Badman report on the review into home education

For the last ten years our children have been growing, playing and learning without interference from outside agencies, yet if the author of this report has his way, after the 19th October we will be acting illegally. Will we have suddenly started to abuse our children? Or neglect them? No. We will be acting illegally because we choose to autonomously home educate our children. One of the recommendations of this report is that "At the time of registration parents/carers/guardians must provide a clear statement of their educational approach, intent and desired/planned outcomes for the child over the following twelve months." Anyone who knows anything about autonomous education, and from this report it is clear that Mr Badman neither understands nor wants to learn about it, knows that this recomendation is a nonsense. I can no longer say what my desired/ planned outcomes of my children's education over a year would be than I would be able to accurately predict the weather. In fact predicting the weather would be a darned sight easier. My children learn what they learn when they learn it. End of.

 People are often incredulous when I try to explain it to them, my own family included. It is hard to let go of the belief that in order to learn something children must be taught. However over the last ten years I have had it proved to me by my children that this is not necessarily the case. My ten year old son taught himself to read at the age of six with no more input from me than reading books to him. My seven year old daughter is teaching herself to read in a totally different way, which works very well for her. I began to worry about my son learning to spell as he is a reluctant writer, yet when I asked him to write about his dreams, as he is always telling us about them, he typed a fairly lengthy piece on the computer which was word (and punctuation) perfect except for one word - tortoise. He really didn't need to be discretely taught to spell. He reads so much for pleasure that spelling comes with it as easily as crawling, walking and running did when he was younger.

These desired/ planned outcomes will have to be agreed by a LA official. This seems odious to me as I will no longer be responsible for  my children's education. Someone else will. If I try to circumvent this directive by stating the very minimum I expect my children to achieve I can easily imagine that the official will say it won't be enough. My only hope is that the official assigned to me and my family will be sympathetic to AE. It seems unfair though that I have to cling to the vague hope that this one person will understand our approach.  

To say I am dismayed by all this would be to understate my feelings hugely. I am devastated. The pain I am feeling at the thought of the loss of our way of life is akin to being told that a dearly loved relative has a terminal illness. I am losing sleep over it. My waking moments are filled with fear and panic. I hate feeling like this.