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?

Making money out of home education

Those who hang around on home educating forums and lists on the internet will probably be familiar with the expression ‘rent seeker’. It is meant to describe a particular type of home educator who hopes to make money out of home education by hiring herself, or himself, out to local authorities or central government and charging for services. I have myself been accused of this and of course the archetypal ’rent seeker’, at least according to some, gave evidence to the select committee a couple of days ago.


Now I am all in favour of private enterprise in such matters, but I am also pleased to see the state getting in on this act as well and so was enchanted to see a local authority attempting to turn home education into a money-spinner. As readers probably know, it is possible for local authorities to obtain funding for home educated children to attend college once they are fourteen. Here is a local authority discussing this among themselves:



http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/moderngov/Published/C00000461/M00004827/AI00019641/$ProposaltoreclaimFundingforElectiveHomeEducated.docA.ps.pdf




Notice incidentally how home educators are ‘challenging’ the local authority to provide the funding! Not just asking or requesting. Interesting too to note one of their motives in agreeing to such requests:



BCSB is, therefore, supportive of any mechanisms which

may enable the local authority to track and monitor the education, safety and wellbeing

of those children who are receiving a home education.



Still, this is all to the good. Home educated children are actually getting to attend college and study for nothing, as the government has explicitly stated that they may. Some authorities though have scented an opportunity to make a bob or two from all this; the London Borough of Bexley, for example. Take a look at this:



http://www.adultedbexley.co.uk/SubjectHomeEd1.html






You will see that they are specifically targeting home educators and charging them cash upfront. You might be able to claim some of this back, but this is by no means certain. I have tried in vain to find out from Bexley whether any poor sap has actually been fleeced in this way, but they are strangely reluctant to discuss the matter or even say if anybody has handed over cash for one of these courses. I wonder if anybody knows any other local authority trying this on?

The trouble with ALAN

It is not uncommon to read or hear statements by home educating parents to the effect of, ‘we have decided not to do GCSEs’. Since it is usually parents who possess both the money and knowledge to arrange the things, this may be better translated as, ’I have decided that my child will not be taking any GCSEs’.


I have discussed before here the disadvantages for home educated children of not having GCSEs. These range from difficulty in getting a place at college when they are sixteen to limiting the choice of university at eighteen or nineteen. Still, as I have been reminded, not everybody wishes to go into further or higher education. Some young people are eager to enter the world of work at once. Here too, problems can arise form the decision not to sit GCSEs. When over 99% of children in the country are taking GCSEs or IGCSEs, those without a single one to their name do tend to stand out somewhat and not in a favourable way. The news that a sixteen or seventeen year old has not attended school for some years and has no GCSEs suggests to many potential employers that he has either been excluded, has learning difficulties and/or has feckless parents. This is an unfortunate impression to be creating when looking for work! Not everybody is familiar with home education and even those who have heard of it can have difficulty working out whether or not a child who has been subjected to this experimental procedure has the necessary skills to make him a valuable member of the workforce. In short, how does the employer know that this young person can read and write, carry out arithmetical operations and so on? For many parents , the answer is for their  child to sit adult literacy and numeracy tests.

Here is some information about adult literacy and numeracy tests or ALAN for short:



http://www.edexcel.com/migrationdocuments/Adult%20Literacy%20and%20Adult%20Numeracy/ALAN%20brochure%20for%20web%2030-4-09_A4.pdf
                                                                              

These are pretty popular with home educating parents as a way of proving that their child is literate. They are supposedly the equivalent of a GCSE, although in reality they are nothing of the sort. They certainly demonstrate that a teenager can read, write and do simple sums, but that is about it. Still, surely this is better than nothing? It at least provides some evidence for an employer that an applicant is not utterly lacking in academic skills. Sadly, these things are not a brilliant advertisement for children. The very phrase, ’adult literacy’,  brings forth images and associations to the average mind which would better be left untouched.

For the ordinary person, the expression ’adult literacy’ is connected with ’illiteracy’. Adult literacy courses, adult literacy qualifications and so on are widely thought to be remedial activities undertaken by adults who did not learn to read and write while they were at school. This is not at all the impression that one hopes to make when applying for a job; that one was until recently illiterate! Most employers glance at educational qualifications and want only to see five ’good’ GCSEs. Anything less than this marks an applicant out at once and not in a good way. The thought that somebody has not attended school and as a result has taken adult literacy qualifications is not really a good start.

Parents might think a little carefully about how their child will present to the outside world in later years. It is all well and good that home educated children are, at least according to their parents, cleverer, more sensitive, spiritual, creative and compassionate than other children. None of this will be much use if they look to outsiders like hopeless dropouts that have been learning to read and write at remedial classes!

‘A’s are for losers…

I have had to abandon this blog for a while to meet a deadline, however, normal service is now resumed. I shall be looking in the next couple of days at the idea of compulsion, which seems to be so baffling to at least one reader; compulsion in her mind being associated only with punishment or physical force! Before that, I want to talk about the awful situation at British secondary schools, with reference to what are known as grade boundaries. These have a pernicious effect upon children unfortunate enough to attend school.

When my daughter was studying for both GCSEs and A levels, I had a saying that I used frequently with her. This was, ‘A's are for losers!’ I meant to convey by this that if she gained only an ‘A’ in an examination, rather than ‘A*’; then as far as I was concerned, she would have failed that particular examination. Nothing less than 100% was satisfactory, whether she was working at home with me or sitting an IGCSE. There are a number of possibilities for this attitude on my part. One would be that I am a man obsessed with GCSEs and their importance in life. Another might perhaps be that I am a male, Caucasian version of the notorious Chinese ‘Tiger Mothers’. A third and, to me at least, more likely explanation would be that I am not a bloody fool and that I know how the world actually works outside of school and examinations. Let me make this a little clearer.

In a deplorable lapse of judgement, I allowed my older daughter to be registered at school. Apart from a spell of flexi-schooling, she was at school all the way through until leaving at sixteen. When she was fifteen, a year or so before she was due to take her GCSEs, I noticed that her maths was atrocious. She was getting around half the questions wrong and yet her teacher was marking the work with things like, ‘Well done’. When I spoke to this woman she explained that from her point of view this was fine. It was not because my daughter was unable to do any better, it was that there would have been no point. In the GCSE, which mark you get depends on the percentage of marks you score. These are the grade boundaries. Incredibly, if you get over 50%, you get an ‘A’ in mathematics for GCSE. Over 70% and you will have an ‘A*’ Because my daughter was in line for at least an ‘A’ and possibly an ‘A*’, she was doing as well as could possibly be achieved. What purpose would have been served by trying to get her to get three quarters of her work right? It would have been overkill; way over the grade boundary for an ‘A*’. I resisted the temptation to slay this idiot on the spot; in retrospect, a matter of some regret.

Let’s forget for a moment about schools and GCSEs. I have only recently, after a long struggle, resolved the problems I have been having with the Student Finance people over the loan my daughter is getting for university. I sent in almost everything necessary. The only problem related to an income of £60.75, for which I provided no documentation and had overlooked when filling out the form. You might have thought that they would have given me a gold star for this, or at the very least congratulated me on getting over 95% of the calculations correct. Even a ‘Well done’ would have been nice. They did none of these things, because of course this is real life. Anything less than 100% accuracy means that you fail. It is the same with my tax returns. It is not enough for me to get 70% of the answers right. This will not earn me an ‘A*’ with the Inland Revenue. Not even 80% will do, nor 90% or even 95%. Every figure and all calculations must be 100% correct.

This principle, that of getting 100% all the time in maths is how we have to live our real lives. Whether we are looking at out bank statement, measuring the room for a fitted carpet or working out the change from a £20 note; nothing less than 100% will do. Saying ‘Well done!’ to a child for getting a third of her sums wrong is a false kindness. It does not matter a damn if that will be enough to get her an ‘A*’ at GCSE; getting a lot of sums wrong in real life will be a disaster for her. The same is true of practically every other aspect of life. If I write out a job application and only make errors in spelling a quarter of the words, this will not earn me an ‘A*’ from the potential employer. He will probably dismiss me as illiterate.

Real life is very unforgiving. Most of the time we need to get things right. The penalties for getting things wrong can be pretty severe and you are not awarded marks for effort either! Anybody who does not expect a child to get things 100% right in maths, English or any other subject is leaving the child ill-prepared for the real world. Real life is not about GCSEs or A levels. It is about getting figures 100% right, making sure that not one word is misspelled nor a single capital letter or full stop omitted. Teaching children this and being ferociously demanding about it is the only strategy that will fit them out for the adult world in which they will all too soon find themselves.

GCSE related scams for home educators

I have noticed lately that I am apparently turning into one of those unfortunate people that one occasionally encounters in the street; shuffling along and muttering to themselves, while shouting obscenities every so often. In my own case, this behaviour is all too often precipitated by some new idiocy from the world of home education, from which I still seem unable to disengage myself. Perhaps I am suffering from some species of pre-senile dementia. It can’t be normal to read through the various HE lists and start growling, ‘For fuck’s sake!’ to one’s self every few minutes!


What with the Education Committee considering the help available to home educators and Fiona Nicholson beavering away to find out which local authorities are providing help with alternative provision, this strikes me as a good time to consider why so many teachers and local authority officers flee shrieking in terror at the prospect of helping home educating parents to arrange for their children to sit examinations such as GCSEs. This is a big topic and I shall restrict myself today to just one aspect of it.

I was reading an appeal recently by a home educating mother who was trying to secure extra time and rest breaks for her son, so that he could take a GCSE. He would apparently need at least four breaks an hour for there to be any realistic chance of his sitting the examination. She wondered what proof she would need to furnish of her son’s problems. Cue somebody advising her that under the Disability Discrimination Act, she could take a firm line with anybody who doubted her word on the matter. Well why wouldn’t it be enough for a mother simply to explain the facts of the matter to the exam centre and for them just to provide the kid with the extra time or laptop or whatever he needs? The answer is that this whole business has turned into a huge racket in the last few years.

At the local comprehensive, no fewer than 15% of the children sitting GCSEs get extra time and various other things such as scribes or laptops. One child in six! What is truly astonishing is that they are almost without exception the most middle class children with the pushiest and most articulate parents. Rummy indeed! Are middle class children more prone to dyslexia and neurological difficulties? Well, no; it is of course a scam. By getting a report from a tame specialist, which will set you back a few hundred pounds, your child can have two hours to write an essay, rather than just the one hour that all the other children are getting. This is a huge advantage. Nor is this all.

It is also possible to boost your child’s exam marks by pleading a range of special circumstances, ranging from headaches on the day of the exam to being diagnosed with terminal cancer the day before. The one will give you an extra 1%, the other 5%. In between these two extremes are a whole raft of possible life-events; pets falling ill, seeing somebody killed in a road accident, death of a grandmother and so on. By combining a couple of these with dyslexia, you can give your kid a huge advantage in GCSEs.

What is the point of all this though? After all, GCSEs don’t matter all that much, do they? In fact they do matter a great deal if one wishes to get a place at one of the better universities. Oxford and Cambridge expect to see a string of seven or eight A* GCSEs as standard, as do a few other universities in the Russell Group. At less prestigious places, GCSE results are often used as a tiebreaker. If you have a bunch of kids, all with three A levels at A, you can look at their GCSEs; the one with mostly As will often trump the one with mostly Bs.

A natural consequence of all this is that many well informed parents work the system by pretending that their children are dyslectic and have suffered some sort of trauma the day before an exam. This sort of thing is nearly always accepted, but many teachers are getting a bit sick of it. Between them, the exam boards each get over half a million appeals for special consideration every year and only 3% are rejected. With one child in six being given extra time, separate rooms, laptops and so on during GCSEs; it is starting to be plain that this is becoming another tactic by parents to boost their kids’ grades at GCSE from B to A or from A to A*.

I am not of course saying that there is no such thing as dyslexia. Nor am I objecting to children with special educational needs being granted extra help. Rather, I am claiming that middle class parents are using the system to give their children an unfair advantage over the rest and that attempts are now being made to discourage the practice. One of these is to be a bit stricter about which children genuinely have a disability.

I am afraid that home educating parents are famous for wanting special provision for their children. There are a number of possible explanations for this. One is that many home educated children have been withdrawn from school precisely because they had special needs that the school was unable to cater for. Another might be because the parents are predominantly middle class and are therefore using the same scam as many other middle class parents. It may also be the case that they are so used to having their own way and believing their child to be special, that they want different treatment as a matter of course.

Whatever the explanation, and it could well be a mixture of all of the above, it makes fixing up GCSEs for home educators something of a nightmare and is one reason why many places give them a wide berth. In my next piece, I shall look at a few other reasons why so few people seem to want to help home educators to enter their children for exams.

The Education Committee considers support for home educators

As most readers will be aware, the Education  Committee, a select committee,  has launched an enquiry into the support available for home education in this country. It seems to me inevitable that this enquiry will lead eventually to more involvement by local authorities into the lives of many home educators. One of the problems that some home educators face is that they would like their children to take GCSEs and other examinations, but lack both the expertise and money to arrange them. It is manifestly unjust that a home educated child whose parents have perhaps been paying taxes for years should have to pay again to access GCSEs. It is also to the benefit of society in general that more of the fifty thousand or so children currently being educated at home should gain GCSEs. This would help them to progress into further and higher education and also make them more attractive to potential employers. I have an idea that this is one area of support where the select committee might make a definite recommendation.


This is all well and good, but the implications for both those who do want their children to take exams and also those who do not, are profound. Let us look first at those parents who do wish their children to sit GCSEs. Children at school typically sit eight or ten GCSEs; obviously, if you are going to provide finance and other assistance for home educated children to sit them and the local authorities will be receiving the Age Weighted Pupil Units for each child, then some parents will want their children to sit the same number as pupils in schools. My own daughter took eight IGCSEs and if the local authority had been offering financial help, then I would have expected them to pay for  those GCSEs that I wanted my child to sit. Now all this will mean spending public money. You can’t just chuck it around willy nilly and so we hit the first difficulty. How will local authorities know whether or not they are simply wasting the money by entering some child for ten GCSEs? They would be unlikely to take my word for it that my daughter knew enough about physics to get an A*; they would want to make sure that they weren’t wasting time and money arranging for her to sit physics. For all they know, she might be barely literate, the whole thing might really be a pointless enterprise for all concerned. Perhaps she should just sit one or two, in perhaps English and maths, rather than physics, chemistry, history and geography as well? Even then, if they did enter her for maths, should she be entered for foundation or higher? How can they find out what level she is at in the various subjects?

Already, before the scheme is even off the ground, testing of the academic achievements of home educated children by local authority officers has appeared. Indeed, it is an inevitable development if once you concede that the local authority will be assessing the amount of money to be spent on arranging for these children to take examinations. Still, it might be argued, this is all voluntary. Only those parents who wish their children to take GCSEs will be involved. Just because I want my daughter to sit GCSEs, that does not mean that an autonomously educating parent in the next street would have to do the same. Nobody would have to submit to this testing and all these questions. This is ingenuous. If once local authorities begin regularly testing the abilities of home educated children, it will create an entirely new situation. This testing is bound to spread to parents whom the local authority will talk into it and encourage to become involved for the sake of their children, who would do so much better if they were to have a few GCSEs.

Now as it happens, I do not think that this would be a bad thing at all. Speaking personally, I would like local authorities to ask more questions of parents and to see how their children were doing; whether they really were being provided with a suitable education and so on. I would be glad if local authority officers were to start pressing parents to think about GCSEs and doing their best to see that the children studied for and took them. Not everybody feels this way though.

The point I am making is this. What sounds like a perfectly innocuous and well-meaning idea, making it easier for those who want to enter their children for examinations, has serious implications for the future of all home educating parents. It has the potential to create conflict a few years down the line, if taking GCSEs became the aim of local authorities for home educated children in their area, rather than simply an optional service which they provided. I think that people need to think about this a little before championing one side or the other in this question. They need particularly to think carefully before expressing too vehemently these views before select committees or to local authorities.

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.

Teach and forget; a common strategy for parents

I want to look today at what motives parents might have for teaching their children systematically and then forgetting that they have done such a thing; in effect, airbrushing this from their family history. This is by no means uncommon among both home educating parents and also those who send their children to school. Some motives for this are restricted to home educators and so I shall deal with these first.

Quite a few home educating parents seem to feel almost ashamed to be seen to be pushing their children academically and those who do ensure that the children study literacy and mathematics in a structured and traditional way often conceal this from other parents. I want to think about this first and see if we can discover what could be responsible for this extraordinary state of affairs; educators who seem to be embarrassed about educating! There are several reasons why home educating parents might behave in this way. Before we go any further, I want to make it quite clear that I do not want to become bogged down in terminology here. I am talking about parents who teach their children and then keep quiet about it afterwards or try to erase it from their minds. I do not mind whether we call this coercive education and contrast it with autonomous, or whether we talk of imposed teaching and compare it with unschooling or informal education. The fact is, that parents do it.

Many, but not of course all, home educating groups are ambivalent about teaching and imposing discipline upon children. I have heard from parents who say that when they have said 'No' to their child at a group, they are stared at as though they are child abusers. One mother mentioned that her eight year-old son would be studying for GCSEs when he was older and the reaction was very hostile. How could she possibly know that he would do this? Wasn't she being presumptuous? Did she not want to give the boy a choice when he was older? I think that quite a few readers will know what I am talking about here. Under these circumstances, there is a tendency to adapt to the mores of the group and keep quiet about anything that might smack of 'school at home'. There is also, incidentally, a tendency to pretend that one does not permit visits from the local authority, this being another of those things that many parents are expected to give lip service to. People who accept visits are sometimes made to feel as though they are letting the side down. One sees this attitude a lot on Internet lists. The family who I mentioned yesterday, for example, claimed in the newspaper to be unknown to the council and said that if registration became compulsory they would leave the country. In fact, just as with many other autonomous educators, they enjoy a perfectly amicable relationship with their local HE advisor from the council. This is also common; quite a few parents have visits from their local authority and then keep quiet about it for fear of being thought Quislings!

Conforming to the expectations of a group in order not to be rejected is one reason for maintaining these pretences, but there are other motives at work. Saying, 'We're autonomous' is a bit of a catchphrase in some circles. It makes one sound 'with it'. It's a bit like saying 'We're organic'. It is a shorthand code for a lifestyle rather than merely an educational philosophy. There was of course also the enjoyment during the campaign against the Badman review and Schedule 1 of the Children, Schools and Families Bill of pretending to be part of a persecuted minority. For a while, some of these parents could make out that they would be forced to flee the country or go on the run like desperate criminals! This was the only chance some of these families would ever have to feel like members of a despised minority and it would have been foolish to pass it up. Of course one had to be an autonomous educator to be part of this. Structured educators who were registered with their local authority could not make out that they were threatened by the proposed new law and so many parents denied that they had visits and let everybody think that they too felt that the new law would stop them home educating. This particular game encouraged many home educating parents to pose as being autonomous.


Perhaps the strongest motive for teaching one's child and then forgetting that one has done so is this. People tend to sneer a little at pushy parents and those who appear over anxious for their child to succeed. Let's face it; it looks a bit sad to be so desperate for your child to do better than everybody else's! It is much cooler to pretend that your kid does not have to work hard and that you certainly don't have to put the hours in on their education. When GCSEs were are taking place, every single one of our friends would claim that their children were doing no revision and that it was confidently expected that they would do badly at their exams. This was despite the fact that many of these kids had had private tutors for years and the parents were insisting that they stay in and study practically every night. (To say nothing of completing their coursework for them!) When their children achieved a string of As and A*s, it made it look as though the kids were little geniuses who had managed this without trying. The same thing happens when people teach their children things like reading and mathematics. If they then forget about this, then it looks as though their child must be super bright for being able to learn the thing later without any formal instruction. I must admit that I was tempted to do this myself. Had I kept quiet about all the teaching which I did, then I could have made out that my daughter had 'just picked up' literacy, the four basic arithmetical operations and everything else up to and including calculus. This would have had the double pay-off both of making me appear a laid back and right-on parent and also presenting my child as a real brain-box!

I have to say that there is often no conscious deception involved in this process by the parents. Some of our friends seemed genuinely to have forgotten the years of tutoring, the extra-curricular activities and so on. They honestly seemed to believe that their children's GCSE results were entirely their kid's doing. I am sure that the same thing happens with home educators who spend time teaching their children. If I had my time over again, I might well be inclined to erase all the intensive work with flashcards from my memory and allow my daughter the credit for simply picking up reading of her own accord.

Non-standard UK qualifications

Last week I was accused of being fixated on GCSEs and A levels and not acknowledging that there were other, equally useful qualifications to be had by the home educated child. This is a very fair point and so I thought it might be worth looking a little at the alternatives to the standard qualifications in this country and seeing if any of them might be preferable for those being educated at home.

The first point to consider is this. The higher education system and also most employers are geared to the GCSE and A level. This may be regrettable, but it is indisputably true. Further Education colleges ask for five GCSEs if a teenager wishes to study for A levels, universities require A levels to study for a degree, training courses for plumbers ask for four GCSEs, even a shopkeeper or garage owner may well insist on GCSEs in English and mathematics. This means that anybody hoping that alternative qualifications will do the trick for their children is immediately putting those children into the position of being guinea pigs for a risky venture. It is not only home educating parents who do this. Schools and colleges are also conducting experiments of this kind with the International Baccalaureate and the New Diploma. Here is an analogy. Hikers usually ascend mountains wearing stout boots and thick socks. Imagine that somebody insists on trying to climb up while barefoot or wearing only flip-flops. It might be possible, but for every person who succeeds, there will be many who cannot manage it. This is what it is like for those who want their children to take non-standard qualifications. A few may do well, but it is hard to see the motive for avoiding the conventional path in the first place, except through sheer perversity!

Let us look at the alternatives to GCSEs and A levels, not just from the perspective of home educators, but also schools and colleges. One famous alternative to A levels is the International Baccalaureate. Some schools have adopted this in recent years because the standards are set quite independently of any government and are far more rigorous than A levels. There are two problems with the IB. Yesterday I mentioned the London Borough of Enfield, a local authority with which I have had quite a few dealings. One of the schools there, Highlands, decided a few years ago to be pioneers and scrap A levels entirely in favour of the International Baccalaureate. Big mistake. Because unlike A levels, it is perfectly possible to fail the IB entirely. In 2008, the sixth formers leaving Highlands found this to their cost. Almost half of them, 46% in fact, failed the IB. This meant that they had nothing at all to show for their two years further education. I cannot tell you how furious the parents were! Highlands dropped the IB and went back to A levels. Other schools found the same thing. Another problem with the IB is that universities are, as I said above, geared to GCSEs and A levels. They will accept the IB, but most are not as happy with it as they are with A levels, despite what they say on their websites.

A similar experiment has been carried out with the new Diploma. One local FE college decided to encourage many of those who wished to study for A levels to do instead a diploma, claiming that it would be worth three or four A levels and that universities would accept it as well as A levels. This is quite untrue and those foolish enough to be used as guinea pigs for this scheme are now finding that they are going to have great difficulties with getting into the universities of their choice.

Some parents have got their children to sit the National Tests in Adult Literacy and Numeracy (ALAN). In theory, Level 2 is equivalent to GCSEs in English language and mathematics, grades A*-C. This may in theory be so, but you will have trouble persuading a college to accept these as being equal to GCSEs if you are trying to access an A level course. A serious difficulty with these qualifications is that they look the sort of thing which an illiterate person might have taken after going to remedial classes. This is not always the impression which one hopes to give to a prospective employer. Combined with a blank space in the box for secondary school, the whole tone of an application form for a job might be seriously jeopardised by such a qualification.

We recently saw a teenager from Wiltshire get into Exeter University on the strength of Open University credits alone, without any GCSEs or A levels. This has been done before, although it is not common. Once again, we come up against the problem of a system which is geared to GCSEs and A levels, together with certain recognised foreign qualifications. One has to ask one's self, what is the advantage here for the child? Gaining 190 points at the OU is very hard work, but if you are going to embark on such structured academic work, why choose a scheme so radically different from that with which universities are familiar? It is in any case unlikely that this is, or will become, a common way of entering university.

I can see, although do not think it wise, that some parents wish to allow their children to make free choices about the type and degree of education which they have. For those who are going to embark upon structured study though, it is the responsibility of the parents to research the options carefully and consider all the implications. What I find utterly baffling is that any family would deliberately set out to obtain qualifications which would make it harder for their children to get jobs or university places than would be the case if they stuck to the same things as everybody else, i.e. GCSEs and A levels. The only possibility that I can see is that these are people who like to do things the hard way, who enjoy a struggle. That is a perfectly good decision for an adult to make about her own life. After all, if I wish to make things difficult for myself, that is my affair. I could start walking everywhere backwards if I liked or with my eyes closed. However, the case is altered somewhat when the future life of a child is concerned. In such a case, to set out upon a course of action which will make it harder for the child to get on in life than is the case for a schooled child, seems to me foolish and irresponsible. I was disgusted with Highlands school when they gambled with the future of their sixth form pupils and I was horrified to see our local college trying to get loads of bright kids to sign up to the New Diploma. I feel exactly the same way about parents who ignore the evidence and pursue an unconventional route for their teenage children. Why would you take such a gamble?

Todays GCSE results

The publication of GCSE results today seems to me to be a moment for reflecting upon what these examinations mean to home educating families. One often sees things written by parents who are educating their own children that minimise the importance of GCSEs and suggest that they are hardly worth having, so devalued have they become by so-called 'grade inflation'. This strikes me as a neat excuse for indolence; why should we bother with them, they aren't really worth anything anyway? The truth is that GCSEs are becoming ever more important. Indeed, without them young people face almost insurmountable problems in their future lives.

Let us begin by looking at an article from today's Daily Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7961011/University-candidates-selected-on-their-GCSE-results.html


This article suggests that many universities now use GCSEs to weed out those candidates whom they feel are not really worth bothering with. In other words, they first select those with a string of As and A*s and then chuck out the rest. This process is done regardless of the A levels, OU credits or International Baccalaureate scores. In short: no GCSEs, no consideration. With the squeeze on places at university, this is likely to be even more the case this year and for the foreseeable future. Any young person who wishes to take his pick of universities had better have a clutch of As and A*s at GCSE. Otherwise, he will be restricted to the less prestigious universities or indeed none at all the way things are this year. So for higher education GCSEs are, as I have been saying for years, absolutely vital.

Of course, not everybody wishes to go into higher education. Some young people wish to get jobs at sixteen or eighteen. Here again, the lack of GCSEs is likely to prove a grave disadvantage to them. In its Survey of Employers, published by the Learning and Skills Council in 2006, many employers revealed that they would not even consider giving an interview to a teenager without any GCSEs at all. In fact GCSEs were of huge importance to the potential employers in deciding who they would take. In employment too, as well as in higher education, the lack of GCSEs is a serious handicap for any young person. With rising unemployment, this too will tend to make the GCSEs which an applicant has of crucial importance.

There were two reasons why it seemed to me a wise move to ensure that my daughter had a string of A* GCSEs. Firstly, the information contained in the specifications for these examinations is very useful in itself. Rather than devise a curriculum of my own, the biology, chemistry and physics International GCSE specifications already had in outline the scientific knowledge which a reasonably well educated person should have at her disposal. From that point of view they were valuable for their own sake. They are also useful for making sure that a young person has as many choices as possible in life. My daughter hopes to apply to a Russell Group university. For this, at least six A* GCSEs are indispensable. If, on the other hand, she wished to start work at once, then eight A* GCSEs in academic subjects would impress any potential employer. It is a win-win situation, no matter what she chooses to do. All that we have done is ensure that she has as many options as possible for her future life.

Failing to take all those GCSEs would have curtailed her choices. To give one example. She hopes to apply, as I said, to universities in the Russell Group. The fact that she has been to two summer schools this year, one at Oxford and one at Cambridge universities, will be a great help in this; just what looks good on the personal statement. However, to get on those summer schools in the first place, it was necessary to have a string of A*s. Without them, no summer school.

In his judgement in the case of R v Secretary of State for education, ex Parte Talmud Torah Machzikei Hadass School Trust in 1985, Mr Justice Woolf defined a suitable education as one which:

Primarily equips a child for life within the community of which he is a
member, rather than the way of life in the country as a whole, as long as
it does not foreclose the child's options in later years to adopt some
other form of life if he wishes to do so.

It seems to me that by failing to arrange for their children to sit and take GCSEs, many home educating parents are indeed taking an action which will 'foreclose the child's options in later years to adopt some other form of life if he wishes to do so'. Children are not really able to foresee the consequences of not studying for GCSEs and it is not fair to thrust the responsibility for such a serious decision with so far-reaching implications upon them. Few children probably read the Daily Telegraph and will not be aware that in several years time when they might wish to apply to university, that their lack of GCSEs might disqualify them before they have even sent in their UCAS form. As parents though, we know and we have the responsibility to see that their future prospects for either higher education or employment are not wantonly blighted in this way. That is what home education is for parents; a serious of duties and responsibilities to do the best for our children. Those who would shirk these duties by hiding behind some mythical 'right to home educate' and who seek to pass the buck to their children for serious decisions affecting their future life, should think very carefully about the consequences for those children.

On the passing of GCSEs without systematic study or help from parents

I sometimes think that my daughter must be the only teenager who worked hard to achieve her GCSEs, just as I must be the only parent who put in a lot of effort to help her do so. According to practically all our friends, their children did no revision or studying at all and it is a miracle that they managed to get strings of As and A*s. The parents also generally claim to have done nothing to help the children pass their examinations; they were themselves too busy to do anything to help and so their child's academic success is a mystery to them. These are all children who attended school. It is not to be wondered at that when I hear similar claims being made by the parents of children who were home educated, I raise my eyebrows a little. Yet more children who did not study systematically or revise and yet got good grades. This is very mysterious, because both my daughter and I had to work very hard to achieve the same end. Perhaps she is particularly slow witted and needed a lot of extra coaching!

Now I have no idea about other parents and children, but in the case of many of those known to me personally, these stories of nobody doing much to get the kid to pass a lot of GCSEs at high grades are not really true. Parents who claim to have done nothing seem to forget the tutors they engaged for years, the attending church in order to get the kid into a good school, the piano and ballet lessons, endless visits to museums, rows with the kids to make them do their homework, helping them with their coursework, forbidding them permission to go out during the run-up to the exams so that they revise and all the rest of the efforts which they made.

Why do parents tell these fairy stories to each other about all this lack of effort on both their part and that of their children? Partly I suppose because nobody wants to appear to be a desperate and pushy parent! Much more impressive to be laid back and cool and not to beaver away neurotically for years just to get your kids into a good university. Telling other parents that your kid didn't revise or study and yet still passed a clutch of examinations is a subtle way of boasting. They are saying, in effect, 'My daughter is so talented and bright that she didn't need to work. She simply absorbed the content of the GCSE courses easily and did not have to revise it just before the exam. What a brain-box!' Of course, it is also laying up a brilliant alibi for yourself if your child does muff up her GCSEs. You can simply say, 'Yes, I told you she didn't do any work!' It's a win-win situation really.

How likely is it that a child would really pass GCSEs without studying hard and putting in a lot of work? Not very likely at all I would say. One picks up all sorts of knowledge casually just from ordinary day to day reading of newspapers and magazines, watching television, surfing the net and so on. This means that anybody concerned with the environment, climate change or even science in general is likely to know that plants grow by taking water from the soil and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and combining them together in process known as photosynthesis. This is simply the sort of general knowledge that any educated person might be expected to possess. It is not hard to see how anybody, even a person who has never studied for GCSEs or anything else might acquire this sort of information more or les automatically without anybody telling them to do so. However when I meet a teenager who is able to set down the correct balanced formula for this process, that is to say;

6 CO2 + 12 H2O → C6H12O6 + 6 O2 + 6 H2O

then I am pretty sure that she has made a conscious effort to learn it by heart. What possible reason could anybody, even somebody passionately concerned about trees and the environment, have for wanting to know the chemical formula for glucose? This is most definitely not the sort of general knowledge which one picks up casually in the course of reading about plants. It is not the sort of thing which anybody apart from a chemist, biologist or teenager swotting from an examination would ever know! It is of course a vital piece of information if one wants to pass a GCSE in biology, which is pretty well the only reason anyone ever learns it.

The same can be said of the minerals which plants need to grow effectively. Knowing the importance of these minerals is general knowledge which most of us have. The gardeners among us could also talk about NPK fertilisers and be aware that these contain potassium, nitrogen and phosphorus. We might even know about their role in eutrophication. We are unlikely though to know the precise proportions for a balanced NPK fertiliser and the symptoms of deficiency in plants of one of these elements. Again, to get an A* at biology, you must know this.

I make no bones at all about the fact that I am myself a pushy and ambitious parent who made damned sure that his daughter studied and got a clutch of good GCSEs. Both of us worked extremely hard towards that end, which, as I say, sets me apart from most of parents whom I know or of whom I have heard. There may perhaps be teenagers who learn for fun about Snell's Law, the formula for photosynthesis and the precise reasons for the failure of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914, but I think that they are as rare as rocking-horse shit. About as rare in fact as parents who do not do all that they can to ensure that their children pass these important examinations at the age of fifteen or sixteen. For the rest of us, it is hard slog involving a good deal of work for both parent and child.

A curious case of apparently autonomous education

I am often accused of ignoring evidence for successful autonomous education, although this is not really true. I examine everything in this area closely whenever I get the opportunity. So I was intrigued a couple of days ago when somebody posted the following here;

' My AS child took science GCSE's as a way of consolidating her knowledge, and was very disappointed when she realised that her knowledge already far exceeded that which was necessary for the GCSE course. She got A*s without doing a stroke of work. She is completely self-taught, and was teaching me by the age of 11.'

What are we to make of this? Firstly, it is apparently being touted as a case of autonomous education without any teacher being involved. ' She is completely self-taught' certainly suggests strongly that she taught herself without anybody actually teaching her. For most people, this would indicate that she has not been attending school. Also, this comment was posted following a discussion of autonomous education and home education. The implication is plain. This is certainly the impression which others gained as well. The next comment was;

' well done to your daughter for learning so much without a course, Simon really has no idea, does he?'

This person too seems to have got the impression that the child passed the GCSEs without actually studying a structured course, either at school or anywhere else. She already knew more than enough to pass the GCSEs and barely needed to glance at the syllabus. A clear triumph for the autonomous method.

I found this all very interesting for several reasons. Firstly because I give advice and assistance to some local parents who have withdrawn their children from secondary school. They all want their children to take GCSEs although this is very difficult because of the problems of coursework and practical investigations. If it is possible to take ordinary GCSEs without following a distance learning course or attending school, this would be pretty exciting. Most find GCSEs almost impossible to do out of school unless they have a few hundred pounds to spare on a distance learning course, which these people don't. Science is particularly tricky, because of the practical work. The second point is the use of the plural; ' science GCSE's ' , ' She got A*s '. Obviously, this person's child did not take the usual double award science but instead opted to take separate sciences; biology, physics and chemistry. Now I have to say that I have never heard of any home educated child managing to do this with the standard GCSEs, due to the problems about authenticating coursework and carrying out the practicals in the laboratory. I don't say it has never been done, simply that I have never heard of it, either in those home educators whom I know or on any of the lists. Naturally, I wanted to know more about the business.

Most home educated children who wish to have qualifications in sciences take the International GCSE or IGCSE. This gets round the problem of practical work in the laboratory. There is simply an extra paper which replaces the practical. This is how my daughter took her examinations in physics, biology and chemistry. My daughter of course did not attend school for a single day of her life, nor did she ever follow a distance learning course or anything of that sort; a genuine case of home education.

Now one of the people who commented about this may well have thought that, ' Simon really has no idea, does he?'. I understood this to be a reference to my supposed inability to appreciate the efficacy of autonomous education. Actually, I did have an idea; the idea being that there was more to this case of a child apparently being completely self-taught and breezing through separate sciences at GCSE than met the eye. So it proved, because when I asked about the circumstances, I was told, 'To answer your question on yesterday's post, my child did GCSE's at school.' This is pretty breathtaking. After claiming that the child was, ' completely self-taught, and was teaching me by the age of 11.' we are now told that she actually attended school and took her GCSEs there like everybody else.

It's a good job that I took the trouble to ask about this because otherwise people might have gone off with the impression that here was a child who simply taught herself science by the age of eleven and then passed science GCSEs without studying any course or syllabus. Let's hope that this scotches at least one little myth in the making. In fact this is just the sort of anecdote which many parents of ordinary schoolchildren tell all the time and nothing to do with home education. I have lost track of the number of parents who have told me, 'My daughter is so bright. She already knew everything that the teachers tried to tell her and she didn't do a stroke of work; just sailed through her GCSEs. And she got A* for them all'. My daughter did actually get all A* for her IGCSEs, but it took some pretty hard work by me teaching and her studying! I couldn't truthfully say of her that 'she didn't do a stroke of work'! See;

http://www.guardian-series.co.uk/news/efnews/4569389.LOUGHTON__Home_educated_girl_gets_eight_A_s/


Shortly after this discussion on the comments, somebody posted a link to a GCSE course in Coventry which they thought might be suitable for home educated children;

http://www.covcollege.ac.uk/courses/Pages/Types/Course.aspx?@ID=882


I followed this up, but it is really aimed at overseas students from whom fees may be extracted. The person to whom I spoke at the college was surprised at the idea of a teenager without any experience of previous GCSEs starting the course and did not think it very likely. Back to the drawing board I fancy on this one.

More about education

There seems to be some sort of impression that my view of education is limited to acquiring formal qualifications such as GCSEs. This is not at all true. I see education for children as something which prepares them for a satisfying life and opens as many opportunities as possible for them in their adult life. Being happy, having emotional stability and strong family relationships are part of this education. Inculcating a love of learning is also very important. This can be done by example and by what Roland Meighan describes as "purposive conversation." All this is quite true and formed an integral part of my own daughter's education. Another strand of this education inevitably involved studying for GCSEs.

Some of those who have left comments on my previous posts seem to imagine that I am obsessed with higher education or with children needing GCSEs to get jobs. It is a little more complicated than that. I was actually obsessed with making sure that my daughter had as many options as possible and that she did not restrict her life chances too early on in her life. For instance, she was very keen on ballet and music as a child. For a while, it looked as if that was the direction her life would take. This would have been absolutely fine with me, but I still wanted to keep open her options. For this reason, we studied a variety of academic subjects in addition to music and dance. At some point, she decided that she would prefer to focus upon creative writing and English; an interest which she still maintains. This did not mean dropping music or mathematics. We continued studying a wide range of subjects. This is just as well, because later on, she discovered that the universities which interested her were always impressed with A level Mathematics.

The point that I am making is that neither of us could possibly have known which direction her interests would ultimately take. I was very surprised when she decided to take A level Mathematics. In the event, she decided to go to college to study for A levels in Mathematics, English Literature, History and Government and Politics. This would not have been possible had she not taken and passed at least some GCSEs. People talk casually of presenting a portfolio of work instead of taking GCSEs and that is fine; if one wishes to study Art, Photography, Textile Design or Musical theatre. Try getting onto an A level course in Physics, Mathematics, History or Chemistry without GCSEs and you will be in for a shock. In other words, had I not encouraged her to continue studying a range of subjects to GCSE, she would be unable to pursue the life she wishes now.

We can debate whether or not it should be so, but those parents who don't arrange for their children to take GCSEs are actually making choices for their children, choices which will limit their opportunities in later life. A child of eleven may not much feel like studying physics to GCSE level, it is true. He may not plan to take A levels; my own daughter did not. But if at the age of sixteen he wishes to go to college and study for A levels, that early disinclination will come back to haunt him.

It is our job as parents to give our children the greatest possible range of options in their lives. Deciding not to enter them for GCSEs closes off a wide range of these options at an early age. many parents talk vaguely of their children being able to take GCSEs later if they wish. These are usually the parents who have not realised just how horribly restricted Further Education Colleges have become in recent years. It cannot be right for us as parents to close off avenues to our children in this way unless we have very sound reasons for doing so.

On the nature of education

A few days ago somebody made a comment here when I was talking about education. This person suggested that my view of education was somewhat restricted and that other things were at least as important as a bunch of GCSEs. For example, "happiness, emotional maturity, family relationships, etc," This is an interesting view and one shared by many of the parents who took part in Paula Rothermel's research back in 1997. Quite a number of those people also thought that strong family relationships were a good reason to educate their children at home.

Now of course the first question that a potential employer is likely to ask a young person, whether home educated or otherwise, is not "Did you have a good relationship with your mother?" Similarly, emotional maturity is not likely to come up during a job interview. That's not to say that it is unimportant, just that it is not the sort of thing one can discover in an hour or so. A far more likely question is "How many GCSEs do you have and at what grades?" This is what most people mean by education. This applies not just to employers, but also colleges, universities, the Department of Children, Schools and Families and also the ordinary man or woman in the street. Why should this be so?

The fact is, much of the "studying" for GCSEs entails learning a lot of stuff by heart, none of which will be the slightest use in your future life. Let's face it, nobody you meet after the age of 16 is going to be the least bit interested in knowing what the Alkaline Earth metals are, or how far it is to the Sun, or the date of the Treaty of Utrecht, or anything else that you had to learn in order to pass your GCSEs. Nor will you be expected to solve a quadratic equation or know how to spell "pterodactyl". From that point of view, most of one's "education" has been a complete waste of time! So why do people use examinations as a measure in this way? There are several reasons.

For her History IGCSE, my daughter chose as one of her themes, "The Changing Nature of Twentieth Century Warfare". Unless she gets a job as an historian or applies for a post as a curator at the Imperial War Museum, you might think that all that study was pretty pointless; yet it impresses colleges, universities and employers a great deal. For one thing, it demonstrates that she was able to stick at something for a year or two and work systematically at acquiring the rudiments of the topic. This is what you might call a transferable skill. If you can master a load of stuff about nuclear strategy, the tactical use of aircraft carriers, combined operations in World War I, the concept of limited warfare as developed in the Korean War and so on, then the chances are that you should be able to learn and remember other stuff too. If you are working in an insurance office, then the prospects of your picking up the information necessary to be a loss adjuster are good. If you become a solicitor, then you have shown that you can study and remember information which is of little interest and no use. Looks like there should be no problem learning about law! Passing GCSEs at high grades often means that you did not spend your education flitting like a butterfly from one topic to another, never staying long enough at one subject to get to grips with it.

This sort of study suggests that you are capable of deciding to do something and then sticking at it without giving up after a month or two. This is worth knowing for a potential employer or prospective college or university. You don't want to engage a smart fellow for your office and then find that he loses interest after a few weeks and drifts off to get another job. You want someone who has staying power. Applying yourself to studies for a couple of years is evidence that you might be able to stick at a job. Nor do you want to give a student a place, only to discover that she gives up in the first month or term. There is also some indication of intellectual ability in passing a lot of GCSEs at high grades. An A at maths might indicate that you are not a complete fool and that you could be able to understand abstract concepts. It is certainly not an infallible indicator, but it is better than nothing.

Having a good relationship with one's family, on the other hand, is probably a pretty poor guide to how somebody will perform both intellectually and practically in future life. It definitely does not give you any clue as to whether or not they will make good employees. Again, happy people of course are generally to be preferred to miserable ones in the workplace or university, but some happy people are utterly useless and a bit stupid. Being happy is not one of the most prized traits which employers are looking for.

In short, it is a good thing for children to be happy, emotionally stable and to enjoy strong family relationships. I certainly valued those things myself, but they do not really constitute an education. That is also why, when a local authority is wondering whether a child is receiving an efficient, full-time education suitable to her age and ability, they tend to be asking about dull stuff like how many GCSEs will she be taking, rather than how happy and emotionally mature she is.

Five "good" GCSEs

Regular readers will be aware that I am a great enthusiast for more attention being paid to the standard of education being provided to children who are taught out of school. The impact assessment for the new Children, Schools and Families Bill expresses the hope that more home educated children will be gaining five GCSEs, including English and Mathematics. This is of course very right and proper, but one cannot help but wonder whether this same Government will soon start putting their own educational house in order. Currently, fewer than half of all school leavers manage to acquire the magic five GCSEs. In some areas, the figures are truly appalling.

My wife has the misfortune to come from the North of England; Grimsby, of all unlikely places. In one area of that town, 93% of school leavers failed to pass five GCSEs at Grade C or above. For anybody at all familiar with the shockingly low standards needed to pass a GCSE at Grade C, this is more than a little staggering. My daughter and I have had many conversations about this with friends and their teenage children and we have often speculated as to how anyone could possibly manage not to get at least a C for English! Only 13% of the marks are awarded for spelling, grammar and punctuation. Even if you hardly knew the language, you could therefore still hope to gain 87% with a little effort.

Despite the horribly low standards of the GCSE and the frightful cheating which takes place under the guise of coursework, over one hundred and thirty five thousand children last year failed to pass even a single GCSE at Grade C or higher. Not one. This can be disasterous for them. A survey by the Learning and Skills Agency in 2007 discovered that 20% of employers would not even consider a job applicant with fewer than five GCSEs including English and Mathematics. Never mind about going to college and university, some of these kids are going to be hard pushed to get a job at McDonalds!

It is good that the Government are determined to drive up standards in home education, but with such terrible schools on offer they might spare a thought as to why some parents choose not to send their children there. If the average school were safe and provided a sound education, then perhaps home education would not be such an increasingly popular choice. There are many reasons why home education has grown exponentially in recent years, but the decline in the quality of British schools must surely be part of the explanation.

Exam centres and the home educating parent

One of the things that the new Children, Schools and Families Bill should do is to increase the number of home educated children who pass five GCSEs, including mathematics and English, at grades A* -C. Those framing the new legislation have come to the conclusion that not enough home educated children are sitting GCSEs. There are no definite figures available, but most parents would probably agree that fewer home educated children sit GCSEs than do those at school. There are a number of reasons why this should be so.

I have been prompted to reflect on this by a thread on one of the home education lists which is bemoaning the lack of exam centres which will accept private candidates. The perception is that there are fewer such centres now than there have been in recent years. Of course not all the parents of home educated children want their children to take GCSEs. Sometimes this is because they are too idle to put in the necessary work, others have ideological objections to the whole business. In both cases, this is to the detriment of their children. Over 20% of employers, according to a recent survey, said that they would not even consider a job applicant who lacked five GCSEs. Are there other reasons why parents do not enter their children for GCSEs?

For one thing, there is the cost. Typically, parents must pay around £140 per subject for their children to sit these examinations. Ten GCSEs, not uncommon for school educated children, would thus set the parent back about one and a half thousand pounds. This is scandalous, considering that we already pay council tax for the schools! The suspicion voiced in the recent post on one of the lists was that it has become more difficult to find an exam centre because people are trying to assist the government by making life harder for home educating parents. This is absurd; the real reason lies in the behaviour of the home educating parents themselves.

Consider the situation from the point of a school or college. The sitting of GCSEs is a smooth and carefree operation. everybody concerned knows the ropes, teachers know how to put children forward for the various subjects, they know which will take foundation and which will sit higher. The whole process is like a production line in a factory. You are dealing with fifty children for this subject, two hundred for that, all the players know their parts. Enter stage left, a home educating parent. She does not know the ropes at all. She does not know which board she wants, whether Edexcel or Cambridge, she has no idea if her child will sit foundation or higher tier. Worse still, her child has to have special arrangements; extra time, a room to himself, a scribe. This one parent can easily take up more time than two hundred school pupils! There is nothing sinister about the reluctance of a school to put themselves through all this extra aggravation. Why would they do it?

Never the less some, often independent schools, have done so in the past. Some of them do it once or twice and then decide that the game isn't worth the candle. Because in addition to being very labour intensive, some home educating parents can be very.......how can we put this politely? Shall we say eccentric and difficult to satisfy? Of course, many parents of schooled children are probably no less awkward, but the beauty of the school system is that you don't have to deal with them when it comes to exams. You just drop them a brief note telling them which exams their little darling will be sitting and that is all there is to it.

I know of one independent school which has stopped taking private candidates this year because of problems with home educating parents. One mother made allegations that the exam conditions were unsuitable and accused the school of condoning cheating. Another could not get precisely the conditions which she felt that her child's condition required and the upshot was that both mothers complained to the exam board. This was a great embarrassment to the school and since the two children had only been sitting three GCSEs between them, they decided that the trouble was greater than the benefit of allowing private candidates. Because from the school's point of view, there is very little advantage in taking private candidates. Most home educating parents only enter their children for one or two subjects at a time anyway. It is not a very profitable enterprise, considered strictly from a business point of view.

It is to be hoped that once the Children, Schools and Families Bill is actually on the statute book, the situation will improve for home educated children who take examinations. As I said above, the parents of such children pay council tax and really should be entitled to the same services as children who are at school. I would not be at all surprised if there were fewer schools and colleges this year who were taking private candidates, but as I say, this is less to do with a conspiracy and more to do with the nature of the parents themselves.

The way the wind is blowing

One sometimes sees a news item which although seemingly trivial in itself, appears on reflection to indicate something of a sea change in attitudes or opinions. One such appeared a few days ago. It was to the effect that some high profile employers take at least as much notice of the GCSEs which a prospective employee has, as they do of the quality of his or her degree. This could have serious repercussions in the world of home education. A number of universities already set more store than others by GCSEs when making offers; Oxford for example expects as routine, six or eight at A*.

For some years now, the feeling among home educators is that they don’t generally need to bother with GCSEs and if they do then it need only be English and Mathematics. It is common to hear remarks like, “Oh, nobody takes GCSEs seriously now, they’re completely devalued”. Or again, “It’s up to my daughter if she takes any exams”. All the evidence is that precisely the opposite is happening, that is to say rather than becoming less important as the years go by, GCSEs appear to be actually growing in significance for employers, universities and colleges of further education. I have mixed feelings about this trend, but it is undeniably true that this seems to be the way that things are moving.

I have of course remarked before on the number of colleges and sixth forms who will not accept as A level students any teenager who does not have at least five GCSEs. This means in practice that home educated children often end up on arts based courses rather than academic ones. This is because these are the sort of courses which can be accessed by audition or portfolio. Even studying GCSEs when they are sixteen is becoming very hard. Few areas now have colleges which offer GCSE courses and those that do often want the student already to have some GCSEs, a genuine Catch 22 situation! If employers too are going to start grading job applicants, even those who have degrees, by the number of GCSEs, then the prospect for teenagers who have none at all may soon be pretty bleak.

Many parents do not face up to this problem until their children are fourteen. Sometimes they then try and enter them for a few GCSEs, only to discover that the child has not the necessary skills to apply herself for the sustained and methodical study needed to take a formal qualification like the GCSE. Others pin their hopes on Open University points and various non-conventional examinations in basic English. Unfortunately, both colleges and universities tend to be a little sniffy about some of this. They actually want GCSEs.

This is not really leading anywhere in particular, I am just thinking out loud. I can assure readers that I do not myself especially value GCSEs, but many do. I have a strong suspicion that a few years down the line it will be all but impossible for a child to gain access to either a job or post sixteen education without the them. This would of course really make autonomous education impossible, proving even more effective than anything which Graham Badman’s report recommends. The New Diplomas are not really suitable for home educated children and neither is the International Baccalaureate. The bad news is that the GCSEs themselves are moving towards a system where controlled assessments in the classroom will be needed.

I am guessing that pretty soon home educating parents will be faced with two choices. Either they will continue to reject studying as a routine business for GCSEs, in which case their children will not be able to go on to college or university, or indeed get any but the most menial job. Failing this they will be obliged to register their children at least part of the time at schools so that they are able to take GCSEs there and take part in the controlled assessments and so on which must be undertaken in classrooms. Either way, I think that the days of home educators refusing to engage with the educational system at all could well be numbered.

What are the advantages and disadvantages for home educated children in collecting half a dozen GCSEs?

There are a number of advantages for a teenager in taking GCSEs. Firstly, the possession of a clutch of GCSEs demonstrates to a college, sixth form or potential employer that a teenager has some kind of basic education and can probably read, write and carry out the four basic arithmetical operations. Another advantage is that a child cannot help but pick up some useful information about science, history and English literature while studying these subjects. It provides a good training ground for the self discipline which will be needed if the teenager decides to go on to college or university. Of course, it is still possible to get a college place or job without any formal qualifications, but it is often much harder. Many of the better universities regard GCSEs as almost as important as A levels. It is of course also possible to acquire general knowledge without studying for formal qualifications, but learning is a habit which can be nurtured and encouraged by regular practice. Systematic study can provide just such practice. Humans are often lazy and many of us avoid thinking about difficult problems if at all possible. Academic study presents the student with a constant series of problems and tasks which must be tackled, whether he wishes to or not. Even if the student does not retain much afterwards, the very act of carrying out calculations involving calculus, say, stretches the brain in a way that it might not otherwise experience. It is like muscle training; the more it is done, the stronger and more agile the brain grows. These are just a few of the benefits which might accrue to the child taking a variety of GCSEs as a teenager. There are of course many others, but these should serve to give some idea of why the project is worthwhile.

The only disadvantage which is immediately apparent to me is that it means a considerable expenditure of time and effort on the part of both parent and child.