Children Missing Education???

There's been a lot of concern in blogland recently (eg here, here and here) about mission creep, especially in the way that policy guidance and local authorities are now approaching home education from the viewpoint of Children Missing Education.

Only today, I learned of a local home educator who had challenged her LA visitor when this official mentioned home education and Children Missing Education in the same breath. Apparently, the LA officer very quickly backtracked to the position of "It's not you, of course, your provision's wonderful, but there are others ..." (etc, etc). But it's not about a single insulting instance, it's about the way that the two terms are becoming increasingly linked in the standard, unexamined parlance of government and local authority officials. In the minds of stressed workers, whose minds are probably far more obsessed with whether or not they will have a job next year, it just becomes easy to lazily and unquestioningly use one term interchangeably with the other.

And this is dangerous. Like other stock phrases like "You're making a rod for your own back" or "If you don't listen to me it'll end in tears"(there's a great list here), if you repeat a thing often enough it becomes accepted as right and proper. The less we challenge the nomenclature, the more at risk we are.

Our children are not missing education. There are plenty of children in schools who, for one reason or another (undiagnosed special needs, bullying, shyness about voicing bewilderment) ARE missing education. But the assumption is that only those outside of school need to demonstrate that education is indeed taking place. Once again, home educators appear to be seen as guilty until proven innocent. Only months after Badman, it looks as though we have a new fight on our hands.