Halting the rise of home education

Whenever I talk about the various reasons why parents choose to educate their children at home, somebody is always sure to challenge me by asking if I think that one motive is better than another. I think that at the back of some people's minds is the idea that I am determined to set up a hierarchy of home educators, with noble men who decided not to send their children to school in the first place, at the top, and those weaklings who withdrew them because the school did not cater for their special educational needs at the bottom! This is of course absolute nonsense. I find this whole question interesting in itself and also vitally important for the future of home education in this country.

Nobody has any idea how many children are not sent to school, as opposed to those who are sent and subsequently deregistered. Similarly, nobody knows what percentage of parents withdraw their children from school for this or that reason. We do know that very common reasons are bullying or the inadequate provision made for special educational needs. We also know that the number of children being taught at home has been climbing inexorably for some years and shows no signs of declining. So much, everybody would agree. It also seems quite likely that many of those who have taken their children out of school for various problems, would not have done so if things had gone smoothly. They were happy to send their children to school, a problem or series of problems arose and so they deregistered their children. Also fairly certain is that once these children are out of school, they are likely to remain so, even if the original problem is sorted out. In short, they and their families get out of the habit of school. Once out, they are liable to remain out.

The implications of the above are profound. To begin with, if the schools had tackled the problems of which parents complained, robustly enough, then the children would probably have stayed at school. In other words, it is the schools and local authorities who are really responsible for this type of home education; the impetus does not come from the parents themselves. This being so, it is pretty likely that local authorities could, if given sufficient incentive by central government, get their act together and deal with bullying and special educational needs in a better way. If they did so, the numbers of home educated children would begin to fall.

It is, as I say, impossible to know how many children have been withdrawn for this reason or that. It is a fair guess though that there are something like twenty thousand home educated children known to local authorities. It may well be that the same number again are being educated at home unknown to their local authorities. Those unknown, have probably never been registered pupils at a school. In short, their parents decided not to send them in the first place. Of those who are known to local authorities, the great majority are known because they have been deregistered from schools which they were attending. That being so, and bearing in mind what I said recently about few people taking their kids out of school for purely educational reasons, it is probably the case that most of the twenty thousand children know to local authorities have been taken out of school because of problems which the school has been unable or unwilling to resolve.

We thus reach a point at which we can say with some assurance that roughly half the home educated children in this country were originally sent to school by their parents and are now being educated at home because the schools fell down on the job in various ways. A natural and inescapable corollary is that fixing the schools so that they meet parents' expectations would eventually halve the numbers of children being home educated in this country. This would not happen overnight. I cannot really see a mad rush of home educating parents besieging these improved schools with requests to enroll their children! It is likely though that dealing with the schools would perhaps halt the exponential rise in the numbers of such children being deregistered which we see each year and probably reverse the trend entirely, leading after a period of time to a sharp decline.

It is this idea that I have been trying to explore when I talk of the motives for home education; the idea that "home education by default", as Graham Badman called it, is the driving force behind the rise of home education in this country which we have seen in recent years.