Has the Children’s Minister Got the Right Priorities?
Civitas, 20 January 2009
‘Making sure children are safe, well and receive a good education is our most serious responsibility… However, there are concerns that some children are not receiving the education they need. And in some extreme cases, home education could be used as a cover for abuse. We cannot allow this to happen and are committed to doing all we can to ensure children are safe, wherever they are educated.’ So said Children’s Minister Dame Morgan of Drefelin.
She did so in explanation of her Government’s just announced decision to conduct a review of the procedures currently in place for monitoring standards of care and education of the country’s estimated 50,000 children in receipt of home-schooling.
Clearly the state has a perfectly legitimate interest, indeed an obligation, to ensure all children growing up within its jurisdiction receive adequate care and education.
However, one has to wonder about the timing of the Government’s decision to conduct this review, as well as the sense of priorities that it displays. The announcement of the review comes on the same day as newspaper reports that many secondary schoolchildren now turn up for school wearing stab-proof and bullet-proof vests.
It also comes not more than a few days since release of the 2009 School League Tables for England and Wales. These showed that almost 400,000 schoolchildren, half the relevant age-group, failed to obtain 5 GCSE’s, including maths and English, at grades A* to C. That level of attainment is the Government’s own benchmark of a satisfactory education. Over half of the country’s state secondary schools are reportedly failing to ensure the majority of their pupils leave with such grades.
In light of these facts and figures, it would seem that, if Dame Morgan sincerely wishes to take her ministerial responsibility seriously to ensure the country’s children are both safe and in receipt of a good education, the review she urgently needs to institute is not that of the monitoring of home-schooling arrangements. It is rather a review of arrangements for ensuring the safety and education of children attending its publicly-maintained secondary schools.
Fat chance.
Yes I do.
I cannot see that there is much of a principled distinction in considering the state to have a right and an obligation to protect children born within its jurisdiction from suffering physical harm through assault or neglect, and considering it to have a right and obligation to protect them from suffering that harm which would befall them from being allowed to grow up without benefit of an adequate education.
Such an obligation was recognised by such classical liberal authors as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, so, in believing as I do, I don’t regard myself as having strayed outside the classical liberal domain. Indeed, I consider those libertarians who deny such an obligation to be the ones who have done so.
By the way, nothing in what I believe requires that it should be the state itself that provides or decides the exact content of the education that I believe it has both a right and obligation to ensure all children receive growing up within its jurisdiction.
It no more does so than the fact that the state may legitimately demand that all car drivers have obtained adequate third-party motor insurance before taking to the wheel demands that it should itself be in the business of supplying motor insurance to would-be drivers.
Clearly, I would welcome the error of my ways being pointed out by those who think otherwise than I do.
John
I would really like to hear David answer your question. Implicit in that statement seems to be a belief that nanny really is looking out for our greater good.
“Clearly the state has a perfectly legitimate interest, indeed an obligation, to ensure all children growing up within its jurisdiction receive adequate care and education.”
Do you really believe that the state has an obligation to ensure that all children growing up within its jurisdiction receive adequate education??