🎀 To Whom It Clearly Shouldn't Concern: A Rebuttal to Westminster’s PLO Letter from a Mother With Standards
By Polly Chromatic
Founder, SWANK – Standards and Whinges Against Negligent Kingdoms
“Because one must maintain standards, even under surveillance.”
💌 Dearest Westminster,
How terribly unfortunate that we must continue this correspondence. I had hoped, however optimistically, that once I submitted my evidentially robust, linguistically sophisticated, and legally unassailable PLO Response Bundle, you would have the good sense to remove yourselves from my family’s affairs and occupy yourselves with matters more aligned to your level of professional competence — for example, reorganising the stationery cupboard.
Alas, here we are.
🎓 I. On “Isolation” — Or, Your Pathological Misreading of Autonomy
Your suggestion that my children are “isolated” is as revealing as it is incorrect. They are, in fact, shielded — purposefully, precisely, and with a level of intellectual care that your department has neither demonstrated nor attempted to understand.
We do not subscribe to your spreadsheet metrics of social engagement.
We engage in conversation with philosophers, not forms. My children have read Nietzsche. Have yours?
🩺 II. On My Medical Records — Which You Failed to Read
I have eosinophilic asthma and muscle tension dysphonia, both documented extensively by clinicians whose credentials far surpass those of the social workers attempting to override them. My psychiatrist, Dr. Rafiq (GMC-certified, unlike your anonymous referral authors), has confirmed I cannot speak under stress without risk to health.
This is not a metaphor. It is a clinical fact. That you continue to demand verbal meetings is not safeguarding — it is ableist theatre.
📉 III. On Your Procedural Incompetence
Your PLO letter, while ambitious in tone, is tragically deficient in legal substance. You cite no threshold. You offer no evidence. You reference a concern about “GCSEs” while misspelling the acronym.
You escalate based on insinuation and hearsay, ignoring clear documentation, protected characteristics, and the actual voice of the children you claim to protect.
You manufacture concern in the same way tabloids manufacture scandal: poorly.
🎭 IV. On Surveillance Masquerading as Support
Let us be absolutely clear.
You do not know my children.
You have visited occasionally — ill-informed, unwanted, and uninvited. Each time, you brought illness into our home, both viral and bureaucratic.
You left no insight, only infection.
No care, only cortisol.
This is not safeguarding.
It is Victorian voyeurism dressed up as modern policy.
📚 V. On Pedagogy and Intellectual Misalignment
I curate my children’s education with the rigour of a Cambridge don.
We do not “home educate” in the way you understand it.
We cultivate a salon of ideas — interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and intentionally post-institutional.
That you continue to assess our household using criteria borrowed from Ofsted flowcharts is, frankly, embarrassing. For you.
📢 VI. My Position, for the Record
I have submitted a complete PLO response bundle.
It contains medical, legal, educational, and evidentiary documentation — written in clear English, with footnotes.
If you wish to proceed, you must do so with full acknowledgment that any further intrusion will be regarded as harassment, discrimination, and a deliberate act of institutional harm.
And I do not engage with institutions that cannot even correctly spell “GCSE.”
🖋️ With Measured Disdain,
Polly
Mistress of Grammar. Mother of Four. Founder of SWANK.