What's on the news today

Jayne, who educates her three children aged nine, 12 and 15, said: “A lot of us feel the proposed changes are not about benefiting the child but about control. As the current legislation stands we have a very free system and that is a good thing. We want to protect it for people who need to make that choice in the future.” Read more...

Plans to force home-schooling families to register their children with local authorities are “not a good use of public money”, according to a member of the Local Government Association’s Children and Young People Board. Read more...

Rising numbers of parents are being fined for taking children out of school for cheap term-time holidays. Read it here.

Homeschooling Family Granted Political Asylum

“This decision finally recognizes that German homeschoolers are a specific social group that is being persecuted by a Western democracy,” said Mike Donnelly, staff attorney and director of international relations for Home School Legal Defense Associaton.

“It is embarrassing for Germany, since a Western nation should uphold basic human rights, which include allowing parents to raise and educate their own children. This judge understood the case perfectly, and he called Germany out. We hope this decision will cause Germany to stop persecuting homeschoolers,” he added.

Read more here. The story also appeared on the Guardian, the Deutsche Welle, the Local, and in spanish here.

UPDATE: Commenting on this, Ed West says here that the British Government is trying to make homeschooling even harder because he suspects many of the parents are religious.

Dealing with truancy, the american way

Simple! Tag the children with GPS Tracking Devices!


More here and here.

Select committee criticises plans to monitor home-education

The Select Committee Report is now available here. Pdf version here.

Balls's plans for home education should be scaled back, Sheerman says. Select committee criticises plans to monitor home-educating families as 'too aggressive'. Read it here.

Change urged for home-school plan - Parents who choose to home-school their child should not be forced to register with their local council, a cross-party group of MPs has said. More here...

More parents 'educating children at home' - Growing numbers of parents are shunning state schools to educate their children at home, according to MPs. Here.

The Big Question: Should the parents of home-schooled children be forced to register? - Why are we asking this now? A report by the House of Commons Select Committee covering education, published this morning, is highly critical of the Government's plan to tighten up on regulations governing home education. Read it here.

Badman review blasted by MPs' inquiry - A cross-party inquiry into Graham Badman's controversial review of home education has labelled the government's handling of the issue as an unfortunate episode. More here.

LOCAL NEWS

Home truths for city MP - Parents who choose to teach their children at home say meddling officials need to be taught a lesson. Read more...

Home schooling petition launched - PRO-HOME schooling campaigners have submitted a Parliamentary petition aiming to block legislation designed to give education bosses ‘stronger powers than the police’. Read more...

Parents fury at plan for lessons in home - Mother Jo Coulter, who educates her nine-year-old daughter Stella at home, said:

“I am absolutely horrified at the thought that in the name of child protection, thousands of children would be subjected to this degree of exposure to strangers within their own homes. We are automatically being treated as if we have done something wrong. It is deeply offensive that families like mine should be subjected to this degrading treatment. Why stop at home-educating families? Why not extend these measures throughout the land to cover all homes? After all, schoolchildren only spend around seven hours a day in school. Why are they spending all this money to police home education? There are already systems in place through social services to protect vulnerable children. They are knocking on the wrong door.”
Read more...

Despite all the opposition, some MPs criticise absence of home-school regulation: Parents who teach their children at home should be more closely monitored by local authorities, a group of MPs have said. Read more...

Bad regulations for home educators

Graham Badman asks local authorities to identify the number of home educated children who currently fall into categories as stated in the attached letter by 1 October 2009.

Other news:

How Much Should Government Regulate Home Schooling?

Sweden—the Next Germany for Homeschoolers?