In which I appear on Radio 4's feedback re home education

This week I was invited to the BBC studios at Lincoln to be interviewed by Roger Bolton for Feedback on Radio 4.  My reason for contacting feedback was that Winifrid Robinson had presented a programme called "Out of School, out of sight" for radio four which had been broadcast a few days earlier.  Depending on when you are reading this, you may still find it on the iplayer.

The programme started with an interview between Winifrid and a someone from the family who had withdrawn their children from school allegedly in order to home educate, who had told their family they were moving to Dubai, and had decamped to Syria.

For some reason, Winifrid believed that if the family had been registered, this would not have happened, ignoring the fact that when a child is deregistered from school the local authority is automatically notified by the school, and therefore is "registered" on a list of electively home educated children in that area.

Starting the programme with that case set the wholly negative tone of the programme from that point on.  The programme makers were definitely of the opinion that registration and inspection were the answer for children who were claimed to be home educated and clearly were not being home educated, in the face of its own evidence that this is not the case.

Two of the problem families, a mother struggling to home educate child who was threatened with a pupil referral unit if his attendance didn't improve, and a Jehovah's Witness man who had been home educated by his mother, were subject to regular inspections by the authorities... and yet this didn't appear to be helping or have helped.

Ignoring that, the programme went on to interview a couple of actual home educators, firing questions such as "What qualifications do you have to be a teacher?" at one poor woman, and spending some time on the continued breastfeeding of the other.  Neither of them appeared to have any problem with inspections or registration.

In fact, the styles of home education, the benefits of home education and the success stories of home education were not a part of this programme, which a BBC statement claimed was entirely commissioned to concentrate on the children slipping down the holes in the system, either because they were not being educated suitable to their age ability and aptitude, or because they had been opff-rolled by a school desperate not to have their results cluttering up their test scores.  However, as I told Roger Bolton on Feedback, this was not obvious from the programme and was not stated anywhere in the programme.  It was presented as though the freedoms that home educators rely on were the problem, and if these were withdrawn everything would be fine.

I feel it gave a very unbalanced and negative view of home education which was not in keeping with the ethos of the BBC, and should be rectified with another much longer programme studying the positive aspects of home education.  Or maybe that's a programme we will have to make ourselves.