Select Committee Inquiry on Elective Home Education

[Ali P]

The deadline has just passed for submissions to the Elective Home Education Inquiry to be held by the Select Committee next month. Judging by the number of organisations and individuals who have responded to the call for evidence, they will have a lot of advance reading to do.

Since the 'rules' prevent the publication of submissions before the committee reports, we will all have to settle for 'deferred gratification' until we can blog them all at once.

[Ali P]

Looks like the select committee is going to be another stitch up. Can anyone spot any legitimate home education reps there, apart from (possibly) Jane Lowe? You'd think they might have paid lip service to the idea of independent inquiry, but obviously not. I for one won't be wasting any more ink on consultations or on putting an X on a Westminster ballot paper.

Children, Schools and Families Committee Select Committee Announcement


Committee Office, House of Commons, 7 Millbank, London SW1P 3JA Media Enquiries: Rebecca Jones 020 7219 5693 / 07917 488549

No. 48 of Session 2008-09 7 October 2009


Elective Home Education

Oral Evidence Sessions


The Children, Schools and Families Committee will be taking formal oral evidence as follows:

Monday 12 October 2009 at 4.45pm
Wilson Room, Portcullis House

Witnesses:

Graham Badman CBE;
Ms Diana R Johnson MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools, and Penny Jones, Independent Schools and School Organisation, DCSF.

The purpose of this session is to examine the evidence base for and recommendations of the DCSF commissioned review of elective home education in England.

Please note these sessions will be open to the public on a first come, first served basis. It is advisable to allow about 20 minutes to pass through security checks. Committee rooms and timings are subject to change.

Please note that seating is limited and there is no guarantee of access to the Committee Room. There is no system for the prior reservation of seats in Committee Rooms. Interested parties are strongly encouraged to follow instead a live video and audio feed of proceedings, which can be viewed on the Parliamentary website at www.parliament.uk<http://www.parliament.uk>.

Wednesday 14 October 2009 at 9.30am
Wilson Room, Portcullis House

Witnesses:

(At 9.30am)
Jane Lowe, Trustee, Home Education Advisory Service; Fiona Nicholson, Trustee /Chair Government Policy Group, Education Otherwise; Simon Webb, home educating parent; David Wright, home educating parent, and Carole Rutherford, co-founder, Autism in Mind


(At 10.30am)
Colin Green, Chair, Families, Communities and Young People Policy Committee, Association of Directors of Children's Services; Ellie Evans, Head of Children Missing Education team, West Sussex County Council; Sir Paul Ennals, Chief Executive, National Children's Bureau, and Phillip Noyes, Director of Public Policy, NSPCC

The purpose of this session is to examine the views of home educators, local authority representatives and national children's organisations on the recommendations of the DCSF-commissioned review of elective home education in England and assess the desirability and feasibility of those recommendations.

Please note these sessions will be open to the public on a first come, first served basis. It is advisable to allow about 20 minutes to pass through security checks. Committee rooms and timings are subject to change.

Please note that seating is limited and there is no guarantee of access to the Committee Room. There is no system for the prior reservation of seats in Committee Rooms. Interested parties are strongly encouraged to follow instead a live video and audio feed of proceedings, which can be viewed on the Parliamentary website at www.parliament.uk<http://www.parliament.uk>.


FURTHER INFORMATION:

The Children, Schools and Families Committee is one of the House's Select Committees related to government departments: its terms of reference are to examine "the expenditure, administration and policy of the Department for Children, Schools and Families and its associated public bodies". The Committee chooses its own subjects of inquiry, within the overall terms of reference. It invites written evidence from interested parties and holds public evidence sessions, usually in committee rooms at the House of Commons, although it does have the power to meet away from Westminster. At the end of each inquiry, the Committee will normally agree a Report based on the evidence received. Such Reports are published and made available on the Internet. Copies are sent free to those who give oral evidence. Reports usually contain recommendations to the Government and other bodies. The Government by convention responds to reports within about two months of publication. These responses are also published.
The Members of the Committee are:

Mr Barry Sheerman (Chairman) Labour, Huddersfield
Annette Brooke Liberal Democrat, Mid Dorset and Poole North
Mr Douglas Carswell Conservative, Harwich
Mr David Chaytor Labour, Bury North
Mrs Sharon Hodgson Labour, Gateshead East and Washington West
Paul Holmes Liberal Democrat, Chesterfield
Fiona Mactaggart Labour, Slough
Mr Andrew Pelling Independent, Croydon Central
Mr Andy Slaughter Labour, Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush
Helen Southworth Labour, Warrington South
Mr Graham Stuart Conservative, Beverley & Holderness
Mr Edward Timpson Conservative, Crewe and Nantwich
Derek Twigg Labour, Halton
Lynda Waltho Labour, Stourbridge

Media Enquiries: Rebecca Jones, Tel 020 7219 5693 / 07917 488549, email: jonesbl@parliament.uk<mailto:jonesbl@parliament.uk>
Specific Committee Information: Tel 020 7219 6181 / 1376, email: csfcom@parliament.uk<mailto:csfcom@parliament.uk>
Committee Website: http://www.parliament.uk/csf/ Watch committees and parliamentary debates online: www.parliamentlive.tv<http://www.parliamentlive.tv/>
Publications / Reports / Reference Material: Copies of all select committee reports are available from the Parliamentary Bookshop (12 Bridge St, Westminster, 020 7219 3890) or the Stationery Office (0845 7023474). Committee reports, press releases, evidence transcripts, Bills; research papers, a directory of MPs, plus Hansard (from 8am daily) and much more, can be found on www.parliament.uk<http://www.parliament.uk/>

[pendlewitch]

have sent a complaint in to this address:

csfcom@parliament.uk

I, along with countless others, have just seen the list of witnesses for the hearing into the home education review.

To say that we are horrified is an understatement. If the government wished to at least attempt to give some semblance of credibility to this inquiry, then they have just blown it out of the water.

I would like to object in the strongest possible terms to the inclusion of Simon Webb, who I believe is not even a home educator any longer, and I would also like to express my utter dismay that no one has been called from AHEd, AEUK or the Facebook group. EO are not representative of Home Educators, no matter what they might say about being the *biggest and oldest*. I am absolutely dismayed at this turn of events.

[Ruth]

This is mine - not a masterpiece. I ma too angry

I am dismayed and horrified at the line up of so called witnesses into the home education inquiry, especially so the inclusion of Mr Simon Webb who no longer home educates and has spent a good deal of time writing horrible, personal blog posts about home educators on his blog, http://homeeducationheretic.blogspot.com/, and vilifying them in press articles in the Independent online, during the course of the review. Most of the people chosen are against home education or know nothing about it. Where is the independent statistician to show how flawed Mr Badman's statistics are? I would have thought a pretence of democracy would have at least have had to been shown. This is a stitich up of home educators of the highest order and is nothing more then a going through the motions, seen to be done inquiry to get to a predetermined outcome. I am disgusted.

[Elaine Kirk]

My garbled rant

May I draw your attention re the inclusion of Simon Web as representative home educator that this tes article with Mr Yallops article following Simon Webs and the 63 comments are a clear , defined and public example of the general feelings towards his 'take' on home education .
I would also like to draw to your attention that EO with a membership of under 4,000 cannot be judged to be representative of 50 - 80,000 home educators especially when one considers that if they were felt to be representative then their membership would be very much higher.
I appreciate that an effort is being made to allow home educators to be heard but I strongly feel there has been an over reliance on EO . The 45 - 75,000 home educators who were not asked for, nor given a choice of representative should be given that option to be heard at, and participate in, the hearings.
Elaine Kirk

[Ali P]

Maybe they chose their witnesses by holding a lottery after first removing from the hat all those submissions which were deemed to be at risk of failing to meet state dictated outcomes? It must have been a pretty small hat in the end.

Or maybe Badders was just allowed to pick his own team after all that bother with his evidence.

Whatever happened, it is such a partial line-up of loony tunes that it is obviously designed to be a stitch up.

I'm not sure, by the way, why anyone would link to an EO site since even the naughty people got a direct notification email from the committee.

[HomeEdMum]

Simon webb!!?

[Elaine Kirk]

It is a total stitch up and if they had consulted the crc first they would have realised that Christians, Musim's , Pagans, Gypsy Roma etc were entitled to representation by default. The fact that these groups that no doubt number in the thousands nationally do not have national representation is to their credit as they function within their communities providing an education that equips their own child with an education which 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 .
I feel that the select committee should be bombarded with objections .

[pendlewitch]

erm I didn't get a notification for my personal sub or the facebook group one.

[liveotherwise]

and couldn't find it online on the CSF site, or believe me, would have linked there direct.



weeping slightly.

Why has Paula Rothermel not been invited - she was involved in the review, has submitted to the select committee and volunteered herself, surely she can speak to the conduct of the review board as well as home education generally?