Thursday 25 April 2013

Another reason that flexi-schooling is being discouraged




I am, I will freely confess, a little slow on the uptake sometimes. During all the discussion on flexi-schooling, I have failed to connect up the dots and tie it in with various practices in schools; practices which I knew about, but did not think to associate with flexi-schooling. A reader yesterday drew attention to a new report on informal exclusions and it was after reading this report that the penny finally dropped.

I am sure that most of us know that there are children at school who do not wish to be there. Sometimes, these children register their protest by being disruptive and making life difficult for both the staff and other pupils. It only takes one or two such children in a class to slow down the teaching and sometimes make it wholly impossible to deliver a lesson. One way of dealing with this is to let these children leave the school premises; thus satisfying both them and the staff. This can be done in various ways. You can tell them to stay off school for a week if their ties are not done up properly, for example, or, and this is where we come to the subject of flexi-schooling; you can encourage them to take ‘study leave’.  This sort of thing is more common for children in the run-up to GCSEs, but can be granted informally at any time. What you do is say to the child, ‘You can work from home if you like for the next fortnight. Be sure to study hard.” It is of course all nonsense. You know and so does the kid, that there is not the slightest chance of his doing any schoolwork. He will be playing on the Xbox  and hanging around the park. You, the teacher, will be able to get on with teaching those kids who do actually want to learn. Badly behaved children are often given more ‘study days’ than those who are doing well academically.

What has this to do with flexi-schooling? Children who have been excluded from education by this racket are marked in the register as being educated off site; the same code used for children being flexi-schooled. Recent research showed that 2% of primary schools and 11% of secondary schools are doing this. It is a brilliant way to reduce bad behaviour in your school, but not very good for the children themselves.  In one school, a bunch of the more disruptive pupils were told not to come back after the Christmas holidays, but to study at home until they took their GCSEs in May. They too were marked down as being educated off site.

It is because this scandal was about to erupt, as it did when Maggie Atkinson, the Children’s Commissioner, spoke out about it this week, that the Department for Education have cracked down on the use of the code in the register for children being educated off site. They evidently caught wind of this a few months ago and decided to tighten up a little before Maggie Atkinson began shooting her mouth off.  I do not think that this is the only reason that flexi-schooling is now being discouraged, but it certainly explains why such children can no longer be described as being educated off site. This system  has been so abused that the DfE are determined to put a stop to it altogether.

7 comments:

  1. Glad to have helped, Simon. I could only see it because it happened to us. (Not, incidentally, because of bad behaviour, but because they didn't have a clue what to do with either child. They could have handled high IQ or autism, but not children who could out-think the teachers but who couldn't handle being in a noisy, sixties built school with bare brick walls and flickering lighting.)


    I think the damage to flexi was collateral, because otherwise schools would have said 'oh, but they're flexi-schooling.' And with unions as they are, the idea of actually prosecuting schools and punishing those who are falsifying the records was a non-starter. Funny, isn't it? If we don't send them to school when they're registered, we get prosecuted and Educational Welfare and all the rest of it. If the school doesn't want the child, it's written off as 'isolated incidents'


    Still, I'd never have home educated without it, so they did us a massive favour, no matter what it felt like at the time.

    Atb
    Anne

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  2. 'I could only see it because it happened to us.'

    Does that mean, Anne, that you were encouraged to take your children from school at times and they marked the register as being educated off site?

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    1. Yup, that is exactly what I mean, Simon. For the first half term when my son 'should' have been at school he was educated off site because the TA who should have been providing one to one support resigned the day before he should have started. Then he was educated off site for all except 2 hours a day for another half term, and asked not to come in over the Christmas period at all, because it'd be too disruptive for him, and guess what he was marked as? Then it was 'suggested' by school and LA that he was doing so well at home that it might be better for him if we withdrew him.

      With my daughter, it was school trips, swimming lessons and TA absences.

      And the LA knew it was happening, because that was where I got my 'sharp-elbowed, middle class, pushy parent' label. (Which, incidentally, I wear with pride!) I fought for them to be there, and it was going into school as my son's TA that started me realising that what I was doing at home was a whole lot better for him than what they were doing, and that, in turn, made me into the thorn in your side that I am today.



      (See what a lot you've got to blame that school for.)

      It's still happening down here, as you can see from this report - http://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/10213313.Educate_your_autistic_son_at_home_

      Atb
      Anne

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    2. It is happening everywhere Anne. It happened with my child and I hear similar stories every day.

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  3. It also happens when medical conditions need close monitoring, such a brittle diabetes.

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  4. Yet Alison is still trying to say that Code B can be used for flexischooling. She is advising schools to do this. The rules clearly state that it can't be used, that code C must be used when the child is flexischooling and flexischooling is NOT meant to be a long term arrangement it is meant to get the child back into full time attendance.

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