I am screaming

Hey! Parents who send your kids to school! Indulge me one moment. Imagine the government asks you six questions about your educational choice, and those questions assume you made your educational choice because, secretly, you would like to chain your child to a radiator, abuse them, beat them up, marry them off to your cousin and treat them like a slave.

Would you be a little pissed off by that?

You are standing in the shoes of many home educators right now up and down the UK, who are tearing out their hair in frustration, consternation, and anguish.

And it starts with this.

1. Do you think the current system for safeguarding children who are educated at home is adequate? Please let us know why you think that.

Excuse me? Are there different safeguarding systems in place for schooled kids and home educated kids? Don't all children have the same safeguards, the same rights, in this country? And what is the 'system for safeguarding'? What is that system? Do you mean Social Services? What have they to do with educational choice? Are you confusing welfare and education? Or are you saying that children who are educated from home need extra safeguards? Specific attention from Social Services? Welfare visits? Because their parents choose to have their kids educated from home, rather than school?

And does this question assume that we do not need to focus our minds, monies, systems, attentions and that ever penetrating 'welfare' searchlight on the kids at school? Let's go with that. Let's assume kids are safe at school, right? They are just there 'getting an education'. They are seen there by dinner ladies, staff, teachers, OK? They are with other children, of course!

OK. Maybe we have to assume kids at school are not a danger to each other. And they are never bullied, beaten up, abused, made terrified, or offered drugs. Neither does any kid at school give birth in a toilet, come home effing and blinding, steal cars, carry knives, guns or pepper spray, or get hooked on the pleasures of a vodka and lighter fuel cocktail. Not at all is their education completely trashed by the welfare issues they face.

And the studious hard working kid like yours who goes to school every day because they want to gain 8 GCSEs and 3 A levels? They have to sit there while other kids smash up the learning, destroy the lesson, disrupt the classroom, send the teacher fleeing from the room. I bet you never hear stories like that; how some crazy kid managed to destroy lessons that day, got sent out, suspended, excluded. Nope. Never. None of those things.

Like, for example, Wayne. In Grit's Hell School Wayne slapped a replica gun on the desk one morning in an English lesson and sparked mass classroom hysteria. That was nothing about Wayne's welfare issues intruding on his and everyone else's education, was it?

And then, Jim! Dear Jim! Where are you now! Remember that time you poured lighter fuel over the desk in the computer room and set it alight? Hey, because you were at school, and everyone knew you there as the brain-melted school drug dealer, that was OK! No special welfare issues there! Neither me nor all your little classroom chums needed protecting from you in any way at all, no we did not! We didn't need SAFEGUARDING!

Then of course there are those kids who attend school every day, who are 'known to the system', and known to many teachers. Those kids who are routinely beaten up, sexually abused, who won't go home because they are terrified, who one day find mum's left, dad's down the pub, big bro brought home his dealer friend, and the six year old is in charge of the baby. How slowly do the welfare wheels grind along there, so slowly that anyone looking at those situations would think nothing was happening to help those children at all!

No, we don't need to pay extra special attention to the welfare issues of these children educated at school each day, because guess what?

There is a little girl in Basingstoke being HOME EDUCATED.

And the state, who clearly cannot cope with the educational and welfare problems happening DAILY in UK schools, turns their attention to the parents of that home educated child.

But instead of saying, Hey, well done! What a bucketload of hard work! Can we learn anything from the way your child learns? the state suggests - makes that insinuation - that children at home are somehow, anyhow, unsafe, and that the SAFEGUARDS for these home educated children are unlike the safeguards in school: that scrutiny of welfare issues in the home is somehow inadequate.

So, hey, little girl in Basingstoke! What did you do for your education today? What? Cook cakes! Try experiments with water in the garden? Play with your friends in the park? Go to your dance lesson? Do some reading with mummy? Talk about how you'd like to walk the dog for the old lady next door?

NO WAY. ADMIT THE TRUTH, LITTLE GIRL.

ADMIT IT. You were tied to the radiator with worms pushed up your nose and then you were beaten with a wooden spoon and made to eat cat poopy soil and tomorrow you will be bundled into the car and married off to the mad-cousin-woman-beater and we can assume the people doing that to you are YOUR PARENTS and they are using HOME EDUCATION as a COVER.

Today, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger - the 8-year old triplets whose parents chose home education as the form of learning that would best match our family goals and suit the individual needs of these three children, and who are educated from home because of the appalling welfare issues disrupting education in schools - these three children of ours listened to the CD audio collection of Treasure Island. We then looked in lots of books to read about pirates, we studied the atlas, talked about Blackbeard, privateers, pirates, trade and wealth, before they scampered off to draw secret maps and stain them with tea bags.

This is of course all a cover for the Satanic rites we regularly engage in where we dance around the house naked and beat the children with goat heads.

So what it Grit's answer to the first question of the 'consultation' on home education?

No response.