Knitting for Britain

May and I are busy knitting. She knits slowly, carefully and methodically, in her germanic way. She keeps her knitting carefully rolled up in a wicker basket, which fits so neatly on her arm. I hurry through mine, dropping stitches, missing patterns and sewing it up with a burning thread. I ram it into plastic carrier bags, dropping the needles down the side of the couch as I tidy it up. She knits to make herself clothes, I knit to calm myself down. She is still on her first jumper, I have a wardrobe full of brightly knitted socks, jumpers and hats. I still manage to sleep, I function as a responsible adult and I don’t jump when the phone rings, so it must be working.

On Saturday afternoons May comes over, with her basket over her left arm. We take out the growing handiwork and marvel at the colours and the textures, repairing any faults and discussing the pattern while the kettle boils. Saturday afternoons are her oasis of calm, after caring for an over-active toddler during the week. Her oasis is my chaos, as I rush around looking for teapots and clean mugs, sweeping children off the sofa, tripping over gaming station wires, sorting out Pip’s anxieties and listening to yet another of his hairbrained schemes, not agreeing to them but not refusing them, in a determined effort to keep his temper sweet in front of guests. After the tea is brewed I put the cup beside her feet, so that someone will knock it over before it goes cold. The coffee table is rammed against the far wall, with a lazy stack of Nina’s birthday presents covering it.

May and I then pick up our knitting and start putting the world to rights. What is it about women ? The older they get, the more political they become, the more they grumble and the more they seek out and campaign against injustices. I suspect I would just sit at home, quietly whining, if I was alone in this, but May and I goad each other on, planning our campaign of awkwardness and public moaning.

And we do make our moans public, anyone who hasn’t heard us must be deaf. We plan visits to our local MP, questions to prospective parliamentary candidates and petitions. May even confronted one in the vegetable aisle at Tesco’s. We perfect our arguments over our knits and purls, ready to unleash them on the unsuspecting public. And we are so careful to choose our grouses. Not for us some trite, Daily Mail, Middle England battle. Rather we choose some obscure government plan, made on the hoof, designed to placate the Daily Mail reading public, for which we feel we are especially knowledgeable, in contrast to the rest of the country.

So what is our most recent problem ? Home education.

We don’t have a problem with it, to the contrary, we love it. Both of us have used it for all of our children, in desperation, when traditional schooling just didn’t fit their needs. As we sit there knitting, our passion for home education exhudes through our pores, as we reminisce over the marvellous, dedicated earth mothers who make home education such a diverse, thriving community. They say that reluctant converts make the most rabid worshippers and we worship the ideals of home education. Both May and I chose home education when there was no alternative, when we could no longer placate our children or offer them any hope. I home educated for 6 years, saved Pip from the misery of mainstream school and met some wonderful and inspiring people. May continues to home educate her special needs son and he is a wonderful credit to her.

The government, however, sees us as a group of potential abusers, failures who want to brainwash their children and propagate their own disturbed views against schools. We are all keeping our children off school to hide our crimes and to prepare them for early and unsuitable marriages. Or maybe we are using home education to hide the most evil of crimes – a refusal to accept childhood immunisations ? Who knows, but we have to be identified, numbered, questioned, investigated and tested.

As with all games of chinese whispers, some of the message got lost in the telling. We started off as potential abusers, but the word potential seemed to disappear with the telling and retelling. Before long I had other mothers patiently telling me that home educators keep their children at home to hide their crimes. But in truth, home educated children are usually to be seen in the community, being educated in the streets, parks and museums which are available. The only time we stayed at home was when the home education inspector warned us of truancy patrols, which he knew would upset Pip.

I have a particular hatred of the new home education bill, which cannot be explained away just by happy memories of halcyon days, surrounded by my children as we discovered the marvels of the natural world. My dislike isn’t a salute to the friends I made during those times and it isn’t a snub to the teachers who ignored Pip’s obvious disabilities, accusing him of stupidity and laziness to cover up their own ignorance. I hate the home education bill with a vengeance because I’m fed-up with experts trying to put square pegs into obviously round holes.

My biggest gripe is that all of the experts I have met, for all their expertise, experience and qualifications, are not experts. They don’t understand the needs of children, they don’t understand the day to day upsets and anxieties of vulnerable children and they can’t appreciate that text book methods aren’t the only ways to bring up children and in some cases aren’t even an appropriate way of bringing up a particular child.

I could write about the dozens of children I know, who’s needs are not being met by the experts, but for the sake of simplicity, I will just mention Pip’s. Pip clearly had problems in nursery. While other children were happily dressing up, playing and listening to stories, he sat there in a corner, unable and unwilling to join in. The only time he became animated was during the story time. Rows of children would sit there, their heads raised, expectantly, at the teacher. Pip would grudgingly sit awkwardly, his pudgy arms folded but the hands in tight little fists, a scowl spreading across his forehead. The story would start and Pip’s anxiety would increase. He would shout out, walk towards the teacher and stroke the pictures as the assistants would reach out to catch him and control him. He couldn’t tell them that he hated stories, could only listen to facts and hated sitting down to listen to something new. The teacher thought she was setting a routine, with milk and biscuits quickly followed by a story but it wasn’t a routine, it was a different tale every day, a change from the familiarity he craved. The teachers could see that Pip came from a chatty family and that I enjoyed an easy and loving familiarity with him. His withdrawn and unhappy behaviour at school must have made them realise that he was having problems with the school itself. I look back at his old school reports at the time and they all describe classical Asperger’s Syndrome but no-one at the school thought to treat him like a child with Asperger’s.

The teacher and her assistant hatched plans to get Pip to conform. They brought out a star chart, explaining the logic, the research and the years of experience behind it. It lasted a week. Then they arranged for the assistant to sit beside him, that lasted for a couple of days. Finally, they arranged to teach him a lesson. An hour later, when it was clear he wouldn’t stop howling, they called me up to arrange collection. Over the next few weeks he sobbed out his experiences to me, of being dragged along the corridor, into the reception class, to be humiliated in front of the older children. The teachers denied it, but his sister had watched it all. The teacher, furious that I questioned her professionalism, came round to my home and harrangued me on the door step ‘Do you know how much you are ruining that boy without disciplining him ?’ ‘We were only doing what was best for him, he needs a firm hand’ ‘He was setting a bad example to the other children, we had to teach him a lesson’ ‘You are totally ruining Pip, he’s going to end up bad’ ‘Do you really want him to end up as some sort of scientist in an ivory tower ?’ Then, and now, I’d have given my eye teeth to have that sort of security about Pip’s future. Besides, I argued, his Dad was a scientist in an ivory tower and it payed the mortgage. As I slammed the door, my body slid down the wall and I sat in a crumpled heap, sobbing. I was the failure, they were the experts, it was just such a shame that Pip had to be so upset when they took him in hand.

Over the next three years, and three schools, I kept reassuring myself that Pip had to conform, that he needed the sort of discipline that schools offered, that he’d soon knuckle down and succeed. But he turned into a sullen, taciturn child who distanced himself from everyone, including me. I became used to teachers taking me on one side and explaining to me that I wasn’t up to much as a parent, somewhere amongst the school drop outs, child neglectors and drug addicts.

Finally, after some relatively mild event, which even I, in my downtrodden state, couldn’t accept as ‘good teaching practise’, I went home and asked my husband, Jay for advice. It’s never a good idea to ask Jay to take responsibility for anyone other than himself, I could see he was getting angry but I was desperate and I forced the issue. The next day he had told the headmaster that we would be educating Pip at home.

When I look back over the 21 years of marriage, I remember few things which Jay gave to me. He refused to buy jewellery as I already had a wedding ring, when he was the sole breadwinner he objected to wasting his money on me, besides, he gave me housekeeping money every month, which nearly covered our food bills. I look back at those 21 years and I remember he gave me fear, confusion, poverty, three children, a roof over my head, Pip’s home education and finally, my freedom. I will remain forever thankful for the last four of those.

Years later, emboldened by my success as a home educator, I fought to get Pip into a specialist school for communication disorders. After an amazing honeymoon period things began to go wrong. Staff began to leave, being replaced by inexperienced and untrained temporary staff who couldn’t maintain any sense of order in the school. Behaviour deteriorated, morale fell and chaos ensued. The headteacher sought to hide the problems by lying to parents who complained. Dissatisfied parents started meeting up to discuss the problems. We complained to her employers, to OFSTED and to the Department of Chidren, Schools and Families. It was a waste of time, as the latter two didn’t even listen. Her boss probably did and she looked for another job but not before she had written to our local authorities, accusing us of abuse, inadequacy, and cruelty towards our vulnerable children. I can honestly say that the accusations against me were totally unfounded and the authority took it no further. However, not all parents were as fortunate. Two parents were investigated and were asked to put their children into care voluntarily. One of them, already in a caring profession, stands to lose her job because of the accusations.

And these are the experts, the trained professionals, the caring and committed people who know so much about our children that they can rise above our unprofessional, inexperienced inadequacies and can meet the needs of our children where we fail them. These are the people who will be coming to our homes and inspecting and judging our provision for our children.

In the meantime, May and I just sit and knit, waiting for this world to calm down