The group didn’t want to home-educate on their own. So they started meeting at Ringsfield Ecostudy Centre between Beccles and Bungay. None of them were professional teachers. She said: “Ringsfield allowed us to use their centre, set in 14 acres of land, and they were going to build a sustainable centre from straw bales for their horses, but allowed us to build it for our kids instead.

“At the end of last year we pulled our children, seven of them, out of school and began to construct our building, and eventually we will use it for peer-to-peer education. We paid someone to advise us.

“We started by levelling the land and had to learn how to use a mini-digger. Then we had to get tyres, which have to be the right size, and due to new regulations we had to register where they were going. The tyres have to be rammed with aggregate. A ladder-type frame is laid on top, and then a frame is built upwards from the foundation with hazel poles, that the straw bales are impaled upon.

“At the top, you put on another ladder-type frame, and then you ‘gripple’, putting flexible pipes over the bails, and pulling down the bails to compact them. To get to this stage it cost us £1,000 to get the walls up. But we had no money for a roof, and we’ve had no funding, but we’ve put on gigs, cabarets, begged in newspapers and have raised about £3,500 towards the building, and we’re now starting to think about the energy systems. We want to go entirely on renewable energy but there aren’t a lot of resources available to help search.

“We want to make it as far as possible a situation where our kids are teaching us as much as us teaching them. We are now up to about 18 children and more are contacting us, and we’ll have a maximum of 20. Children who were labelled as problem children have had a big turnaround in behaviour. The teaching is very different, the parents are there, and there is much more autonomy.”

* .[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Children are having vast amounts of their personal information, including sexual preference, parents’ details and political leanings, and later the political leanings of the children themselves, details such as thumbprints etc. The plan seems to be to build up a massive and comprehensive database on everyone from a very young age[/FONT]