NSPCC and government: hand in glove?

Our government's department for children, schools and families repeatedly suggests that home educating parents need to be checked, vetted and monitored to ensure we are not abusing our children. (This is despite the only case of home educating abuse being cited - Eunice Spry - being regularly monitored and assessed by her local authority for years, though apparently none of her professional visitors noticed the blatant abuse of her foster children.) The call for this latest attack on home educating freedom apparently originates from the NSPCC, specifically its Child Protection Policy Advisor, Mr Vijay "We.. the inf.. We don’t have the evidence there statistically, no," Patel, but the NSPCC is so dependent on government funding now that it's difficult (but not impossible!) to work out which one of them is actually coming up with the ideas.

And yet two years ago the same department ran another consultation to decide whether the paid childcarers of children over the age of eight should be Ofsted-checked and monitored. This particular decision has to be seen in the light of the recently announced abolition of Income Support, which means that single parents, including home educating ones, will soon be obliged to earn money to pay their rent and bills, using whatever childcare arrangements they can access. This means that there will be some cases in which home educating parents have no choice but to leave their children with childminders who, due to that decision, will not be vetted, checked or monitored.

So by this logic, parents are to be seen as potential abusers, but random unregistered paid childcarers of children over eight, are not! How can we parents be deemed fit to select a non-abusing childcarer, all by ourselves (or have one foisted on us by DWP at risk of losing our income) and yet not to be left alone with our own children?

We understand that it's just easier for the powers that be if we all, without exception, obediently send our children to school, go out to work and pay our taxes, thereby doing away with those pesky family bonds and so on, and that it's probably a bit of a pain that this has to be acheived by creeping increments in the form of 'consultations' in case too many of us notice what's really going on, but would it take too much effort to at least make the whole thing hang together with some kind of logic?

The NSPCC, incidentally, didn't like the plan to allow those childcarers to go unregistered. "All children must be afforded the same level of protection and safeguards, regardless of their age, the time they spend in childcare and by whom the childcare is provided," it said. (Does this, then, include children in schools? Apparently not, because we don't see any Full Stop campaigns about that, do we?)

[Many thanks to Elaine for pointing out the above incongruities to me. And if she can lay her hands on the relevant figures from the NSPCC accounts that we also discussed, I'll add those in as well.]