This latest round of government attacks on Home Education certainly seems to have stirred up a real hornets’ nest of opinion.

Home Educators are furiously writing letters to various government departments and I have seen numerous blogs devoted to subject, both by home educators and journalists.

The cynical side of me has to wonder why the government are picking on us now? What else, even more sinister, is going on behind the scenes that they want to divert people’s attention away from? Or is merely that our EU puppet-masters are getting impatient because the numbers of independent and free- thinking home-educated children are growing and not shrinking?

I really don’t know. However, I know it takes a huge amount of time and effort and energy to be fighting highly-paid, box-ticking euro/beaurocrats who have nothing better to do with their time.

Having fired off as many letters as I can, we have been busy with Home Education this week.

Stephanie is making great progress with her IGCSE Chemistry and is looking forward to taking Biology and Chemistry in the Summer.

Maths is progressing well for both of them.

I am enjoying teaching them the IGCSE English course, because there is  huge variety with it and the texts we are working with are enjoyable to read.

We have been working through a basic grounding in English Grammar and covering the different tenses. This is something that is needed for the IGCSE, yet neither of the girls seemed to have covered Grammar in school.

Speech and Drama is moving along really well. Stephanie is now progressing towards her medals, which give her UCAS points for University. The Musical Theatre part of this covered by Stagecoach.

We have also found that she can acquire further points through Music.

Jacqueline has been busy writing stories. She is such a talented writer. I am editing her books and stories at the moment with a view to publishing them.

Greg, my husband, took Jacqueline to the “Think Tank” in Birmingham, with our local home-ed group, last week. She loved the Planetarium, so we have got out all the books on Astronomy and the Planets to go through with her.

The week seems to fly by.

Have a great week.

Amanda Goldston

Tags: home education, igcse by Amanda
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Hi

I have just found a great draft response to this stupid government consultation.

The link is here.

Draft Response

Thanks Carlotta.

Amanda Goldston

Tags: home education by Amanda
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Hot on the heels of the last stupid Consultation over “Children Missing Education”, the UK government seems absolutely determined to prove that Home Education is merely a cover up for child abuse, including neglect, domestic servitude and forced marriages.

This article was in the Times newspaper and most of the press ran the same glib, copy-cat articles.

The Home Education community was up in arms last week as yet another consultation in Home Education was announced. This one, however, only gives us 4 weeks to respond instead of the required 12 weeks.

Responses have to be by the 20th February 2009. Here is the link to the consultation. You can only fill it out online.

Consultation Response Document

Beware, the questions are very “LEADING” in the way they are written.

I presume this is to make sure that as few families have access to it as possible. Home Education groups only found out about all this through someone from the press contacting Education Otherwise about it.

Clearly we were not supposed to know about something that could affect all of us.

Please pass the link on to as many home-educating families as you can.

The reason that has been given for the short period of time is that it is a “matter of public interest”. Requests made under the Freedom of Information Act to explain this urgency have been ignored.

Requests for actual statistics to show exactly how many home educated children are abused, neglected and forced into  marriages have been ignored. No figures have been produced, either for this current consultation or for the last one.

Even Scarier

In my view this whole thing is to give Local Authorities power to force their way into our homes and attempt to force us to comply with the rules of their failing sheeple-driven education system.

The ultimate goal is clearly to make home education in the UK illegal, as it is in most places in the EU.

Even scarier than the document we can fill out, is the 60 question (so-called independent) questionnaire that has been sent to Local Authorities. This has to be completed by 2nd February.

Local Authority questionnaire

Some examples of where all this is heading:

Q51 Thinking about your local area, in the last five years, how many cases have you come across that use the premise of home education as a ‘cover’ for child abuse, forced marriage or other aspects of child neglect?

This is a case of total “Guilty until proven Innocent.”

This latest attack has caused total outrage as you can imagine. There is now a Facebook group set up to lobby the government over this matter. Please join and add your voice to stop this stupid nonsense.

Facebook Group

If people can pull together and get Gordon Brown to back down over concealing MPs expenses, then we can achieve the same result with our rights to Home Educate our children.

As a parent, I just wish they would leave us alone to get on with the job of educating our children. However, we have to make our voices heard so that Home Education is not made illegal in the UK, so that we follow the instructions of our French and German Masters in the EU.

Please take action, fill out the consultation, join the Facebook group and protect our rights to Home Educate.

Amanda Goldston

Tags: home education by Amanda
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Hi

Well, we are into 2009 already and January is flying past.

Over Christmas we had a family review of everything we are doing and put our plan together for 2009.

All the regular activities are now back in full swing.

Stephanie is doing her IGCSE Chemstry course  this term. Both Jacqueline and Stephanie did their Biology course last term. Whilst they both did very well, we decide that Jacqueline is still a bit young for the exams, so we are putting that on hold for the time being with her.

On the subject of IGCSEs there was a brilliant article in the Daily Mail earlier in the week. It is called GCSE backlash and talks about the increasing numbers of private schools which are now doing IGCSEs, instead of GCSEs because they are – well- better preapration for A-Levels, University and life in general.

All these schools are now bottom of the league tables because the government does not recognise IGCSEs.  So children educated in the top fee paying schools and home educated children are now getting the best education! LOL! That is so funny!

We are now working towards getting Jacqueline’s stories published into physical books and updating her Pawing Photographs website with more videos for teaching children about photography.

She just written a couple of poems for writing competitions, so we will see how she progresses.

English, Maths, ICT, Speech and Drama are all proceeding as normal.

Great start to the year.

Amanda Goldston

Tags: exams, home education, igcse by Amanda
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