Home Educating and Childcare

It’s been a very long time since I posted. A great number of posts have been swimming around in my head, but it’s only now that I seem to have managed to come up for air myself finally to blog something…

Recently our gob-smackingly ignorant government has made it clear (although not by actually saying it, obviously) through the Badman report that, as far as it is concerned, the days of autonomous learning are numbered. An article in The Independent on 30 July by home educator (following presumably a very traditional school ethos) Simon Webb moves to sway Joe Public’s opinion and help to put another nail in the coffin of autonomous learning: in his opinion it

… involves nobody teaching children anything at all! I believe this peculiar technique is causing incalculable damage to the thousands of home educated children upon whom it is used.

Nobody teaching. Oh dear. Mr Webb, that is precisely the point! With people like this on the Government’s latest board of ‘experts’ involved in the home education review it’s all starting to look a little engineered to say the least. Clearly this Government doesn’t want any form of education – or indeed any form of anything at all – which cannot be inspected, monitored and thus controlled.

Which leads me onto the recent case of the two policewomen who shared a job and, as friends with a little one each, they also shared childcare by looking after each other’s toddler whilst at work. It was an arrangement which both suited them perfectly and worked very well. Until Ofsted got wind of it. Because some interfering busy body shopped them, not that the policewomen had any idea that there was a law out there which prevented them from looking after each other’s child for more than 14 days a year, two hours at a time. An utterly preposterous law and one which beggars belief. It all smacks of more Government socialist creep; all children must be in nurseries or with Ofsted registered childminders so that they can be monitored and their ‘progress’ assessed against its tickbox outcomes.

The national outcry at such interfering ridiculousness has been illustrated by support for the petition to change the law at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/reciprocalcc/. With over 19,000 signatures to date, it’s a strong indication that people want to make their own choice when it comes to childcare, not have the Government make it for them. The Government, clearly squirming in their seats at the sight of such dissent, has already responded with the following:

The Childcare Act 2006 requires anyone providing ‘childcare for reward’ to register with Ofsted, with the aim of ensuring every child in a commercial childcare service is safe and well cared for. Parents would expect no less. However, our intention has always been that friends and families caring for children through informal arrangements should be exempt from having to register and we believed that was what always happened. In the light of this recent case we are talking to Ofsted about how we can make sure there’s a shared understanding with Ofsted, and with parents, of what the law means and how it should interpreted.

Since 1997 we have invested £25bn in childcare and early years services, doubling the number of childcare places available for children under 8 to support working families and providing more support than ever before with childcare costs, with over £3.8 million a day going directly into parents hands to help pay for childcare through tax credits.

It’s still just not quite clear to me how on earth there could have been a lack of ‘shared understanding with Ofsted’ in the first place. However, what concerns me more is the emphasis on how much has been invested in childcare places. Personally, shoving my children into a nursery to become statistics for the Government’s tickboxing fills me with horror.

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