Alternative provision funding, colleges and home education

A difficulty with some home educating parents is that once they have been out of touch with mainstream education for a while, they rather forget how things work. This is leading to yet another confrontation, this time regarding the alternative provision funding which Westminster makes to local authorities for children under sixteen who attend colleges rather than schools.


I must say, before I point out why this scheme is doomed, that I cannot for the life of me see why any parent in her senses would want to send her fourteen year-old daughter to a further education college, where she would be mixing at once not with other fourteen year-olds, but with young men of eighteen or nineteen. This seems quite mad to me, but then it is really no affair of mine. Let us ask why local authorities, schools and colleges would all be very wary about such an enterprise and probably try and stop it dead in its tracks if humanly possible.

What we have to bear in mind is that many fourteen year-olds currently at school, particularly the more mature ones, do not like being kept at school. They hate being treated as children, dislike wearing uniform, do not really want to call adults ‘Sir’ or need to ask permission to visit the lavatory and so on. They remain at school because most of their parents are unable or unwilling to educate them at home. If a method existed though whereby they could simply move from school to college and study there, there would be a great demand for it. In the last few months, it has started to become known that this is possible. All the parents have to do is de-register their children, allow them to ’deschool’ by watching television or playing computer games for a few months and then apply for a place at college. I know of at least one parent who has been bounced into doing this by her fourteen year-old son. She would not have dreamed of home educating, but is quite happy for her son to transfer to the local college. If the idea becomes widely known and catches on, there will be many more such parents.

If the present trickle were to become a flood, this would cause a massive change in further education colleges. At the moment, because nearly all the students are over sixteen, nobody needs to worry much about things like the age of consent, which kids are heading off to the pub at lunchtime, stringent child protection policies and a host of other things. If it is known that two students of seventeen have nipped back to somebody’s house and had sex at lunchtime; nobody cares. The situation would be very different if the place had a substantial proportion of fourteen and fifteen year-olds. It would quickly become a nightmare, with the lecturers having to assume the responsibilities of teachers acting in loco parentis. The students at college are currently past the age of compulsory education and this affects how the staff view them. This too would change if there were a lot of fourteen year-olds about.

There are other problems. The funding would tend to flow form the schools to the colleges. This would screw up the finances for local authorities. What would be the reaction for the general public if instead of children being kept on school premises, they were wandering around the town at all sorts of odd times? Why just fourteen year-olds? Why not thirteen or even eleven and twelve year-olds?

As long as arrangements of this sort were informal and rare, nobody much minded the occasional fourteen year-old attending college to study. It has been going on from time to time for many years. This is quite a different thing from making it an official policy of which anybody may take advantage. One final point and this really does puzzle me, is this. I can understand parents wishing to assume responsibility for their fourteen year-old child’s education; I did so myself. If they no longer wish to do so, if they want others to undertake the job on their behalf, then there exists a nationwide network of institutions dedicated to that end. Such places are present in even the smallest villages and will educate children whose parents do not wish to do so for themselves. These places are called schools and if home educating parents wish to stop educating their children at home then they can always send them to one of these establishments. Why must home educators try to ensure that the entire secondary educational system in the country is altered, indeed revolutionised,  for their convenience?

Funding college places for home educated children

Graham Stuart and Nick Gibb do a double act and reveal that local authorities can allow home educated children to attend college and then claim the cost back from central government:


http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2011-07-18a.66262.h&s=home+education#g66262.r0

Going to college at fourteen

There is currently a good deal of interest in the Department for Children, Schools and Families' assurance that children aged fourteen will soon have the opportunity to study for examinations in Further Education colleges and that such studies will be funded by central government, via the local authorities. There are a number of problems with the whole idea of children attending college at this early age.

Not only do some young people go to college a couple of years before they turn sixteen; others go when they are a bit older than that. For example, at my daughter's college there is a young man of twenty who is taking A levels. Most of the seventeen year old girls have quickly realised that he is a Grade A sleazebucket, the kind of guy who hits on every girl he meets in a very unsavoury fashion. Also at the college is a fourteen year old girl who has been out of school for a year and has been given a place at the college. She is now spending a good deal of time with this twenty year old man; they even go to the pub at lunchtime. Having been given the brush-off by all the seventeen and eighteen year old girls, he evidently finds it easier to impress a fourteen year old. She for her part is flattered by the attention. Anybody see any dangers here, in a shy and vulnerable fourteen year old girl being thrown regularly into the company of a sexually predatory twenty year old man in this way? This is not the only disadvantage.

Most of the girls at the college spend a good deal of time discussing, surprise surprise, sex. Who they are doing it with, with whom they would like to do it, how their periods were three weeks late and led to the fear of pregnancy, the rival merits of various methods of contraception and so on. Again, this might not be the sort of environment that many parents would wish for their fourteen year old daughters. Of course, there are other fourteen and fifteen year olds at college. Many, perhaps most colleges have a sprinkling now of young students. Perhaps the fourteen year old home educated child going to college could find a ready made peer groups there? Unfortunately, not. The majority of fourteen year olds who currently attend FE colleges tend to be problem kids of one sort and another. Some have been excluded from school, others have various problems. Without wishing to be snobbish and elitist, I have a suspicion that most of these kids are not the sort that a sheltered home educated child is going to get on with brilliantly.

There is also the problem of course that few colleges do GCSEs, if this is what parents are looking for. Any fourteen year old home educated child being given a place at college will be limited in the main to vocational subjects such as hairdressing and vehicle maintenance. Nothing at all wrong with that of course, but it is a limitation. I do know that some home educating parents had at the back of their minds that going to college at fourteen would allow their children to take academic subjects. this is really a non-starter. They certainly won't be able to get on to any A level course early without already having the appropriate GCSEs.

There are good reasons generally why our educational system is arranged so that children stick broadly to children their own age. This has as much to do with development and shared interests as it does with education. A child of eleven may well be capable of doing the same work as a sixteen year old, but it would not really be a good scheme to mix up children of these very different ages together. this is for their own protection as much as anything. I shall be interested to see how the new scheme of local authorities receiving funding to give children places in FE colleges works out in practice. For my own part I do not think it a brilliant idea at all and I certainly would not have wanted my own daughter hanging around at fourteen with eighteen or twenty year olds!

The'shyness effect' and home education

Those interested in the paranormal will probably be aware of something called the 'shyness effect'. This is the phenomenon mentioned by some researchers in the field who have noticed that paranormal powers and activity often stop showing themselves if somebody is watching too closely. This is particularly noticeable when the observer is unsympathetic to the idea of the paranormal. In other words, if a sceptic watches spoon bending or demonstrations of ESP very hard, it often stops happening. The very same effect is quite prevalent in home education. Let's look at a couple of examples.

Ann Newstead of Education otherwise has compared autonomous education to a quantum system. She claims that what is going on is so sensitive that the very act of looking at it , measuring it or even asking questions can damage the process. This manifestation of the shyness effect was a key part of the opposition to the Children, Schools and Families Bill. It was felt that if children being educated at home in this way had their education examined or observed very closely, the process would be disrupted and damaged. I suppose that I can just about believe that some children are so sensitive and nervous that an adult asking a few questions would cause massive harm to their education. It is not only children though who can be harmed by asking questions; research data too can be irreparably damaged by somebody asking questions and looking searchingly at it. When I began staring hard at Paula Rothermel's PhD Thesis, upon which so many claims about home education in this country are founded, it soon became apparent that I was causing harm to it. Dr Rothermel responded by pulling the thesis from her website and threatening me with legal action if I ever spoke about it again. An extreme example of the shyness effect; the very act of looking at the research data was having a bad effect upon it!

I have been put in mind of the shyness effect while trying to find out about home educated young people who go on to attend college and university. As long as we don't look too hard at this topic, everything is fine. All home educating parents know that it is possible for their children to get into college by means of an audition or by showing a portfolio of their work. Then it's straight on to university. Why bother about GCSEs? Unfortunately, when you look too closely at this promising situation, it changes into something a good deal less inviting. As soon as we ask questions and examine all the stories critically, they seem to melt away. This is sad, because I for one would like to have avoided all the hassle of IGCSEs if it had been possible for my daughter to study A levels in Mathematics and History at college without them. I cannot help but notice that people get a little tetchy with me when I even ask questions about this, as though I am being a real spoilsport. Alison Sauer reproved me for this yesterday and told us about a university which would be happy to accept a well kept lab book as part of their entrance requirements, because this is actually better evidence of scientific understanding than an A level in Physics or Chemistry. The only thing missing is the name of the university and the name of somebody there who will confirm that they have taken students without any GCSEs or A levels. I hardly like to enquire any more about this, in case the shyness effect begins to operate and the university changes its admission procedures!

I have in the past been told by some home educators that there are doctors and architects, vets and engineers, surveyors and accountants, all of whom have been home educated. We cannot know their names though, because they wish to keep the fact that they were home educated a secret. This really is astonishing, unless it is just another example of the shyness effect. The bottom line is that one must not ask about these matters and simply take it all on trust. It is just one more example of how home education is not accessible to being measured and quantified. It is fine and dandy as long as one takes everything at face value and no questions are asked. Try to track down solid facts though and the least that will happen is that people become irritated. The harder you search, the more the facts seem to recede from your grasp. I first asked on the HE-UK and EO lists two years ago whether anybody is aware of somebody being accepted at a Further Education college to study A level Mathematics or Chemistry without already having GCSEs in the subject. At the same time, I tried to find an example of somebody who had been accepted at a university to study a traditional academic subject without any GCSEs at all. I was told that there are such cases, but that nobody was prepared to give the names of the colleges and universities concerned!

Like all human enterprises, home education is less than perfect. Personally, I would like to improve it by looking at the facts and fallacies and separating them out, so that we may all make informed and sensible decisions about the future of our children. It is pretty plain though that some parents do not wish to do this. They prefer the fantasy to the reality and who am I to discourage them? Any way, nothing seems to dent this amazing optimism about further education and so I shall stop looking to closely at it, lest I spoil the illusion for others!

College for fourteen year olds

The Government Response to the select committee's recommendations sets out the provision which would be made for funding if and when the Children, Schools and Families Bill is passed. For those who will be taking examinations as private candidates, there will be about £300 a year from central government. There should also be additional funding for those who wish to study for GCSEs and other qualifications at a Further Education College from the age of fourteen. The claim being made is that this funding is already available, although in practice it is not easy to obtain.

I have to say that I find this idea of rejecting school in favour of a college very strange. I know that it happens and that some well known home educated teenagers have taken this route. Never the less, I simply can't see why anybody would want this. I can perfectly well understand why people would wish to avoid schools; my daughter and I felt this way ourselves. But if you feel that way, wishing to reject the state system in favour of your own educational methods, why would you then want to send your fourteen year old off to college? There are quite a few reasons not to do this. If you have taken your child out of school due to bullying, then college is likely to be a really bad idea. In some colleges, the bullying is worse than anything at school. The main problem is the age difference. Most of the students are aged sixteen to eighteen, but there is usually a fair sprinkling of nineteen year olds and even some twenty year olds. This is a great age difference for a fourteen year old to cope with, particularly girls! I am bound to say that when my daughter was fourteen, I should not have wanted her to go off and spend the day with a load of eighteen year old boys! This is one advantage of schools, that the children tend to stay in their own age group. In many ways this is safer for them. A lot of the older students at colleges go to the pub at lunchtime, or even smoke dope. This is not really the social scene many of us would wish our fourteen year old children to get drawn into.

There can be other problems. Often, the other fourteen and fifteen year old students at college are likely to be fairly rough types who may have been sent there as an alternative to being excluded from school. Some are from Pupil Referral Units. All in all, not necessarily the sort of crowd whom many of us would wish our fourteen year old children to fall in with! So what motivates parents to take this step?

Sometimes parents find their children approaching fourteen, the age when schoolchildren are beginning to work seriously for GCSE's, and realise that they are simply not going to be able to coach the child through a batch of GCSE's. Some home educating parents have a problem not so much with formal education as specifically with school. They and their children have the idea that they will be treated more as adults if they go to college than would be the case if they returned to school. Then again, if you are lucky enough to have a cooperative local authority, college can be a sight cheaper for GCSE's than entering the child as a private candidate somewhere. If the local authority will play ball, then the whole enterprise shouldn't cost one a penny.

I do have, as I said, a slight difficulty understanding this whole business with colleges. I mean if you want your child to study for GCSE's in a formal educational setting funded by the local authority, there's no problem finding such a placement; it's called school! I can in a way see why local authorities get a little awkward and irritable with parents who do this. After all, they have plenty of custom built establishments where fourteen year olds can study for and take GCSEs and then somebody comes along who wants to stick their fourteen year old in a place specially designed for sixteen to eighteen year olds. You can see where that looks like bloody mindedness from one point of view. I mean why be so awkward? Why not just let the kid learn with all the others of the same age? I rather suspect this is why some local authorities make it hard for home educated children to go to college. It just makes things that little bit more complicated for everybody and is completely unnecessary.