El gobierno inglés ha aceptado las recomendaciones del nuevo informe Badman sobre educación en casa, que entre otras medidas sugiere que las familias que practican el homeschooling se identifiquen anualmente en un registro obligatorio, declaren cuál es el programa educativo que van a seguir en los próximos 12 meses, y que inspectores locales tengan acceso al hogar para examinar el progreso del niño.
Sean Gabb, director de la Libertarian Alliance, ha reaccionado con estas palabras en una nota de prensa:
The current proposals sound moderate. The talk is of giving support, not of forbidding. But they are the first step to outlawing home education. Registration will, for the first time, let the authorities know who is educating their children at home. Once these parents are known, they will be visited and inspected to ensure that they are providing a 'suitable' education. What this means - though not all at once: it will take several years of salami slicing - is that parents will be hit with impossible and ever-changing health and safety rules. (...) Paper qualifications may be required from parents. They will eventually be forced to teach the feared and discredited National Curriculum.
At no point will home education be made into a criminal offence - as it is in Germany and Belgium, among other European countries. Instead, it will be surrounded by so many rules and by so much supervision, that most parents who now educate at home will give up. Many who carry on will be picked off one at a time - their children conscripted into a state school for some trifling infraction of deliberately conflicting and arbitrary rules. In extreme cases, parents will have their children taken into 'care'.
El UKIP, que en algunos temas tiene ribetes liberales, también se pronuncia en contra de las recomendaciones del informe y su positiva acogida por parte del Gobierno.
"The release of the Badman Review into Home Education today is yet another example of this government's controlling, heavy handed approach to society," said UKIP chairman Paul Nuttall MEP.
He said: "Calling for local councils to have the right to interfere in the responsibility of parents to provide sufficient education for their children may sound reasonable but amounts to a grab for power.
"Worse still the Government is using appalling scare tactics to justify its actions by suggesting that home education is a cover for the worst forms of child abuse. No evidence is presented merely smears and threats."
