We’re ready to go to jail, say Matilda star’s parents in home schooling row
Westminster council is trying to force us to send my daughter to school, and this is why we won’t
THE parents of a child actress who starred as Matilda in the award-winning musical have warned they are prepared to go to jail in an escalating row over her home schooling.
Edward Hardy and his wife, Eileen Tracy, have been ordered by their local council to send their 12-year-old daughter, Lilian, to school by March 7 or face prosecution.
Mr Hardy and Ms Tracy are refusing to comply with Westminster council’s ultimatum and have vowed that they will go to jail if necessary.
If convicted, the couple would be liable for a fine, but they would refuse to pay it as a point of principle to stand up for the right to home school Lilian.
Writing in today’s Daily Telegraph, Ms Tracy, 50, says: “We have no intention whatsoever of complying with Westminster’s order. We are exercising our rights under the law to ask them to rescind it, and we will appeal to the Secretary of State if they refuse. If that fails, we would oppose the council in court – and if necessary, though it doesn’t bear thinking about, we would go to jail.”
Mr Hardy, 51, who works full-time in a primary school in London, said yesterday: “We would both be prepared to go to jail. However absurd a situation that appears to be.”
In her article, Ms Tracy explains how Westminster council has been demanding that the family meets with a home education adviser or else submits to “endorsement by an educator” who knows Lilian.
The couple have refused the council’s requests and instead sent the local authority examples of Lilian’s work. Ms Tracy, author of The Student’s Guide to Exam Success, points out that “vindication” of their home schooling methods is clear from Lilian’s success in auditioning and winning the lead role in Matilda. She performed in the musical for six months.
Westminster council said it remained keen to “resolve this matter amicably” but that “unfortunately” Lilian’s parents had declined its requests for meetings.
A spokesman said: “Local authorities have a statutory obligation to ensure that resident children receive a suitable education.
“In Westminster, the majority of families meet with the home education adviser to discuss their education.
“We have explained to Mr Hardy and Ms Tracy that we cannot solely rely on samples of their child’s work to form a view about the suitability of their education.”
When my daughter, Lilian Hardy, got the lead role in Matilda the Musical, it was a vindication of the unusual way we had chosen to raise her. Lilian loves learning, pursues many passions, and willingly took it upon herself to audition. But she has never been to school, and my husband and I decline to drill her in any particular curriculum. Instead, we simply concentrate on keeping her safe, joyful and free – and trust her natural curiosity to do the rest.
Doing this does not make us Luddites or extremists. Between us we have decades of professional educational experience, and it is precisely because of our love for learning that we chose to home educate. We believe the psychoanalyst John Bowlby’s theory of attachment, which affirms that children learn best from a secure base of wellbeing. A happy child does not need to be dragged towards new ideas but will seek them independently. even if she approaches them in an idiosyncratic fashion. As educational reformer John Holt put it: “We can best help children learn not by deciding what we think they should learn… but by making the world accessible to them, and helping them explore.”
It takes pluck as a parent to let your child play for hours in the park with her friends and trust that something is cooking in her mind. There will always be some relative who worries that Jimmy is not ticking the right boxes. But the results speak for themselves: worldwide research confirms that home-educated children from all kinds of backgrounds achieve highly. Even as I write, a text pings in from a mother in Leicester delighted that her son, who dropped out of school aged 10, has just received an unconditional offer from a top London university.
In theory, British law makes ample room for this. Mindful of Yeats’s definition of education as the “lighting of a fire”, rather than the “filling of a pail”, and heeding Dickens’s timeless warning about Mr Gradgrind, our government safeguards home education by framing bureaucrats’ duties in the negative. Councils may not intrude into children’s home education unless “it appears that a suitable education is not being provided”. Without such cause for concern, it is parents, not the state, who have charge of their children – which is why even schools act “in loco parentis”.
But Lilian’s success seems not to be enough for our local authority, Westminster city council. Shortly after it issued her performing licence, which put her on its radar, the council asked to meet her. We declined this unwarranted inspection, offering instead a range of samples of her work and activities, which we felt spoke for themselves. The Department for Education’s guidelines for local authorities ask councils not to ascertain the suitability of the child’s work or routinely inspect, so this should have been enough. Education is not the same as welfare, and there are no red flags justifying any kind of intrusion into our private life.
Westminster responded that it operates its own policy, and demanded that we either permit an inspection or provide some endorsement by an educator who knows the child. Now the council has ordered us to send Lilian to school by March 7; if we do not, we could be prosecuted, convicted and fined.
Perhaps we could end this easily by letting a qualified tutor sign off on her work. But there is a crucial principle at stake. Right now, home education is under sustained attack. The magnificent work of parents who dedicate their lives to their children is being maligned, with insinuations of neglect and abuse. An attempt is under way in the House of Lords to force all home-educated children to be registered. To declare these children “missing” from the system, as some have done, is reckless scaremongering.
Only totalitarianism would ask citizens to register for a basic human right such as parenting, and anyway it would achieve little. A child could tell you that if registration spelt safety then psychiatric wards would be empty of school pupils and teen suicides would not occur.
So we have no intention whatsoever of complying with Westminster’s order. We are exercising our rights under the law to ask the council to rescind it, and we will appeal to the Secretary of State if it refuses. If that fails, we would oppose the council in court – and if necessary, though it doesn’t bear thinking about, we would go to jail. The European Convention on Human Rights gives us a right to privacy. People have endured far worse than us for that principle.
My hope, though, is that by speaking out this can be avoided. As Lilian said when I warned her that she might feature in the papers: “I think we need to educate people on home education.”