Educational Support At Home to Be Scrutinised.
By Alistair Owens www.keen2learn.co.uk
The DCSF have decided to introduce a checking procedure to home learning. Ofsted, the lambasted schools inspection body is to also handle home learning inspections to asses educational standards against the national curriculum.
Many parents with the requisite skill and dedication have opted to teach their children at home. The educational values achieved are ultimately measured by a child’s performance in GCSE’s. The progress en route is clearly monitored intimately by the parents. Assuming the ultimate achievement is the educational success for their children the home schoolers must be at the pinnacle of personal involvement.
There is an obvious duty to ensure children are receiving the educational content that will benefit them and society in adult life. Granted the system should assess the ability of home school parents to achieve that goal. But the tests should be at the onset of the task. Perhaps this can be achieved by emulating how we monitor house building projects, through planning applications, building regulations and inspections. A similar process could be introduced for educational at home, but once the inspections are complete the parents can perform the tasks unhindered by further inspections.
The real problem in the short term is the choice of the inspectorate and the size of the problem. Ofsted are already overloaded dealing with 33,000 schools, failing to achieve the objective to become proactive in improving schooling standards. Potentially they are being asked to handle a further 30,000 inspections in homes. This may break the camels back and we could witness Ofsted crumbling into a pile of terminal bureaucracy.
