Yesterday, somebody commenting here gave us a link to some Canadian research about how home educated children fare as adults. This is it;
http://www.hslda.ca/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=60&Itemid=81
I had read this already and dismissed it as being irrelevant to home education in this country. However, perhaps I was wrong. Let's look at this and once again compare the situation in North America with that in Britain.
Perhaps the first thing to strike one about the Canadian adults is that this statement is made of their education;
The most typical pattern of home education covered the entire period from the ages of 5 to 18
This is very different from the general pattern in this country among home educated children. It is pretty rare to encounter any home educated child or young person who has not been to school or college between the ages of 5 and 18; in this group it is the rule. The reasons for home education are also interesting. In the Canadian study, they had this to say,
Most respondents gave many reasons for the decision to home educate, but the desire for a better education than that offered in schools was by far the most frequently mentioned and the most important.
This is not the situation in this country. All the surveys carried out here, including the most recent study by Ofsted, show a very different pattern of reasons for home education. The majority of home educated children in Britain have been deregistered from school. The most common reasons for this are bullying and the perceived failure of the school to meet a child's special educational needs. Another popular reason relates to lifestyle and being able to spend more time with a child. This at once underlines a major problem with using studies from North America to make even tentative conclusions about the outcomes for home educated children in this country. The outcome for a child who was never sent to school at all because his parents wanted a better education for him than could be provided at school is likely to be vastly different from that of a child whose parents didn't plan to home educate him at all, but feel compelled to remove him from school due to some problem or other. The two cases are quite different and this alone makes the Canadian study pretty useless as a predictor of how children here might do in later life.
Another very great difference between the young people in this study is religion. 84% of these home educated adults participated in religious activities in the home at least once a week and 82% of them belong to religious groups. Does this sound like home educators you know? However, something that I have noticed in this country is that those for whom religion is important often seem also to favour a more structured and conventional educational approach, which is usually dependent upon teaching rather than simply the hope of learning taking place. I certainly fit into this pattern, being a fanatically structured teacher whose child has been attending church and reading the Bible since she was very small! I wonder if there is a fruitful area for further investigation there? I have noticed the same thing about American studies; religion is a very big factor and seems to go hand in hand with both structured teaching and good educational outcomes.
I have said before that these studies from the USA and Canada are not really likely to shed any light upon the outcome for home educated children in this country. There, we are looking at religious types who have chosen to educate their children for purely educational reasons. The educational outcomes tend therefore to be pretty good. Here, parents typically educate their children for reasons wholly unconnected with education. Most of them send their kids to school and then take them out because problems develop. They then often choose a system of education which does not involve teaching, again in contrast to the sort of parents we read about in North America. It is high time that some research was carried out about this in Britain, but judging by past reactions to any idea of this sort, I am not hopeful. When Ofsted launched their study, the lists were buzzing with messages calling for parents to boycott the thing. The DfE's pilot for a longitudinal study was also received with great suspicion and promises of non-cooperation!
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"It is pretty rare to encounter any home educated child or young person who has not been to school or college between the ages of 5 and 18; in this group it is the rule. "
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's just email lists that are biased towards families that start HE later. The five families we are closest to all began to HE shortly after their eldest child started school so of the 18 children involved only 5 went to school at all and this was for a maximum of a year.
Yes, that's possible. The picture does seem to be the pretty much the same though with all other research in this country, from Paula Rothermel's work right through to the Ofsted study. When my daughter went for her interview before starting college, the guy simply couldn't believe that she had never spent a day at school. He wrote on her form, 'Never been to school.' Then for good measure, he underlined this and added a couple of exclamation marks.
ReplyDeleteold Simon says-When my daughter went for her interview before starting college, the guy simply couldn't believe that she had never spent a day at school. He wrote on her form, 'Never been to school.'
ReplyDeleteyour daughter should have demanded the guy wrote on the form home educated by my father why did she not do this Simon?
"The most typical pattern of home education covered the entire period from the ages of 5 to 18"
ReplyDeleteIf you look at the second study on that page, the split is 67% fully home educated, and 33 mixed.
"Most respondents gave many reasons for the decision to home educate, but the desire for a better education than that offered in schools was by far the most frequently mentioned and the most important."
Again, if you look at the second study, the first four reasons for HE were:
"Ability to teach the child particular beliefs and values
Desire more parent child contact
More directly influence moral environment
Enhance family relationships"
The ability to accomplish more academically came in 6th place.
Out of physical, learning and emotional needs, emotional needs came out top.
This study also found that the style of education (structured, mixed or very unstructured) made no difference to outcomes.
"This is not the situation in this country. All the surveys carried out here, including the most recent study by Ofsted, show a very different pattern of reasons for home education."
Don't you think the respondents would have been biased towards those who had been withdrawn from school because of problems? These people are far more likely to be known to their LA than people like me who home educated from the beginning for philosophical reasons.
"The majority of home educated children in Britain have been deregistered from school."
ReplyDeleteIn which case they are already 'registered' and therefore fulfilling LEA criteria of 'suitable education'.
"The picture does seem to be the pretty much the same though with all other research in this country, from Paula Rothermel's work right through to the Ofsted study."
ReplyDeleteBut you know how wary many home educators are. Many worry that they will become known to the LA if they take part in research and then have to put up with the hassle of visits or reports for no benefit. It they are already known to their LA they have nothing to lose.
Even Rothermel's research may have been biased towards those who were already known by their LA (the majority of which are likely to have de-registered from school). I think most of her respondents were members of EO. EO lose many of their members once the members HE is established and they have made contact with local home educators. Those who HE from the beginning often join EO before their children are school age (as I did) and may leave a year or two later. EO's current membership at any point is biased towards those who have recently started HE and those old enough to take part in research of this kind are more likely to have been de-registered from school and known to the LA (because the families of children this old who were HE from the beginning have already joined and left EO by this age). Hope this makes sense - in a bit of a rush.
"When my daughter went for her interview before starting college, the guy simply couldn't believe that she had never spent a day at school. He wrote on her form, 'Never been to school.' Then for good measure, he underlined this and added a couple of exclamation marks."
ReplyDeleteA sample of one is hardly representative though is it? Our local college has taken at least 4 life time home educators that I know of.
"A sample of one is hardly representative though is it?"
ReplyDeleteI was drawing more upon Paula Rothermel's work in the late nineties, Education Otherwise's large survey in 2003 and also the study published by the National Foundation for Educational Research in 2006; Some Perspectives on Home Educated Children. As well as these, York Consulting's study for the Department of Education and Science published in 2007 as The Prevalence of Home education in England: A Feasibility Study. They all came to a broadly similar conclusion.
The mention of my daughter was an amusing anecdote and not meant to be a representative sample.
It is quite reasonable for people to draw attention to the fact that not all home educators are known to local authorities. It is also true that much of the research has been with either this group and/or members of Education Otherwise. There may well be tens of thousands of home educators unknown to anybody. About these, we can say nothing and so the only discussion which can take place is about those views which we actually have.
ReplyDelete"About these, we can say nothing and so the only discussion which can take place is about those views which we actually have."
ReplyDeleteWe can say for sure that the vast majority of them were not de-registered from school and almost everyone seems to agree that there are at least 20,000 of them.
"We can say for sure that the vast majority of them were not de-registered from school and almost everyone seems to agree that there are at least 20,000 of them."
ReplyDeleteWell, possibly. Many parents who deregister their children from school still remain unknown to their local authority as home educators. Some local authorities do not chase up pupils who have been deregistered. The London Borough of Enfield is one such; there are many others. In these boroughs, if you deregister your child, you will hear no more about it. Apart from those local authorities, quite a few parents persuade the school that they are deregistering in order to move and things like that. They also remain unkown to the authorities. I suspect that most of us are familiar with these dodges!
"Many parents who deregister their children from school still remain unknown to their local authority as home educators."
ReplyDeleteThe home educator may not hear from them but the local authority still knows about the children, they would be able to compile a list, unless you are suggesting they throw away the notification the school must send to them? Seems unlikely.
"Apart from those local authorities, quite a few parents persuade the school that they are deregistering in order to move and things like that. They also remain unkown to the authorities. I suspect that most of us are familiar with these dodges!"
I'm not. I've been on email lists and a member of various home educator groups for 15 years and have not found this to be the case. I certainly know of people who *have* moved from the area without telling the LA where they are going (which is, of course, lawful) but these have been people who were already home educating and known to the LA. I have heard of authorities attempting to track these home educators by questioning neighbours and even estate agents. Most LAs seem to make an effort to track school children these days (according to friends and relatives with children in school) if only to send on information to the new school and school nurse system.
Curious that you do not seem to know how these things work in the real world! This is the sort of thing I'm talking about; it is from the comments to a recent article on home education in the Independent:
ReplyDelete"The LEA made some effort but the parents were able to give false /misleading information and evade much evaluation being carried out. The LEA were concerned about the poor education but felt it was too difficult to take any action.
The evasion took the form of not allowing the LEA to visit the house or see the children. The parents gave false or exaggerated claims about their educational provison, the LEA could not insist on any substantiation although they were highly sceptical. The parents said that they were moving house and gave an address outside the area. The LEA could not find out that they had only moved round the corner. "
I certainly have personal knowledge of this sort of thing, particularly in inner city areas where there is a high turnover of population and people are constantly dropping out of sight. There simply isn't the resources to keep track of such people. At one school which I know in LB Tower Hamlets, no attempt at all is made to track down children who stop attending.
" unless you are suggesting they throw away the notification the school must send to them? Seems unlikely."
Again, I am surprised that yu are not aware of how this happens in some areas. Enfield certainly has a department for dealing with elecetive home education. They are not over eager to have any new cases though. I have no idea at all how the mechanism works or at what stage the information is misplaced, but a number of families there have deregistered their children properly from schools and then been erased from the system entirely! If it were one school, I could understand it, but it is not. This is not the only local authority known for this.
To a certain extent, all this is irrelevant in any case. I agree that there are probaly twenty thousand children being home educated who are unknown to their local authority. We don't know anything about them though; for example what their parents' views are on monitoring, whether they are structured or autonomous and aso on.
"To a certain extent, all this is irrelevant in any case. I agree that there are probaly twenty thousand children being home educated who are unknown to their local authority. We don't know anything about them though; for example what their parents' views are on monitoring, whether they are structured or autonomous and aso on."
ReplyDeleteThe original point was that you seemed to think that far more HE children in this country had been to school (as opposed to being HE throughout) than in North America. I suggested that a much higher proportion of the 20,000 unknowns were likely to have been HE throughout because they have managed to remain unknown. That a few LAs seem incapable of compiling a list of children who have been de-registered does not take away the fact that the majority of them are capable. Likewise, I suspect the majority of LAs manage to track a reasonable proportion of children once they leave a school for any reason (for transfer of files and records, etc as well as H&S issues). There is no reason to assume that the majority of HE children in this country have been to school at some point because all of the research studies to date have been biased against finding these children.