The Freedom in Education site was started in 2002, shortly after the publication of One-to-One, a Parent’s Guide to Teaching at Home. My family and I worked hard at maintaining and developing the site for a period of five years and by 2007 it was receiving over 100,000 hits per month.

However, at that point, I was forced to start paying attention to other matters – most noticeable finding a way to increase my income – and I have not been able to put any fresh energy into the site for several years (apart from revising the home page earlier this year). Consequently, traffic through the site has declined, along with its relevance to parents faced with having to make difficult choices for their children.

Hopefully, all that is now about to change. This re-designed site is still in a very infant stage, and access to much of the old material on the Freedom-in-Education site is temporarily blocked. We have opted to use the WordPress, ‘blogging’ software, which should make it possible for us, over a period of time, to add all the latest website features, that were not possible when we were running the site a few years ago.

I am personally quite surprised that things seem to have got worse rather than better in almost every aspect of education since I was last actively engaged in the area. It is perhaps no surprise that things have not improved in government-run schools, but as far as I can tell the last few years have not seen any growth in free-thinking, privately-run schools, no radical increase in people opting out of school to home-educate, no imaginative use of new technology to replace schools, and no serious attempt to find non-financial ways to fund community schooling.

I assume that this is at least in part due to the ever-increasing difficulty experienced by parents in simply surviving – paying high rents or mortgages, travel costs, employment demands, etc. - and that people do not believe that they have the option to listen to their children when they talk about the problems at school.

Hopefully the new Freedom-in-Education website will be able to make use of the latest internet technology to compile information, enable people to exchange ideas, pool experience, and find practical solutions to educational problems.

If you are interested, please visit the site again soon, and hopefully we will have added a contact page, so that you can get in touch, and a newsletter page, so that you can register for a Freedom-in-Education eNewsletter.

If you would like to get in touch with me before that, then send an e-mail to me at freedom-in-education@orange.fr

Gareth Lewis