First of all, I’ve now had a reply from Alan Simpson to my questions about the evidence base and who would know more. Here’s what he said:

Thanks for coming back to me. This isn’t something I have had data on. It comes only out of the community discussions I have had in Nottingham over the last 20 odd years. The international picture, however, is something that you might be able to take up with the Department for International Development or some of the aid NGOs. They have far greater first hand experience of the reluctances they encounter, in relation to girls’ access to education.

So, a piece of string there, pulling on which may or may not lead to something interesting :-)

Meanwhile, I also wanted to include some of the discussion the rest of us had in the meantime, from our various different perspectives. All the commentators quoted here are from EHE communities. Most of these quotes are from email lists - I got permission to copy them here. There are a few more comments on the original post too.

Girls

About “Families with a belief that girls only need to know how to raise children and keep house”, Dorothy says:

You invite comments on the above imagined scenario your MP mentioned.

I’ve never heard of it in the HE community and I’m an evangelical Christian.

Thing is, even if there *were* Christian girls being prepared *solely* for a role as wife and mother, then they would also have to be prepared for the role of future home educator (of both daughters and sons) and logically, they would need a sufficiently broad education themselves in order to do that.

However, every HE’ing Christian parent I’ve ever met (even the most traditional ones) are very aware that not all women are called to marry. Some may be called into the mission field for eg, in a medical capacity, so girls are generally prepared for as many eventualities in life as boys.

On the same point, another Mum adds:

I know we’re told that families say this, but I’ve never heard a parent either say it or demonstrate it. However, the head master of my old school in London used to say that girls didn’t need educating because we would become wives and mothers.

continuing…

Incidentally, around here it is the immigrant families who seem keen for their children, girls just as much as boys, to have a good education. And they are the ones who are prepared to spend a lot of money on it.

A couple of people told me that some Gypsy / Roma / Traveller communities (a.k.a. GRT) tend to educate girls very differently from boys. Tania has spoken to a lot of Local Authority people:

you may find that the comment about girls and childcare is about the GRT community.

I have had this said to me by 2 LAs.

However one of them said that culturally there is no emphasis on reading and writing but the girls get a good grounding in their culture (childcare etc) and the boys often go into their father’s business. Hence it can be said they are receiving an education which prepares them for life in their own community.

(That last point is relevant in law: see the judgement quoted below.)

Tania continues:

the only religious group mentioned as a ‘problem’ for LA’s has been the ultra orthodox Jewish one in Manchester and London and the LA simply CANNOT get in there!

(i.e. “problem” in this context means “declines the LAs’ interference and the LA staff don’t like it”.)

The law

Imran Shah, a home educating Dad, comments on the legal position:

I think there is provision within the 1996 Education Act and the 1989 Children Act to deal with HE that is severely restrictive in the way that Mr Simpson describes.

…

The 1989 CA is a much fairer piece of legislation than the [currently proposed] CSF Bill since there are many checks and balances to prevent LA overstepping their powers. The CSF Bill in contrast has no appeal process, and gives the LA the powers of judge and jury. The 1996 Education Act also gives parents the right to appeal, and thus a judge can determine the merits of an individual case, in answer to the question whether the education provided is suitable to the age, aptitude and ability of the child. If a girl is only being taught to cook and clean, then I would argue that that education is not suitable, since it forecloses her options later on in life.

That last phrase is an allusion to a judgement which now forms part of case law about “suitable education”. The case was R v Secretary of State for Education and Science, ex parte Talmud Torah Machzikei Hadass School Trust (1985) (Times, 12 April 1985). Mr Justice Woolf held that:

education is ’suitable’ if it primarily equips a child for life within the community of which he is a member, rather than the way of life in the country as a whole, as long as it does not foreclose the child’s options in later years to adopt some other form of life if he wishes to do so.

The hard questions

A Christian Mum asks some of the difficult questions:

I have lived with fundamentalist Islamic neighbours. His daughters were only allowed to leave the house with him. Literally could not leave the house without their father leading them down the street. They went to a private Islamic all girls’ school, where no one ever sat GCSEs.

In our two yrs as neighbours, I was never permitted to speak to them - since I was a Christian and a woman.

His daughters were covered head to toe, inc face, all the time I ever saw them in public. They were a family, living life as it mattered to them, doing what they thought was right. They were good, kind, considerate and helpful neighbours, but wanted to live their own life in their own way.

Who am I to tell them they were wrong?

Is “being British” more important than the right of parents to bring up their dc [dear children] as they wish?

And if “being British” is the more important, where do the lines get drawn? How does the state ensure that children are “British” first, and children of their parents second?

Or if parental rights are more important, then where do children’s rights come in?

(Alert readers will of course have spotted that the family in that story weren’t home edders.)

Proportionality and evidence

Several commentators picked up the theme of proportionality and evidence. Dorothy comments:

Sometimes, such scenarios as the one your MP seems concerned about are just the figment of a prejudiced imagination. Sometimes, they are based on one or two extreme situations. One or two extreme situations however, is not a good enough justification for a new law which would affect tens of thousands.

Renegade Parent has a point:

The problems they can “see” are mistaken stereotypes (and therefore too politically incorrect for politicians and civil servants to talk about honestly), unhelpfully fuelled by misperceptions of risk and risk mitigation.

Sue sums it up:

The key factor here, as you point out, is evidence. If there is evidence that some people exercising their liberty significantly interferes with the right of others to exercise theirs, and the outcomes for the majority are clearly damaging, then legislation should be considered. Otherwise government should mind its own business.

Imran puts education in context along with other ethical questions of difference and risk management:

There may be a small number of households who keep girls at home in order to limit their chances by teaching them very restrictive gender roles. The number of HErs who do that would be tiny. If I think the contact that I have had with Pakistanis in Bradford and Bengalis in Newham, that sort of restrictive education does go on, but most of it goes on with families who send their children to school. It is only a tiny number of Muslims (or of any other community) who HE their children, and I think that it would be only a tiny number of those that would educate their children this way.

You could draw an analogy with the tiny number of Muslims who are actively involved in terrorist activity. There are many more who are sympathetic, but don’t do anything, and I think that there are many more who are opposed to British policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan but do not agree that terrorist assaults are the answer. Would Mr Simpson advocate annual checks on Muslim households to ensure that no subversive activity is being engaged in? I think not.

Similarly, a lot of child sexual abuse goes on in middle class households, as it does throughout all groups. However, child sexual abuse in middle class households does not come to the attention of social services. It goes on, and is hidden, with those children suffering. Is Mr Simpson advocating annual inspections of all middle class households so that not even one child suffers? I think not.

Then there is the issue of prejudice and myth. Show me the figures. How much of this really is a problem in the HE community, and how much of it is myth and prejudice disguised as liberal concern? (Forgive my covert invective).

For hot housing my arguments are the same: most hot housing takes place with schooled kids; hot housing is not a crime; never have I heard any pronouncement from the Government that they wish to prevent families from hot-housing their children. Would that mean that Labour MP’s would not be allowed to send Junior to private school?

You may also ask Mr Simpson if his argument extends to the traveller community? How does he propose that they be brought into the mainstream fold? I doubt that he does. I am sure he would agree that the true test of a democracy is not how much it bends to the will of the majority, but by how well it protects the rights and freedoms of its minorities.

Social cohesion

Several people also commented on the question of community cohesion. Sue again:

I think you are absolutely right about the cultural issues. Except that I think ‘Britishness’ has been hijacked as a quality that will appeal to voters. There appears to be a simplistic idea going round (and I haven’t figured out where it comes from) that cultural cohesion can be achieved by forcing us to be culturally cohesive. i.e. that we all behave in the way that government thinks we should behave.

Imran continues:

With regards to combating Islamic extremism, surely Mr Simpson is aware that the best way of doing that is for the UK government to stop spending money and sending its young (mostly working class men) to foreign lands to kill Muslims? That awareness must have at least in part informed his votes against the invasion of Iraq, and for an inquiry into that atrocity.

Finally when it comes to class issues … he may not be aware that HE is the only educational approach where the working class children do as well as, or better than middle class children. How’s that for social cohesion, eh?

Here, have an index…
Gender, tradition, education: responses
Girls
The law
The hard questions
Proportionality and evidence
Social cohesion

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2009. All rights reserved.

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On Friday 4 December, I had a very illuminating and useful meeting with my MP, Alan Simpson. I’m a big fan of Alan’s for (among other things) his eco house and his stand against the war in Iraq, so I was genuinely curious about his reasons for supporting the proposed yearly licensing of (a.k.a. heavy-handed interference with) home-based education.

We had about 45 minutes’ discussion, and we didn’t waste time, so we covered a lot of ground. There was other useful stuff which I may return to in another post. But here I’ll home in on an area which felt especially helpful to me in understanding what’s going on.

Key themes

For Alan, if I understood correctly, there are two key themes of concern informing his support for the home-ed-related part of the Bill:

In principle, I agree that neither of those scenarios is ethically desirable, and also that such families and parents undoubtedly exist (though not necessarily at a higher ratio in UK home ed communities).

In practice, some questions occur to me about the girls getting inadequate education on religious/traditional grounds:

and, of course:

What did Mr Badman say?

In the Badman Report, nearly all the references to religion are about religious or philosophical beliefs as a reason to choose non-school education, including the Human Rights law relating to that choice - not about the resulting education itself.

There’s one oblique allusion to religion as a possible limitation, in section 4.8, a quote from the British Humanist Association:

some of those who choose to educate their children at home for religious reasons may not be providing schooling that is adequate, either according to the Every Child Matters agenda or the principles of Article 29 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

That’s the whole quote, and the author doesn’t elaborate on it. Note the “may”; no facts supplied.

Doing “Find in document” on terms “gender”, “girl” and “tradition” doesn’t turn up anything, so I don’t think Mr Badman addressed the subject anywhere else either, though I confess I haven’t re-read every word to check.

The Equalities Impact Assessment for the Bill makes no mention of religion; the only groups discussed are (a) children with “special educational needs” and (b) Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.

Making a connection

The evidence base and practical questions definitely warrant more investigation. But meanwhile, I went off in a slightly different direction.

You see, something about this rang a bell for me. Some time in the last couple of years, somewhere on one of the community lists, I’d read a post where someone said something like: “What the Government is really worried about is the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, but they can’t come out and say that, so they have to pretend it’s about all of us.”

Well, so this popped into my head in the meeting, and I quoted the gist of it to Alan. And he corrected me straight away: it’s not just Islam.

Which is obviously correct of course (and to be fair, I may have misremembered the original post too, especially as I was reading about Islamophobia in another context recently). There are lots of cultures which prioritise boys’ education over girls’, or steer girls away from certain areas - are there any that don’t have that in them at all? It’s part of sexism. (Example English meme: “Girls don’t need an education; they’re only going to get married so then it will go to waste”.) Conversely, it’s well known that Aisha, third wife of the Prophet, was a scholar and highly respected for her learning, and there are plenty of Muslim communities where young women get the best education within the families’ grasp.

And there are parents in at least several faiths who would rather their children weren’t influenced by “secular values”. In the US, there’s an enormous Christian home-schooling movement, which is fairly famous.

(In the UK, my impression is there is something of a Christian home-schooling contingent, but on nothing like the same scale. I’m not sure to what degree people erroneously assume it’s the same over here; I do recall a story of someone commenting in surprise that so few of the English home-edders they met had that background. I’m also not sure what the actual stats are.)

Another clue

Interestingly, the UK Government nowadays makes a point of lying to all immigrants:

The law states that children between the
ages of 5 and 16 must attend school.

That’s from page 30 of the “Life in the United Kingdom handbook”, which all immigrants “must read” as part of preparing for their “Life in the UK” test. It’s the first sentence under “Education”.

I seem to be seeing a grey thing with tusks

I find myself wondering if, for some* supporters of the home ed interference, one of the driving forces behind it is about fear of parallel non-British cultures, and fear of the role of home-based education in enabling families not to assimilate into Britishness.

(* I don’t mean that I think Alan thinks this.)

My new intuition is that for many if not most of the supporters of the Bill, their point of reference is that hypothetical girl from a religious/traditional family, whose education would be limited by sexist tradition - and maybe her brothers too. That’s whom they’re thinking of when they’re trying to invent how licensing and monitoring would work.

And for some people that’s purely about that girl’s education in the practical sense: reading, writing, history, general knowledge. But I suspect that for others, what’s behind that, or hand in hand with it, is her not being allowed to grow up unexposed to proper Britishness.

Doesn’t that just somehow seem to make more logical sense than the dramatic but non-factual justifications we have been hearing about abuse and educational outcomes?

1. School doesn’t guarantee that children won’t be abused, or even much help to stop it. Most abuse is not immediately obvious; most children won’t disclose to a teacher; many teachers say they wouldn’t know what to do if they suspected a child was being abused; and in many cases the school is the site of the abuse.

And there’s the school holidays… and there’s the fact that if you’re this worried about children “of school age” not in school, you’ve got no excuse for not doing the same checkups on children too young for school…

Yes, there are occasions when someone at a school helps a child.* But as a “safety net” for abuse, school is always going to be full of holes, and anyone who’s thought about the territory in any detail can see that.

It’s Social Services which is meant to be the primary safety net, and i.m.o. it’s misguided to be throwing millions of pounds in secondary directions before the most glaring malfunctions of that have been fixed. (Hard to say how many millions it would really be for the home ed licensing scheme, as the sums for the costs and benefits include both questionable assumptions and mistakes.)

* I haven’t been able to find UK stats comparable with these ones from the US (showing 16% of abuse investigation referrals were from teachers), but I’ve heard from someone who used to be a child protection social worker in the UK that more referrals came from neighbours or relatives than from schools. And that makes sense to me, because teachers see very little of parents actually interacting with their children. Neighbours overhear things.

2. State schools in the UK don’t guarantee children a good education. Thousands leave school with no qualifications.

(Yes, I know that qualifications aren’t the be-all and end-all - e.g. some young people move from home-based education directly into further education or employment using only portfolios and CVs. But since mainstream school is aimed very strongly at GCSEs, the lack of them is not too far-fetched a measure of how poorly school served those young people.)

What is it that school does guarantee - provided it’s a mainstream school?

School guarantees that children are exposed to mainstream culture.

Is it just me, or does that fit in like the long-lost missing piece of a jigsaw?

Social cohesion

Now I’m not saying that community cohesion isn’t a worthwhile thing to discuss. I think there are some thoughtful and wise angles to it as well as probably some pretty xenophobic ones.

What’s got me suddenly so antsy about this whole angle is the fact that, as far as I’ve noticed, it isn’t being discussed (in this context). It seems like one of those “elephant in the room which nobody’s mentioning” scenarios.

(Though, thinking about it, I have a suspicion that this motivation might become more obvious if/when the Government’s intended discussions begin about redefining “suitable education”. What’s the betting there will be some attempt to insert “British values” into that?)

Hot-housing, social levelling, other issues

I’m also not suggesting that this is the only thing which the supporters of the Bill have on their minds. People do have other reservations about home-based education too.

And of course the “must save them from being trapped in their homes with only their parents to talk to!” thing is an extremely prevalent stereotype applied to all home ed children - even the English-for-generations ones… even the ones who in fact have to specially make an effort to spend time at home because their social lives are so busy :-)

So it’s not that I think the Britishness-assimilation thing is the only force at play. I just suddenly have this feeling like it’s a significant part of the motive power, and yet we’re not talking about it.

Clunk

So even though, like I said, Alan and I discussed some other things too, this whole Britishness/immigrants/religions/traditions thing went on resonating in my mind all the way home from the meeting and all the rest of the evening, with a feeling of things clunking into place CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK.

And on the one hand I was thinking: Aaagh - if this is how they’re thinking, then nothing we can say is going to change their minds, is it? We are dooomed to this invasive and dysfunctional licensing scheme, and it’s going to be a horrible mess.

And yet on the other hand I was feeling much better because I felt so de-mystified! Like “Now I get it. This is what’s been going on.”

An underlying “social cohesion” motive would explain why the Government is so oddly unmoved by the fact that every single one of Mr Badman’s stats falls to bits as soon as you look at it! Those were only about the supposed reasons - abuse risks and educational outcomes.

And it would explain why they don’t even care that the supposed “savings” predicted in the Impact Assessment have a big glaring mistake in the sums which mean the imagined theoretical financial benefit probably doesn’t exist.

We need to talk

Now I might be wrong of course. This might all be a figment of my imagination. (And I might be wrong about being dooomed too.)

But if this is a significant factor in how legislators are thinking, we need to start talking about it. There’s limited usefulness in demonstrating how mistaken people are about issues “X” and “Y” if the sticking point is really ”Z”!

And, either way, we need to start talking specifically about the risks to girls in families of limiting religious &/or traditional gender-roles. What are the risks? And how well would a Badmanesque licensing scheme work for girls in that situation? How much good would it actually do them? I’ve seen nothing addressing that specifically.

Collateral damage

Part of the shift in how I’m perceiving the whole territory now is that I’m less sure how much of the agenda is aimed at all families in home-based education.

I mean, there doesn’t seem much doubt that some of it is; “a DfES spokesman” was quoted in 2007 as saying “we believe the best place to educate a child is actually in school.” The quote did continue “we respect a parent’s right to choose home education for their children”, but “we respect your right to do something we believe is second-best” is perhaps not the most respectful or reassuring kind of respect that there could be :-/

And I know that some people have felt that the main agenda is to put all children under the yoke of the National Curriculum and under Government control. Lord Adonis said it was an “anomaly” that “The state does not currently prescribe what form of education parents should provide.” (Or, as the Pet Shop Boys put it: “You’re not integral / to the project”.)

But now I’m wondering if, from another angle, it’s more like: the main agenda is about cultural cohesion, and anything that happens to the not-particularly-religious, English families is “collateral damage“.

Ethics, risk and evidence

Now I definitely don’t want to do some kind of “Well our children are OK so there isn’t a problem”. The one way you could convince me that licensing is a good idea is by demonstrating that the overall effect for all children collectively would be better.

Balancing risks like that includes both assessing the magnitude of the risks, and a subjective weighing-up of how they counterbalance each other. (And there’s never no risk.)

An example from breast cancer screening: Is it better for a thousand women to have unnecessary surgery and unnecessary fear so that one woman can have ten extra years of life? That’s a hard question even if you know exactly what the ratios are. People need to know the facts and then talk about those hard questions.

But if you’re not even starting with facts, the balance might be dangerously wrong.

“False positives” aren’t only bad because of the disruption and stress to the people who were OK - which in this case would be substantial. (That’s a big topic in itself and this post is long enough already, so won’t go there now.)

An equally or more important factor in the disastrous effect of “false positives” is that they’re like hoax fire alarm calls. While the fire brigade attends the false alarm, someone else somewhere else in a real fire might be burning to death. Sending social workers round to investigate children who were fine includes exactly that kind of problem, just on a slower timescale where the connections might be less obvious.

I am angry with the DCSF about the amount of lying and misdirection that’s gone on this year, arguably at the expense of talking about the real stuff. Hundreds of hours of people’s time have been wasted just getting back to zero - demonstrating that all the statistical “evidence” that Mr Badman came up with (and the DCSF so uncritically endorsed) is fictional.

If girls from some particular backgrounds are at especial risk of missing out on education, then we should have spent part of this year finding out the facts about that and then having the difficult conversations based on those facts.

What do we know about that hypothetical girl in a family of limiting gender-role traditions? What does she need? Would she get it from the currently proposed legislation? Is there a way to address her needs without it being at the expense of thousands of other children?

and how many of her are there in reality?

What next?

The “we” of “we should be finding out the facts” doesn’t mean just activists from EHE communities. It should be part of everyone’s thinking about education law. But I wonder to what degree we the activists can put this territory explicitly “onto the table”. And I wonder to what degree other people “on the side of sensibleness and truth” might pick up the factual questions.

And if none of what I’ve described is an issue, I’d appreciate it if someone could prove that to me :-)

Here, have an index…
Top of document
Key themes
What did Mr Badman say?
Making a connection
Another clue
I seem to be seeing a grey thing with tusks
Social cohesion
Hot-housing, social levelling, other issues
Clunk
We need to talk
Collateral damage
Ethics, risk and evidence
What next?

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2009. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.