Every single parent matters?

AHEd yesterday launched its postcard campaign against the proposed changes to the UK benefits system. People can visit the page, download the postcards, print them and send them off to MPs, the Children's Commissioner, etc.

AHEd has decided to take the approach that any conditionality attached to Income Support for lone parents is a bad thing, and of course I agree with this view. In fact, I'd go further and say that all parents should be supported by a basic income to enable them to focus on the most important job of raising their children. The government's stubborn determination to rate only paid employment as 'work' is both short-sighted and dangerous to our children. Parents are not units of human resource: they are the essential guardians of the country's future.

Why should you pay your taxes to fund this? Because you're already paying them to fund MPs' second mortgages, foreign wars, to bail out profligate bankers and all the other over-inflated, unnecessary and useless expenditure to which the Treasury is committed, so you may as well also do something worthwhile with your money.

My letter to my MP calls for an exemption for home educators from the proposed changes, which will require all lone parents of children over the age of 7 to be 'available for work' as a condition for receiving their subsistence income but on reflection, I think I agree with AHEd that this is both unlikely to be granted, and would be unfair if it was. I don't know though: the government is saying that lone parents should take up paid employment while their children are in school and the point is that home educators don't use schools, but to make this argument is to agree with the original presumption, which I don't. School attendance is only 6 hours per day and a child might be ill for longer than the bureaucratically sanctioned two weeks a year. And of course, there are school holidays to consider.

I see there is some talk on the home ed lists this morning about the proposed requirement for lone parents to declare vulnerability in order the qualify for exemptions to the 'available for work' status and I think that to get tied up in the minutiae of all this red tape is a waste of energy: a useless distraction. To talk to government in these terms is to condone this preposterous world view and we should not condone it in the slightest. We should take a firm view that the whole idea is unacceptable.

My personal view is that I will not, while home educating, be signing anything to say that I'm available for paid employment. I will not jump through any government hoops or leave my children with strangers while I attend repeated appointments at the Benefit Office to prove I'm looking for jobs that I don't actually have the time to carry out. I'll take the money cut instead, and we'll manage somehow: we always have. When you don't smoke, drink, go on holidays, buy new clothes or have nights out then subsistence benefits do go quite a long way.