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Home truths for city MP
Parents who choose to teach their children at home say meddling officials need to be taught a lesson.
Some Sunderland families feel the best place for their children to learn is with them, but the right to home educate has been questioned by a new Government report.
Education tsar Graham Badman has recommended tightening up the rules on home schooling, including forcing parents to register as home educators and keeping a closer eye on how they teach their children.
He set out 28 proposals after being asked to consider systems for keeping children safe and making sure they were properly educated under home schooling.
Catherine O'Neill-Walton, 32, from The Broadway, Sunderland, is one of a number of Wearside parents fighting his recommendations.
She teaches daughter Julia, five, at home and fears the Badman proposals would erode part of the reason she chose to home educate in the first place.
"We would have somebody from the authority coming out to help make plans, but it hasn't got to be so prescriptive. It doesn't work that way," she said.
"Julia chooses what she wants to do and we work from there, so she's more engaged in it, but by the end of the year I would like to think we would be at the right stage."
Catherine, an English teacher at Monkwearmouth School, shares the responsibility of educating Julia with her mum, Brenda, also a teacher.
The five-year-old attends Barnes Primary School each morning, which her mother says makes sure she gets the social side of education, and spends the afternoons with her family.
Catherine said Julia attended school full-time at first. However, Catherine felt Julia was missing out on the activities the family did with her little brother Joseph, two, and thought she would be best working at her own pace at home.
The mum is very concerned that she may now be forced to apply for a "licence" each year to teach her own children and stick to pre-set plans which may prove unsuitable.
Home schooling organisation Education Otherwise is campaigning against the recommendations of the Bradman report, calling them "disproportionate intervention for a problem which has not even been proved to exist".
Members are also concerned that failing to register as a home educator would be a criminal offence, and that part of the application process would involve their children being interviewed alone at the family home.
As part of the campaign, Catherine handed over a petition with dozens of signatures to Sunderland North MP Bill Etherington.
The MP said he recognised parents' concerns and defended the right to home educate, but said he felt there needed to be some sort of monitoring in place.
He said: "It's a very, very old right to educate your own children, but I think there does have to be some sort of deferment on what children are learning. It's very, very difficult to get the balance right."
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Thursday 09 February 2012
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