Responses to the government’s consultation on registration and monitoring proposals for home educating families in England now look certain to exceed 5000 in number by tonight’s deadline. It can also be confidently assumed that the vast majority of these will have articulated strong opposition to all the recommendations in the Badman report on elective home education, which were accepted with unseemly alacrity by Ed Balls in furtherance of his insane bid to nationalise England’s children.
While few home educators have any faith in what is widely seen as a sham consultation exercise, they have nevertheless responded in their thousands, mostly to draw a line in the sand and make the point that they will not permit the state to appropriate their responsibilities as parents. AHEd members have described the proposals as being tantamount to state sponsored grooming, whereby children are expected to submit to being interviewed alone by clipboard carrying strangers, and a resounding no has been the collective response, not only from supporters and practitioners of home education but from others who value liberty across the land.
The past week has seen two select committee oral evidence sessions, a mass lobby of parliament at which the home educators’ Right to Reply was delivered to MPs. A professional statistician has meanwhile demolished Badman’s latest claims that home educated young people are more likely to be NEET and a petition to reject the Badman report in its entirety closed yesterday with 4860 signatures. Home educators are attending a further roundtable discussion with members of the select committee today, the Just Say No campaign is fast gaining momentum, and Scotland is preparing to welcome an influx of educational refugees from Nazi occupied England.
Only those with a vested interest in the schooling system, which has been roundly rejected by home educators (along with, perhaps, a handful of irredeemable statist sympathisers), might be expected to agree with such totalitarian proposals, but no one has any doubt that Balls will just ride roughshod over parents’ and childrens’ rights regardless. Having been labelled a bully by the chair of the parliamentary select committee, which has been investigating the Badman fiasco and has voiced opposition to the appointment of Maggie “just two words” Atkinson as England’s new Children’s Commissioner, he will not give a moment’s consideration to any of the 5000 consultation responses from a pesky “vociferous minority” which call his megalomaniac plans into question. Only a general election will remove such a monster from office.
Bring it on!
