Way to spend a Friday

Spend two hours with a bill.

Not like a bill strapped to my face or anything. I'm not taking part in a kinky ornithologist's porn movie you know.

Not bills headed Final Demand either.

Bills before Parliament. Go on, yawn now. Especially at The Children and Families Bill, clauses for Special Educational Needs.

This is just something that all good home educators have to do. Along with the educating, the cooking, house maintenance, visiting of educational centres, the laundry, picking out apple tree branches embedded in your child's forehead, removing staples from someone's hand and maintaining a constant stream of sleepovers to the end result that it looks like we're running a shelter for delinquents.

Because yes. The wording does suggest the local authority takes responsibility to screen all children, just in case they need special educational provision. Here it is. Number 22. It's caused a lot of fuss in my world.

22 Identifying children and young people with special educational needs

A local authority in England must exercise its functions with a view to securing
that it identifies all the children and young people in its area who have or may
have special educational needs.

With a view to securing? What language is that? Are they going to march all toddlers to a local designated testing point, where they'll be passed or failed according to a set of targets? Your child assessed by Acuvision. Or maybe every health visitor will grass you up to an educational services support company on whether your kid is chewing or sucking their alphabeti-spaghetti. And is this where the local authority outsources yet more record keeping to a private company (Capita)? But where's the money coming from to support national assessment? Or trained staff? What other parts of the law is this interacting with to change our landscape of choice? Who pays?

See? All these questions flow through the good home educating mind if we are to maintain the laws of freedom in this country, or at least before we're all knocked over together by a big tank called indifference driven by the general public.

It's a job in itself, deciding whether or not to get worked up about the wording of bills before parliament, and I haven't even started the proper work of writing a response or drafting an email.

Well, I just thought I would share this with you, because I don't have enough to do, what with scrutinising legislation before parliament, planning a chemistry session, booking tickets for a cunning little vixen, imposing on the little grits some Latin declensions, organising the fencing (must get chest measures), making a goth owl notebook, replying to 34 emails, taking Squirrel to her Astro club (must get cash), opening a letter from the bank, and offering misguided relationship advice to my broken hearted Big Brother sitting miserable and alone in Suffolk.

Hmm. Now I've written out my Friday to-do list, the idea of spending the day with a giant bill strapped to my face while I star in an ornithology porn movie is sounding strangely attractive.