Member

Secondly, I am a trustee of the Royal Institution. I went there one day, and a group of children were being educated there. They were home-educated but had come together for that particular experience because there is a very good quality science education in a laboratory with specialised teachers which was not available otherwise. I suspect that they do that only a few times a year. If I take that as an example, I am not sure whether that needs to be recorded and whether the Royal Institution will have to provide its postcode, fill in and sign a form and collect the information. Some sort of clarification around that would be important. The main point of this—and I know the Minister will understand this—is that those of us who have spent our lifetime in formal education see time very differently from those who are home-educating a pupil. We have lived a life of splitting learning into blocks of time. If I say a period or half a day or whatever, everyone who has ever taught, or been a parent, knows that we are thinking in 40-minute or one-hour chunks. One of the things I have been attracted by from parents who educate at home successfully is that they use time, space and skills in a completely different way from how those of us who are teachers in formal education use it. I just worry whether we are trying to make them fit into our concept of who taught it, how much time was it and what did you cover? If that were the case, I think that we might be losing the good essence of what some parents are doing with home-educated children.