The growth of confrontation over the last fifteen years between home educators and local authorities

I have long thought that some of the more aggressive home educators bear a good deal of the responsibility for the antagonism  which presently exists between local authorities and the home educating community. Apropos of this, I was looking recently at a book which I acquired in 1998, when my daughter became five and I was, at a stroke, officially transformed into  a home educator. It is called The Home Education Handbook and was written by Jane Lowe,  who has been mentioned here recently.

The astonishing thing about The Home Education Handbook is that although it was published in 1996, it portrays a world that is scarcely recognisable now. Many home educating parents today seem to think that until people like Mike Fortune-Wood and others of his militant ilk  took a hand in things, home educators were being bossed about and bullied by local authorities left, right and centre. The picture drawn by Jane Lowe in 1996 is very different. Let me quote a few passages, to show you what I mean:

Most parents do not have any objection to a visit, because it helps to place the education in context.

It would hardly be possible to make such a statement today, where visits are widely regarded as being one of the most contentious issues in home education.

Many advisers are friendly and sympathetic and they may be able to give you helpful ideas and suggestions, but they are not obliged to give advice to home educators. The adviser’s remit is to check that you are providing proper education.

Once again, this sounds very different from the attitudes that one typically sees in places such as the HE-UK internet list!

The adviser has to assess the entire scope of your home education…Before the visit you could get out all the books and materials which you are using and arrange them on a table with the child’s own work.  It is helpful if the work is arranged in order in files, exercise books and folders…The adviser will be looking for some evidence of progress in the work that has been covered, and he will be checking to see that the work is at a level which is appropriate to the child’s age and capabilities.

I think that this is enough to give us a flavour of the thing. As I said, a little over fifteen years ago; but just imagine an organisation run by and for home educators producing this today! So different is the atmosphere now, that had I not mentioned beforehand that this was produced by Jane Lowe and the Home Education Advisory Service, readers might have been forgiven for thinking that I was quoting from some local authority website; one which was particularly strict and unfriendly to home educators at that! Yet this was the general feeling among home educating parents at that time and there was not the slightest hint of conflict with local authorities. My question is a simple one. To what do readers attribute the great change in attitude which has taken place since this was written? In the late 1990s, one of the main home education  support groups was in perfect accord with local authorities and advising parents to work alongside their LA and cooperate with them as far as possible. What has changed?

Just to anticipate one possible suggestion, that Jane Lowe was some sort of collaborator and her views suspect, I would ask readers to bear in mind that she was close to Alan Thomas and they wrote a book together.

Home educated children and the 'broad and balanced curriculum'

Regular readers will know that I am something of a connoisseur of hypocrisy among home educators. Not that I believe there to be more hypocrisy among them than the general population, but rather that some of the more prominent among them tend to be very po-faced and sanctimonious and so the hypocrisy is all the more entertaining.


A few days ago on the television news, Robert Goddard of ATL, a teaching union, said this:



`All evidence suggests that whilst some young people that are home educated do get a broad and balanced curriculum, there's a lot of evidence that suggests that quite a few of them don't. We feel that registration and monitoring of that provision will help towards all young people getting those skills and knowledge that they need to excel in life’



Inevitably, some home educators promptly went mad and accused him of a ‘slur’ against home educating parents. What evidence did he have that quite a few home educated children were not getting a broad and balanced curriculum?

Well of course, anybody who took part in the Graham Badman enquiry and the associated fuss will know full well that an awful lot of home educators were and are bitterly opposed to giving their children a ‘broad and balanced curriculum’. They have a visceral dislike of any curriculum; especially one which is broad and balanced. The concept of broad and balanced curriculum was regularly denounced on home educating blogs, forums and lists as a coercive tool, one which right-thinking home educators should reject. Here are Alan Thomas and Harriet Patterson explaining why they don’t think it is necessary for home educated children. See section 5 of the following:



http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmchilsch/memo/elehomed/me1602.htm




Last year, the Department for Education website said this about home education:



'parents do not have to follow the National Curriculum. However, parents should deliver a broad and balanced curriculum'


This caused such anger among many home educators that Fiona Nicholson got together with Ian Dowty to try and make them remove it. The very idea, that home educating parents should be delivering a broad and balanced curriculum! It was outrageous!

And so a few years down the line, after having fought vociferously for their right not to provide their children with a broad and balanced curriculum, somebody from one of the teaching unions notices this and remarks upon it. He is at once attacked. How dare he suggest that quite a few home educated children are not receiving a broad and balanced curriculum? Why, it is a thing beloved of home educators, all of whom do their very best to ensure that their children receive such a curriculum.

This is such a monumentally awful piece of barefaced hypocrisy, that it goes straight into the Simon Webb Hall of Hypocrisy Fame. Indeed, I think that it will be a strong contender for the Seth Pecksniff Memorial Prize for Arrant Hypocrisy. Seriously, has anybody ever heard a better example of the doublethink which goes on in the world of British home education?

How the autonomous acquisition of literacy in this country relies upon universal schooling

I drew attention a few days ago to the fact that in countries where there is not universal schooling, literacy rates tend to be low. Somebody commenting here then said that the autonomous acquisition of literacy as practiced by some parents in this country is predicated upon children growing up in a literate environment; surrounded by the printed word. Others have made this point; among them Paul Goodman, John Holt and Alan Thomas. Reference has been made to the ‘sea of literacy’ which envelops children in Britain and America, allegedly making it easy for them simply to pick up literacy informally. Not one of those advocating this way of learning to read seems to have considered the implications of such a state of affairs.


At one time in this country, few people could read. Shops had signs consisting of recognisable objects rather than words. The three golden balls for the pawnbroker and the red and white barber’s pole are relics of this; as are the painted images on pub signs. As more children attended school, so the literacy rate rose. Once schooling was all but universal, the literacy rate grew to around 100%. This means that there is printed matter wherever we look. Free newspaper and advertisements are quite literally thrust upon us, being pushed through our letterboxes. It would be hard to avoid seeing printed words each day. In a country like Bangladesh, where fewer than 50% of children go to school for five years or more, the literacy rate is below 50%. It is growing though. As the rates of schooling increase, so too does the literacy rate. There is a direct and strong correlation between the move to universal schooling and the achievement of 100% literacy in a country.

What this means is that parents in this country who choose not to send their children to school and allow them to acquire literacy informally by immersing themselves in the ‘sea of literacy’ are benefiting from universal schooling just as much as those who do send their kids to school. They are riding on the back of compulsory schooling. The universal schooling produces the literate society which is needed for the autonomous acquisition of literacy. It is rather like vaccination. When vaccination levels for measles are almost universal, the disease becomes very rare. When the levels of vaccination fall, the result is a measles epidemic. This does not of course mean that one child who is not vaccinated will get measles; merely that he still benefits from the protection afforded by all those who have been vaccinated.

It is common for autonomously educating parents to moan about the efforts made by local authorities to ensure that all children attend school. This is a little ungracious, because without universal schooling of the kind we have in this country, there would be no literate society, no ‘sea of literacy’. Their own method, that of letting their children acquire literacy informally from observing the world around them, would then be impossible. Autonomous educators actually need schools at which almost 100% of children are taught, in order  to create the correct environment for their own children to learn effectively.

Alan Thomas and How Children Learn at Home

Many home educators are very sensitive about any criticism of the ideologues whose writings underpin their chosen lifestyle and educational methods. I mentioned a few days ago that AS Neill was brought up in Scotland and believed that children should be free to have a sex life; I was promptly accused by one person commenting here of ‘slandering’ him! Many of the more outlandish beliefs and practices of British home educators are justified by them on the grounds of supposed research. Often, claims are made about the academic attainments of home educated children or the acceptability of not teaching them to read formally. These claims are usually supported by reference to the work of Paula Rothermel and Alan Thomas. I have dealt with Rothermel’s research in the past. Time now to look in a little detail at that of Alan Thomas.

A popular belief among those who think that children are able to acquire literacy informally is that although they may be later than school children in learning to read, it does not matter because they will soon catch up when they do start. The only research which supports this contention is that of Alan Thomas. Let us look at what he said. The chapter on reading in the book which he co-authored with Harriet Pattison contains the clearest account of his work in this field (How Children Learn at Home, Thomas and Pattison, Continuum 2007).

The chapter in question, chapter 8 of the book, begins unexceptionally enough by suggesting that there are various ways of teaching reading and that no single method has been found to be the best in all cases. The authors then go on to say that home educating parents are very flexible at moving from one method to another as seems best. This is a little misleading and obviously put in to lull any professionals reading the book into a state of quiescence. The thrust of the rest of the chapter is not that various methods are successful, but that success may be achieved by using no method at all and just relying upon the child to teach herself. On page 94, Thomas and Pattison claim that ’Resistance to being taught and late reading both featured in earlier research’. They mean of course Thomas own research in 1998. Talking of parents teaching their children to read, Thomas and Pattison say:

’the outcome of parents’ best efforts in this direction was rarely successful. Children frequently resisted any form of structured teaching..’

They go on to describe how parents gave up on the whole thing. This is very strange. For almost the whole of recorded history, children have been taught to read by their parents. In early 19th Century America, a time when there were few schools, the practice was universal. It was said by a contemporary observer that a child unable to read was, ’as rare as the appearance of a comet’. Many home educating parents today teach their children to read, as do many other parents. I was taught to read by my own parents before starting school. The idea that children commonly resist the teaching of reading is not borne out either by history, any research or common experience. Perhaps the fact that Thomas’ sample here, the twenty six families about whom he is writing in this book, were handpicked and dedicated autonomous educators has some bearing on the matter? At any rate, there is something clearly odd and atypical about these parents if their children are proving so resistant to being taught to read.

After acknowledging that not teaching children to read means that they are likely not to read until later than those who have been taught, which is perhaps not entirely surprising, Thomas says this:

‘Not only does late reading at home appear to hold no knock on educational disadvantage but it also seems to have no long-term consequences for reading ability’

It is this assertion which has been eagerly seized upon by parents who refuse to teach their children to read. It is of course absolute nonsense. Thomas does not define what he means by ’educational disadvantage’. Nor does he explain how it might be measured, nor by whom the decision was made that it was not present in any of these children. How on earth does he know that there was no ’educational disadvantage’? We are not told; it is sheer waffle. Similarly, his remark about long-term reading ability. Where are his data for making this claim? Were the kids tested? Did he rely upon the parents’ information? Again, we are not told. This much quoted statement may accordingly be ignored.

On page 100 he tries to revive the tired old notion of reading readiness, citing a number of factors which must supposedly be present before a child can learn to read. It is a daunting list, including recognising and being able to name letters, being able to distinguish different sounds in speech and many other things. The implication is that some children will not acquire all this supposedly vital knowledge until a later age. Again, this is nonsense. A child of eighteen months does not need to know the letters of the alphabet, let alone be able to name them, in order to see the word ’cat’ and read it. We do not spell out words letter by letter in that way. One only has to look at Chinese ideograms to see that it is possible to learn to read without synthetic phonics!

The problem with Alan Thomas’ work is that it has been seized upon and his ideas followed slavishly by people who do not really understand what they are doing. This is dangerous, although to be fair to Thomas, it is not really his fault. There are many excellent books available on the subject of learning to read; How Children learn at Home is not one of them.

Researching into the acquisition of literacy

In my local newspaper this week is the story of a woman who has just celebrated her hundredth birthday. She is a lifelong smoker and attributes her longevity in part to this habit. This reminds me somewhat of those home educating parents who claim that their children did not start reading until they were fifteen and yet still went to university. The point being of course that the hundred year old woman did not live that long because of, but in spite of her smoking. There is no doubt that some home educated children do not learn to read until quite late by school standards, but whether this is a desirable state of affairs or helped contribute to their later success is debatable.

Part of the problem when discussing home educated children in this country and how and when they learned to read is that almost no research has been done on the subject. That which has been done is based upon grotesquely small, self-selected samples and the results of each such piece of research often contradict all that which has gone before. I mentioned yesterday Paula Rothermel's testing of five children using the NLS tests and this irritated somebody who commented here. Let us look at two pieces of work carried out in this country about the reading abilities of home educated children.

Writing in his book How Children learn at Home (Continuum, 2007), Alan Thomas had this to say;

'Some children did learn to read early by school standards, but many were spread out in the seven to twelve age range and a few were even older than this'

This is, I will not say the standard view in British home education, nothing is that, but it is certainly a commonly held view. The idea being that if children are not made to learn formally at the age of five or six, they might acquire literacy a little later, but are not at all disadvantaged by this. We see this opinion expressed pretty regularly. We turn now to another piece of work which indicated precisely the opposite of this. In February 1997 Paula Rothermel, a student at Durham University, sent out 2500 questionnaires to home educators belonging to Education Otherwise. The following year she sent out the same number again and a small number to Local Education Authorities and a few other places. She received over a thousand responses. This work was carried out as part of her studies and subsequently formed the subject of her PhD thesis. One claim which emerged from this work was that home educated children scored far higher on standard tests of literacy than children of similar age at school. 'Far higher' is understating the case. Using the assessments for literacy which Rothermel did, one would expect to find 16% of children in the top band. According to Rothermel, no fewer than 94% of home educated six year olds were in this band.

In other words, according to Thomas and many home educating parents, it is common for children educated at home to be a little later than school children in learning to read. Rothermel claimed however that over 90% of the children she tested were doing brilliantly at reading at a very early age. It has not been possible to replicate these results; a fatal flaw in any sort of research.

Interestingly, a lot of the research in this field is carried out by students. The Otago work from New Zealand was by a student, as was the work on the sixteen pupils at Sudbury Valley which I discussed yesterday. Paula Rothermel's work too was that of a student. It would be very good to see a properly designed survey carried out of a large group of home educated children in this country, looking at the methods used and the long term results; ie, after the age of sixteen. Until this is done, we must really keep an open mind on the matter; the evidence so far being scrappy and unreliable.

The informal acquisition of literacy

It is more or less an article of faith among many home educators that the teaching of reading is unnecessary; children can be expected to pick this skill up for themselves in the right circumstances. In support of this contention, some quote Alan Thomas who carried out research on what he described as the 'informal curriculum'. He said:

'Modern life takes place within a vast sea of written material which surrounds us.... Words are literally everywhere: children are surrounded by advertisements, streets signs...shopping lists, instructions, magazines, bus destinations'

The implication is that reading can be learned with little or no formal instruction; a view which some home educators enthusiastically embrace. Nor is Alan Thomas alone in this belief. As long ago as 1962, Paul Goodman was writing in Compulsory Miseducation that:

' the puzzle is not how to teach reading, but why some children fail to learn to read. given the amount of exposure any urban child gets, any normal animal should catch on to the code'

He goes on to blame schools for reading difficulties and suggests that:

'Many of the backward readers might have had a better chance on the streets'


All of which will be music to the ears of autonomous home educators. There are two points to consider. Firstly, most educationalists believe this to be nonsense. With the exception of the odd piece of research such as Thomas' and the occasional study from an advocate of Steiner in New Zealand, almost everyone thinks that it is necessary and desirable to teach children to read and the earlier the better. Still, what about Alan Thomas' and Paul Goodman's ideas? Could there really be something in this? This brings us neatly to my second point. If it is true that just the experience of living among advertisements, street signs and so on can be enough to get a child going on the road to literacy, then we should see this in other parts of the world. Thomas looked at a handful of kids in England, Ireland and Australia, while Goodman was talking exclusively about America. Surely this informal acquisition of literacy should be widespread wherever children are not in school from the age of five until sixteen?

The literacy rate in London is about 99%. I am not talking here of Ofsted measures at the age of eleven or those getting a C in GCSE English. Instead, I am using the old way of defining literacy; the ability to read or write a simple note. Much was made in the press recently about the number of children leaving primary school with a reading age of seven, but this is perfectly adequate for day to day needs. Our most popular newspaper is specifically designed to be accessible to those with a reading age of seven. It is extraordinarily rare to encounter anybody without moderate to severe learning difficulties in this country who cannot write a simple note or read a passage from the Sun. The official rate is in any case 99%. According to some though, many of these people became literate in spite of rather than because of their schooling. How can we check this?. Easily enough as it happens.

The literacy rate in Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh is just under 50%, which is far higher than rural parts of the country. Here are people who live and work surrounded by all the print that Thomas talks of; the advertisements, street signs, destinations on the front of buses and so on and yet half of them seem stubbornly resistant to acquiring literacy! This is odd. Surely, if Western children can 'catch the code' just by living in a city, then Bengali kids should be able to do the same? Let's see what might account for any difference. Both Bangladesh and England use alphabetic systems, so that is the same. London and Dhaka both have masses of print of all sorts on display in the form of advertisements, bus destinations, street signs and so on; the 'vast sea of written material' which Thomas talks of. That can't be the difference. Oh wait a minute, I think I might have it! In England all but a tiny handful of children attend school between the ages of five and sixteen. Compulsory education, which for almost everybody means compulsory schooling has been a feature of life her for well over a century. In Bangladesh on the other hand, the situation is very different. The overall literacy rate is about 35%. Roughly 40% of children never go to school, only 7% complete secondary school. Here perhaps is a clue.

In one country with near universal compulsory school attendance for eleven years of their lives, there is almost universal literacy. In a country where almost half the children never attend school and only 7% complete secondary school, 65% of the population are illiterate. Puzzling, no? I am surprised that instead of investigating a small group of children in England or America, nobody had thought to look closely at how the 'informal curriculum' works in places like Bangladesh. I think that we could learn something very interesting about the connection between compulsory schooling and literacy rates. Looking at other countries makes the situation very clear. The more children attending school; the higher the literacy rate. Near universal schooling means near universal literacy.

Towards "informal learning".....

Somebody in one of the comments recently was recommending that I check out Alan Thomas' stuff. I decided to fetch down my copy of "How Children Learn at Home", which he co-authored with Harriet Pattison. (Continuum 2007). A better title for this book would perhaps have been "How Children don't Learn at Home". Unfortunately, it was every bit as terrible as I remembered. What a pompous windbag the man is! Here he is talking about, I think, parents reading to their children;

"Children may not perceive a need to read if they are busy with other things and have adults or older children around who are willing to fulfil their literacy needs".

I know that he is popular with many home educators, but really; "fulfil their literacy needs"! His thesis is that many parents set out on the home educating lark with good intentions, intending to do a lot of work with their children, but that after a while they more or less give up. Of course he does not put it quite like that. Instead, he says things such as;

"While most families started out expecting to educate their children in the time honoured way, by carefully planning lessons based on structured teaching materials, few maintained this over any length of time"

He seems to view this as a good thing, but some of the accounts from parents are very sad. Here is one talking wistfully about what she feels her children have missed out on;

"I sometimes think of all the hours that school children spend in classes, they must be there when lots of information is given to them, how much they retain I don't know, but at least they have been told it. My kids haven't heard, I would love to have told them but they never asked."

Many of the parents seem to have given up on teaching their children because the kids cut up rough about it. There is an air of regret though in much of what is said. These parents know deep inside that they should be doing more with their children, but it just does not seem to happen. Partly this is because of what Thomas calls "Children's resistance to formal teaching and learning". Reading the accounts of the parents though, I think it is also because some of them lead pretty chaotic and disorganised lives. Others seem to be anxious that their children won't like them if they keep trying to educate them. For example;

"Sometimes I think we should do something but mostly things just happen.... I started off more formally doing work but gave it up because she began to find it boring. I still think they should do something but mostly things just happen."

Heaven forbid that a child should be expected to do something boring! Thomas encourages this defeatist attitude quite openly. He says;

"There is simply no point in continuing when children are not listening, or going on asking for more effort if they are not responding."

The first question that I would ask myself if I found that a child were not listening to what I was teaching would not be, "Had I better give up at this point?". More likely I would say to myself, "Am I droning on in an irritating and uninteresting fashion, thus boring the child?" If the answer were yes, then I would set out to make the teaching more stimulating in some way. It would be lazy and irresponsible of me to say, as Thomas suggests, "There's simply no point in continuing, the child is not listening". And why on earth not ask for more effort if the child is not responding? I don't get this at all.

The overall picture which emerges from this book is of parents who want to teach their children, know they ought to be teaching them, but have given up because they are worried about upsetting their children or concerned that their children will dislike them if they continue teaching them. Shocking approach for a man of this professional standing to endorse.

The perils and pitfalls of informal learning

Many home educators in this country favour a method known as "informal learning". Alan Thomas, the famous educationalist, has written a great deal about this. The idea is that learning takes place quite naturally during the course of ordinary life, often just through the medium of conversations between the child and her parents. There are advantages and disadvantages to this method of learning.

When our children are small, we all of us probably do this sort of thing quite naturally. Our child might ask what some animal is and we tell them. As they grow older, children might begin to ask more complex questions such as, "Why do people fight wars?" or "Why is the Earth getting hotter?" or even perhaps, "Why are some people born blind?" These are all marvellous and unforced learning opportunities. As a personal example, I remember my daughter at the age of two or three pointing to a rat in the local park and saying interrogatively, "Squirrel?" What a brilliant chance that was to explain about mammals and rodents, herbivores and omnivores, arboreal and ground living animals and so on. Until the age of perhaps nine or ten, this is a fantastically effective and perfectly natural way of educating a child. As they grow a little older, a problem presents itself.

The minds of most adults are a jumble of half understood facts, vague ideas, popular misconceptions, prejudices and a ragbag of facts which we have picked up over the years and are often hopelessly out of date. Very few of us are able to be objective, even about the simplest subject. Of course, if we are just explaining how birds build their nests, it isn't that important if we get it a bit wrong. It is when we attempt to move on to more complex issues that the trouble can begin.

Take for instance the matter of nuclear power. Most people have opinions about this and I am guessing that many people reading this are more or less opposed to it; a common enough view. We muddle it up in our head with nuclear weapons, the CND, Hiroshima, dangerous radioactive waste and a whole lot of other stuff, much of it completely irrelevant to the generation of electricity by using a nuclear reactor. Very few of us have at our fingertips the facts about the proportions of the different isotopes of U238 and U235, the significance of these different isotopes, the actual mechanism of a reactor, the fuel cycle, the methods for storing and disposing of waste, the amount of radioactive exposure that we get from the background as opposed to other sources. The almost inevitable result is that if we are asked about nuclear power in the course of a casual conversation with our child, we will be unable to supply the facts. We are far more likely to trot out our own prejudices and misinformation.

I plead guilty at once to doing this myself and in fact it was noticing that I was doing so which made me realise that it was time for my daughter to study the writings of people who actually knew about these things, rather than be satisfied with some garbled and more or less inaccurate version served up by me.

Most of us have opinions which we have held for many years, often without re-examining them regularly in the light of new evidence. When my daughter actually began studying physics in earnest, I was shocked at the number of things which had changed since I last looked hard at the business. Even the fundamental particles were different! In fact much of what I had transmitted to her in the course of "informal learning" was at least thirty or forty years out of date! The only thing that she had been learning from me about many subjects was a lot of wrong headed nonsense that any sixteen year old would be able easily to refute. This was a sobering realisation.

The problem was, that if I simply left it for my daughter to ask questions or for various topics to be raised spontaneously in the course of ordinary conversation, then I would not be able to tell her the elementary facts that she needed to know. I had to know in advance what she would be "informally" learning, so that I could be sure of giving her the facts rather than misleading her with a lot of nonsense. It was for this reason that I began working out ahead of time what sort of things she might ask about, what she might want or need to know. This gave me a chance to acquire the books that she would need and for me to gen up on the subject myself. I dare say that many home educating parents do exactly the same as this. In effect, this is what a curriculum is; deciding roughly what sort of knowledge will be necessary or desirable and planning to be able to provide accurate information when the time comes.

The alternative is not attractive. It can entail children being limited by our own educational background and general knowledge, influenced by our own prejudices, handicapped by our own lack of understanding of certain aspects of the world. Unless we are keenly aware of this possibility and work to combat it, we risk ending up with children growing up to share our political views, tastes in literature, failure to grasp certain ideas, even our preferences in food and hairstyle! I cannot imagine a worse fate for any child than to be moulded like this in his parents' image.