A diligent lurker sent us this job posting for Doncaster council, who are looking for someone to fill the position of ‘Elective Home Education Consultant’:

Elective Home Education Consultant

Reference:
0402774
Employer:
Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council
Location:
South Yorkshire
Salary:
Up to £100000
Benefits:
Solbury 9-12 Plus 3 spa
Job Details
ELECTIVE HOME EDUCATION CONSULTANT

DONCASTER LOCAL AUTHORITY (LA)

Required for April 2010.

NB This is a part-time post equivalent to two days per week and for one term only in the first instance.

The School Improvement Service is seeking to appoint an education professional to visit families who elect to educate at home.

The candidate appointed will be expected to:

• Monitor the quality of education for children who are being educated at home
• Provide feedback to a senior officer of the LA and to families
• Liaise with Education Welfare Service and Traveller Education Service as necessary
• Provide detailed notes of visit

For further information relating to this post please contact Caroline Greening on 736261.

Closing date for applications is 19th February 2010 12noon.

Interviews will take place on week commencing 8th March 2010.

If you have not heard from us by this date, please assume you have not been shortlisted for interview for the post.

Doncaster Council is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, young people and adults and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment. This post is subject to an enhanced CRB check.

Many thanks for your interest in this vacancy.

Please be aware that this job closes at 12:00PM on 19/02/2010

Lets do this!

Elective Home Education Consultant

First of all, this is not a consultancy job. The correct title for this is ‘Elective Home Education Inspector‘.

Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council

A limited liability company it seems! You do know about this do you not?

The School Improvement Service is seeking to appoint an education professional to visit families who elect to educate at home.

Home Educated children are NOT IN SCHOOL (even though sometimes they are called ‘HomeSchoolers’) and so it is entirely wrong that a person attached to ‘School Improvement’ should be entering the homes of private people to spy on what they are doing with their children. Families who elect to educate their children at home should not be subject to suspicion by default, guilt before being proven innocent, licensing or registration. Neither are they entitled to any special treatment or gifts or anything else from the state. They should be left completely alone to do whatever it is that they do, and they should assume full responsibility for whatever happens to them. Period.

The candidate appointed will be expected to:

• Monitor the quality of education for children who are being educated at home

This is entirely illegitimate. If parents want the progress of their Home Educated child to be monitored it is up to them to employ someone at their own expense to do this. Is it not the proper role of government to monitor the families who do not opt to partake of their ‘free’ ‘education’. Whatever the nature and quality of the education being delivered or not is the private affair of the family, full stop. It is no one else’s business and no one has the right to enter a person’s home to carry out an inspection of this kind. This is non negotiable.

• Provide feedback to a senior officer of the LA and to families

As I said above, this is not a consultation job; the person doing this it is an inspector; an inspector who gathers data and then reports back to the Company LA. Once again, families that want this service should pay for it themselves; also it is completely absurd that this inspector should provide feedback to the family that is being inspected. They already know what it is that they are doing. The subtext here is that Home Educators are not competent by default, and that they need some metrics provided to them to measure their performance.

• Liaise with Education Welfare Service and Traveller Education Service as necessary

What on earth does Home Education have to do with Travellers? Home educators can also be travellers… or not, but the two should not be conflated. What on earth is ‘Education Welfare’? You can have ‘education performance’, ‘curriculum compliance’ or any number of combinations that make sense, but education has nothing to do with welfare; Home educated children are being educated. They are at home, and so their welfare is not in question; if it is, then it is a welfare issue which is a separate thing entirely from education.

• Provide detailed notes of visit

So, this person is to be let into a house in Doncaster, so he can whisper into a voice recorder as he observes the goings on in a private household.

You cant make this sort of thing up.

Anyone who allows this sort of violation deserves everything that they get, and no, you DO HAVE A CHOICE.

Doncaster Council is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, young people and adults and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment. This post is subject to an enhanced CRB check.

Let’t think about this.

Doncaster Borough Council Limited is going to hire a STRANGER, someone that THEY DO NOT KNOW to enter your home and ‘inspect’ you, who also do not know this STRANGER. This person, a potential paedophile, will be CRB checked… just like the other people who were CRB checked and who turned out to be monsters yet who had jobs giving them access to children.

Every paedophile in Doncaster (that has not been caught) is going to line up for this job. It is a part time job, so they can carry on with their other work while they prey on the innocent families of Doncaster, grooming them as they go, and be PAID for the privilege.

That Doncaster can claim that they have the best interests of people at heart, and that it will be OK because they are going to CRB check this inspector is beyond a joke.

The reality is that Concaster (yes, Con-caster) cannot vouch for the intentions of any stranger who they send into the homes of private people to do this nasty job. They are hiring someone who they do not know, and sending him to homes where they have no business. Even if they did know the person they are sending very well, that still does not lessen the insult of the idea.

The price of your privacy, by the way, is £100,000 per year. Thats what someone will be paid to force their way into your home, and then determine wether or not you should be home educating. He can report you to Social Services based on his personal prejudices and interfere with your life at will. There will be a huge queue of busybodies lining up to do this; many of them with a chip on their shoulder, drooling at the opportunity to lord it over other people, tell them what to do, frighten them, harass them, and potentially rape their children.

A retired teacher may take up this post. You know that means instant, blistering hostility to the idea that teachers are not needed to educate children, and the slightest perceived infraction will mean you are reported as being a bad parent. For 100,000 pounds a year and a pension for two days work per week and unlimited power to destroy… this is a dream job for monsters.

Whatever way you want to look at it, this job posting is a terrible indication of how the system of licensing and inspection is going to work. Potential paedophiles are going to be the ‘front line’ of this violation. It means nothing but trouble, guaranteed if you let them into your house. And do not forget, that these well paid potential paedophiles will have the power to DEMAND that they interview your children without you being there. If you refuse, your home education license will be revoked.

Incredible ay? Still, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Councils up and down the country are downsising, and the people who are being chopped are from Child Services:

Unions demand talks over Birmingham Council job cuts

The council needs to save millions from its budget

Union bosses want talks with Birmingham City Council over its plan to cut 2,000 jobs.

The UK’s biggest local authority needs to slash £69m from its budget and plans to cut 5% of its workforce in the process.

Unions say children’s services are expected to be hardest hit, with more than 1,200 positions that could go.

The council hopes the cuts can come mostly through early retirement and voluntary redundancy.

Tony Rabaiotti, of local government workers union Unison, said: “What the council is trying to do is offer a kind of moral blackmail to employees and that is not good enough. These are political decisions.”

Patrick Burns, BBC Midlands Today political editor, said the cuts showed it was the turn of the public sector to feel the pain experienced by the private sector last year.

“To some extent the public sector was protected from this initial wave of austerity,” he said.

“Well now comes Phase 2, where the public sector gets its share of this chill wind.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/8510506.stm

Some councils will not be able to start this fiasco at all. There simply will be no money for it. As the New Zealand government has had to admit, spending money on monitoring home educators is a total waste of resources.

The coming financial collapse will wipe out these councils as we have known them. In the mean time, those delusional busybodies at Doncaster LA will use the cheapest possible people do fulfil ‘their duties’. Once again, depending on where you live, you may be left completely alone by your Local Authority. There are many ways you can get around this vile legislation and its animalistic implementors:

If you do not register, they cannot find you.
If they find you, you can refuse to deal with them by whatever means you like.
You can leave the country.
____________________ <<< insert your escape plan here There are a whole raft of ways that you can stay away from this nonsense. All you have to do is make up your mind that you will not tolerate this abuse, and then act upon that decision. Lets make one thing perfectly clear. You cannot ask for a free laptop from the government AND demand that you not be registered and inspected:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to allow home educating families to apply for home access laptop grants.

At the moment home-educating families are purposely excluded from the Home Access free laptop scheme for families on low incomes in England. We believe this to be discriminatory against families who strive to bring a nurturing and personal education to their children and at their own cost. Ed Balls said that children without access to the Internet at home are “…at a disadvantage to their peers…” yet is utterly at home leaving a tiny section of society in that very place: at a disadvantage to everyone else.

Please make the laptops available to home-educated children too. The current criteria is negligent and exclusive. More here.

What the hell?

Perhaps the home educators who are asking for free laptops are the ones that are ‘comfortable’ with registration and monitoring. Who knows? What is for sure is that this sort of utter bullshit makes the case for registration:

Exchange between Graham Stuart MP and Minister Diana Johnson, Bill Committee Thursday February 4th:
MP Graham Stuart: “A few weeks ago, when looking on the DCSF website, we found the programme that allows children to have a home computer and it said specifically, “but not if you are home-educated”. No access to IT then. The website said that on the very day the Minister told us how the Government wanted to change things.”

Ms Johnson: “That point presents an interesting issue. The reason why the home access scheme is not being made available to families who home educate is because we do not know who those families are. We have no accurate register to look to. Some families have put themselves forward and notified their local authority, but there is no accurate record. That is the problem, and the nub of the issue. We do not have an accurate record of families who are home educating.”

MP Graham Stuart: “Time and again we get the circular argument that we need registration before we can provide support. We have 20,000 home-educated children who are known to be registered with their local authority. Has that led to any provision for them? It has not.”

Reminder of Baroness Morgan’s answer to Lord Lucas, Tuesday February 9th:
“In order to be eligible for a Home Access Grant, the learner must have their education funded by an English local authority or the Department for Children, Schools and Families. When a learner is withdrawn from, or is not enrolled in school, the family opts out of receiving the statutory funding towards that learner’s education. As such, those who elect to educate their children at home will not be eligible to receive a Home Access Grant.”

And there you have it.

Diana Johnson makes a statement that is pure logic, “how can we give you your free sugary laptop if we do not know where to send it my pets?!”. Amazingly, there are some people who would sell their own children for a laptop. That is their right of course. What they CANNOT do is say that they are AGAINST registration of themselves as home educators (and the subsequent inspections), and then ALSO DEMAND that the state steal from other people to provide them with laptops (or anything else) without the state asking ANYTHING of them whatsoever. The state is answerable to the taxpayer, and they have a responsibility to allocate scarce resources efficiently. That is all the excuse they need to register you if you are going to ask for a ‘free’ laptop.

For all we know, the people who put up that petition at No10 worked for the DCSf, and were glove puppeting. That makes more sense than home educators begging for laptops whilst in the middle of an epic battle for their freedoms and the safety of their children.

FURTHERMORE

People in the know on teh internetz ask:

“Isn’t Doncaster one of the most incompetent LAs where lots of children die?”

the answer, it appears, is YES:

Doncaster Social services facing inquiry after seven suspicious deaths:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5505375.ece

!!!

EVEN FURTHERMORE
10,000 != 100,000

DUUUUUUHHHHH!!!

Thanks Billysu!!

EVEN FURTHERMORE STILL

The listing has been REMOVED by the employer:

Home Edders rock! ‘This vacancy has been withdrawn by the employer’! http://twitpic.com/12tztr £100,000 for a 2-day week :-)

But someone clever made a screengrab of it:

!!!

and here is another:

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Home Schooling, Idiocracy.