Prejudice and accountability

On another subject (school readiness) a member of the Education Select Committee said:

[38:40] Ian Mearns - "...We've talked earlier on about youngsters not being school ready - three and a half, four year olds coming into nursery you know, not toilet trained, can't sit down and eat a meal at a table, can't dress themselves, can't functionally communicate! And yet those parents could have had access to a Surestart Children's Centre but haven't accessed it. And the barriers that we've talked about you know, drug and alcohol abuse, and some things are just bone idleness on behalf of parents. All of those things. How are we going to get these young children and save them from their parents inability to engage with the services which are available?"

I just wanted to explore a bit of non-home education context to this series of posts about the session, because the world is changing.

In the one about home education support, the prejudices were left to a different member (as Grit's already mentioned) :

They want to avoid school. Imagine! (Who did he think he was talking to?!)

This was balanced by Graham Stuart's reassuring assertion that we are not a high risk group (sadly an assertion that only needs making since the Badman Review.:

Pat Glass was concerned about elderly abuse. Not abuse of the elderly, but potential abuse [of resources] by them!

And, perhaps more sensibly (and interestingly, straight after Charlotte Leslie's questions about us all speaking with one voice, rejected by the panel and whether a specific change in the law was required, ditto) accountability:

I really like Jayne Richardson's reply to that:

Absolutely, we take on full responsibility. Asking for government funding - as Pat Glass said - puts us firmly in the 'accountability' bracket, and I don't want to be accountable to Government for my children's education, so I don't ask for funding.