Sunday 21 March 2010

How many parents choose to home educate?

When my daughter went for an interview after applying to go to college, the man who saw her was interested to hear that she had been home educated. He asked her what school she had attended before being taught at home and seemed astonished when my daughter told him that she had never attended school at all. He asked, "But what about primary School?" In the end, he wrote on my daughter's form, "NEVER BEEN TO SCHOOL!!!" There was nothing unpleasant about it all, according to my daughter. He had interviewed home educated children before, just had not met one who had never been to school at all.

I was thinking of this recently when looking at the various statistics, such as they are, for home education in this country. According to Paula Rothermel, for example, almost of third of parents claimed that their decision to home educate was ideological; they had always intended to home educate. This is a bit strange, because nearly all the home educated children one comes across have been in school at some point. You'd think that if a third of the parents had always intended to home educate, then a third of the kids one came across would not have been to school. As far as I can see, it is far commoner for children to start primary or secondary school and then to stop after a while for one reason or another. Bullying, school refusal, anxiety and stress are all reasons frequently given, as is the school's apparent inability to make suitable provision for some special educational need such as dyslexia or ADHD. These are the parents who home educate 'by default' as Graham Badman described it. They send their children to school, something goes wrong and then they take them out of school.

I am wondering whether these parents represent the majority of home educators. I rather suspect that they do. The fact is, apart from my own daughter I only know of one other sixteen year old who has never spent a day in school. This rather tends to confirm my suspicions that most parents do not, at least initially have any deep rooted objections to schools, but that these develop as a result of the experiences they and their children have once they have started there.


The implications for this, if true are profound. It would suggest that most of the parents whose children are at home are not committed, ideological home educators. Rather, they are ordinary parents who have hit upon what seems to them to be the best method of dealing with a problem which their child has. A natural corollary would be that if the schools were so structured that these problems had not arisen, then the parents would not have thought of home education at all. In short, it seems possible that most of the home education in this country would probably fade away quite naturally without the need for any new legislation, if only the schools were run properly! This is a sobering thought. Now I am a complete crank. I would not have sent my daughter to school under any circumstances and could certainly be seen as an ideological home educator. Interestingly enough though, it was my experiences with my first child which caused me to choose home education for the second. So I too have chosen home education in a sense because of the failings of the educational system which I have witnessed. It is entirely possible that if my elder daughter's school life had been happy and productive, I should have sent her sister to school as well.

I think that if I were a government which was growing uneasy about the inexorable rise in the numbers of children being home educated, I might stop to think about just why this was happening. Rather than introduce new laws to regulate the practice, I would be trying to improve the maintained schools to which most children are sent and tackle the problem at the root, instead of pruning the tip. As any gardener knows, this just increases new growth in any case!

14 comments:

  1. At last - well done Simon! I can't speak for the majority of HEors but you describe the experience of most of the few dozen or so HE families that I know.

    My family didn't start as ideological HEors - largely because we hadn't considered our own school experiences when thinking about our first child - but a few months of school soon changed that and we didn't make the same mistake a second time.

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  2. Ditto Simon and Anon's experiences. Dd (18) yanked out after 2 terms in Reception, Ds (16) not ever sent. Does that make me a responsive HE'er or an ideological one? Not sure.

    The idea of schools capable of being improved to the degree required to obviate the need for HE made me chuckle.

    Mrs Anon

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  3. I agree that the majority of parents who are known to their LA and who home educate are doing so because the school experience was not all they thought it was cracked up to be for their children. However you miss several categories.
    In the 'known' to LA group there is also philosophical HErs whose children choose to try school. My daughter chose to go to school in year 4 and lasted until end of year 5 . She is now considering it again for secondary school . I think a lot of 'ideological home educators' have children who choose to try school at some point. None the less I do think that still leaves a majority de-registered due to less than optimum situations.
    What some LAs seem to see is up to an 80% rate of parents in the category you mention. Of course that is obvious, the families who choose HE from the beginning and do not 'try' school also tend to be in the group that does not choose contact with the LA . In my opinion it does stand to reason that this group is more aware of the current review and that is why I conclude that the high end estimate figures batted around are incorrect.If only 5500 signed the petition and counting numbers on lists is a way of estimating, I'd be surprised if there were much more than 10,000 who choose no LA contact from this group.

    Getting back to the 'real' numbers-
    The religious home educators form a part of the 'never been to school' and Jewish, Christian and Moslem groups do exist- sometimes in 'unregistered' schools and I am now seeking information on how many of them may exists ad have never been to school.
    The high end numbers quoted as up to 100 thousand include a very high percentage of GRT children who actually are CME at any given time and not EHE.
    If a GRT child had been at school and had moved and now is not known to any LA, then the Review stats would have been higher for the 'missing' column.
    How many GRT families are there who have never sent a child to school and never become known?

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  4. We considered HE when our eldest was about 2 but didn't decide to take that route until we saw how much they disliked nursery school. Although none of our children started school at the usual age, two have tried school for a short period before returned to HE. This seems to be quite common, at least amongst our friends. The five families we are closest to all began to HE shortly after their eldest child started school, I think the longest attended was for two terms though it might have been longer. I think they were all aware of HE so it didn't take long to make the decision once they had seen how their child reacted to school. All of their following children started out HE though several have also tried school briefly.

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  5. "I would not have sent my daughter to school under any circumstances and could certainly be seen as an ideological home educator. Interestingly enough though, it was my experiences with my first child which caused me to choose home education for the second. So I too have chosen home education in a sense because of the failings of the educational system which I have witnessed."

    This is where you appear to differ from most other HEers in my experience. Other HEers remove a child from school when they see it is failing the child in some way and then go on to HE later children. You appear to have left the first child in school and just not sent later children. Maybe the difference is that for others it was the child that had the problem with school - either bullying or just not enjoying it - and the parents react to this, effectively saving their child from a negative experience. Whereas in your case it was the parent that disliked the experience their child received. The child didn't need 'saving' as they were happy at school but you, as the parent, didn't think it was good enough and chose a different route for your second child. Would this be an accurate description?

    Maybe the ideology of parents who remove a child who is not enjoying school is that an education can only suitable and efficient if a child is happy and enjoying learning, either in school or out (this is our approach as school has always been an option for our children). You may have developed (or already have it but have become more aware of it) this ideology if your first child had disliked school for some reason.

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  6. Old crazy Badman was on Womens hour today radio 4 droning on about child protection he is such an arse! i can understand what he is talking about half the time!Does any one know?LOL

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  7. It is to be hoped that the above comment is not a misspelled observation about Mr Williams of Alton.

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  8. no word from Hampshire County Council Webb nothing! not even a letter LOL. have you reported us yet? go for it

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  9. We went through both the State System and Independent Schooling and finally gave us the ghost when both educational and welfare issues were not resolved at the last, very expensive, independent school.

    As we made the decision to withdraw our daughters from that school (10 and 13 at the time) and looked at the other schools in the area, it was only then that we decided to investigate home education - in the total absence of anything more suitable!

    We very nearly did not home educate at all. It was only when we came across a home educator whose child had taken GCSEs,that we decided that we could and follow that route.

    I have come across a couple of families, where the children have never been to school. These are a very small minority compared to the families who, like us, started out in the school system and probably had every intention of continuing that path through to 16 or 18.

    I think it would be far more productive for the government to investigate the increasing exodus from schools, rather than to continue to harass parents who choose to home educate and who, ultimately, are responsible for their child/ren's education.

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  10. Amanda says I think it would be far more productive for the government to investigate the increasing exodus from schools, rather than to continue to harass parents who choose to home educate and who, ultimately, are responsible for their child/ren's education.

    You want the government to harass parents who home educate after a school has failed they child?

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  11. Anonymous, you have totally twisted my comments.

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  12. Amanda says Anonymous, you have totally twisted my comments

    How? i ask again Amanda You want the government to harass parents who home educate after a school has failed they child?
    in many cases it is home educate or go back to school that has failed child what would you do?

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