Wednesday 11 July 2012

GCSE related scams for home educators

I have noticed lately that I am apparently turning into one of those unfortunate people that one occasionally encounters in the street; shuffling along and muttering to themselves, while shouting obscenities every so often. In my own case, this behaviour is all too often precipitated by some new idiocy from the world of home education, from which I still seem unable to disengage myself. Perhaps I am suffering from some species of pre-senile dementia. It can’t be normal to read through the various HE lists and start growling, ‘For fuck’s sake!’ to one’s self every few minutes!


What with the Education Committee considering the help available to home educators and Fiona Nicholson beavering away to find out which local authorities are providing help with alternative provision, this strikes me as a good time to consider why so many teachers and local authority officers flee shrieking in terror at the prospect of helping home educating parents to arrange for their children to sit examinations such as GCSEs. This is a big topic and I shall restrict myself today to just one aspect of it.

I was reading an appeal recently by a home educating mother who was trying to secure extra time and rest breaks for her son, so that he could take a GCSE. He would apparently need at least four breaks an hour for there to be any realistic chance of his sitting the examination. She wondered what proof she would need to furnish of her son’s problems. Cue somebody advising her that under the Disability Discrimination Act, she could take a firm line with anybody who doubted her word on the matter. Well why wouldn’t it be enough for a mother simply to explain the facts of the matter to the exam centre and for them just to provide the kid with the extra time or laptop or whatever he needs? The answer is that this whole business has turned into a huge racket in the last few years.

At the local comprehensive, no fewer than 15% of the children sitting GCSEs get extra time and various other things such as scribes or laptops. One child in six! What is truly astonishing is that they are almost without exception the most middle class children with the pushiest and most articulate parents. Rummy indeed! Are middle class children more prone to dyslexia and neurological difficulties? Well, no; it is of course a scam. By getting a report from a tame specialist, which will set you back a few hundred pounds, your child can have two hours to write an essay, rather than just the one hour that all the other children are getting. This is a huge advantage. Nor is this all.

It is also possible to boost your child’s exam marks by pleading a range of special circumstances, ranging from headaches on the day of the exam to being diagnosed with terminal cancer the day before. The one will give you an extra 1%, the other 5%. In between these two extremes are a whole raft of possible life-events; pets falling ill, seeing somebody killed in a road accident, death of a grandmother and so on. By combining a couple of these with dyslexia, you can give your kid a huge advantage in GCSEs.

What is the point of all this though? After all, GCSEs don’t matter all that much, do they? In fact they do matter a great deal if one wishes to get a place at one of the better universities. Oxford and Cambridge expect to see a string of seven or eight A* GCSEs as standard, as do a few other universities in the Russell Group. At less prestigious places, GCSE results are often used as a tiebreaker. If you have a bunch of kids, all with three A levels at A, you can look at their GCSEs; the one with mostly As will often trump the one with mostly Bs.

A natural consequence of all this is that many well informed parents work the system by pretending that their children are dyslectic and have suffered some sort of trauma the day before an exam. This sort of thing is nearly always accepted, but many teachers are getting a bit sick of it. Between them, the exam boards each get over half a million appeals for special consideration every year and only 3% are rejected. With one child in six being given extra time, separate rooms, laptops and so on during GCSEs; it is starting to be plain that this is becoming another tactic by parents to boost their kids’ grades at GCSE from B to A or from A to A*.

I am not of course saying that there is no such thing as dyslexia. Nor am I objecting to children with special educational needs being granted extra help. Rather, I am claiming that middle class parents are using the system to give their children an unfair advantage over the rest and that attempts are now being made to discourage the practice. One of these is to be a bit stricter about which children genuinely have a disability.

I am afraid that home educating parents are famous for wanting special provision for their children. There are a number of possible explanations for this. One is that many home educated children have been withdrawn from school precisely because they had special needs that the school was unable to cater for. Another might be because the parents are predominantly middle class and are therefore using the same scam as many other middle class parents. It may also be the case that they are so used to having their own way and believing their child to be special, that they want different treatment as a matter of course.

Whatever the explanation, and it could well be a mixture of all of the above, it makes fixing up GCSEs for home educators something of a nightmare and is one reason why many places give them a wide berth. In my next piece, I shall look at a few other reasons why so few people seem to want to help home educators to enter their children for exams.

9 comments:

  1. I have had to take a deep breathe here and go back and see what I had posted to the mother described in the third paragraph...... The fact is that whether you like it or not, having an assessment for SEN which allows you special consideration is a fact of life, and whilst it exists there is no reason why a child shouldn't take advantage of it. In fact children in school are more advantaged that those out of school - they usually get free assessment whilst many home educators have to pay for it; in addition the school will take care to implement the recommendations for their own children but may not be willing or able to do so for external candidates. In a recent school exam I noted that 40% of the school candidates had use of a laptop, but we couldn't have offered that facility to any of our external candidates because we don't have access to a supply of laptops - so if any home educated child comes to us with an assessment that recommends that, we have to decline. This has mean that some children have still sat external exams with us without the use of a recommended laptop because exam centres are in such short supply.

    Yes, dealing with home educators wanting to take exams is a bit of a nightmare, but in my experience it is not because the parents or children are particularly difficult ( although I do know another local home educator who coordinates exam who has had a few problems) but more because of the variety of exams that home educators take. In a school a teacher has decided which exam board a class should sit - and they will all do the same, but by the time a home educator comes into contact with me they have already made up their mind which exam - - which is bound to be different from the selection of the next candidate. In addition one of the exam boards is terribly inefficient and keeps making errors, and above all in a school the secretary is being paid to do her job for internal candidates, whilst I am just a volunteer.

    Incidentally - a quick check of this summers exams reveals that out of our 40 candidates, 4 had special conditions. Of those 2 had LA assessments and 2 private ed psych ones. This is 10% - so below even your average....and way below the statistics for the internal candidates!

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  2. ' although I do know another local home educator who coordinates exam who has had a few problems'

    Yes, her initials are JP and to say that she has had 'a few problems' is understating the case a little! Rumour has it that she has been taken off to a nursing home to recover...


    'The fact is that whether you like it or not, having an assessment for SEN which allows you special consideration is a fact of life, and whilst it exists there is no reason why a child shouldn't take advantage of it'

    Quite true. I was pointing out that since this has turned into a scam on an indistrial scale, some innocent parents and children are bound to fall foul of the rules. I suppose that it was the speed with which, in this case, somebody was suggesting legal action and complaints that made me think of home educators as being terrible nuisances to schools in this way.

    'This is 10% - so below even your average....and way below the statistics for the internal candidates!'

    Yes, this is true. However it this sort of thing combined with all the other endearing little quirks which schools encounter which makes the experience less than a pleasure for them. If it was just the dyslexia angle, it might not be so bad. It is the needing a separate room, twice the time for the exam and a scribe, combined with the kid doing a subject nobody is doing, like astronomy. To say nothing of the parent not knowing which tier she wants to enter the child for, missing the deadline and ringing the school fifty times in the week before the exam. It is a mixture of all these factors which makes people a little tetchy about home edcuted children taking exams.

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    1. "It is a mixture of all these factors which makes people a little tetchy about home edcuted children taking exams."

      To say nothing of there being nothing in it for the school. Private schools are at least able to chalk it down to being useful for their charitable status. There are no benefits to state schools as far as I can see, so even if they are easier to deal (as Julie seems to suggest), there is no advantage to the school in helping. Which just goes to show how much generosity of spirit exists in our schools!

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    2. "There are no benefits to state schools as far as I can see,"

      There can be benefits to state schools - they can, and usually do, charge admin fees to cover their costs, along with the exam board fees. One local state school takes many private candidates - not just home-ed students, but mature students, and students who have not been allowed to resit at their own establishments. They charge a reasonable fee and it seems to be worth their while. I am bemused at the suggestion that fixing up GCSEs for home-ed students is generally a 'nightmare' as it's been easy for us. My son has taken IGCSEs rather than GCSEs, and the state school has had no difficulty organising that.

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  3. Peter got a brand new lap top webb 599 pound it cost got it for him for college!

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  4. 'There are no benefits to state schools as far as I can see, so even if they are easier to deal (as Julie seems to suggest), there is no advantage to the school in helping. Which just goes to show how much generosity of spirit exists in our schools!'

    All very true! Quite a few private schools have latched onto this as a 'public benefit' that allows them to retain their charitable status. For maintained schools, the whole enterprise offers nothing but trouble and those that do it are indeed to be congratulated!

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  5. Apparently it’s no longer necessary to have an ed psych’s report in order to get extra time in exams. It’s enough to have an assessment carried out by a specialist teacher in the school. Great way for a school to improve their results!

    Interesting article, if a little out of date,

    http://www.schoolhousemagazine.co.uk/features/issues/exam-excuses

    "I spoke to a girl at a private London Day school, who is midway through her GCSE course. She already feels strongly about the unfairness of the system – especially as some of the girls in question are not, in her opinion, genuinely dyslexic. ‘One girl says she’s dyslexic, but she gets top marks in English all the time. I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with her. This year she got an hour’s extra time in the school English and Philosophy exams. We got one hour, she got two.’ And an experienced London tutor I spoke to felt similarly strongly about how the system is being abused. ‘Quite often I come across students who has been diagnosed ‘dyslexic’ by a pliant doctor or educational psychologist, but there’s nothing wrong with them except a slight inability to spell. They get 25% extra time in GCSE, and a laptop. This means that their material is clearly presented – and this gives them an advantage.’

    Do parents think that having their son or daughter diagnosed dyslexic is going to improve the chances of them getting into Oxbridge? I spoke to the Admissions Secretary at Trinity College, Cambridge to ask whether there was some kind of quota of special-needs students they had to be seen to be taking. Absolutely not, she said. ‘There’s no quota. Every student is judged solely on academic merit. But if you are dyslexic, you can put this on your UCAS form, and this is taken into account at interview. You’ll be given up to 25 per cent extra time in your interview tests – and, if you do get a place, this extra-time allowance will carry on throughout your university career.’"

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    1. The problem is that some are not dyslexic at all. They just have never been taught how to spell properly.

      Sadly, this happens quite a bit in certain sections of the HE community.

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  6. Let me make this clear: none of my family has ever been given extra time, a scribe or other special arrangements in an exam because we don't have special needs. But those who have special needs DO need special consideration. In schools or in home education, of course the pushier parents, many of them middle class, will lobby for and get these arrangements but surely you can't claim this is because the perception of special needs is a middle class neurosis. I'd suggest it's far more likely that less pushy parents simply don't ask because they're either afraid to do so or they're unaware that many of these facilities are available. Do we withhold much needed support for those with special needs just because at the moment there's something of a class bias in that support? Or do we try to address the class bias?

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