A cautionary tale about home education and college courses

Partly as a result of appearing in local newspapers and partly because of this  blog, I have got to know a number of home educating parents in this corner of Essex. One of them, I first met two years ago, when his daughter was twelve and had just been deregistered from her secondary school. The child liked studying, which set her apart from many of the other pupils at her school. Last week, the parents got in touch with me, because they didn’t know what to do. The girl is now fourteen and is dead keen on going to university at eighteen, to study either history or English. She will need A levels for subjects like these and so her parents made initial enquiries at the two local FE colleges; Harlow and Epping Forest. 

I might mention at this point that the mother and father had been excited to learn about the possibility of fourteen  and fifteen year-old home educated children being able to study at college. What nobody had told them, on the internet lists or elsewhere, is that this would not be possible for A levels; at least, not without a clutch of GCSEs. They are feeling very anxious now, as to what their next step should be.

Harlow and Epping Forest have traditionally been very low achieving colleges and they have recently made efforts to raise their standards. On A level courses, for instance, there was always a high dropout and failure rate. They have tackled this by making it far more difficult to get on the courses in the first place. When my daughter went to Harlow, she needed  five GCSEs at A*-C; which was pretty standard at that time, four years ago. Things have changed dramatically. Epping Forest now requires five GCSEs at A*-B. Harlow want seven GCSEs and if you wish to take mathematics at A level, you must have a GCSE at B. There are absolutely no exceptions to these rules. 

I think that the parents to whom I had been speaking had thought in terms of their daughter taking GCSEs at college or perhaps  some literacy test before A levels. Nothing doing; the colleges are not taking any chances now.  They are determined to keep up their results and not let anybody in to study A levels who might fail or drop out. The result is that the girl in question could, if she wished, study hairdressing, film-making, motor mechanics and so on. She cannot without those GCSEs, get on to an A level course. In effect, the result of withdrawing her from school and believing much of what her parents were told on various support groups has sounded the death knell for her hopes of going to university to study history.

This is a sad case, but by no means unusual. I think that many parents have vague memories of doing O levels at college or remember when they ran evening classes for those who did badly in their GCEs. Anybody thinking of home educating a teenager who might wish to study an academic subject at university, really needs to find out about this!

GCSEs.... again.

I officially became a home educator in 1998, when my daughter turned five. I had of course been taking her sister out of school for a few days a week to teach her, before this, but 1998 was when I assumed sole responsibility for the education of a child of ‘school age’.


At that time, it was commonly supposed among many home educators that GCSEs would not be around for much longer and that there was little point in getting their children to sit them. After all, there were other options. Studying with the Open University was one of these, another was going to a further education college at fourteen or fifteen to take GCSEs and then A levels;  if the child wished to go on to university that is. Fifteen years later and some parents whose children are not at school have much the same kind of attitude; that GCSEs are on the way out and that even if they weren’t, they are not that important anyway.

Now I am not one who thinks that university is the be-all and end-all, the ultimate aim, of a child’s education. One of my children took A levels and went to university and the other did not. I regard both as successful, in that they both decided when they were young what it was that they wished to do. They then went on to achieve their very different goals. It was however important to me that both had the option of going to university if that was what they wanted. Which of course is where GCSEs enter the picture.

There was a time when many colleges ran GCSE courses in various subjects and if you wanted to skip GCSEs entirely and study for A levels at an FE college; well, that was also possible. You might have to work at it a little, but it was often possible to find a way round the entrance requirements. Many teenagers managed to study A levels without having very many or indeed any GCSEs or GCEs at all. Times change, of course. I have been prompted to reflect upon this by looking at the college to which my younger daughter went in 2009.

Harlow College used to be, to put the case bluntly, a really shit place. It was full of kids who were just marking time and the drop-out rate was astronomical. When my daughter applied, the college was just raising their standards. Nobody was allowed on any A level course, under any circumstances, unless they had at least five GCSEs, all at grade C or higher. There were no exceptions to this rule and it had the effect of fewer students dropping out of A levels half way through the course. A few home educated children tried to get in without GCSEs and were turned away. Even so, three years ago, there were still colleges where you could get onto an A level course without GCSEs; it was still happening.

I have dealings with Harlow College and I see now that anybody wanting to study for A level mathematics there now needs six GCSEs, one of which must be mathematics with at least a grade B. I am sure that this will reduce the drop-out rate still further, but it has the side effect of making the place even less accessible to home educated children. Ringing around, I have found the same kind of thing happening in other colleges in various parts of the country. We are moving towards a situation where sixteen year-old home educated children simply will not be able to study for A levels at colleges or sixth forms unless they have a clutch of GCSEs. This has serious implications for those who might wish to go on to university.

Of course, there are other routes into university apart from A levels. There is the IB, but this cannot be done at home. There is that old standby, the Open University, but anybody using this method stands a good chance of queering the pitch for a later application to the student loans people. Some courses, mainly those in the arts, can be entered through portfolios or auditions, but A levels are by far the commonest way in. It is worth parents bearing these factors in mind if their children are not at school. Obviously, it would be an unfortunate situation if a decision about not doing GCSEs had the later effect of preventing a child from going to university at eighteen if she wished to.

As I said earlier, fifteen years after I began as a home educator, some people are saying precisely the same things as were being said about GCSEs in 1998. Things have changed radically since then though and this must be borne in mind when reading success stories from the past of children without qualifications who managed to get into colleges and universities anyway. These routes are closing down rapidly and the time may come when formal qualifications such as GCSEs are absolutely vital if a child wishes to go into further or higher education.

Getting into university, or not

One of the saddest things one ever encounters in the world of home education is watching that moment when a parent realises that the dogged pursuit of ideology has irrevocably screwed up a child’s life. Sometimes this moment is almost invisible. For example, seeing a mother on a blog who says, ‘We have decided not to do GCSEs’. Because it is of course parents who arrange and pay for the taking of such examinations, this may be translated as, ‘I   have decided that my child will not be taking GCSEs’. Sometimes, this particular decision is not altogether catastrophic for a home educated child. It is still possible to find some Further Education colleges which will allow a child in without GCSEs, although this is becoming rarer every year. Even then, it will seldom be for A levels and so the parent’s decision has effectively restricted the kid’s life chances at the age of twelve or thirteen. Even if she takes A levels, many universities will raise their eyebrows if she applies without having any GCSEs as well.

What is even worse that the above scenario is the parents who steadfastly refuses, and teaches her child to refuse, to consider gaining any formal qualifications up to the age of seventeen and then still hopes to be able to swing a place at university. Often, these people have been lured on in their folly by the story of Ian Dowty’s son getting into Oxford without any GCSEs or A levels and are unaware of the background to this story. They breeze up to some university in the Russell Group when their daughter or son is seventeen and try to get the child in on the strength of a portfolio or life experiences. This is truly tragic, because they have not the slightest chance of succeeding in this endeavour. Here is a very well-known home educator having this ‘Eureka’ moment of discovery last week. She writes:
Has anyone had any success with Edinburgh University?


We've just had a disappointing response to my home educating daughter's enquiry about what they 'need' for entrance. The bod suggests that my daughter put her home educating experience in her 'personal statement' and I feel like suggesting where the bod should put a copy of her mechanical response to student enquiries.

It's the usual demand for A levels or an Access Course.

Yet when we went up for the Open Day the head of the department was quite positive about her chances.

XXXXX

P.S. She wants to study Japanese at University level and Edinburgh's MA is 'supposed' to be the 'best'.

I find this almost literally unbelievable. Approaching one of the best universities in the United Kingdom without any A levels and hoping for her child to be given a place on the say-so of the mother! I am particularly enchanted by the anger she expresses towards Edinburgh University, as though it is somehow their fault that she has not arranged for her daughter to take A levels! Here is a woman who took her daughter on a misguided and foolish educational journey, only to find that the result is likely to be complete failure for the child. Can anybody imagine anything sadder?

Smoke and mirrors in school-based education

Somebody commenting here suggested yesterday that I am prone to ‘bashing autonomous education’; a preposterous notion! To even things up a bit, we shall today look at the phenomenon of parents working away hard at their children’s school education and then forgetting that they have done so. As Old Mum correctly divined, the aim of this stratagem, both for schooling and home educating parents, is to make their children look more clever than is actually the case.


We looked yesterday at a couple of home educators who made great efforts in getting their children to read or take the necessary qualifications to get a place at college and then forgot what they had done. This kind of thing is by no means exclusive to home education; although there are certainly some stunning examples in that field. As a matter of fact, most of the parents I have known who have engaged in these games have had children at school. Before we look at how this works for those who are not home educating, I want to look at the motive for these deceptions. I say deceptions, but in many of the cases which I have known, the parents had actually managed to take themselves in as well; in fact they had come to believe their own myths! I rather suspect that the parents at whom we looked yesterday fall into this category and were not setting out deliberately to deceive others.

So what is the motive behind all this? It is pretty simple. Look at my own activities. When my daughter was two and a half and reading English fluently, I decided to teach her to read Chinese. This was very successful and she was making great progress until my wife put her foot down. Now as this stands, it is not much of a story. It simply shows the child’s father in a poor light as an insanely pushy parent. Let us imagine though that I made the same claim that the parent in yesterday’s post made to a newspaper about the kid reading English. Suppose that I told people that my daughter had learned Chinese herself; just picked it up, without any help from me at the age of two. You see the difference? This is much better; I have been transformed from a pushy parent into the father of a genius. A great improvement indeed! Telling people that we as parents have done little to encourage and help our children makes their achievements look much more impressive. They become very bright kids and we can portray ourselves as laid back parents without a pushy or ambitious bone in our bodies.

In the last few years, my wife and I have seen the children of friends get places at good universities after passing tough, academic A levels with As and A*s. Every one of their parents has claimed that the children didn’t study hard or revise, as well as making out that they themselves never bothered much about their children’s education; just leaving them to it. This is simply another version of the autonomous educating gag. What is astounding is that these people seem genuinely to have forgotten all that they did to get their kids to this point. The best local school is the Davenant Foundation. To get in, you need a ten year record of church attendance. Some of these parents spent a whole decade feigning belief in the Deity in order to get their kids to this school! How’s that for dedication, ten years pretending to be religious and all for the sake of your kid’s schooling? Once there, they paid for tutors to push the children academically, shouted and argued with the children to make sure that they took the right options at GCSE and A level and arranged a hundred different leisure activities and hobbies; to all of which they drove their children. In most cases, it would have been surprising had the kid not done well at A level.

Despite all this, the parents pretend to have done little or nothing to help their children’s studies. They tell everybody that their son or daughter never did any homework, didn’t pick up a book until a week before the exam and so on. This makes their children’s A level results look all the better, which is the aim of the gambit. Returning to home educators, we saw a marvellous example of this last year when a parent whose two children are famous for being autonomously educated claimed that her daughter had passed a science GCSE with flying colours, despite never having studied the subject and just flicking through the textbook a fortnight before the examination took place!

Speaking for myself, I have not the least objection to people claiming that their children gained GCSEs or A levels without any input from them, any more than I disapprove of parents making out that their children taught themselves to read. It is human nature to wish to present both your children and yourself in the best possible light. These tactics have the dual effect of both making you look like a relaxed and confident parent, while at the same time casting your kids in the role of infant prodigies. It’s a great game to play, as long as you don’t lose your sense of humour and start getting tetchy when others take your claims with a pinch of salt.