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Letter of the week

Jenni Russell's apparently reasonable defence of home education ("When parents are the best teachers", 10 January) evades one central weakness of this dangerously unmonitored activity. This is the right of a child to grow up in the company of his peers experiencing both the joys and knocks of life.

You don't get to choose your mother or father (remember Larkin's dictum), where you live, your family's prosperity or your physical attributes, but if you live in England now, you do get to go to school. If your mother deprives you of what all your contemporaries take for granted so that you can stay home, keep her company, and maybe mind the baby, then an inalienable right is being taken from you. And you are too young and unprotected to object.

Local education authority inspection is generally lax and infrequent. Inspectors can be ready to identify progress where there is no evidence and often cosy up to home educators to give themselves an easy life.

Inexperienced home educators can concentrate on improving their child's hand writing at the expense of creative work and set reams of mechanical exercises culled from course books bought at W H Smith's.

I have never heard of a prosecution of an incompetent home educator. I have been told by one education authority that the rights of the parents are paramount in this matter. They shouldn't be--the rights of the child are central. In my view, home education can be a form of abuse.

Peter Harris

Emsworth, Hampshire

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