I have signed this petition

- and will be promoting it, for what good it'll do, given that this government no longer seems to be taking input.




The petition is here and the wording is as follows:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to uphold that parents have the primary responsibility for the upbringing and development of their child, to not undermine parents legitimately fulfilling their fundamental duties, and to assume that the best interests of their child is the basic concern of parents unless there is specific evidence to the contrary. In particular, the government should ensure :-

• No right of access to the family home without evidence of a crime
• No right to interview a child alone without evidence of risk of serious harm
• No CRB checks or registration for parents to look after their own children, or to informally look after those of their friends, family etc
• No licensing / registration / assessment / monitoring of methods by which parents fulfil their duties without evidence that they are failing to do so, and with specific recognition that education “otherwise” than at school is a perfectly legal option to fulfil their duty regarding education
• No undermining of parents as being in the best position to determine how to meet their child’s needs, according to their age, ability, aptitude, and any special needs they may have
• Greater focus on applying existing resources and procedures to cases of children known to be at risk, rather than dilution of these resources by routinely monitoring whole sections of the community
• Compliance with the fundamental presumption of innocence unless there is specific evidence to the contrary.

I like it because it covers everything without adding any compromising, lets-meet-them-halfway sort of bits that I can't put my name to. And its author has put her name to it! I'm proud to say that Jill Harris is a Calderdale home educator, with whom I'm yet to disagree on anything.

Other things that are going on include this new wiki, about which I'm a bit less sure, though on which I need to spend some more time before I take a position I think. I'm not in favour of groups of people meeting up to work out what's to be done about us, as if we were a problem - because we're not! So if the new wiki is working along those lines, then I won't be supporting it. So far it looks like it contains the bare bones of info, in much the same way as Dani's great, one-page leaflet does (copies of which I'm printing out to take to our home ed meeting tomorrow).

Meanwhile Graham Stuart, who spoke so well for us in Parliament last week, via a lady called Leaf Lovejoy, has asked for
Twitter messages from us which set out, in 140 characters or less, our objections to the bill. I've been thinking for over a day now of how to condense all my thoughts on this down to 140 characters and am no closer to doing so! I was also introduced to a new word (for me) yesterday: e-prolixity. Hmm. The cap fits: I think I'll wear it.