Badman review blasted by MPs' inquiry

jennie clark - 17 December 2009

How can we expect local authorities to hold accurate data on home educated children if registration is voluntary? How is the LA to find out whether children are missing from education or are saftly being home educated? The logistics needs to be considered.

John Bennett - 16 December 2009

The Badman report was ill-informed, amateurish and biased. A pity that Balls did not recognise this before he adopted it in its entirety.

It is difficult ot conceive of anything more certain to alienate the home-educating committee than this appalling lazy piece of work.

Louisa Southey - 16 December 2009

As a home educator I tentativaly welcome this report, however I fear that with relationships between Local Authorities and home educating families at an all time low, many will not want to register voluntarily. The home education community is collectively bruised by the vicious attack it has had to endure from the Badman review which was compiled with this 'less than robust' data. Actually 'less than robust' is in my opinion an understatement as during a recent meeting with my local authority we established that the data they provided was possibly inaccurate by up to a third. They claimed they were not able to cross check or update the infomation they provided. We only discovered this after Graham Badman requested further data which showed this discrepancy and we questioned the LA about this. Home educators accross the country have had to spend vast amounts of time and energy into opposing this unjustified attack on them which was actually brought about by the governemnt's own laws in relation to truency. Local Authorities have been advising the parents of truents to claim they are home educating to protect them from the courts or their children from expulsion. However rather than look upon this as time away from our primary objective, many of us have used this in the education of our children specifically with regards to victimisation of minority groups, how parliament works etc. Although we are diverse in many aspects of our lives we came together to fight and protect our choices, perhaps this is the greatest lesson for us all.