Saturday 21 August 2010

Statistics

It is one of the enduring mysteries of home education in this country; how many children are actually being educated at home? The Ofsted survey Local authorities and home education, which was published in June, sheds new light upon this.

One big problem when trying to calculate the numbers of home educated children is that everybody exaggerates or underestimate the numbers depending upon who they are talking to and what they wish to prove. Home educating parents do this and so do local authorities and the Department for Education. Graham Badman's report, for instance talks of as many as eighty thousand home educated children in England. The reason for such a high estimate is simple; the more kids there are not at school, the more urgent is the need to do something about them. Badman gave no grounds for putting this figure forward. When the Department for Children, Schools and Families were compiling the impact statement to go with the CSF Bill on the other hand, they ridiculed the suggestion that there might be as many as eighty thousand children. They estimated the true number as much lower. Again, they gave no evidence for this belief. The reason for their wanting a lower figure was that it would make the estimated cost of implementing the bill lower and therefore more acceptable to MPs. Home educators sometimes like to pretend that their are lots of home educated children, if they are trying to make home education look like an unstoppable mass movement. At other times, they want to persuade people that there are only a few measly thousand. They do this when they wish to make the case that because there are so few children, no new legislation is needed.

So what do we actually know about the numbers of home educated children? When York Consulting undertook their feasibility study in 2006, they came up with a rough figure of twenty thousand children known to local authorities. they arrived at this figure by extrapolating from the nine local authorities at whom they looked. It is thought that there are a considerable number of other children who are not registered with local authorities. Many people assume that there are about the same number again as are known, which would give a total number for the whole country of around forty thousand. There is a problem with this though.

Ofsted discovered during their survey last year that the number of home educated children known to local authorities fluctuates dramatically throughout the year. There are usually plenty in September when children are supposed to move to secondary school and their parents decide not to send them. However, by Christmas, many of these parents find that they can't really manage it and then send their kids to school in the new year. One authority found that they had sixty five home educated children in September and only thirty five in the spring. Another had six hundred and thirty in September, which dropped to four hundred and thirty after Christmas. Since there is no standard time to conduct the census of home educated children, it means that the figure of twenty thousand which York Consulting came up with could be wildly out. If the figures they worked from were collected at the beginning of the academic year, then the true number of home educated children could be as few as ten or twelve thousand rather than twenty thousand. If we then accept that roughly the same number of children again are not known to their authorities, this would give us an overall figure for the whole country of only twenty or twenty five thousand. This is a good deal lower than the often quoted figures.

There is also increasing doubt as to the number of children not known to local authorities. Most have lists of rising fives and work together with health visitors and so on. It is quite possible that the number of unknown children is far fewer than those who are registered. All in all, it could be that the actual total number of home educated children in the country is a lot les than twenty thousand.

6 comments:

  1. "One authority found that they had sixty five home educated children in September and only thirty five in the spring. Another had six hundred and thirty in September, which dropped to four hundred and thirty after Christmas."

    Badman sent he LA questionnaire out in February and his data confirmed the 20,000 known to LA figure (though maybe this reflects an increase in registration or home education numbers between the York September 2006 study and the February 2009 figures rather than consistent levels).

    "There is also increasing doubt as to the number of children not known to local authorities. Most have lists of rising fives and work together with health visitors and so on."

    This may be the case now. I know when it was looked into a few years ago around a half to two-thirds of individuals from various groups (a HE conference and various local groups around the country) claimed to be unknown to their LA. This matched my experience of the 3 different groups I've been most involved with. I think this was the source of the 50,000 figure.

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  2. I think that at the moment this is one of the questions that Simon would like an accurate answer to, but there isn't one (a bit like the wish for statistical evidence for the effectiveness of AE). Things I do know ...

    a) There are a considerable % of unknown HE children in our local group (probably around 40%, but I will need to update my data to be sure). Most of those are families with children who have never been to school, but bizarrely we have several families where the LA know about one child (and may even do home visits) but fail to notice younger siblings.

    b) Many of the families with younger children joining now though are known; either because the HV have that info, or some other part of information sharing... the children may have been to nursery, get caught up in school registration and then the families change their mind.

    c) My gut feeling is that, in the light of recent tragedies, there is more emphasis on data collection (even without Contactpoint) so more families will come to light. One of our members is a working HV, and part of her job is to follow up any child who attends A and E (whatever the reason, doesn't need to be sinister)- so any family who is unknown may be found by that route. LAs are I am sure concerned about being held responsible by the tabloid press for any disaster.

    d) Against that, in last weeks Ofsted survey, were the staggering stats about how many children LAs lose- nothing to do with HE, but still a bit boggling. I am not sure if this means in reality that many home educators will remain undetected in the midst of that mass, or whether the report itself will spur LAs or the Govt to do something .

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  3. Ah but add to that all the home educators unknown to the home educating community who never network but are known to the LA.....there are lots. This then dilutes, for example, the 40% figure of "unknown to LAs" to a much smaller figure. In the past the majority of home educators networked. Sadly I feel that is no longer the case and many end up isolated. This is partly due to an increase (in my experience) in home educating for reasons such as bullying etc and the changing of the EO contact list - once so helpful to home educators and now all but useless because of the details that are missing from it.

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  4. So, Alison, does this mean you think the number is likely to be lower than the magic 80,000 figure people keep talking about, or higher?

    Figures confuse me.

    Mrs Anon

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  5. Alison said "This then dilutes, for example, the 40% figure of "unknown to LAs" to a much smaller figure"

    So you are saying (I think!) that there are many home educators who are known to the LA but not to the home ed groups?

    Yes, I do agree about that; we have had a real campaign of working with the LA and they now send every contact they have our leaflet. When we had an open day recently at the tuition group we run, the LA invited all their age appropriate contacts. I was staggered to have 2 families turn up, with 15 year olds that had been home educated for years, who not only had none of our large group ever had any contact with before, but who actually lived half a mile from each other, but still had never heard of any of our group stuff - or each other!

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  6. Alison

    Would this be any good as a sub for the lost contacts resource ?

    http://homeschooling-network.com/

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