School-aged children attending college

I recently bumped into a father who I have not seen for over a year or so. He and his family live some way from here in a village. His son was always bullied at primary school for being, shall we say, not as masculine as the average boy. The problem intensified when the kid started secondary school and so he deregistered him and began to home educate. It didn’t really work out, because however dreadful school was, at least the boy was mixing with other children. He missed this when he started spending all his time with his parents. They carried on for a couple of years until they managed to persuade the local authority, Essex, to allow the child to attend college part-time. This was the last I heard of the family until the other day.

The college placement fell through very quickly. There were a number of other fourteen and fifteen year-old boys at the college and they were a pretty rough bunch. They made this boy’s life a misery and because the college was really geared to the needs of sixteen to eighteen year-olds and not schoolchildren, the policy on bullying was pretty feeble. After one term, it was back to home education; which did not really suit either parents or child.

One of the problems with arranging college places for fourteen to sixteen year-olds, something which many home educating parents see as a solution to their problems, is that the sort of teenager of this age who usually fetches up at an FE college is a very different kettle of fish from the average home educated child. Home educated children have sometimes been withdrawn from school because they are vulnerable or the victims of bullying; the fourteen year-olds offered places at college are often the bullies themselves who have now been excluded from school. This can create problems for a sensitive child who is found a place at college. Our local college has a group of younger teenagers and they are all studying vocational subjects; mainly motor car mechanics. I see them at lunchtimes and they look and behave like the kids in Lord of the Flies. Heaven help a vulnerable or delicate child of the same age who was attending college with these characters!

I have myself remarked that it is unnatural for children at school all to be lumped into a group of the same age, but of course this does provide a measure of protection for them. The fourteen year-old girls spend all their lessons with fourteen year-old boys. This can serve to prevent the more mature of them from getting up to much mischief or being exploited by older boys. Most of the students in an FE college will be in the sixteen to eighteen year-old bracket. Some will be nineteen and one or two will be twenty or twenty one. Mixing freely with boys this age could present a hazard to a vulnerable girl of fourteen attending a college.

I am not really sure why so many home educating parents seem to be keen on the idea of college for their young teenagers. This subject often comes up on Internet lists and forums and the impression sometimes seems to be that local authorities are being unreasonable when they will not fund places for fourteen or fifteen year-olds who have been home educated. It might be more that those working for the local authority can see the pitfalls of this sort of thing more clearly and are trying to protect the children. If anybody wishes for their fourteen year-old child to receive education in a formal setting, rather than being educated at home, there exists a large network of purpose built institutions, staffed by trained professionals. All children are guaranteed free education at such places and there is sure to be one near most homes. They are called schools.