Badman, bad times

“What do you all talk about on a normal year?” another first timer at HesFes asked me.  It was also my first experience of HesFes so I couldn’t give an accurate answer but the question did prompt a fleeting imaginative glimpse of all the interesting and important conversations that the Badman review robbed us of in that week.  Obviously the Review has become very, very important to all of us, but interesting?  I think we would much rather be talking about learning.

For now at least though the Badman Review has to dominate and if we can’t head off its recommendations then it will continue to dominate all our futures: parents, children and researchers.  Alan and I set out to research informal learning with a blue sky attitude - let’s just get out there and talk to people, see what we can find out.  If Badman’s clouds keep rolling in then that blue sky will be considerably diminished and the unique opportunity to study how learning actually happens through home education will be lost. I hope he knows what he stands to destroy but maybe the worst part is that he clearly doesn’t have a clue. 

In the meantime we still have questionnaire returns trickling in.  Thanks again to everyone who has filled one out for us.  We are past the 300 mark now and that means that this will be a substantial study with a weight of numbers behind it; hopefully that will help to satisfy some of the critics!  At first glance there seem to be as many ways of learning to read as there are children so sorting through those 300 is going to be an interesting task and something we are keen to get on with as soon as we have finished with the Badman letters, consultation returns, inquiry submissions and with making as much noise as we can about his horrible ideas.