Jacqui Young is one of many campaigning to stop the “Schools Bill” becoming law and will be at the Simply Stunning carpark in Wormelow from 8.15am – 9.15am on Tuesday 28th * and also in Ross outside the Market House 9.45- 11am to hopefully collect lots and lots of signatures! “I would be happy for local people to come to my home and sign, if they are unable to make it to Ross on Tuesday morning”.
There are many people around the country collecting signatures right now to stop this bill becoming law. If you have a child at school or at home, it will affect you.
Here is something posted by others to help summarise:
“If the Schools Bill becomes law, your rights, as parents, will be removed from you and given to the government. You will no longer have control over your child’s education.
The Schools Bill is being advertised as a bill only targeting those ‘missing education’. Take the time to read it thoroughly, don’t blindly accept that the government knows what is best for your child, and that you do not.
This is a compilation of key points that affect all children, including those in school:
Currently in the UK our parental rights include the right to make sure that our children are receiving a full time education that suits their own individual aptitude, abilities and needs. The new Schools Bill, if it becomes law, will affect every parent’s rights long term. Once you have lost rights in law, it is almost impossible to get them back. You have to fight it beforehand. Yet most parents are not aware that they are about to lose some very fundamental parental, and personal, rights.
All children, not just home educated ones, will be monitored and assessed, with that information being stored and shared for 66 years. The Bill enables and enforces information gathering, on a scale never seen before. This includes information on parents and children – that you must provide – or face prosecution.
Is this data collection innocuous? No. There is a fallacy that this Bill is just a register, it’s absolutely not. The data that’s gathered can be shared by anyone, with no consideration for GDPR, or what the child or parent want. Literally anyone the Education Secretary sees fit to ‘share’ your personal information to, can access it.
Councils will be able to force through ‘academies’ without consultation or consent of school governors or trustees, even though state-run school outperform academies in Ofsted inspections.
The Education Secretary will also have the power to make decisions about children and their education without parliamentary oversight. The scope is endless: fines, prosecution, altering subjects taught, altering degree requirements, removing degrees of no ‘value’, lengthening the school day, and as said, mass data gathering.
There is something insidious emerging. The Bill has crept in through the guise of keeping ‘home educated’ children safe, implying that ‘school educated’ ones are safer. This is absurd and has no data to back it up, in fact the opposite seems true. The Local Authority do know most home educated children, and can already issue a SAO (School Attendance Order) if they deem their education insufficient.
Lord Baker, a former Education Secretary, warned that the Bill “increases the powers of the secretary of state and the Department for Education in a way unprecedented since 1870”.
How much control do you want the government to have over your parenting choices? We all parent differently, depending upon our lifestyles and communities, our cultures and traditions, yet the government clearly want to put in place one standardised parenting style for all. Every parent / carer needs to read and know this bills implications. The contents of this bill will strip away our fundamental rights.”