We seem to have got a little bogged down on the subject of special educational needs among home educated children in this country. I have more to say on this topic, but I think that I shall leave this subject for a while and hope that we can return to it in a week or two. Before doing so though, I want to look at one of the largest pieces of research conducted on home education in this country; one that is seldom mentioned among home educators.
Today, we shall be looking at an important piece of research shedding light upon the proportion of home educated children in this country who have special educational needs or disabilities. This is Local Authorities and Home Education, (Ofsted, 2010). Some comments here in recent days have been dismissive of this study, on the grounds that is was a self-selected sample. This requires some explanation. In 2009, during the Graham Badman enquiry, some, to say the least of it, questionable data about the possible risks of abuse to home educated children were circulating. Since then, new figures have come to light. As might have been expected, many home educators are very keen to dismiss these data too as being unreliable.
The idea that because the sample used in the Ofsted study is self-selected, it is somehow compromised or worthless is, of course, absurd. All research on home education is of self-selected samples; that is to say people choose whether or not to participate. This is as true of Paula Rothermel’s work as it is of all those large studies in the USA which show how marvellously home educated children do. If we disregard research into home education on the grounds that it involves a self-selected sample, then we are left with no information whatsoever. Ignore self-selected samples and we can no longer quote approvingly those huge studies of tens of thousands of children conducted by Rudd and Ray in the United States!
At the end of 2009, Ofsted carried out a study of home education in 10% of local authority areas in England. These fifteen local authorities ranged from urban districts such as the London Borough of Southwark and Solihull in the Midlands, to places as diverse as Norfolk, Shropshire and Poole. In those areas, every single home educated child known to the local authority, and also his or her parents, were invited to attend meetings or, if they would rather do so, fill in questionnaires. As result, 120 parents and 130 children attended meetings to talk about their views and another 158 children and 148 parents completed questionnaires. It is interesting to note that this total of 556 people whose views and opinions were examined was considerably greater than the 419 whose views Paula Rothermel examined during her research into home education. This too was of course a self-selected group.
One of the things which emerged from this large study was that a quarter of the 130 children who attended meetings either had statements of special educational needs or had, before they were deregistered, been at the stage of ‘school action plus’. Nor was this all. In addition to this;
There were also those whose parents, often supported by medical diagnosis, identified the children (many of whom were very able) as having some form of autistic spectrum disorder.
In other words, the total number of children with special educational needs was more than a quarter of the total. The local authorities’ data gave a similar picture, that is to say that the proportion present at these meetings reflected the whole population of home educated children of whom they were aware. In other words, over a quarter of the children at the meetings had special educational needs and the local authorities confirmed that this was the case in general; that these were not unrepresentative samples.
We saw yesterday that Fiona Nicholson had gone to a great deal of trouble to ask every local authority in England about the numbers of home educated children with statements. She found, after all this, that the figure was 5%. This same figure of 5% was first published six years ago in the study undertaken by York Consulting, (Hopwood et al, 2007). This is interesting, because it was obtained simply by sampling the figures from nine local authorities. Sampling of this sort can yield very accurate results. This should give us a certain amount of confidence in the figures from the Ofsted survey.
As I said earlier, I am going to move on to a different aspect of British home education in my next post. We have, I think, established that around a quarter, or rather at least a quarter, of home educated children in this country have special needs. We know that these children are between four and seven times as likely to be abused as children without such needs. In a later post, we will try putting a few different figures into those percentages and seeing what this might tell us about the increased risk of abuse for home educated children, but for now, that is all that I shall be saying about this.
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The reason why many parents don't rely on this report is that in my area the OFSTED representative was a safeguarding specialist with no knowledge of education and AIM established at the time that different questions and methodologies were used in different areas, which is not how a statistical exercise should be conducted. Also, at 'my' meeting, the OFSTED representative ended up by openly asking for people with positive experiences of the LA to speak about it. I did try, but all I could come up was that the park staff and library staff employed by the council were very good, friendly and helpful!
ReplyDeleteAs the OFSTED report says "Just over half the parents surveyed were frustrated and upset by the experiences they and their
children had had while the children were at school. "
and
"Almost all the parents surveyed whose children had special educational needs and/or disabilities had removed them from school because they believed their child’s needs were not being met. However, once they were educating their children at home they experienced a lack of specialist support. Children did not always receive support such as speech and language therapy or physiotherapy unless the parents commissioned and paid for it."
So, the ones who were angriest went to the meetings and filled in the questionnaires, and many of the ones who were the angriest were the ones whose children had SEN/disabilities. This doesn't seem to me to be the actions of parents who were anxious to stay under the radar or avoid contact because they were abusing their children, but people who cared passionately about their children and wanted them to have services that they had been established as needing. And while I'm aware that you'll say I'm generalising and that it's the mysterious 'other ones' you're worrying about, they did go and they did try to get the system changed, so for them to be used as part of your argument that parents of home educators with SEN/disabilities are more likely to be abusers is, to put it mildly, extremely distasteful.
Again, to quote from the report
For most of the parents to whom inspectors spoke, educating at home came about as a result of their concerns about their children’s education and well- being while at school, including:
experiences their children had already had concerns about what their children might encounter, for example on transfer to secondary school
dissatisfaction with the progress their child was making
concerns that their child’s particular needs were being ignored or were not being met.
10. Nearly a third of the 120 parents to whom inspectors spoke had withdrawn their children from school because of what they saw as the school’s lack of concern about the bullying of their child.
So to summarise
1) You have not established that a quarter of home educated children have special needs. We don't know how many children have special needs because we don't have a definition of what special needs are, we don't know how many home educated children there are, and we don't know how many parents consider their children to have SEN.
2) Nor do we know that these children are between 4 and 7 times as likely to be abused as children without special needs, because, as you have said, different types of special needs carry different abuse risks, and the risk of abuse will also be affected by economic circumstances and the support available.
3) The OFSTED report was not research into the incidence of children with SEN in the HE community, but, to quote from their report one last time , 'to evaluate how well the sample of local authorities discharged their statutory duties to ensure the suitability of education for children and young people who were educated at home.'
Looking forward to a change of subject. Do you take requests? If so, I'd like to hear your take on balancing child-led education with the boring but necessary stuff.
Atb
Anne
' the OFSTED representative was a safeguarding specialist with no knowledge of education and AIM established at the time that different questions and methodologies were used in different areas, which is not how a statistical exercise should be conducted.'
ReplyDeleteIrritating perhaps, but hardly likely to affect the percentage of children present who had special educational needs!
'so for them to be used as part of your argument that parents of home educators with SEN/disabilities are more likely to be abusers is, to put it mildly, extremely distasteful.'
No really my argument at all. I merely presented the results of research carried out across Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. That children with special educational needs are at an increased risk of being neglected or abused is the conclusion of all such studies.
Yes, but the percentage of children present was not necessarily representative of home educators in general. (Not least because it's easier for parents of children without SEN to find someone to leave them with!)
DeleteAnyway, looking forward to moving on
Anne said,
ReplyDelete"So, the ones who were angriest went to the meetings and filled in the questionnaires, and many of the ones who were the angriest were the ones whose children had SEN/disabilities."
Good point. Children with SEN are likely to be over represented in the sample group for several reasons. Children with SEN are more likely to experience problems at school and eventually de-register to HE. A large proportion of families who are known to the LA are known because they de-registered from school, so straight away the known family group will have a higher proportion of children with SEN than those who are unknown. Those who home educate from the beginning (like Simon and us, for instance) are likely to have similar rates of SEN to the general population. However, unknown home educators are more likely to become known to their LA if their children have SEN through increased contact with health professionals (this is how my friend's family became known and I've heard from others that this is quite common). So again, the known group becomes SEN 'heavy'.
So not only is the self selected sample likely to be biased towards families with SEN (because they are the angriest), the population from which the sample was drawn (those known to the LA) is also likely to be biased towards families with SEN.