not back to school picnic

Last Wednesday, home educating groups up and down the country held 'Not Back to School' picnics, to celebrate the start of the new school year and to draw attention to/object to the proposals currently being considered by government to substantially increase the monitoring of home educating families (see my 16 August post).

Interestingly, the consultation that resulted in these recent proposals was initiated because of concerns for the welfare and safety of home educated children; the review found no evidence that home education was being used as a cover for abuse or arranged marriage, which were the specific concerns, but still proceeded to make a long list of recommendations for significant monitoring of all home educating families. The government is now conducting a further consultation to see which of the recommendations to implement and to assess the implications of doing so; as part of this, the man (the wonderfully named Graham Badman) who led the first consultation is currently desperately trying to dig up further evidence from local authorities about 'vulnerable children who are home educated' because the initial consultation was based on 'a small sample', so they are trying to provide the government with 'more statistically rigorous information'. It doesn't exactly give one much faith in those setting the policies that they plough on with these heavy handed tactics regardless of lack of evidence and using statistically unreliable information.

Anyway, back to last Wednesday ...... We went along to a Not Back to School picnic in Southampton, organised by the SEEDS home educating group that we belong to. We haven't managed to get along to many SEEDS activities over the last year or more, so it was great to catch up with our friends from that group. Hopefully we will be able to get over to Southampton more often over the coming months. The Southampton picnic was very well organised, with a great turnout from SEEDS members. They had also arranged for the local MP and local paper to come along and find out more about home education and understand the concerns about the Badman report. And someone did a short video about the picnic too (see end of this post).

Ready to leave for the picnic - because of the press coverage, and to make a good visual impact, everyone was asked to wear brightly coloured t-shirts. Many people did t-shirts with slogans about home educating or the SEEDS group. We made some batik ones for Tess & Brodie to wear ........

Tess chose to do a heart ......

It may not show up too well here, but unsurprisingly, Brodie chose to do a train (we used a stencil for the outline) .....

Everybody at all of the picnics around the country blew bubbles as a unified symbol of the campaign (as this was something that had featured in a previous protest in Brighton that received quite a bit of media coverage) .......

Here is the video made at the Southampton picnic.