Lord Frost calls out the Education Blob

Lord Frost calls out the Education Blob

Peer pushes back forcefully against current proposals to regulate home education, and spotlights some root issues at play here

What’s been said?

The Telegraph featured an excellent article by Lord David Frost on 16 January, Home-schooling helps us resist indoctrination. [Archive Today copy – free to read]

It’s perceptive, timely and very relevant to the thinking that is driving the Blitzkrieg progress of the Children’s Wellbeing & Schools Bill.

Frost begins by challenging the notion that just because the British rarely discuss the ideologies that underlie their policies, it doesn’t mean that they are exempt from their influence. He asserts quite the opposite:

“our politicians are very often the unquestioning slaves of the broader background flow of ideas.”

He then turns his attention to the current assault on HE in the ‘dreadful’ CWS Bill, making some fundamentally important observations on revised beliefs about the boundaries of state intervention and how these affect parents and their children:

“The coming attack on home-schooling is only possible because of the unspoken background belief, right across the political spectrum, that there is no aspect of life in this country that cannot in principle be regulated or changed by state action – and therefore that children are legitimately considered as much wards of the state as the responsibility of their parents.” [Emphasis added in all cases]

Timing-wise, he notes shrewdly that “the education Blob, in both parties, has seized the moment,” milking the Sara Sharif case for all it’s worth.

But the present episode is not just a minor blip in the state’s customary attitude of benevolence towards home education and those families who practise it, as Frost well knows. Aware that this anti-HE crusade has been going on for years, he summarises the back story with further insights into the motivation of the education Blob which, he claims,

“…has wanted to get tighter control on home-schooling for years. They hate the idea that children can simply be removed from schools and educated by their parents instead. The Blob sees schools not primarily as institutions for imparting knowledge but for imparting indoctrination about contemporary and progressive values. So proposals to control home-schooling have kept surfacing.”

The educational bureaucrats who hold that HE is a form of indoctrination would vigorously deny that schools are a vehicle for the same. Frost, however, was on the money about this one from his title onwards: “Homeschooling helps us resist indoctrination.”

Why does it matter?

After further specifics about the “whole new bureaucratic regime to which home-schoolers are subject,” Frost reaches the sort of question few politicians or journalists are willing to countenance:

“Is there actually a problem with home-schooling?”

“Not really,” he concludes, launching into a pithy comparison with the success ratings of the schooling system and asking,

“Which system is failing here?”

But, given the Government’s stated intentions re academies and free schools, his next deduction is nothing short of prophetic. If VAT on private school fees take these beyond a family’s budget and the parents are unwilling to turn to state schooling, where else is there for them to go?

home-schooling is a vital safety valve, the last refuge for those who can’t afford private school fees and whose local school is failing.”

Then he gets to the deepest issues of all, what it means to live in a free society. The expression of home education will inevitably vary from family to family, and “some parents will educate their children in a way the rest of us wouldn’t.”

But for Frost that is a risk far preferable to the bigger and more chilling threat he goes on to describe:

that we concede the right of the state to intervene on everything, to stop us deciding what’s best for our own children. Then we will have begun to eliminate private space altogether. Once we have accepted the principle that the state can set the rules, we have no ability to say back to it: “I hear what you say. But this is my family and I am teaching them my values not yours.”

Frost’s closing words demonstrate that he has ‘got this’ beyond a shadow of a doubt. He’s seen what’s at stake and he’s identified the issues with clarity and courage.

“That’s why keeping an eye on fundamental principle is important and that’s why we all have an interest in preserving home-schooling. Home-schoolers are not just doing the right thing by their own children but also maintaining the principles that freedom and autonomy are intrinsically important matters and that the state does not have the right to go anywhere at will. Whatever the cause, it’s not worth giving those rights away for.”

Are today’s home educators up to that challenge? What is securing the future of your children worth to you? Perhaps our collective boldness will encourage more people to stand with us and defend not just our freedoms but theirs as well.

What can I do?

Read this article more than once, and take time to assimilate the main points.

Please share it with as many people as you can, especially those outside HE circles.

Similar sentiments were expressed by Rebecca Smith during the Second Reading debate.

If you care about preserving any semblance of educational freedom and choice for today’s parents and those of future generations, amplify the core message of this article as widely as you can.

Frost was correct about previous attempts to regulate HE having been seen off, for a variety of reasons. But he sounds a loud alarm call now: “This time it looks like they are going to win.”

So now is the moment to do all you can, in a timely and strategic way.

Thank you, Lord Frost, and may your words be a wake-up call to all parents to value their freedoms enough to stand with home educators to defend them.