My oldest daughter is due to start school in September next year and applications for state schools will be due around Christmas. One often hears stories about families moving house in order to get their children into a good state school and I must confess that I used to think these people were mad, but I don’t any more. I am considering moving country.
As I wrote last month, the new sex education (RSE) curriculum has come to Wales where I live and as of September 2022 is compulsory. The leaflet from our local “Church in Wales” school says so in two places on one page: “RSE will be mandatory for all learners from September 2022” and “from September 2022, parents and carers will no longer be entitled to withdraw their child/young person from RSE”. We get the message.
The same leaflet has a diagram of two naked children covered in red, green and amber spots. The spots denote which part of the child’s body people are allowed to touch. The private parts have a red spot over them, which means: “I don’t want anyone to touch me here”. The shoulder, forearm and calf have green spots, which mean “It’s okay for anyone to touch me here”. The most mysterious one is the amber spot – “It’s ok for some people to touch me here” – which is placed on the hand and foot of the child. I am desperate to know who can and who can’t touch my own child’s feet and on what basis this decision is made. Am I allowed to touch my own children’s feet? So many questions.
According to friends who have children at the school, the parents are “really excited” about the new curriculum. They express this excitement at the school gates and on parental WhatsApp groups. In many ways, this worries me more than the existence of the curriculum itself. I would have thought more of parents. If they don’t disapprove, surely they must at least find it funny? Apparently, generally, not.
The other schooling option for us is the Catholic state schools which are significantly further away but manageable in desperation. As I have mentioned before, when it comes to RSE, the Catholic schools deal with it in their own way, which is to be applauded. But then there is the Welsh curriculum in general which seems to have done away with proper subjects entirely, choosing instead to teach lessons “thematically”. The three themes via which all lessons are taught from age 4 to 11 are “The best of me”, “Our planet, our home” and “groundbreakers and change-makers”.
At this point, it looks like I am going to have to move my family abroad or start home-schooling. And having done some research into home-education, I have not been surprised to discover it on the rise in Britain, and not just among Catholic families. According to the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, as of October 2021, there were 81,200 registered home-educated children in the UK, up from 60,500 in 2019.
Several factors are contributing to this, explains Joseph Shaw, a teaching fellow in philosophy at Oxford university and a Catholic home-educating father of nine children. “Most recently, the Covid-19 epidemic gave parents a chance to see school materials they would not normally see, and to experience first-hand some of the reality of teaching their children at home,” he says.
“Although now in danger from the proposed Schools Bill, currently before Parliament, the UK’s legal regime on home education is quite liberal and parents should certainly consider fulfilling their duty to educate their children more directly, whether they do it personally, through tutors, with the help of home-education collectives, or some combination of these. Children need their parents’ help to navigate the increasingly dark world we live in, and parents need to get to know their children, their talents and their vulnerabilities.”
When you start looking, there are indeed many options out there for home-schooling parents, and home-schooling Catholic parents in particular. The arrival in the UK of the Catholic “Regina Caeli Hybrid Academy” in Bedford is interesting. It supports home-educating Catholic parents by having their children in a classroom setting two days a week, and providing the curriculum for when they are at home. According to Roy Peachey, a home-educator and author who helped with the academy when it first came over, it offers a solid classical education and has developed a distinctly British character despite its American origins. If all continues to go well, more such academies will undoubtedly follow.
Home-schooling sounds exhausting and certainly not something I would have imagined considering, but with the various support systems out there it seems that parents who aren’t natural teachers can act as facilitators without having to take the entire weight of the teaching upon themselves. With private schools becoming more and more expensive and state schools teaching children less and less of what actually matters, who knows if home-education won’t start moving closer to the mainstream.
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