Sexual assault

I haven't yet met a woman who hasn't got a story to tell. Depressingly, several stories, spun out like knots and threads, twisting and splicing between the years.

It's true, for decades - centuries I'd guess - women have spent hours, listening to each other, telling the same stories. Powerlessness, shock, living the consequences of a decision you never made; decisions you were never even asked to take a part in, never considered.

Perhaps women have talked and listened to other women, more often than to men on the consequences of this imbalance. But women haven't always stayed quiet to men. Not always. Perhaps men too have felt there's nothing to be done. This is how things are. This is the way the world works. It's inevitable. Except of course, that nothing is inevitable.

For the moment - briefly? - it seems okay to publicly tell this personal narrative. Is this the time, perhaps, we can assume the woman's story is not only true, it has a right to be heard without blame or condemnation? For the moment, perhaps, there is sanctuary and sanctity about the individual telling. What comes next, after a thousand flowers have bloomed, makes me cautious.

Perhaps a positive message is my preference to teach my daughters. You are equal to a man. You are equal in law. Your voice carries equal weight. I assume these things are true because I want them to be true. We should act how we want to the world to be. I can teach my daughters guarded and watchful behaviour, but I cannot assume that all men are predators, or that all men are guilty on account of their biology. Of course not. Perspective and balance matter. On our most basic levels we're all humanly capable of blundering stupidities, dreadful errors, shaming misjudgements. We each, men and women, need the same extended to us: patience, kindness, forgiveness. My daughters will probably want that too.

But it is also true that we're still holding the derelict end of a legal, administrative world; a world of power, decision, influencing; a social construct, made primarily by men who have stacked that system towards their wants. Perhaps this is a fulcrum-time that I can hope - and I do not often hope, believe me - that a different culture now can become possible. That men will, alongside women, help stop that blind eye, turning.

Reflection, anticipation

One of those days where my plans all collapse.

These days, having my plans collapse effects little more than a gentle wave of relief around the house. Now we have a fortnightly timetable from which we must hoik out a chemistry assignment, a completed physics worksheet, and a finished Latin homework in neatest handwriting. Meanwhile, I have another photo album to stitch.

We all feel quietly glad for the sudden given hours we can freely go about our various studies.

This is the difference, I am discovering, with age. When the children were aged three, frankly it felt like being trapped in a life sentence. A day of collapsed planning meant I'd better pull something out of my pocket pretty sharpish - maybe a walking-talking fish or a harp-playing kangaroo - otherwise my nerves would be flayed out like raw wires come tea-time.

Now the offspring are aged thirteen, on exam courses and with a timetable, I find myself looking at them taking more control over what they do with a quiet independence. Hopefully they will pursue what matters to them through college or other FE option, and create that adult place where they want to be.

And then what? In years to come (if I am still alive), I plan to maintain a neat and tidy parlour, of the type that ladies keep, should the vicar call.

Possibly that, or go on week-long benders and hook up with easy men. I have not yet decided which.

Brilliant and depressing

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger join a GCSE Geography workshop at the Field Studies Centre in Essex.

I cannot fault it. If you are looking round here for support on the Geography IGCSE, then it is 100% on target. The workshop is highly organised, clearly structured, flawlessly delivered, with all points an A* candidate needs to make carefully laid out and indicated. 

Even more remarkable, the teacher leading our session was superb and - despite the fact that she must deliver this workshop a hundred times to know the script by rote - maintained interest and liveliness, and brought all the equipment safely back to base. More than I ever managed to do with 32 copies and a drawn out six weeks to plod through The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler. Give her a pay rise.

And Epping Forest is beautiful. I became totally distracted throughout.

 And look! I found nibbled flint, so there's some paleolithic digging to be done.

So yes, all encouraging, if Tinkertop needs to learn the practical measurement of river characteristics.

But the day told me more, too, in wider ways. What the learning culture is; how it relates to the exam process, how the school student is brought up to interact with their discipline. 

For that A*, do not deviate from the given answer one bit. Reproduce the bullet points. Supply keywords. Make the points concisely and accurately in the expected order. An excellent memory is needed, as is unquestioning compliance to the given answer, and the ability to pull off that pseudo-scholar trick: copy the teacher's answer in your own words. 

You can say this is a great advancement in the schooling and testing of 16-year olds, ensuring the high attainment of grades across the country. It is great for international tables and shows how England is producing truly world-class students. Look at the numbers of these A*!

Or it is a sad reflection on the times. By the end of secondary, it will not have been possible, under the present testing regime, to take the time to stimulate creative flair, originality, or independence of approach. Neither will the culture have seriously engaged with student-initiated work, genuine probing dialogue between student and teacher, nor exploration of problems from far-out angles or oblique perspectives.

But did not education go through a stage - post Plowden - when children were, within the schooling limits, invited to explore, make intellectual inquiries, given open-ended questions, and generally encouraged to work out how to achieve what they wanted to do? I can remember my project on dinosaurs even now! The further up the system you went, the less free-ranging that inquiry could become, and the PhD was like a straightjacket, but nevertheless, the spirit for your average school student was find out first, then see how you do in the exam at the end.

Now we are teaching to the exams from the word go. From primary - no, pre-primary - we have a straitjacket approach to learning. Play is restricted, free-range thinking discouraged, off-curriculum exploration labelled as time wasting and unproductive. Answers are delivered and repeated and routes beaten to achieve that A*, which is all that seems to matter.

So the workshop was totally targeted, focused, and delivered efficiently and more than capably. I recommend it for your exam focused Tinkertop. 

Even we are learning to play the game.

But still, I just hope there remain enough people out there who continue to obstinately believe that a child is not the sum of their grades, and that a questioning approach to the world - even if it earns a Grade D - can be a great reflection on a character. 

And who knows? In another 20 years, we might get Plowden coming round again.

Birthday presents

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are invited to celebrate a birthday today. Stupidly, we have left presents to the very last minute. They are a little disorganised and me, I am a lot overwhelmed.

We put our heads together and come up with ideas a near-teenage girl might like. Chocolate, books, puzzles, dvds, charm bracelets and music. The latter is out, immediately, because after Dowland I lose the thread, and Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are disdainful of all boy bands.

We come up with presents, of course we do, and the party is great celebratory fun, with balloons and games and cake.

When you are young, the time can be filled with great astonishment and wonder and expectation.

It is, if you are allowed a moment of it left to yourself, and your own devices, free to wander about and stare at impossible creatures like ladybirds or the fragments of a pigeon wing half-eaten on the path.

These are the wonderful inexplicable moments of childhood we should allow children time for, so they can hold them and carry on with them through their lives, finding astonishment and wonder and expectation as they grow.

I am grateful, hugely thankful, to my rather neglectful mother, for demanding I push off out of doors and don't come back until tea-time. Because now I am old, now I feel old, now the dead bit of me is eating up the living, I find gorse bushes are still beguiling and treacherous, blossom still needs throwing to the winds, and the feathers from dismembered pigeons still invite my curious gaze.

I am not a very good present-giver; I fall back on bubble foam and flannel. But if I could give any present, it would be a package of curiosity, a burning desire for exploration, a sense of adventure, and time.

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.

Quietly enjoying...

The mini grits are occupied. Quietly busy, they slide away to bury their noses in books, fasten them on computer screens, or worship fish.

This is a strange, translucent time, one state of them blending invisibly to another. Their plump baby cheeks are still there with their fat little tummies demanding pasta, but their shoes are size 7 and their opinions are delivered with withering insight.

They are no longer my little girls, and yet they are completely my little girls, occupying some sort of transitory form between digging up the garden and telling me of things they would like to do: the online maths games they want to boast about, the physics they want to learn about, the morning approach they are going to adopt for learning 20 Latin verbs.

This strange state is both satisfying and scary. As their too-long limbs fold into the postures of students, sat at desks for longer than they should, I can only hope I rise to the challenge to match it with ambitions, books, intentions.

For me, their sloping away to private study increasingly leaves me with whole gaps in the days when I too can creep away, relieved of responsibilities, apart from the usual household feeding, cleaning, and mucking out, to simply potter about.

Quietly daring to think of life post age-16, wrestling with fifty-summer-things-I-want-to-do spread impossibly from Edinburgh to Brighton, Hunstanton to Swansea, and filling the silence with my own quiet dancing; today with Steve Martin and Edie Brickell Love has Come for You.

Too busy

I am overwhelmed with tickery-tockery. Really, I should have been an automatic calendar, running by computer, then it wouldn't have mattered.

Because today I co-ordinate our comings and goings with three different families from 9am to 9pm, bringing my three kids to three different points with six other children via astronomy clubs, play dates, and swimming sessions. Between times I reschedule the walk-and-talk, rearrange the theatre booking, organise the London date, navigate the telephone and shop, then meantime clear up, cook dinner, empty bins, and set the laundry churning.

Some nights, when the days are like this, too busy to think or to rest, I lay my head on the pillow and try to remember whether I really did beome a software program running on a blind routine of motion. Then I feel fear how it all passes and I never knew that I was alive. I try to remember, as the hours clicked by that day, whether I hurt or felt happy or knew the wind on my face.

I must have been alive. I remember, through the clock ticking and the anxiety running too high, catching Squirrel's horrified widening eyes on finding the only swimming costume in the shop sized for her, and  laughing at her expression from my bellywards up.

I remember eye-spying in passing the last half-muffin from breakfast, cold but buttered, abandoned on the kitchen table, and no-one around to ask, Does anyone want this? Delight.

And I found, put here by a daughter hand, the moments taken from a day to follow impulse and curiosity, a ring of petals and leaves tatty and crushed, maybe drawn from a pocket or held in a clammy fist, where an eye, not mine, absorbed and intent, set the colour and shape swirling round, laying it all out, out of time.

Workshops for teenagers?

It seems to me that la famille Grit is now conducting a survey of KS3 workshops around the shires.

See? I even have all the lingo, what with those National Curriculum Key Stages 1,2,3.

I wouldn't have known what you meant a few years ago. But, you home educating parents, there is a disjunction from larking about in the fields with children aged under 11 and these secondary years. Not a culture change entirely of our own making. I observe two trends.

First, the seeping back to school of home ed kids about age 11. Several friends of the griblets went to school, some for the first time. They'd spent a fantastic time replacing the tedious school grind with a truly expansive, outdoors, inquisitive education put into place by outgoing parents, but filtered into the school-based service for the secondary exam years. Coming into our world are those children who may have coped with primary school, but for whom secondary is a harmful nightmare. So we are now moving in a slightly different composition of people.

Second, as we all look around for educational support, we're finding a decline in number and variety of workshops and activities we can pick up from museums, parks, councils, and libraries suitable for the home educated post-11-year old child.

At primary the home ed parent can't go wrong. You can keep Tinkertop busy with dozens of activities from pizza making to storytimes to archaeological games and den building. You don't need to travel about the country looking for those; you can find them in your locality. You don't need to buy the services of the educational supplies company, you can organise a group and pick up a phone. But there's only so much pond dipping you can do, right? The growth of your kids and the targeting of services means that by age 12 you're scouting for something different.

So with kids aged 13 we're looking for new stuff. But I'm finding museum and institution activities no longer offered for the interests of teenagers; they are now activities morphed into the formal, national 'KS3 workshop'.

The organisations offering these workshops are sure to make website promises that are drawn straight from the National Curriculum, and offer targets printed off from a government website. Which means they're already a step away from the concerns of teenagers. They're speaking to us not through their own voices and interests; they're addressing us though a nationally school-mediated voice rather than a local people-oriented voice. Nevertheless, we stick with it, book a session, and then find these workshops are truly of variable quality.

There is no guarantee of academic content at a 'KS3 workshop'. Parents of schooled children, you should know this too. When you fork out a tenner for the annual KS3 trip touted by the school as a 'valuable learning opportunity', know that it could all descend into 'D'you wanna touch a dead badger?' with your child enthused only to the purchase of a rubber egg in the gift shop.

So now the KS3 workshop is disappointing on both counts. First, in failing to be heard by the interests of teenagers and second, in failing to provide even what they offered for the content.

Old Grit observes an issue here for those educators working in all our dear museums, libraries and the rest.

First,  if you want to keep them involved in your disciplines, you need to consider whether you are creating workshops and activities that fit with the interests of teenagers. Please don't assume they all grunt and play computer games.

Second, you need to examine whether you really want to provide National Curriculum services for the government, or whether you want to do the thing you're interested in, have the resources to do, and the staff to help create it.

Third, you need to think it through, where you want these teenagers to go with you, when you run a session. What do you want to happen as a result of your activity? What do you want them to do and say about your outfit?

Finally, you need to make sure, absolutely sure, without exception, that you front your workshop with real, live, blood-fired people who care about, and are sensitive towards the nuances of both their audience and the discipline they're promoting. They won't necessarily come with a PGCE. In fact, that might be a hindrance.

These thoughts are all prompted because today we hit another teenage workshop at the Centre of the Cell, in Whitechapel. It promises KS3 science of the National Curriculum.

The workshop session is, basically, play a load of computer games in a pod suspended above a laboratory. It hit the presentation, commendably showing aspiration and imagination, but despite the science/medical students hanging about, still relied on computer games rather than the excitement of actual human interaction to prompt thought and provoke discussion. For us, it failed to send our teenagers buzzing home, enthused by debate, fired up with ideas, and imaginatively placed at a different point from where they'd started.

After the flexischool ban

Strange forces are gathering in my world of education.

Not the mermaid on the toilet again! We kicked her out.

No, these forces are emanating from the political world in the form of steady drip, drip messages. Your child not in school - your child not educated. All children must be in school. Any child not in school is a child not accounted for.

But this sly restructuring to our fields of vision, to our understanding of education, is not being done through direct challenge to statute law. It's being done to how the law is interpreted; the guidelines issued from central government, the rules laid down and passed to local authorities, then commanded on to parents.

Take our recent flexischooling ban. The one where the Tory government just outlawed your hard-won negotiation to build an education for your child based on part-time attendance at school with one-to-one time elsewhere. Boom! Gone. Illegal overnight. As of last week, your flexischool arrangement is not allowed. Effected not through any change to law. But a 'defining of school attendance codes'.

Eh? This shift affects thousands of children whose parents have worked hard to achieve a personalised education for their child. But suddenly we have an insidious change wrought to our thinking about where education must effectively take place - school or home not both - and it's all coming from a school attendance code? It's all about the letter B?

Suspicious. What's the aim here? Where is the independent, informed analysis about this in the newspapers? Where is the commentary on the aims of Gove and Truss?

My bet is, the bleating from central government will be about funding. These are hard times with tough economic choices. But change to the interpretation of education law is not about funding, whatever they say. A deal could be stitched up to support flexischooling if the commitment was there: part-funds could be offered to schools, and that would be straightforward enough. So cash is the excuse, but the real reason is elsewhere.

Howabout, underlying this recent shift of education interpretation, is a shifted definition of what it is to be socialised.

Socialisation used to mean learning how to get along with other people in your community to get stuff done, but now socialisation is coming to mean something different - try conformity to a 'national vision', the adoption of particular forms of national values - where failure to subscribe to these aims is suspicious and alien.

But how to achieve this form of socialisation - of changing our expectations, cultures, and practices, to something akin to the new national identity - is a problem. Solution? We must work on the upcoming generations: bring together all children to central points where the correct interpretations can be taught.

This is usually where my brain takes a big kaboom. Because, educationally, Gove has built this rhetoric of diversity, choice, of maximum ranges of free schools and academies, where the language is all about freedom. This language seems to be so at odds with what I feel is happening in education - a tightening up of definitions from the centre, a hold over interpretation, a narrowing of acceptable practice, and a restriction on the practicalities of choice.

This is where I had a conversation with someone, and it was quite helpful. They said, Think of your educational landscape not as state schooling supplied free to all children, not as offering maximum choice for parents, not as a system rewarding intelligence, but actually as a regulated private market, whose dealings are opaque to the parent.

Imagine thousands of private schools dotted all over the country. They offer many types of educational provision. These private schools are run by educational suppliers. They operate independently with government approval, or they are part-funded by government.

Every child must be registered in their local area with an educational supplier, and every child must be signed up to one of the approved schemes on offer.

Each school is then accessible to a child in that region by several means - via allocation by a local body, via bursaries, via grants, or via scholarships. To apply for a place at a private school, you, the parent, must prove your residential status. If you are to apply for a grant, or expecting to support in part or in whole the school fees, then you must submit details of household income, your employment information, the taxation you paid and the benefits you received.

A market which contains many, many suppliers in competition with each other, which enforces administrative co-operation from parents, and yet which is managed centrally, has many advantages.

Presentation of your residency credentials, for example, prevents migrants from trying to drop their kids into a local school on a casual basis; the requirement of all parents to apply for an education grant or to provide information of their willingness to part-fund or totally support educational fees brings all citizens within the surveillance of the taxation and economic administration; and a regulation requiring all parents to register at a private school of whatever scheme ensures there is no opt-out, none at all.

They were describing the strange regulated world of private and state education in China. But heigh-ho, starting to look a lot like England.

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.

The nearly teens

The children are gone. One to the back of a horse; the others alongside their sleepover chum to a local conservation group to restore a path and a bog.

Leaving me free to kick my heels. For hours.

I walk about the house a bit. Then I make coffee. Then I put the laundry on. I don't mean wear the laundry, I mean stick it in the washing machine. Then I make another coffee, and wander about the house.

I think I may have the beginnings of a problem here.

Because now I ponder this - on this most momentous day, the day before all three of my children become teenagers - I consider how my life could change course.

To this point, I have been micro managed by children for years. I have been followed around by my three headed creatoids from the Planet BetaZeti for 12 years 364 days. They have argued over everything about me and my daily routine - what I cook, how I cook it, when I serve it; which cup, plate, bowl or spoon is to go where, and why it matters. Why I moved this piece of paper, where have I put it, why that is wrong, and why it should be put back on the floor.

But now, this last day before teens proper, with all my children gone, out the house, for hours, I am looking into my ahead years and thinking, Hey, my kids will be gone! With friends, pursuing interests in which I have no interest, gone doing worthy activities in a bog, and off and away.

Leaving me with no-one to complain about me, chide me, call me up, shout me down, spy on me, tell me off, shut me up or comment on how lunch is always a cheese sandwich and why having your mother wearing shoes like that is not appropriate.

Really, I should be pleased with this thought, when I will be parent to teens, taking them by taxi to their own weekend dates with their own peculiar kind. Then I shall reach that nirvana I have fantasised for; my years of teenage dropping off and picking up, otherwise left to arrange my own life, negotiate my own way, then meet up again to argue about lost keys, complain about lack of routines, disapprove of boyfriends and read out email threats from the maths tutor about missing exam work. How different life will be, to what is gone.

Then what comes next? Maybe a state of quiet household living will not be the dream it seems. When the children are gone, the house is quiet, I have made coffee, put the washing on, vacuumed the carpet? I will sit in my orderly child-free calm, not feeling composed, clear-minded and ready to do my own thing, but vaguely empty, aware that I am not doing anything interesting enough to be told off for it; waiting for my teenage children to come home to bother me, order me about, and tell me why those shoes I'm wearing are still not suitable for a woman my age.

What will become of me then? What can I do with myself? I cannot imagine myself adopting orphans or fostering blind kittens. I can only think I will have to mess up my remaining years in brilliant, bold style, hopefully with more extreme shoes than ever imagined, if only to bring about the arguments, reprimands and disapproval I have become so utterly accustomed to.

I went to pick up my conservationists early. This is what they did. The path and the bog.

 I would like to think they used only a pair of nail clippers and a sink plunger, but I doubt it. 

These days people trust my outdoors teenagers with real tools.

Sisterly advice

Big Brother Ghoul is fed up with Little Sister Living Death.

The problem, he says, is that I am so awfully positive! He is all She left me! How could she do that? There is nothing left for me in life!

Then I'm straight back there with, Think of this as an opportunity! And all Big Brother Ghoul wants to do, is bash me round the head with a wooden plank like we were kids again, then crawl away into a corner and die.

But, Big Brother Ghoul, look! I'm alive! Only on the outside, but it still counts, right? Yay me! So it figures that Grit's top ten tips must be good for something, so long as you add eat, sleep, take happy pills.

What Big Brother Ghoul needs to learn how to do, is to lie. He is too much in the way of truth and honesty. He needs to lie best to himself and thus he will keep the whole show going.

Lies are excellent because half of a lie is embedded in the horrible reality, but the other half is free to take shape and change according to circumstance. That is the bit you can make up as you go. It is your only freedom. Of course you don't have to believe your own lies. You know the fibs you tell yourself, of course you do. You're not an idiot! But retaining the capacity for delusion, for imagination, for fantasy, for exploration of all other, that is the special gift of the accomplished liar.

Think of it like this, like the butterfly, trapped in the mud. One wing is caught in the sticky dark goo and can't ever be free. But the other wing is beating and beating and, for the briefest of moments, you might imagine that the strength and power of that wing will lift the whole life free. You can believe it for the most fleeting of moments. That's the power of the lie. Better than the truth, better than the reality, I tell Big Brother Ghoul.

Big Brother Ghoul looks straight at me, like I am the mad one, then off he goes, to find a plank of wood.

And tell me what is wrong with modesty and courtesy

Doubletake Film Club today, plus an Art session with a home educating artist.

Latin? The tutor cancelled, due to icy roads.

I said Snow? Ice? No excuse. Spend time on Ten Ticks maths website instead then go out and scrape together an ice dolphin. Someone can help me prepare dinner and we'll watch Alec Guinness in The Ladykillers.

See, education officer slumped over your desk at the local council, helpless in the face of this week's snow closures?

Pft. We don't have to wait for the grounds to be gritted. Everyday is a gritty learning experience round here. I expect Shark, Squirrel and Tiger to bust into life and carry on with their activities through the blizzards, even when everyone else gives up.

Which brings me to my point about this.

Broadly, I agree. Except about the control over the 'secret garden, strip-tease culture'.

The culture is most certainly not out of my control, thank you very much. Culture is very much in my control. The responsibility is mine, and I am in charge of teaching it to three future citizens. I am not letting them grow up to blindly consume the tripe from the lowest common denominator or passively consume the dross without question. And the rules for behaviour are ultimately set by me, not by Jessie of 3G.

Say no to the sexualised imagery and land punches on the superficial garbage dressed up as freedom of expression that washes daily across the nation's television screens, monitors, phones, games and toys.

Do not adopt a helpless stance and sod off with the victim of corporate power. Take the power back. Boot out a school that's failing them and open a book instead. Turn off the TV, don't buy the games, restrict the phone use, keep tabs on the internet access, choose the friends wisely, and eat together - or as much as the family as you can muster - where you can argue out the 3Rs - Respect, Responsibility and Resourcefulness - then use the damn RRR to hammer out a few non-negotiable ground rules, and find out which ones the kids can't agree with.

As a last resort, get the offspring in the car, lock all the doors, drive them to the woods while delivering a moral assembly, then tip them out and put into action some values of mutual support and cooperation in finding the way home.

I have one final card up my sleeve, and it is to be utterly, totally, fearless when talking about anything and everything. Being open and receptive to any question means the children know to trust you, parent, to ask, at their own pace, to wonder at their own speed, and to learn by their own instigation.

Parent. Not state, school, government representative, local council officer, Lady Gaga, Mr Spooky from the corner, the NSPCC, Hot TV, Femail, website XXX, or Jessie of 3G.

And this, to me, is taking control of culture.

The lolling about in bed blog

The home ed life is so relaxing!

Except, obviously, for the general concerns about the unknowns, the daily trawl through the family politics, that dread of responsibility, the penury that comes from the loss of one income, and the abyss into which my head is routinely plunged - sink in there and I know for sure I've destroyed the future of my children forever and blighted their lives in a misguided educational experiment with no guarantee of reward.

Apart from that! The home ed life is so relaxing!

Take timetables. Home ed means that childhood is not a process of dancing to someone else's deadlines. No school makes me do the job I don't want to do for someone else's benefit. Specifically, I'm not whipping the entire family activity to fit in with school bells and homework diaries.

Better still, I get to divide up the week to my benefit.

Not only can I plan stuff the kids want to do - supportive workshops, field trips, museum visits, outdoor tours and theatre visits - I also specify no early morning starts, no 7am beginnings, no requirement to climb out of bed before 9am, and one afternoon a week I can fit in a swim. But it is cold, my bed snuggled toes are warm, and I'm waiting for the heating to kick in, so today, getting up can be 9.30. Or 10, because everyone is still quiet in their beds, reading.

The late start won't make much difference. We have squished into these last seven days the Whipsnade animal workshop, Shark's sub aqua, Latin lesson, Woodcraft Folk, homework afternoon, movie club, art lesson, science lecture, play away, Astro club, wildlife group, family reading (Nathaniel's Nutmeg), film night (Goodnight Mr Tom) and the installation of another bookcase.

This is very comforting to me, the woman who yolks together her control issues alongside the horror of knowing I have no control over time - but I have to say that having the responsibility for how the week divides up is not as bad as I once feared. Encouraging, even. I'll get up at 11.

What we leave behind

Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are taken off by The Hat to enjoy Proteus Theatre in The Secret Garden.

I mope about the house, lost. January blues have set in. Time is already overwhelming me. It slips by, doesn't it? When I try and catch hold of it, it's gone already, and I'm left empty-handed, wondering how did that happen?

Maybe it was Mr Death opening the year, catching us in the flick of his coat-tails, followed by the day we do best, which is sloosh about in water and mud.

Perhaps it makes me think. And the thing that I think, as I look forward to my age and stage of purple and grey, is that when you are young, you can fantasise about everything and anything and there is timeless potential to make it real. You can be anything. One day I am going to be a great photographer, learn to play the piano, travel to the Andes and learn to like watching ballet. More than that! I am also having the man of my dreams by my side with a permanent lust, I will have all the youth and energy at my disposal for any adventure required and desired, plus I will at some time in the future, unspecified, enjoy sipping cocktails, timelessly travelled to all exotic locations, perusing a train timetable, wondering whether we should hop along to Agra or Samarkand.

As the years come and go, those fantasies start to have a little less possibility about them. I'm not saying I will never attempt the Andes, or learn to like watching ballet, or board the wrong train and end up in Uzbekistan, because one or two of those goals are still just about possible, perhaps with the benefit of dementia to mislead me at the train station, but I am unfortunately starting to have a bit more pragmatism about my fantasies. I cannot delude myself as perfectly as I once did. There is an annoying squeak in my brain that tells me I will give up at the foothills because my fantasies now require a decent hotel rather than a back pack and a tent. And I know for sure I will only attempt the ballet if someone else is paying and the most comfortable seats in the house come with ice cream at the interval and no-one nudging and judging me if I nod off.

Worse, what I know I can't do, is everything else, unspecified. The whole potential of life. My one day's, might do's and could do's. Come 2013, I now have enough years to have acquired a few shrivellings and scythings, losses and lacks, and holes in the soul where a life should be, and I have the intuition that from here on, they are not going to be magically replenished.

I have decided I can do two things. I can kick out the pip squeak voice of reason and make my fantasies utterly brilliant and satisfying in any direction, comfortably safe from reality. And I can console myself with the thought that I will eventually leave behind the things that I have made or done, and hopefully they aren't only tears, a pile of unread bills and a horrible mess.

I cast around for my triumphs. They will be minor, and that is okay. They do not necessarily have to be beautiful, and that is okay too. Neither do they have to be permanent, nor cherished nor adored by strangers or onlookers. All okay.

Thankfully, the Arseface sisters seem to fit the bill. Maybe they just have to pass on something of love. Then that stitched-on smile becomes more important than anything.

Scared of England

No, really, I am. Especially, I'm scared of these.


The border officer.
Do you know, life in Hong Kong isn't filled with polite people who hold open doors for each other, smile in greeting, offer assistance, or say gentle words in social support? If someone smiles at you in Hong Kong, it's usually because they want your money.

Once - no, it was 16 January 8pm - a European gentleman held open a door for me in the IFC shopping mall. I could've kissed him.

I want England to be polite. I want people to say After you, How do you do, Please and Thank you. I want my first introduction to England to be warm and happy.

Like the border officer. I want them to be kind. They don't have to blow up balloons and wave banners or anything. Just smile, mean it, and maybe say Welcome Home.


Have they changed the money?
Yes, it has happened to me before. You leave the country for five minutes and the Bank of England does something, like whips off Elizabeth Fry's head and shoves up Emily Pankhurst.

It leads me into a social minefield. For the first few days I stand in shop queues, holding everyone up, scrutinising the money in my palm, looking like Scrooge counting out ha'pennies. If I get it wrong, the shop assistant is calling the security guard. I am clearly trying to pass counterfeit coins and dodgy notes.

England, please don't change the money and not tell me.


The tax office.
I would dearly like to avoid our liabilities, I really would.

We won't be able to, of course not. We are not skillful enough in finance. Neither is the accountant who deals with the multiple income streams. He isn't brilliant enough either to be a criminal mastermind. He merely sinks his head to his hands when he sees the plastic bags bursting with paperwork, then charges us another thousand pounds to sort it all out.

So I would just like the tax office to alleviate my fears of the worst, and be nice.

Dear Grit and Dig, nice to have you home. Don't worry about the tax demands in the hall until you're unpacked. We can come to some agreement over a bottle of wine!

(Ditto for corporation tax, companies house, people at the late filing penalties admin desk.)


The judgements, the judgements.
You can do nothing in England without someone making a silent social judgement about you on some level. Fear of negative judgement makes people afraid to be different, but they resent being the same.

Well, I must be brutally honest.

What with the hair, the kids, the lifestyle, the strange choice of foodstuffs, the talents to swig from a bottle and swing a punch while wearing a frock, I'm never fitting easily into a social niche (unless maybe it's eccentric).

But I make it worse, the way I walk about your High Street with my do I give a toss attitude, spouting the stuff that comes out of this mouth that I was born into. (Isn't that why people leave England in the first place? Because they feel like they don't fit? Thanks, Ed Balls and your version of the Labour Party.)

Even so, please England, be tolerant of me and mine.


The advertising.
This always scares me. I don't want to see images of semi-naked women selling stuff. We do not see a lot of this technique in public spaces in Hong Kong, unless it's a Western style campaign.

It makes me miserable that England so easily presents sexualised representations of women and girls; I'm genuinely saddened that the media spews out a diet of celebrity doings.

That's not going to change, is it? I'd better tackle my fears and introduce my girls to the pleasures of the spray can.


The local council. Especially the people sitting at the education desk.
Ah, yes, officialdom!

How I miss the jobsworthies, criminalising my every move! It is an irony to me that I feel freer in Hong Kong, being blatantly illegal, than coming to the radar of England, where I am legal but not wanted.

Have you a new person, a new broom, sweeping clean? Have you paperwork you would like to patronise me with?


The abusive relationship with the house.
What have you got in store for me this time, you bastard? Last time you flooded the cellar, took the plaster off in the bathroom, and let the mice live in your underwear.

You don't know how much I adore you. And this is how you treat me.

God, I love your wooden floors. Let me clean them for you.


The wardrobe.
Have you been harbouring those moths? Have you? I tried so hard to eliminate them from Planet Grit. Is Betty Jackson sitting in there, all chewed up? Even thinking about opening your doors is bringing me out in a sweat.


Bum. Now I think about this, what of the heartless Tory government, the Jubilee year, the dishwasher, the car, the exterior paintwork, the endless duties, obligations and responsibilities? And the man with the chainsaw. He wanted paying in December.

This is the stuff of nightmares, isn't it?

England, help me out. Can you folks just wave a cheery hello, show me your rolling green fields, and remind me why I'm coming home?

Taking comfort in geology? Weirdo.

Shhh - don't tell anyone, but I have ways of living in Hong Kong.

(I will miss.)

Yes, I know I said I hated the damn place. Shut up. But those other voices are right. There are worse places to be.

And I have suffered here! That always counts for something in a human, right? Emotionally, the last two years have been blasted hard work.

So I have had to look for, and find, consolation. That has come not in the Hong Kong shopping malls (although Starbucks and I Scream have helped), but in its impressive and majestic mountains, seashores, and rocks.

Even then my consolation has not been complete: I have imagined the heaving waters as Tiger's homesick sorrows, and the beach rocks her tears, picked up and pelted at me in fury.

So I am not about to admit I have found my immediate land and sea scapes my full spiritual comfort. These mountains, they are not home. They are hard work to climb, and sometimes the sea swell makes me queasy.

But I would say, looking over the experiences of the last two years, that I have grown a certain love for living on a two hundred million year island in the sea, where my thoughts are surrounded by beaten-up old volcanoes. I can trace with my finger their inside veins. I can see their broken surface, pricked with sparkle. I can see proof that solid can melt. I can watch great surges of waters from sky and ocean. And I can think about permanence and transition, the passing of minutes and millenia, and how all things change and stay the same.

We each get our kicks somewhere, right?

Today, while I come to terms with new realities and all the instabilities and insecurities of our future living arrangements, I make the kids and Dig take a walk against the sea and rocks.

Where I can quietly watch the rocks and pretend to everyone how we come here only for a Sunday stroll along the shoreline.

Ahh. That's better.

And just as well that Tiger is in charge of the route-finding to the tip of Ma Shi Chau.

And he has a shifty stare

We have completed our final discussions about the UK Education Secretary, Michael Gove.

The outcome is, he has to go.

Have you ever worked with someone you couldn't figure out? When, say, they implement a new policy, and you think, Eh? What's going on there?

Then you reason, they either just committed an act of alarming stupidity, or there is a master plan, and I haven't seen what it is yet.

So you waste your time trying to work out whether they are inept, or whether their latest action is an inscrutable step in a hidden agenda. If only you could make the imaginative leap to get there and see what's ahead!

For some time I have had this feeling with Gove.

When he visited China and Hong Kong in 2010, then went home to Blighty, he wrote this:

'the Government has been responding to the economic and social crises we face with big and comprehensive programmes. And nowhere has that been more needed than in education, where I am happy to confess I’d like us to implement a cultural revolution just like the one they’ve had in China.' (28.12.10)

My original reaction was, What an idiot! Doesn't he know what happened in the cultural revolution?

Now, I think his words were much more sinister and scary. It's a statement of intent. He was telling everyone exactly what he was going to do.

Yes, he's looking to effect a cultural change in the social status of teaching. He's going to label, ridicule, humiliate and bully teaching staff before throwing them to the loudest, most resentful voices of the parent population for the inking. He's determined to strip any final respect anyone can harbour for the profession. He's forcing schools to change, to become academies (whether they want to or not), as a means to destroy the present system. Once schools become a vehicle to divert public money into private hands, the role of every participant will be changed into a seller-buyer relationship. Yes, he's destroying state schooling. It is a cultural revolution. Mao already showed him the principle: destroy first and construction will look after itself. In Gove's reconstruction, that will be the market.

Thinking all this puts me in a problem. I believe schools need shaking up. They use a Victorian factory model that needs updating. I resent the simplistic worlds modelled for children via the curriculum, and I loathe the testing, the lack of flair, and the either/or/arts/sciences choices slapped over a child's ambitions like the cold hands of a corpse. School culture can be stultifying and deadening. Kids are locked away from the community. There's a lack of social mixing. Expectations drift to the mediocre. You can see the creativeness and inventiveness of new staff slowly ebb away. And I agree, there are some suspect and hopeless teachers, where it's difficult, even after years, to shift them.

Schools need to freshen their ideas, yes, but Gove's way?

So many, many more good people work hard in challenging situations with little room to develop professionally. They'll never see rewards in A grades, but are motivated to impact positively in a young person's life. Many parents want the fine responsibilities of education removed from them; they don't have the resources, time, or stomach, to put together an education alone. And many children want another place to go: for some unfortunates, the classroom is a sanctuary from a turbulent and destructive home life.

I don't want to see any of these people, who needs state schools, trafficked to corporates and privateers.

If Gove continues rearranging education, then yes, he'll be one of the most dramatic Education Secretaries we've had. But I don't consider that any glory. In the last few years, schools have been thrown about, driven by ideology, run by institutional mentalities, set up like businesses and been used as agents of social control. It's time they had someone who did less, allowed teachers more creative freedom, and listened to the ideas of scholars, educators, and children.

Truancy is a useful label

I noticed this story in the Guardian; school truancy figures of nearly 12,000 for last year, released by the Ministry of Justice following a Freedom of Information request.

I feel a bit suspicious about the whys and wherefores of this information. Don't know where that rat comes from. Maybe it's an unusual time of year for truancy scare stories. Maybe the article misses information. Maybe because the only response to an FoI on school attendance prosecutions I can find was nearly 6 months ago in June 2011. Maybe we're all being buttered up for something.

But I'm not a reporter, so I'm probably looking in the wrong place, at the wrong people.

Anyway, the story took the usual suspicions with it: pictures of hoodies, mentions of benefits. We all know the sort of negligent kid-producing types who couldn't give a toss, right?

Of course the story travelled around. I listened to one interview with a young woman whose father was about to be prosecuted for her sister's truancy. She painted a clear picture from her description, although it wasn't the one that the Ministry of Justice maybe preferred me to have, of quaking parents standing in the dock.

I could imagine the terrible meltdown a little girl might experience on reaching the place she dreaded. Then it was like a Greek drama. I knew what would happen on the day the headteacher arrived to strong arm this terrified child onto authority premises. I could see the school office, filled with big looming shapes of unfamiliar, unpredictable adults: a headteacher, admin staff, an EWO, the community police woman, smiling with her mouth when her eyes didn't mean it. In the middle, a screaming, out of control, nine year old girl, flailing helplessly.

A dramatic, traumatic, heart gripping moment of cruelty.

Yet the brutality continues; the characters take part, as if they are locked together to make it so. The local authority, threatening and brutal; a family, threatening and coercing; a school, threatening and demanding; a child, threatening and tortured. Going round and round, providing a public show for us all: a message that says, this is what Authority will do in the face of your willful defiance.

Why does it happen like this? It would be inconceivable that no-one involved in this trauma, and I guess in hundreds of similar cases, has not thought of the words school phobic or school refusing.

It's also inconceivable that these players remain unaware of one solution, home education. The omission of this, in descriptions, interviews, discussions, media reports, is like an elephant in the room.

That omission alone is strange enough to me, but I guess there are reasons for it. I don't know what, in the family I heard in the news.

I know why in some cases, from experience, of parents with children who won't go to a school where they're registered. Home education is the last thing the parents want to be pushed into. They wish to make no starry-eyed paradigm shift, nor jump to any philosophical conviction about learning. Taking a child off the school roll is simply not practical, nor financially supportable, nor necessarily how they judge the best interests of the child.

The family I am thinking of, closely connected to us, have determinedly avoided that description, home education, even though for most daily activity, that's exactly what it appears.

Battles between parent and local authority have been fought. Months, years of meetings, reports, attempts at coercion, declarations of legal standing. Years on, the child now receives funding for one-to-one home tuition, access to flexi-school arrangements on her terms, provision for exams, supply of materials, text books, and resources.

In that case, the issue is clearly now not about truancy, although in the beginning, it looked exactly the same. The parent worked daily to move the agenda from the authority's preferred spin - neglectful parent couldn't give a toss - to one where the local council meets its responsibility, under law of a registered school pupil, recognising, resourcing and properly financing an education for a special needs child.

Then the prosecutions I'm now reading in the media make a bit more sense: a hard up local authority wants nothing of the prohibitive cost that goes with SEN territory. Individual learning plans? One-to-one tuition? Flexi-schools? They can't have this sort of parental demand. Imagine what would happen if other school-refusing families got wind of paid-for arrangements like this?

Better isolate a school refuser, shout the label TRUANT, define the terms of engagement as persistent refusal, fight any suggestion of special needs, hide all unwelcome, expensive issues, blame the parents, keep everyone frightened, insinuate negligence if need be. Rip the family up. Shatter the child with brute force. Make it public. That course of action is much more cost effective.

So it's not always a simple case of truancy. When a local authority continues not to hear the reasons for school refusal, continues not to see the child, continues not to understand the parent, then yes, I can almost hear a person cry Now let me have my say in court.

Happy and bleak

I sent this article over by email. I received one back in return.

It's clear to me. We out-of-school educators, we won the argument on learning.

Schools can be grim, joyless, factory places; childhood thieves and spirit crushers.

They deal in mass systems, handle lives with minimum cost and maximum efficiency, order everyone in rigid structures and call it individual.

To say they are accountable, show you better that the system works, they intrude into your family, make daily, pointless demands, and thus control the hours and every days of pupils, parents, teachers.

And shutting your children away from the community! We have observed that for years, we people in your High Street. While we have been hiring public halls, taking over common spaces, using your libraries, museums, parks and high streets for learning, we watched the schooled children dressed to a kind and shut in boxes. Who's part of the community there?

So yeah, we won. The home educators were right. School is outdated. The world moved on.

I won't expect that people like me - gripers and misery guts - we who pull kids out from this system and holler from the sidelines, we won't enjoy any credit for shaping ideas about education.

I doubt any thanks will come to any of us for pointing out missed opportunities and putting the pressure on schools to change, even though in my world I've watched people turn lives upside-down, sacrifice friends, and chuck up careers to put into action what they believed in, what they feel is right in bones and hearts.

Nope, not us. It'll be mainstream educationalists in institutions who advance social theories and tell you the way forward. Thousands of inconvenient parents since Joy Baker will be swept away. We're the threatening ones, potential abusers, cranks, outsiders, freaks and loners, remember? Institutions need to keep control, and they don't do that by thanking the opposition.

But I think, in the next stage, the argument won't be about what education should look like. Glance over to some of the guiding ideas in our world. You can see what it's going to look like.

The argument will be about how much state/corporate involvement do you want in your lives.

The state/corporate will seek to assume control over knowledge in new and more fundamental ways than at present. They'll worm down to the organisation, access, and flow of knowledge. They'll want to structure it, order it, supervise it. They'll assume a role as regulator and monitor. When it is accessed by the young, the state/corporate will call it education.

Anyone might welcome that, or not. But where's the line? Where's the cut-off point? At which point will you say enough? A child's learning - their time, play, freedom to ask, explore, think, discover for themselves - this belongs to the child, and not to governments, nor corporates.