The Shape of things to come...

If you HE you will know there is another government consultation. I say another, but for me this is the first consultation I have known about. This is because until April last year I was unaware of home education in all its confusing wonder. I didn't even know it was an option. Home education was to me one of the best kept secrets in the country.

Before this time my daughter was due to go to a school that I didn't like, with children whose faces looked washed out and sullen, and be taught in a way that reminded me more of hitler youth than a fun place of learning. I visited this school on a parents evening and spent an hour listening to the Head Teacher telling me and 70 other parents just how they would deal with bad behaviour and how only those with talent would be accepted in to the choir/ football team/ chess club - these were seven year old children. I came out of that meeting feeling sick to my stomach and knowing that my daughter would hate it there or become one of the child driods I had seen modelling the correct way to wear the school uniform that evening. It was a chance comment from a friend that led me to take this path, and now I am on it I really don't want to leave it.

I am a new home educator, I am still very much learning the ropes and finding it both terrifying and challenging. It is a challenge I am willing to take on though when I see how much my daughter has benefited from just these few short months of being out of the system.

She is free to be herself. She doesn't have to like "xyz" because that's what every one else likes at the moment and she'll be the freak in the corner if she doesn't go along with it. When she had some old school friends to sleep round the other night, she was able to plaster herself in (wash off) tattoos and paint her nails five different colours without worrying what the teacher would say on Monday morning.

She can spend all day dressed as a fairy, a police woman or a nurse, and not be shamed or ridiculed by classmates for being a baby.

When the weather is fine, which is fleeting in January, we can take our studies to the park or the garden, or we can put them to one side for a few hours and make the most of the sunny dry spell and ride bikes or scooters.

In these few short months of home education, my daughter has asked me more questions about the world and its contents than she did in three years of school.

Yes, I am painting a rosy picture of home education and of course there are days when it feels like all I have endured is tears, tantrums and despair, but I can comfort myself that these tears have been caused by not being able to remember the six times tables rather than Sophie in year four sneering at her for wearing the wrong kind of hair bobble, or worse.

My daughter tried Junior school. She gave it her best shot and she hated it. To have to tell the happy confident little girl I am getting back that she would have to endure the perils of the playground again would break her heart and mine, so I ask any one who reads this blog to think long and hard about why the government need to do this consultation, what statistics they are basing their concerns on and whether any children's lives will really be saved by restricting home educators freedom to teach their child in a way that they see fit.

I don't want to see any child abused in the name of home education, but I also don't want to see any children forced in to an abusive school environment in the name of child safety.

If you want your voice heard, then go here.