Then I sent off the cheque

Realising that Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are now aged 13, I am experiencing one of those moments, familiar to all home ed mamas and papas, that is the pendulum swing betwixt educational resignation and blind panic.

But I need to think about this next stage of our adventure in calm, clear, pragmatic terms. Because we all have options, right?

1. Go primitive and dangerous. Do no GCSE exams. Not one. See if the kids can wing it into college relying on their passion and enthusiasm.

Let's do it: Has great appeal. No exams is the entrance ticket for the weird and dangerous crowd, the ones who best challenge social norms, cut across your group-think, and who express their individuality in true, genuine style. Also appeals to my deep idle streak which I will claim is my educational philosophy.

Let's not risk it: Tiger, Squirrel and Shark utterly fail to get into college thanks to an interview technique based on slumping in a chair and saying Leave me alone! Why are you asking such difficult questions? Consequently, have to spend a year and two thousand pounds on intensive coaching in English, Maths, and anything else demanded by Mrs Stern Lips at the college interview.

2. Go autonomous. Follow a couple of IGCSE curriculums at home in indifferent, haphazard manner, basically finding an excuse to turn geography into cake, then stride cheerfully into an exam room as an external candidate and see what answers come to mind.

Let's do it: Suits our style. Would fit naturally into everyday life chez Grit. We could become freedom fighters for how exams ought to be. A snapshot of your natural wits, wisdoms and abilities, rather than the possessor of a very large memory copied from the bullet points.

Let's not risk it: Shark, Squirrel and Tiger fail to be tested by the miserly, constricted standards of the day and come out with a scattering of grades from U to E, then have to spend a year and two thousand pounds on intensive coaching in English, Maths etc.

3. Play a little bit normal. Hire IGCSE tutors online, take distant courses which give the appearance of accreditation, hope to build up a CV for each child that has a variety of recognisable and interesting stuff which helps them blag a way into college.

Let's do it: Sounds like an interesting way to spend a couple of years, and would involve both cake and an essay that someone else has set.

Let's not risk it: Sounds like hard work requiring an administrative role from me, which is a bad idea considering I haven't a clue what day it is. Shark, Squirrel and Tiger fail to have the staying power to manage more than a couple of half-finished courses and we all revert to cake and making unicorn money. I kiss goodbye to three thousand quid for the privilege. Spend a year and two thousand pounds on intensive coaching in English, Maths etc.

4. Play a lot normal. Insist on eight ICGSEs taken from home. Set up a timetable. Enforce it. Be rigorous and stern about deadlines, correct answers, marks, scores, feedback, etc.

Let's do it: No, I can't think of any reason why we would do this, unless I had a character-transforming brain injury, or I died and Shark, Squirrel and Tiger were gifted with a step mother who did it for me.

Let's not risk it: I would have to become a person I am not. The children would hate me, then rebel, steal cider, sleep on park benches, take drugs and become prostitutes.

5. Make it someone else's job. Send Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to school. I don't have to bother thinking about it, booking exam rooms, paying as external candidates, fretting about the right paper on the right day, reading mark schemes, or printing out sample exam papers. It's all someone else's job and I can blame the teachers if anyone comes out with a grade D.

Let's do it: I could spend all day conjuring my leather-bound works of poetic brilliance until I am taken up by Vivienne Westwood accessories and my business empire is assured.

Let's not risk it: Shark, Squirrel and Tiger won't get up in the morning. Vivienne Westwood drops dead without ever clapping eyes on my notebooks.


Verdict: Looking at Shark, Squirrel and Tiger in detail, assessing their character types and the triplet dimension which is, frankly, getting in the way here, I'm choosing Route 3. At least until next month, when I have another crisis.

Stagecoach

Squirrel was right. I have a secret agenda, of course I do.

It is my ongoing project to introduce my gritty offshoots to cultural studies - which can mean more or less anything you want - but for me must include film, politics, literature, music, enjoying myself doing what I like, nice leather-bound notebooks and, when I am old enough to have one, a tiny toy fox terrier with dainty paws I can hold and stroke lovingly.

This is one of the best things about children, the way you have the opportunity to bring up people who share your culture and community groups, and who have an understanding about your concerns about the world. Basically, people whose company you might enjoy.

This is not to say I want my mini grits to be identical in outlook to me, of course not, that would be absurd; if they had the same tastes as me, I would have to share my fine collection of handbags with them, which I am not prepared to do. I want enough of a difference that we can all have a good ding-dong over the kitchen table about who deserves the last slice of pie, before leaving the house with deep-seated grudges before going off to vote in all our different ways. I want to be a normal family, obviously. But broadly, I want us to have opinions we can share: we should know where each other is coming from, and understand the things which matter to each of us.

By-the-bye, it is this 'reproducing-a-culture' thing which for home educators, and probably many other minority groups, is often cast as a problem: maybe there is a fear that unless we are all made publicly accountable via our presence at school, with our allegiances, views and values on display, then we might be perpetuating undesirable, anti-social values in private.

In Britain I take the fear to be linked fundamentally to class, and naturally I wonder if people may resent one state, but not the other. Example: Lolling about the sofa eating pies while unemployed = bad. Sending the daughters to Roedean with the expectation of a career in Tatler = good.

But this is an awfully long way round of putting down in my home ed diary that - hot on the heels of the British Library Propaganda show - I deliberately sat the little grits down on the sofa to watch Stagecoach* (1939) with John Wayne. Specifically so we can talk about ways in which culture reproduces itself, whether film is a form of propaganda, and whether we should go and see The Lone Ranger at the cinema or wait for the dvd.

I feel it's important. I want to show my little grits where culture looks backwards to, for its sources, images and ideas. Which is cultural studies, if you like. And who cares whether or not they understand this stuff now. They'll grow into it. (I hope.)

Squirrel on Stagecoach: What is happening? What's wrong with her? Where did that baby come from?


* The lazy way out; if it's not Stagecoach, then the other way I can tackle the Wild West is to sit and read aloud the dreaded Leatherstocking Tales.

Doing (yet more) home ed research?

Home educators, more of it over here. Take it or leave it.

For any person passing, curiously nosing about the world of home ed, this is when I pause, so we home educators can go at each other with windmilling arms, kicking each other in the shins, and hoping to land some bloody-nose blows, until some kindly consensus-seeker drags us apart, yelling Leave it! It ain't worth it!

Then know, passing viewer, that we are truly one big, happy family!

Yes, it may seem unlikely, but in my tribal world, research into home ed can raise a lot of strong opinions.

For a start, for the die-hard brigade, there is the primary problem of the research itself - it comes from within the education 'system' that the old hippies have spent years poking with sticks. Of course they're right! The research will come from people using particular sanctioned approaches within straitjacketed university contexts; researchers will not be able to deviate from particular methodologies and means of presentation if they want that PhD. What's more, they are likely products of a school-based system themselves, so how can they apply their standards of interrogation to the home educating approach? We have knowledge that is other. Researcher, when you begin, consider yourself doomed.

Then we have the mamas and papas out here in the home ed world who can challenge your conventional educational theories with their perceptions and observations about the way children learn. But because they haven't made those observations within the empires, or they don't display letters after their names, or because their observations are gathered from hard-core practical experience - possibly including mud, blood, bone, and a dead badger - those voices are forever consigned to the fringes; they will never be inside the system, and they will remain ignored or dismissed by the mainstream.

But there are those who say Let's help out the poor researcher! Even though they display stupendous ignorance! Mixing up home education with home schooling! But these rational voices, they advise caution: research in itself is fine, but what's the purpose? What use will it be put to? No academic researcher will produce pure information protected from government policies, business interests, or safe from a rubbishing by those who feel their agendas are being damaged or undermined. The message from here is: Home educator, do your research. Pick the research you think isn't just touting for business, allowing someone to build an empire, has a hidden agenda, or is covertly sponsored by Schools'R'Us.

What of those who say it is a downright failure of the home ed community not to be involved with academia? Only by furnishing the mainstream educational world with sound, peer-reviewed, academic data will home ed ever be accepted; it's only by understanding the significance of an academic approach in presenting arguments to defend a belief, can home education, eventually, become a mainstream choice. Think of a time when even Ken Robinson might be able to utter the dreaded words, safe in the knowledge he will no longer be considered a raving loony!

And then we get the bloody-minded provokers. They try and spoil it all by filling in questionnaires with annoying and unhelpful answers deliberately to advance, frustrate, illuminate and piss off the researcher in equal measure. I absolutely deny any involvement with that lot.

Taking control

To newcomers, I usually explain home ed like this, with my arms spread wide, as if to show the spectrum is wider than I can stretch my waving hands:

'At one end there are the school-at-homers.' (I waggle the fingers of my left hand, helpfully.) 'They might follow school subjects with the national curriculum, stick with timetables, and may want to slot a child back into school.'

'At the other end' (I waggle my fingers on my right hand, taking a deep breath and trying to choose my words carefully, so I don't blow anyone's mind to kingdom come), 'are those for whom the child is a natural learner. The child takes control of the learning, leads the family, and might pay no heed to any constraints like time or subject boundaries.' (I don't add, 'Or the opinion of the neighbours who think that 3am is not a good start time for a woodworking activity involving an electric heating circuit and their cat').

Then I say (rolling my arms about a bit), 'Most home educators? We're in the middle. Parents try a bit of this and a bit of that. Structure, organised workshop stuff, worksheets, maybe timetables, sometimes hire a tutor. But the kids are also free to do as they want while we parents run about behind the scenes and try to help on the way to their goals.'

(Usually then I stop, waiting to hear a response before launching into an explanation of the TCS brigade, the radical unschoolers, autonomous crowd and those for whom the words home education and home schooling might end in you coming away with a bloodied nose and blacked eye, so watch it.)

But I now add the line: 'What I've found, is that home ed changes. Every year. It can go in directions that you can't always predict'. Finishing by bringing my palms together and sliding my arms side to side, in the form of a giant animated prayer.

I could now say, every week. This week, the gritlets are locked firmly in a structure. I can't tell where it's come from. Whether it's by their desire, my connivance, or our mutual unspoken and pragmatic realisation that to slot in all the ridiculously diverse activities we've come to demand from Monday to Sunday there's no other option.

But I have mixed feelings as I stare at today: English 10-12; Maths 2-4. My nature is not the school at homer. I resent the hours laid out like corpses dissected by my efficient pencil. I want to leap out of bed with sudden purpose and intention to Let's hunt otters and fly planes.

Yet even I can see, a divided week helps Squirrel organise herself around outings, deadlines, projects and jobs she otherwise cannot do when the days are thrown jumbled into the air. Tiger too, has chafed to get that timetable. Even though, when she possesses it, she has a big squeal and rips it up. Then Shark. She merely observes the days, sees my divisions, then quietly gets out a pencil and ruler, and sets about to timetable her own.

The evil hour I wasted on this

Wondering what Gove wants.

Frankly, this was horrible, trying to inhabit Gove's brain. If I want to squat in someone's brain, I'm jolly well going to choose someone with whom I feel more sympathies.

But there are strange things happening in the world of education! Not a week passes that I do not read of some tweak, change, realignment, shift of emphasis - not of the law - but to the supporting infrastructures of the law: guidance given to local authorities, priority of information published on government websites, recommendations issued to governing bodies, re-interpretations of legal responsibilities which conveniently miss out options, or simply provide misleading statements.

On the recent reading list of areas I'm watching for redefinitions, realignments and readjustments, are those affecting the worlds of traveller education, special educational needs, migrant schooling options and flexischooling.

Why these slipstreams of education? I'm assuming, for Gove, sly slide is easier than full-on challenging law as a means to shifting the ground of our beliefs. Changing statute is long-winded, time consuming, and potentially too upfront, pissing everyone off, while dangerously threatening prime goals of political life: stay in power to manoeuvre through Westminster on a route that changes the culture to your favour, forwards your agendas, yet avoids confrontation with the electorate.

By contrast, if you change the guidelines and reissue the recommendations, then at least no-one can complain that the guidelines and recommendations aren't being followed.

Then the other strategies. Use of the special adviser, for example.

I trust not the special adviser. It is a sly way of politicising the civil service, appointing unelected, unaccountable grey suits to key locations in the administration and, with Gove placing his chess pieces all around the board where they can work together to defend and attack on his behalf, means he can control in a hands-off manner, deny all knowledge of 'specific incidents', and adopt a position of disingenuous, well-I-never innocence.

But he's a Tory, so what he wants must surely be to position the man on the Clapham omnibus as believing he has control over various choices ahead in life; but those choices must be quietly defined and shaped to business advantage. Then we choose not of freedoms but only where we would like to put our money. Corporate A or Corporate B, from which choice, there must be no escape.

To that end, and in education, there must be other tactics, too. Reduce the power of local authorities. They are wildcards, choosing to stitch up deals with their own friends in local educational services when you would like them not to. From Gove's point of view, surely better to enrich your own social networks by delivering local suppliers into the hands of larger corporate bodies and putting the miserable consumer's money into the hands of your chums.

Placing those connecting wires from central government to local areas brings benefits, not least close touch on where the funding goes. Nationally, an economic situation can change rapidly, so to ride that out and gain maximum political benefit, you need to be in a position where you can respond swiftly: switch the cash off, divert it, redirect it and turn it back on at a moment's notice. So what if you're doing that in education? Better make education a payments by results market, with prompt hire-fire staffing, commodification of product, conveyor belt delivery, and controllable supply routes for goods and services.

In this there should be no escape for consumers; every parent is a consumer of their child's education. Get each and every one of us to pay for entry into the great educational endeavour. Home education is not an opt-out route, even though old hippies like Grit might like to think so. Gove needs to have us all drawn into a commercial system, where we pay for any curriculum we follow, where any engagement with e-learning is monitored to better target us with product, where we are manoeuvred into a registration system where individual choices can be tracked, and where all children of this educational enterprise are socialised into appropriate deference and compliance to authority, thinking they have no choice but to choose in the commercial options presented.

Gove's visit to China and Hong Kong a few years back was not insignificant in all this: routinely he has used those international statistics to whip up stories of how British students are failing once again compared to your average Asian 10-year old and how this demonstrates a need to change, an opportunity Britain must not fail to seize. But I hear it's only half the story. I'm told Hong Kong employers constantly bemoan the lack of creativity in their graduates, complaining how students are trained to repeat bullet points but not to think independently, or with any originality.

But Gove's stories are means to ends, too; I'm guessing they not only make the domestic market feel crap, that change is needed, but also to push Britain to international league tables where Gove would politically like to place them. He needs the status positioning of Brand UK English Schools in overseas markets. Competitive in those preferred countries where we would like to return to our universities a healthy stream of rich kids. (If only May hadn't gone about simultaneously trashing student income from China and India with her immigration reduction!)

Oops! I've suddenly had enough! My head's gone wobbly. It's time for me to be off, and find someone with a more interesting brain and the juvenile humour of a twelve-year old.

Here, have a picture of an owl in a notebook.

England, you are a strange place

I am experiencing disconnect with religion as well.

Not my inner salvatory sort. On that, I'm already lost to any cause. I don't believe anything will help get me out of the problems I get into, except my own wit and wisdom.

(Okay, I allow fortune cookies. Let not great ambition overshadow small success. From little acorns grow big trees. When you're in a hole, stop digging.)

What I'm finding strange is the expression of religion on the streets. That's what I see is different, between here and Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong I've grown used to the shrines at each shop, the smell of incense, the noise of banging drums. I've seen people make way for devotions, processions and shoe beatings. I've come to expect that the spiritual calender creates routine in the social. I can tell it's grave cleaning time - the weekend to sweep out grandma before she's covered up with dried leaves again - because we must avoid walking all mountain trails. They're far too crowded. Whole extended families trek up there, seeking pure air cleansing as they go. On deity days, moons and ghostly festivals, people flood into the restaurants, and the South China Morning Post floods with outrage about the mess of wax burning.

Religion is in Hong Kong a structural force; it shows in social ways. It's also political; expressing devotion marks a separateness from the rules of China, where there is no state religion outside the Communist Party.

But I can't tell from looking at a person in Hong Kong about their religious beliefs. There's nothing to signify how devotional they are. Not what they do, or wear. You can't tell whether they believe in anything at all. Look at them, and they could be just like me, and rely on a bag of fortune cookies.

So when I walk into the UK, one of the first things I notice is how you express your devotions. Through the buildings and the headscarf.

The buildings, they're magnificent. Not small shrines discreetly positioned at the foot of a plinth, not the small concrete temple at the side of the town, here you have these wham-bang places, grand statements of towers and arch, brick and stone. Today I walked past one local church that stands wallop in the High Street. I remembered I love to see it, because it's such a huge and uncompromising building. It's decommissioned and used by the council as a warehouse, so anyone can guess as to the long-term fate. But I find the Victorian architecture beautiful. If they try to knock it down, I shall tie myself to the railings.

The headscarf, it's inescapable, because to me it's unusual. Did I see more than one or two in the last few months? Probably not. I come into England, see a woman wearing a headscarf and wonder why anyone feels the need to show their personal belief to anyone else. Is that a naive thought? Maybe I'm used to seeing people around me who don't declare their views through dress.

While I have these stirs of thoughts, a young woman pulls up in her car, lowers the window, and asks brightly in a local, amiable voice, Which way to the Co-op Funeral Parlour? Then she smiles, a big, broad smile.

I smile back, and think, with that brilliant smile, there can't have been a death in the family, can there? Grief and happiness, they should look different. Put them together, and the contrast is disturbing. I can't ever forget the Evangelical Christian who laughed her way through her mother's funeral. That photograph stays with me in my mind. I see them side-by-side; she beaming her huge smile, her brother knocked sideways with loss.

But I stand there, confused by smiles and directions, making up routes to the dead, and I look at her porcelain complexion and her soft pink cheeks, and then I realise that her hair is pulled back under a black headscarf. That's confusing, too. Her smile, voice, face and manner, all combining to default state - local girl, probably (when pushed) would offer C-of-E or non-believer - but here tells me unequivocally, unambiguously, a personal declaration, she's firmly with Islam.

I feel wrong-footed, a little. I'm still feeling new here. In expat land we live with images of rural England and your staged national presentations overseas. Country churches, hedgerows, wobbling bicycles, Beefeaters, red telephone boxes. They exist and they don't. But they're a major part of your tourism marketing, and I think probably the right one. But once here, on the streets, it's a very different feel.

A part of me is glad for the mix. I like the ladies at the Co-op who wear the headscarf. Well, the new person at the till, anyhow. She's so very different from the last! The other one was sulky, and would scowl when I handed her my shopping! I always felt especially nervous, passing over my bottle of Fursty Ferret for the blip, anticipating sour disapproval. But this new lady, she's all smiles and How are you today? Last night when a customer asked for 20 Marlboro and she said What? she then tugged at her headscarf and said It's this, I can't hear anything when I've got this on. Everyone in the queue smiled.

I send the local motorist off to her business with the funeral parlour, probably in the wrong direction, but not intentionally. I feel I'm being made aware of religion in England, but not yet sure why. Am I being asked to take up a position or a view? But I don't know what. The usual English one is indifference, isn't it? That's the one I prefer.

But I feel there's a subtle change here. All your religions are mixed up together, yet people feel the need to mark their difference. Maybe you all got religion while we were out? Perhaps you've quietly become all determined and spiritual, veering to one way or another? Have I got to take sides, instead of do my usual, which is ignore it all? So what will happen? Do I have to decide which religion to declare myself to? That would be a shame indeed.

Wandering old git talks to self

I am out-of-things, disjointed, dislocated. Unhooked by time.

Probably post-viral.

That, and fell off the chain-end of a pointless what-is-the-point bloggery thinking, beginning from my sick bed.

Regretfully, I clicked the monthly stats. I see the numbers of happy grit's day readers took a nose dive, lifted only by a popular post on SEN kids who look like truants, and the ever-popular search, naked men in Bali.

But don't get me wrong. I am not particularly sad, nor especially surprised by sinking stats.

I am not very friendly, not at the best of times. I have a terrible record of visiting blogs, even ones I like. And my record for actually commenting when I get there is even worse.

And I already totally failed on the marketing. Wrapping a short skirt and false eyelashes on this blog and putting it out about the virtual world, touting for readership, is not something I can do.

Worse, I am not even on Facebook!

NO WAY can I give up my identity on there. What if I want to conduct an affair? By Thursday everyone would know about it and someone would be trying to flog me lubricant jelly.

Deliberately, I used to hang about the mummy blogs - probably much in the spirit of a miserable ghost who rattles its chains on the landing - where I could catch people unawares with my whiny plea, there is another way, or jump in whenever some misguided parent wrote something foolish, like 'better get used to it, school is compulsory'.

They ignored me. But maybe I somehow believed that positioning myself on the fringes of the home ed/normal world would help.

That place probably did bring up a few readers; those up for a laugh at the misfortunes of others, or the morbidly curious, like people who stare at a car crash.

But now I can't even be bothered with that role. The final bell was when the Britmums thing became a forum with an underlying agenda of whipping up enthusiasm for flogging each other stuff to sell it back to PRs. Beyond the idea there is another way, I have nothing to sell.

So I wondered where to position this blog next. A place that needs little effort. I could hang the blog about home ed land, and tackle home ed politics issues.

That would be okay, but home ed politics isn't that interesting, even to me. I would have to be all polemic, and is my heart in it? At some point I would just say, Oh I don't give a damn about the funding. Call yourselves what you want, EOTAS, AE, EO, WOTSITS. Basically I'm faithless and loyal to my own kids.

That's not a useful position to take if you're looking for a wide and provoked readership.

So I came to the same conclusion I always do when I'm idle. I shall keep the slog for my educational record. Something practical. Even though it feels like a bit of a sad and lonely space for an old hippie preparing to fight a battle with a local authority, when the local authority doesn't know they're at war.

Now, in this newly-found resolute mood, here is today's educational record. We visited the fantastic Hong Kong Planning and Infrastructure Gallery to talk about settlements and land use for the IGCSE Geography syllabus! Yippee!





There. And please don't feel the need to say anything nice. I won't sniff much about declining stats. I always think positive. Eric and his chums might stop calling.

If only we had thought it out

Now then, what's the future of education, eh?

You can find out here, at grit's day, because yes! I have my finger on the pulse.

I left behind one of my kids on the island today, having wrestled the other two on the ferry. I turned round, just as the boat pulled away. There, over the widening churning waters of Banyan Bay, stood Squirrel, alone at the pier, with a surprised face, growing smaller as the sea froth spread out between us like a goodbye wave. See? That's how connected I am.

To track significant events - like what time is the next boat out? Will she have the imagination to get on it? Has she any money? things like that - I try and follow education news; it prompts me to imagine the scenarios ahead.

I guess one scenario is informed by that idea that the more things fall apart, the more people work to hold it all together.

So, as an ill-equipped, outdated, factory-school system falls apart, the more the state will try and control those kids who are spilling away, dropping off the edges. They might impose on them, by obligation and regulation, the state interpretation of what it is to have an education.

Imagine if they were to match kids who don't or won't go to school with digital text-books, a prescribed state curriculum, and threats of prison. Call it compulsion.

Sure, the majority of parents would still choose the buildings of school as a daycare centre, but via a compulsory sign-up, the fringes could be co-ordinated electronically. I could imagine the regime would insist kids show up for appointments so the state can check them for bruising. That seems to be something they're quite keen on.

Well, as any alternative educating parent will tell you, there's nothing like that in force! Yet. Half-way provisions, home tutors, flexi-schools, educated other than at school schemes, electronic options, they all run locally around the country, as small or large-scale projects. As far as I know, you don't have to take your clothes off for them, but they do require a certain amount of agreement to the demands of the state. The point is, at the moment, none of them are compulsory.

The situation we have now is that parents still hold power. By law, you can choose. To accept provision, and to decline it. You are free to choose school, flexi-school, funded support, your own thing. You're not compelled to accept any one educational service if you don't want it. You're free, by law, to educate your unique child as you see fit. You can make it up as you go.

And if you want to spend every day trying to manage events so that three awkward kids walk in the same direction at the same time and get on the same ruddy boat to attend the same chemistry session like you said you would, well that's up to you.

I suppose the point is, what with all this leaking school system and e-bookery (even if it is all a plot by Amazon), the future could unroll in different directions.

Maybe the state will want control and use technology accordingly. Maybe the state will increasingly encourage profitable service suppliers to offer pre-set provision and your choice is between them. Maybe the state will back off from dictating parental choice at family level but opts for compulsory registration and monitoring whatever you do. Maybe it'll just leave things: don't ask, don't tell.

The pressure from parents I guess will stay broadly the same, even though people might move in and out of different camps as children grow and their needs change.

There'll be pressure from parents who don't want any involvement from the state, or who want to create a totally child-led provision. Parents who want to choose state services on a pick&mix basis. Parents who want funds for exams. Parents who want school one year, and an opt-out the next, with or without Local Authority support.

Of course there will always be people who know what's best for everyone else, all of society, and maybe the world! Those who dictate how every child is fulfilled in school; anything else is downright odd! Everything went downhill when they banned the cane, huh? They'll sound more and more as if they live in 1882.

I have no conclusions about any scenario. Except I believe that parents should think now. While they have a chance.

For your child, and not for anyone else's, what would you have? Total state control of education? Total non-state interference? The option to accept funding for exams? The option to opt out and opt in of school as you wish? Compulsory involvement? Freedom of choice?

I'm selfish. I don't care what people choose, so long as I have a choice. I guess my view relies on the hope that not many people would seriously choose for themselves and their children the route of total state compulsion and no-choice education.

My position also lets me be irritatingly high minded and say I believe it's a responsibility of every parent - school-choosing or not - to look ahead and consider what they would want for their child's education should political, social, and cultural events change the options of the future.

The message is, Think now, because events unfold, and overtake you quicker than you can respond!

And I can tell you from experience, people who look ahead are well placed to act decisively and strongly when those events unfold. They're not taken by surprise or wrong-footed by how the world shapes up.

After leaving Squirrel on the island with a giant exclamation mark bouncing over her head, we caught up with her eventually.

We missed only three more boats during the day - one by 30 seconds which I ran for and nigh on killed me - which caused us to change plans at the very last minute, sometimes twice, with the last emergency plan made breathlessly on the phone, all thanks to Dig not making it exactly clear which boat he would catch en route to the scenario you all should fear: his master plan to bend the entire globe to his will by force of commas.

The chemistry choice was brilliant though - with eggs and games and pop-in-the-mouth fizz-bang experiments. Worth catching. Even if, after setting off for home at 5.30pm, we finally landed here at 10pm (all kids intact).

Going round again

The Royal Institution held an Unconference. Bravo.

The RI is an old institution connecting us ordinary folk with the miracles of science.

I like them. A lot. They only really, really upset me once. But we kissed and made up.* So now they're on my list, along with the Royal Academy, of organisations who will be delighted to receive our annual friendship contribution.

One point of their Unconference was to have no agenda. But to give over space to have teenage kids discuss and shape research.

Yes, it broadly suits the RI. They should have a mission to support individual inquiry, autonomous research and independent thinking, given their leading light - Faraday - was self-taught. (These days, such autonomous, self-directed learning might be described under those regrettable words: home educated.)

So at first I thought Unconference? Good.

Any approach where learners take possession of physical space, exchange ideas, collaboratively create ways to shape the environment, and take responsibility for what happens next - must be good.

But then I began to think about this boundary - where autonomous, self-directed learning meets any institution - and I thought, does it work? Can any institution ever open itself up to autonomous learning?

This article about the Unconference from the RI demonstrates something of the problem. Okay, it's probably not fair to pick on it, because I don't want to fight the RI again. Not unless they try and levy additional charges for home ed kids, or go out their way to exclude the home ed voice.

For a start, in this article, the language, it's about permission. It's the RI's 'invitation' and we have to overcome our disbelief to 'trust'. To make sense of what the Unconference is, we first have to agree to the values of the institution, and conspire with the view that any unconference is a bat shit crazy idea. 'Handing over learning, experimentation, organisation and argument to young people? That crazy! What on earth will they do to trash the place?!'

Hmm. There's the institution, defining the territory, organising the understanding. No matter what line is given about freedom of inquiry, the event still starts with lectures and requires outcomes.

Which is sort of not the point of learning freedom. In the landscape of autonomy, of self-directed learning, the starting point is usually the other way round.

In autonomy land, you start off by assuming the creative freedoms of individuals. Then you stand out the way while they're pursuing their paths. Which means that handing over learning to kids is not crazy or shocking. It's daily, normal, natural, if you've ever watched a little kid play.

With freedom to explore, the initiative, experimentation, control, is all owned by the learner. They become the expert. Like all experts, they gain knowledge from direct experience and practical testing. They are open about their limits. They know when to say, This is the boundary of my knowledge; now I reached the limit, and I need to collaborate, talk, and mix ideas from someone else's brain to help me go on further.

That is ownership of learning. That is scholarship. That is unconference. Organisation, structure and control comes from the individual. Frankly, it matters not a jot whether the person engaged with it is aged fifteen, five, or fifty. And the idea that anyone must seek permission for this process of inquiry, or wait for an invitation to do it, is ludicrous.

So I feel a teensy bit frustrated. Not at the RI. They're giving up their building space, fair enough, and exploring this meeting point of institutional control / individual freedom, so that's good enough for me.

But frustrated because I want it to be normal - this assumption that people already have control. People already have the power to learn, teach, organise themselves, specify what they need, control their own agendas, and shape how they learn. I'd like to see more people meeting in public spaces; taking them over for those purposes.

I don't know why we don't see more of that. Maybe people are given to think that they don't already have the responsibility and ownership over themselves. Maybe, in the absence of them just taking that responsibility, I have to look to the existing institutions like schools to support those ideas about autonomy and learning freedom.

But that's not going to happen, is it? It can't ever happen, for that assumption, my daily starting point, to become a normal part of any institution.

The thing is, in a model of learner autonomy, there is a sort of intrinsic anarchy. You cannot control a person who controls their own intellectual path. I tried it, with Squirrel! What I found was that people with their interests and discoveries cannot sit easily inside a place which, by external pressures of organisation, may demand that they shape, formulate, or present their thoughts in particular ways, for products, outcomes, results.

Bugger. I'm going round in circles. There's no conclusion. I'll just dither here on the lines between individual autonomy and institutional requirements. I'll swing about a few more years, wrangling Squirrel's unique and peculiar interests with the mainstream specifics of an exam syllabus. I'll argue the toss between restrictions of institutions and freedoms of individuals. Backwards and forwards I'll flip, chasing my own tail.

Better then, be glad. However well or badly they do it, whatever profit or gain sits somewhere down the line, an institution like the RI handles a basic idea of learner autonomy and offers some space for teenage thinkers to take control.

I hope the RI succeeds. And makes it totally clear that their next Unconference is also open to home ed kids.

* See? I don't bear grudges.

Martyrdom

We gatecrash the Tolpuddle Martyr's Festival. By accident.

I had no idea this was the weekend when the museum is taken over by the TUC. I drove into the village, saw the red flags, the portaloos in the layby, and the cagoules in the rain with the dripping placards. Unity is strength and workers unite.


My heart sank. All I did was drive by the museum, on the off-chance it was open, with half an idea to teach the kids about the spirit of England which is to be traditional social and radical independent all at the same time, and now look. I have to sneak about a wet field pretending to actually have a service job, be a downtrodden worker, always on my guard against the fascist regime, and in solidarity with my working muckers.

Shut up, Shark. Don't mention I am an idle woman, gadding about the countryside, daddy legging it, selling his soul in Hong Kong for a pile of cash, and mummy hoping there's still a Chanel handbag hiding somewhere in the settlement. Be quiet. We are in solidarity with the brethren. Stop arguing. And also shut up about the do-your-own-thing style of education because look, there is NASUWT.


Now there'll be trouble. Shark says come away and stop yelling. But I have a particular grudge against them. I am sure I recall their pronouncement a few years ago. How home education was an abomination against society conducted by baby eating parents, how it should be banned immediately, and a uniform learning policy implemented for all five-year olds because that is FAIR.

I paraphrase. But I am sure I caught the spirit. Bastards. Anyway, they have to say that, don't they, because they are maintained as a collective of teachers with an interest in employment, and home education makes people wonder what teachers do, if it turns out that education is a job any attentive parent can do instead.

From my opinion, which obviously I am not allowed to express given the fact that I am sneaking about in solidarity disguise, home ed blows their cover. It shows that today's teaching is not, in the main, about education.

Teaching in schools is about managing large groups of people in small spaces using skills you might have to use in the disciplined services, or in confinement situations, or in prisons. That is, new teacher, you must contain the fringes of the crowd, please the mainstream, negotiate the behaviours that are weird, disruptive, unfathomable, call the bizarre healthy, normal and perfectly acceptable and, throughout it all, deliver a differentiated lesson that the government says you must if you want to be paid.

Don't imagine I am saying this impossible job is not needed. Yes it is. There are plenty of kids who want to go to school, plenty of parents who want to send them there, and plenty of people who have ideals to work there. Fine. What I am saying is, you do that, and let me, in my single community of oddball, renegade and radical, get on with my own thing, please. I don't want to be hunted down and beaten over the head with your enforced ideas about fairness and inclusion.

Which points to my fundamental dilemma with the whole union thing in the first place.

I grew up in a working class, union-oriented household where the party line was adhered to whether anyone liked it or not. A show of unity was essential. So I sort of agree, yes, I am trained to see the point of it, because the Tories will screw you down if you give them half a chance, and your strong bet is to join together and argue for a particular point of view. Down tools and up fingers.

Yes, of course we need to unite; even we oddball home educators need to join forces at times.

But there is not a lot of scope for high autonomy and individual dissent in a union, is there? And that is my particular problem. Joining a union means having to parrot an ideology that is given to me, inevitably by some fat bloke, who tells me, that thanks to him, I am empowered.

My gut reaction is to tell the git to Sod off. I will make up my own mind, thanks. Even if I find myself totally alone, with no benefit in it, and beaten up in a ditch.

Maybe I had a bad early union experience (possible). Maybe it is my own peculiar anti-authority misaligned character (probable). The result is, I am suspicious of all large-scale organised social groupings. I hate having to say what someone told me to say, and my skin burns with the idea that at some point I would have to chant the party line.

Okay, then yes, I am basically an argumentative loner and mouthy bastard who will pick a fight in a chancel if I don't like the clergy.

I think there is no way out for me from this tortured borderland and included/excluded perspective. Except, maybe to say, how I remain confident that I will never be totally alone. Because look who's coming to give me a piece of her mind. The apple never falls far from the tree.

'School is somewhere that every child needs to be every day'

This made headlines, didn't it? It changed flavour over here. Children missing an education; the abuse; calls for a national database.

Well, I'm sure it's the start. Of something.

It's such a catchy beginning, too. 12,000. People love factoids don't they? Especially ones that are easy to remember. They're best if they come with emotion, a sense of urgency, or a note of alarm.

Anyway, I see this figure everywhere now, and the more it's repeated, the truer it is.

I bet the TES is not unhappy with the repetition. It helps advertisers feel safe to know their ad budget is in a paper with clout.

But I can't help but wonder about this story.

Apart from the stats, check the language. Interchanging school and education as if there is no difference? Is that deliberate? Or incompetent? Maybe education writers at the TES haven't read any education law. That doesn't reflect well on the TES. Surely, can't be that. But if it's deliberate, maybe the author is under a brief to deliver a particular impression, even if it's wrong. That every child must be in school, and this is the law.

Then get some of the 'charity' quotations too! Complete tripe! Take this one. 'School is somewhere that every child needs to be every day' says Martin Narey.

So Martin, you must include Saturday, Sunday, every public holiday, every school holiday and maybe all children too, from hour zero, thanks to the nappy curriculum. That sounds like prison too! But I think that's well beyond the legal requirement of even a dutiful and law-abiding school-choosing parent, isn't it?

You might think I'm taking what he said to ridiculous limits, and of course he didn't mean it like that, he just said it like that. But I assume he did say it; the writer chose to report it. Even if it's complete nonsense.

But how am I to understand him now, after he said that? Should I not take him seriously? Perhaps I should imagine he's just a big delusional joker with a loose mouth that flaps about in the wind.

So the education writer didn't do him any favours. Made him look a bit foolish, maybe. But still, she reported these words, unchallenged, and uncritical. I wonder why she didn't ignore them, and pursue more accurate words, ones that more sensitively addressed and identified the issues that I'm sure are in this story too.

It's true, I would have preferred to read an article that took more care over statistics, used more sensitive language, and relied on better quotes.

I'd like to have seen a recognition that education is compulsory; school is not. That most schools require attendance Monday-Friday, but flexischooling may not. That alternative provision for children of different abilities, needs, ages and aptitudes does not necessarily take place on school premises. That Children Missing Education statistics should not include home educated children. That some children, registered at school, are not deregistered promptly by parents. That some schools may be slow at deregistration procedures. That some areas probably need a shake up in placing traveller children and the families of casual migrant workers. That some children do 'disappear' from school, but probably not 12,000. That local councils have a suspicion they find difficult to voice about some families within ethnic minorities who persist in forced marriages, or who regard the education of female children more problematic than the male.

I didn't get those ideas from this article. Just a big blast of moral panic. And the 12,000 who should all be in school.

But there's more that worries at me here; more than easy stats, misleading words, and crap quotes. What I really want to know is, what happened to bring this article about? What's the background?

I'm suspicious, because the TES is as good a place to start as any.

Maybe there are various interests - commercial, charity-business, political, corporate, undesirable individual - right now coalescing behind the scenes; people who would benefit from a little moral panic.

Perhaps some social alarm would make it easier to introduce a compulsory, national registration system, one for all children, regardless of who they are, whether they are schooled, educated otherwise, home educated, moved house, or packed off for a forced marriage. Parents, by law, would be obliged to front up information about the kids.

You can almost hear it now. We simply need to know. We are concerned about the twelve thousand disappeared. This will help us identify children who are genuinely missing. If we know where all children are registered as receiving education, then it is easier to identify when children are not where they should be. This register is simply to help us focus our support on the children who need it most.

Then the TES article might make sense. It might have a specific intent to scream some scary figures, yell some thoughtless quotes, plough ahead with mishmashed information, ignore the law, and whip up a little social anxiety.

I can't decide. Whether the TES team hears whispers in government, and this article is a tiny particle kick-starting a sinister scheme of things. Or whether it's just another badly written article from someone who's not sure of the law and doesn't choose their soundbites well.

Oh, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm just old, and I look at the world with a brutal eye.

But if I was Martin Narey, I'd ask for a favourable full page to redress the damage. Maybe an interview with me as Important Person. I'd ask for a different journalist and then I'd check the quotes, in case anyone took me for a complete idiot, all over again.

Different and all the same

I spied graffiti in Hong Kong. Modest, isn't it? No colour, no unnecessary wastage of paint, no spilling lines, no jumbling letters. It's so neat; it stays within its borders. Black spray lines on a white background - an echo of the Hong Kong skyscrapers - then careful letters underneath, printed as a caption. They read: Art is not everything / But we need it.


If I saw this in England, I'd imagine it was the sort of fashionably minimalist graffiti that might be drawn by the artsy and intelligentsia middle-class teenagers who live around Clapham. Maybe hand-sprayed by Josh, who is desperate to carve out some creative facial hair for himself, and who is on a campaign of rebellion against his mother. I bet she works in financial accounting and underestimates the social significance of graphic design.

I guess in England, I'd find that message - Art is not everything / But we need it - difficult to take as a wise and incisive nugget of public information. After all, we're surrounded by artists exploring the merits of graffiti. When they're not nailing sticks of celery to walls, or decapitating sheep. In fact, if I did see this in England, it wouldn't come as any surprise to discover this section of wall was sprayed deliberately for an art portfolio, or that Josh drew it there with his heart pounding especially for Jilly who's taking the urban photographic course.

But here in Hong Kong, it's different. We're almost a graffiti free zone. Expressing your resistance by daubing the walls doesn't seem to be the Chinese way. This black-on-white presence feels like something that shouldn't be. A public slap in the face. Then the message. I assume the spraycan artist intended the message to be incisive and political (even though I might give it 7 out of 10 for the creative line). From the sprayer's point of view, I guess there's no point in making a risky late-night anti-social strike to tell the world that Kev is a knob. Straight off then, I'm thinking about the corporate development of urban space and the place of art at street level. The spraycan artist achieved that at least.

But these youthful wall art enthusiasts? I feel old. I bet Josh and Jilly or the Hong Kong activist are basically the same, whether they live in Hong Kong or Clapham. I bet they're otherwise industrious and scholarly, and expect to pass all their exams with an A grade.