Going to college at fourteen

There is currently a good deal of interest in the Department for Children, Schools and Families' assurance that children aged fourteen will soon have the opportunity to study for examinations in Further Education colleges and that such studies will be funded by central government, via the local authorities. There are a number of problems with the whole idea of children attending college at this early age.

Not only do some young people go to college a couple of years before they turn sixteen; others go when they are a bit older than that. For example, at my daughter's college there is a young man of twenty who is taking A levels. Most of the seventeen year old girls have quickly realised that he is a Grade A sleazebucket, the kind of guy who hits on every girl he meets in a very unsavoury fashion. Also at the college is a fourteen year old girl who has been out of school for a year and has been given a place at the college. She is now spending a good deal of time with this twenty year old man; they even go to the pub at lunchtime. Having been given the brush-off by all the seventeen and eighteen year old girls, he evidently finds it easier to impress a fourteen year old. She for her part is flattered by the attention. Anybody see any dangers here, in a shy and vulnerable fourteen year old girl being thrown regularly into the company of a sexually predatory twenty year old man in this way? This is not the only disadvantage.

Most of the girls at the college spend a good deal of time discussing, surprise surprise, sex. Who they are doing it with, with whom they would like to do it, how their periods were three weeks late and led to the fear of pregnancy, the rival merits of various methods of contraception and so on. Again, this might not be the sort of environment that many parents would wish for their fourteen year old daughters. Of course, there are other fourteen and fifteen year olds at college. Many, perhaps most colleges have a sprinkling now of young students. Perhaps the fourteen year old home educated child going to college could find a ready made peer groups there? Unfortunately, not. The majority of fourteen year olds who currently attend FE colleges tend to be problem kids of one sort and another. Some have been excluded from school, others have various problems. Without wishing to be snobbish and elitist, I have a suspicion that most of these kids are not the sort that a sheltered home educated child is going to get on with brilliantly.

There is also the problem of course that few colleges do GCSEs, if this is what parents are looking for. Any fourteen year old home educated child being given a place at college will be limited in the main to vocational subjects such as hairdressing and vehicle maintenance. Nothing at all wrong with that of course, but it is a limitation. I do know that some home educating parents had at the back of their minds that going to college at fourteen would allow their children to take academic subjects. this is really a non-starter. They certainly won't be able to get on to any A level course early without already having the appropriate GCSEs.

There are good reasons generally why our educational system is arranged so that children stick broadly to children their own age. This has as much to do with development and shared interests as it does with education. A child of eleven may well be capable of doing the same work as a sixteen year old, but it would not really be a good scheme to mix up children of these very different ages together. this is for their own protection as much as anything. I shall be interested to see how the new scheme of local authorities receiving funding to give children places in FE colleges works out in practice. For my own part I do not think it a brilliant idea at all and I certainly would not have wanted my own daughter hanging around at fourteen with eighteen or twenty year olds!