.
Are people really still interested in this drivel? A slimmed down monarchy after the death of the Queen was always on the cards. We can do without the hangers on.
load of drivel.
I’ve analysed Harry as well. My conclusion is “he’s got a screw loose.”
The hewitt genes?