Every Child Matters - what does it mean?

Every Child Matters (ECM).

A bit confusing, isn't it?

Our ex-government wished us to believe that we parents should be told what we want for our children. We want what most parents want. We want healthy children who achieve what they are capable of and we want them to become independent of us as and when they can.

The ECM five desirable outcomes are:

Be healthy
Staying safe
Enjoying and achieving
Making a positive contribution
Achieving economic well-being

Of course, the ECM agenda only related to England.

"However, at a deeper level Every Child Matters is a language game or discourse - a favoured way of thinking that is imbued with the full weight, authority and power of the English state."

There you have it. The ECM, like so many other productions of government, is a language game. As a language game, it includes those who play the game and excludes those who don't. It excludes those people who believe that the government should butt out of their children's lives and get on with their own business.

"As a power based construction of reality, this favoured way of thinking not only expresses an entitlement for England’s children and young people, but also inherent within it is a potential to exclude some groups of children, young people, their parent(s)/ carer(s). The Every Child Matters way of thinking has the potential to enmesh formal and informal educators in an unquestioning participation in the cognitive and semiotic traps of the ‘brand’, and in the assumptions, taken-for-granted beliefs, language games and the premises and practices inherent in that ‘brand’, which,

'While they create a way of seeing and suggest a way of acting, they also tend to create ways of not seeing, and eliminate the possibility of actions associated with alternative views of the world. (Morgan, 1986, p 202)'"

Since home education is an alternative view of regular or school or state education, then we immediately have a problem, Houston.

So the emphasis is on a bunch of symptoms, like childhood obesity, and the real wound, the real culprit dividing folks and engendering problems in society is the lack in some families and the overabundance in other families.

"In taking a shallow focus on such ‘symptoms’, attention at both national and local level is diverted away from deep and widening health inequalities between advantaged and disadvantaged communities in England (Department of Health, 2008)."

Once again, the shell game distracts us from the reality that underlies the lies in Every Child Matters:

"...as Wilkinson (1996) argues, it is from deeper inequalities in socially divided societies that negative physical and psycho-social health emerges for children and young people and also for their parents/carers. Linked to this are questions about the ‘invisibility’ of major aspects of children and young people’s lives within the five outcomes. For example, the whole question of spirituality is not mentioned anywhere in the outcomes framework."

"Inherent in Every Child Matters is a seductive and powerful potential to enmesh formal and informal educators in an obedience and passivity that may run contrary to our vocation and calling: to participate in a favoured way of thinking that glosses over, or institutionalises the invisibility of deep structural inequalities in contemporary English society. In engaging with the information and critique offered in this article, my hope is for formal and informal educators to be reminded of their active choice in how we operate in our roles and in our practice:

Whether as autonomous self actualising practitioners who have, “...a disinterested love of her fellows and an understanding of the aims she is pursuing and the methods of so doing - in other words, a mature person with knowledge, judgement, objectivity, and a sense of values in social affairs” (Younghusband 1947, cited in Jeffs, 2006).

Or, as an unquestioning technician of a favoured way of thinking promulgated and sanctioned by government – inherent in which is a specific and particular moral order."

I think most home educators saw through the role of technician during the threatened Badman and Balls invasion of our country of home education.

We are not technicians; we are autonomous self-actualising practitioners raising the next generation to the art of autonomy and self-actualising.

Quotes from http://www.infed.org/socialwork/every_child_matters_a_critique.htm

To home education! An alternative and a reality. May you be spreading your light forever.

Lords and tainted ladies

I suppose you'll have noticed that Lord Soley and Baroness Deech are demonstrating their total ignorance and complete disgust for honest and ordinary people in Britain.

Dear Lord and Lady, congratulations on being Labour or Lieboor stooges. Congratulations on falling for the utter and contemptible balls uttered by, er, Balls.

Since you subscribe to the principle that, to be one of a group containing a criminal indicts and condemns you, perhaps you will consider the implications of that thought.

Lord Taylor of Warwick is being investigated for fraud.

"POLICE have begun a fraud inquiry after a Conservative peer received more than £70,000 in expenses by claiming to live in his mother’s home, which had been sold off when she died.
The move follows a Sunday Times investigation last month which raised serious questions about the probity of Lord Taylor of Warwick’s expense claims.
Taylor, a former barrister, part-time judge and university chancellor, was claiming allowances for peers living outside London when his home has been based in the capital for 18 years.
He attempted to claim his main address was in Solihull, West Midlands, between 2001 and 2007 because he was looking after his sick mother. However, she died in 2001 and her house was sold at the time.
Peer claims £70k for home that does not exist
Labour peer claims £100,000 for empty flat
He said later that he had lived in “a number of homes in the Midlands over the years” but would not say where they were. However, a close family member said Taylor had not had a home outside London since he moved to Ealing in 1995.
Following the Sunday Times article, the police and Crown Prosecution Service decided there should be a formal fraud investigation.
Taylor stopped claiming expenses in November 2007. There had been a Freedom of Information inquiry that month about his declared principal home.
Baroness Uddin and Lord Clarke of Hampstead are also facing criminal investigation over their expenses after reports in this newspaper."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6832360.ece

So, if Lord Taylor, Baroness Uddin and Lord Clarke are found guilty, you will be guilty of fraud also.

What? you shriek. You're innocent, you say? You've never pinched as much as a postage stamp? Why should you be punished because other people 'might' be guilty of crimes?

Heh, heh. Does that matter to me? You're a lord (or a lady) and you're tarnished with the same tar as the Lords and Ladies who might be lying and cheating the public purse (which is, of course, jingling with money conned out of ordinary folks). Yep, sirree, you come from the same stable so you must be the same as them.

You're not innocent because you belong to a group containing felons. You, personally, may be a pure-living chappie, but your colleagues in the top house 'could' be fraudsters. They 'might' be criminals.

If you're innocent - which of course is possibly true - I'll give you a break. I'll let you prove you're innocent...

Go on, then, hire the legal aid and prove to this country that you haven't been salting away our money behind our backs. What are you waiting for? I cut you a break.

Prove your innocence. Do it. Now.

No can do? Okey doke, I'll give you another break. Instead of just imprisoning you on suspicion of being a criminal, I'll impound your bank accounts, and I'll send a representative along from the local authority to look under your own private bed for the cash and check the mattress for lumps (potentially betraying the whereabouts of more filched loot). Then I'll question the servants to find out how many houses you have.

That's not right, you cry. How can I prove I haven't swindled? How can I prove that I'm as white as the driven snow...?

Don't ask me. I'm busy wondering how many children will be sent back into a hell-hole of a school and commit suicide because you condone 'checking' their homes and some off-his-nut-with-power local authority prat decides the child will be better off in school. You imply that any home educator can be an abuser, and they have to darn well provide evidence to brainless power-addicted automatons that they, home educating parents, aren't bad for their kids.

Oh, lord, what's good for the goose etc.

Give a thought to what you sow now because you're darn tootin' the whirlwind will be swerving your way soon.

The Newness of the Year

Hi all,

Happy New Year. Happy New Decade.

To sum up this year, I've had a roller coaster of shocks and horrors. I've had swings and roundabouts of downs and ups. I have had distorted mirrors throwing up daft reflections. I've missed a few ducks floating past in the circle of bright water. I've changed and grown.

I've been astounded and dumbstruck by the idiocy of those I thought knew better than me. And now I know that I am my own measure, I need no other. I am confidence herself as she unfurls her beautiful petals because I seek not to trammel any wild thing.

I wish everyone goodness. I seek not to conspire to hurt or grieve another human being. I no longer think that what I think is right for another person IS right for another person.

I wish with my aching heart that the world was fair and full of undeniably radiant spirits who care for other people and desire the best for them. But I haven't aways found that.

I hate jobsworths and interferers and those who look at me and know what I am and look down their sharp noses at me because I don't dress in Donna Karan outfits or tote Lulu Guinness bags or totter around in Jimmy Choos. My dog knows me and loves me and sticks his wet muzzle on my knee in the confidence that I won't belt him because he's ruined a fortune in clothing. He knows I'll ahh and stroke his loving little face.

What I can say, from the debris of my belief in politics, politicians and local authorities, is that whoever picks up the pieces from the disaster caused by a wrong decision should be the very one considering and making the decision in the first place.

I cringe at the thought of seeing all those little ones who were damaged by school being forced back into their cages by mechanical actions of clockwork toy public servants.

I thrill at the thought of being part of a group of people who will not lie down and be walked all over by big government and small cogs in dreadful institutions. I am amazed at one group of human beings who have risen to every challenge, knocked their blocks off working and thinking and evaluating and re-evaluating and calculating and writing and re-writing to protect the dwindling rights that we parents are scrambling to hang onto. I speak, of course, of home educators.

What a bunch of splendid people.

Awesome!

Thank you all for standing your ground, for going the extra mile, for engaging the treadmill, for challenging evil and just generally being so wonderful.

Here's to a year full of success for every person whose child or children are educated or who are educating from a home.

You're just the very best.

Select Committees and all that jazz

The trouble with Select Committees... well, there are a few troubles with Select Committees. The first is that they are made up of a bunch of people who – er – want to rule the rest of the population. That is an odd thing to want to do. Personally, I don't seem to want to rule anyone, except myself and I have a darn difficult time doing even that on occasions being as I'm so multi-layered and mysterious.

Another trouble with Select Committees is that they have to read a tremendous amount of information in a fairly short time. How can they sort out the chaff from the wheat? It would take me a couple of years to properly digest what some interesting and erudite characters have had to say in support of home education and some fascinating points they have raised too. I'm proud to call myself a home edder.

Of course, I've had a tremendous advantage. I belong to some lively and thoughtful lists with some incredibly dedicated folk adorning them so I've been able to sharpen my little Shrek pencil as I've watched their amazing contributions to the outstanding learning opportunity afforded by home education to even the parental contingent of the home educating family. Me, in fact.

Yet another concern of mine about Select Committee is that they employ discreet language. I want to shout Balls is a moron and Badman is a (er, I cannot think of a suitable thing to shout. Perhaps the DCSF would like to consult on that. Suitable names for Badman. It would probably be as meaningful as consulting on a suitable education).

Then, again, there's the fact that people sitting on a Committee are not exactly unbiased. They are biased in many different ways, but one specific way is that they will be biased towards state schooling. If you skin the average person you will find state schooling writ large upon his or her heart. It's a strange thing how something so potentially damn dreadful, and no matter what atrocities of either the educational or bullying kind were perpetrated upon you, you STILL insist that 'they were the best days of mah life.' What PR school has enjoyed. How deep it has sunk into the societal bedrock. What crap it is! So much so that, if someone brings up all the terrible, soul-destroying happenings in his school, he finishes by wiping a tear from his filling eye and blowing his filling nose at the very thought of the old alma mater.

It's like the most insidious of abuse cycles.

So, we have those worthies of the Select Committee, all with their various Party lines, and their multitudinous prejudices listening variously to the rapidly sinking and almost incomprehensible muttering Badman (an upstanding representative of their kind of man) and the bright, inquisitive, alive responses from home educating children and their families.

What is a man constrained by the likes of Ed. Balls to do?

How are they to look their leader in his dark eyeballs if they deploy the nukes on the pathetic heap of prejudiced garbage that is dignified by the name of the Elective Home Education Review.

One of my first thoughts on sighting the Committee report was that they still have not realised that parents are the best ones to parent and are best placed to decide which form of education suits their own children and that local authorities underlying remit is to destroy home education and get those children into school.

So we have home educators – totally committed parents – and we have local authorities, some with fine representatives but others, a lot of others, with no darn clue about any kind of an education at all and a serious blind-spot which makes them avoid the facts looming up to crash into them. The facts are that the school system does not work. I would say it does not work for everyone but the longer I live the more I believe (there's that word again) that school DOES NOT WORK because it is predicated upon force.

And, however men like to spin it, force does not conquer all.

Overall, it's a 50.3% from me for the Select Committee Report. They criticise Badman, yes, they'd have to be blind, deaf, dumb and living inside the mountains not to know that Badman's so-called report is fit only to line our budgies' cages. Yet they haven't caught on that it is the parents' duty to choose the mode of education for their children. The parents' duty. Not the government's, not Balls', not Badman's, not Barry Sheerman's, not the MPs', not the paranoid LAs'.

You know it's practically impossible for a child to avoid getting an education. They're born to it. They question as soon as they wake up and talk. They do it because it is an instinct. You cannot deny a child an education, but you can choose which education – in accordance with their wishes – that they will get, even if that's one that they select for themselves (this is called the autonomous way).

That's the kind of Select Committee I approve of.

A blissful afternoon...

We've just got back from seeing Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

An afternoon of swing and sing and dancing. A time of clapping and emoting as Joseph got sold into slavery by his brothers (ah, that sounds familiar. Wonder where I've heard that before?). But Joseph, he rises again, even higher than the heights of being his father's favourite sonhood.

He becomes Pharoah's favourite Minister. He practically runs Egypt because Pharoah is so busy being an Elvis Presley look-alike.

I bought the tickets some weeks ago. I was asked how many adults and children. I said I didn't know because some people call a sixteen year old an adult and some say people that age are still children. The nice lady on the desk said, "If they are under 18, they're children to us!"

Thank you, Playhouse.

A row of schoolchildren sat, wriggled, talked and laughed behind us. I wasn't asked for my CRB check or tapped on the shoulder and told to move because I was seated near our fragile young and I might be one of them. (Home educators or paedophiles)

There were elderly people swinging their canes, children in school uniforms, middle-aged folk munching on scones and sucking drinks through straws and all of them, jigging about, singing along and clapping their 'ands orf.

Wonderful.

Great musical. Great cast, full of energy and enjoying themselves.

Great audience. All ages, full of interest and wanting to enjoy themselves.

Not a suspicious glance around. No police. No bother about tickets. No worrying whether or not we were going to be picked up as those weird home educators and returned to our home because we were AT LARGE and we should be ON THE EDUCATIONAL PREMISES.

Great afternoon.

So, you see, it can work. This being in the world and not checked or stopped or shown disrespect or hassle.

We can be normal. Life can be good.

Life is good.