A local authority with a very high proportion of home educated children with statements of special educational need

Apropos of the discussions on this topic which have recently been taking place here, I thought readers might be interested in this news item from Stoke-on-Trent. Out of the 74 home educated children known to the local authority, 11 have statements. This is five or six times the percentage in the general school population.

http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/74-children-taught-parents-home/story-19958164-detail/story.html#axzz2iL4bdlP7

The last post for a while about home educated children with special educational needs

We seem to have got a little bogged down on the subject of special educational needs among home educated children in this country.  I have more to say on this topic, but I think that I shall leave this subject for a while and hope that we can return to it in a week or two. Before doing so though, I want to look at one of the largest pieces of research conducted on home education in this country; one that is seldom mentioned among home educators.

Today, we shall be looking at an important piece of research shedding light upon the proportion of home educated children in this country who have special educational needs or disabilities. This is  Local Authorities and Home Education, (Ofsted, 2010).  Some comments here in recent days have been dismissive of this study, on the grounds that is was a self-selected sample. This requires some explanation. In 2009, during the  Graham Badman enquiry,  some, to say the least of it, questionable data about the possible risks of abuse to home educated children were circulating.  Since then, new figures have come to light. As might have been expected, many home educators are very keen to dismiss these data too as being unreliable.

The idea that because the sample used in the Ofsted study is self-selected, it is somehow compromised or worthless is, of course, absurd. All research on home education is of self-selected samples; that is to say people choose whether or not to participate. This is as true of Paula Rothermel’s work  as it is of all those large studies in the USA which show how marvellously home educated children do. If we disregard research into home education on the grounds that it involves  a self-selected sample, then we are left with no information whatsoever. Ignore self-selected samples and we can no longer quote approvingly those huge studies of tens of thousands of children conducted by Rudd and Ray in the United States!

At the end of 2009, Ofsted carried out a study of home education in 10% of local authority areas in England. These fifteen local authorities  ranged from urban districts such as the London Borough of Southwark and Solihull in the Midlands, to places  as diverse as Norfolk, Shropshire and  Poole.  In those areas, every single home educated child  known to the local authority,  and  also his or her parents,  were invited to attend meetings or, if they would rather do so, fill in questionnaires.  As  result, 120 parents and 130 children attended meetings to talk about their views and another 158 children and 148 parents completed questionnaires. It is interesting to note that this total of 556 people whose views and opinions were examined was considerably greater than the 419 whose views Paula Rothermel examined during her research into home education. This too was of course a self-selected group.

One of the things which emerged from this large study was that a quarter of the 130 children who attended meetings either had statements of special educational needs or had, before they were deregistered, been at the stage of ‘school action plus’. Nor was this all. In addition to this;

There were also those whose  parents, often supported by medical diagnosis, identified the children (many of whom were very able) as having some form of autistic spectrum disorder.

In other words, the total number of children with special educational needs was more than a quarter of the total.  The local authorities’ data gave a similar picture, that is to say that the proportion present at these meetings reflected the whole population of home educated children of whom they were aware. In other words, over a quarter of the children at the meetings had special educational needs and the local authorities confirmed that this was the case in general; that these were not unrepresentative samples. 

We  saw yesterday that Fiona Nicholson had gone to a great deal of trouble to ask every local authority in England about the numbers of home educated children with statements. She found, after all this, that the figure was 5%. This same figure of 5% was first published six years ago in the  study undertaken by York Consulting, (Hopwood et al, 2007).  This is interesting, because it was obtained simply by sampling the figures from nine local authorities. Sampling of this sort can yield very accurate results.  This should give us a certain amount of confidence in the figures from the Ofsted survey.

As I said earlier, I am going to move on to a different aspect of British home education in my next post. We have, I think, established that around a quarter, or rather at least a quarter, of home educated children in this country have special needs. We know that these children are between four and seven times as likely to be abused as children without such needs. In a later post, we will try putting a few different figures into those percentages and seeing what this might tell us about the increased risk of abuse for home educated children, but for now, that is all that I shall be saying about this.

More about home educated children with special educational needs

Before looking at the only real evidence about the proportion of home educated children in this country with special needs, which I shall be doing either tomorrow or the day after,  I would like to address one or two points made  here in the comments yesterday. The first of these was an attempt to limit the definition of a child with special educational needs to those with a statement issued by the local authority.  There are a number of problems with this approach. The first is of course that a child, even one with the most serious,  medically diagnosed  difficulties, who had never attended school would not show up in these figures. The second is that there are many children at school with diagnoses of autistic spectrum disorder, to give one example, who do not have statements nor are likely ever to do so.  

Some local authorities, the London Borough of Hackney was one, have in the past had official policies of avoiding statements for children in its schools.  Elsewhere, there have been individual schools which are keen on them as a way of securing extra funding. Simply counting the number of statements issued to children who are subsequently home educated is a terrible way of working out how many children have special educational needs and disabilities!

Commenting a couple of days ago, somebody drew attention to the fact that Fiona Nicholson had earlier this year  made Freedom of Information requests to every local authority in the country and established the fact that 5% of home educated children have statements. This was a worthy endeavor, but that figure has actually been around for six years. York Consulting carried out a study in 2007, (Hopwood et al, 2007), which sampled nine local authorities and found the percentage of  home educated children with statements to be 5%. This has implications for the reliability of such sampling, something at which we shall be looking in the next few days.

Another suggestion made yesterday was that there was a correlation between the severity of a child’s special educational needs and the likelihood of abuse. No such correlation exists; or rather none has been discovered during research. If this were so, then you might reasonably expect a quadriplegic, blind and non-verbal child in a wheelchair to be more likely to be abused than an active, intelligent child with a relatively minor problem such as Oppositional Defiance Disorder. It is not so. The kid with ODD is several times more likely to be abused than the one in a wheelchair. This is because the levels of abuse of children with special educational needs relate not to the severity of the disability, but rather according to how irritating these difficulties make the child to their parents. Deaf children are four times as likely to be hit by their parents than those whose hearing is normal. Children with conduct disorders are seven times as likely to be abused or neglected as children who do not have this condition. Those with learning difficulties are far more likely to be abused than those with physical disabilities.  It is often those children with relatively mild disorders who are at the greatest risk of being abused. These are the children with special needs who are least likely to be statemented. 

I hope that this has cleared up one or two points and left the ground clear to look at how we may calculate both the proportion of home educated children in this country with special needs and also the overall abuse rates among home educated children , compared with children at school.

Social ineptness and awkwardness considered as a possible cause, rather than consequence of home education.

Those who followed the comments on the recent article in The Independent about some Hollywood starlet’s decision not to send her children to school, will have noticed an old and familiar accusation being made; that home educated children grow up to be weird loners, unable to interact normally with others.

Now before we go any further, I have to say that I have no evidence at all that this is so; I simply have not met enough adults who were educated at home to form an opinion. I have met one strange person who did not go to school, but the overwhelming majority of people who present as odd or unable to get along in society did go to school. So I am not putting it forward as an hypothesis that a greater proportion of adults who were home educated are actually socially inept. This is however what is commonly asserted by those who disapprove of home education.

Having got that out of the way, a home educating mother with children on the autistic spectrum contacted me recently, wondering if I could float this idea on the Blog; the possibility that if we meet such adults who were home educated, it might be that they were home educated because they already had difficulties in being with groups of people and that this behaviour could simply linger on into adulthood. She had noticed that the Ofsted survey of home education which was released last year showed a large proportion of home educated children with special educational needs. Other surveys have revealed the same thing and judging by anecdotal evidence, many such children are on the autistic spectrum.

Might it be possible that if a large number of children with autistic features or traits are removed from school because they have difficulties coping with large group situations, then these children might retain this aspect of their characters as teenagers and adults? If so, then any social awkwardness or dislike of group settings, would not have been caused by their being home educated at all. It is rather that this bit of their characters caused their parents to home educate them in the first place. In short, we would be in danger of muddling up cause and effect.

As I say, neither I nor the mother with whom I exchanged emails are asserting that this is so; merely wondering whether this might provide a possible explanation for those strange adults that people who are opposed to home education seem to meet so often. Of course another and to my mind more likely explanation is that those people who claim to encounter so many strange home educated adults are not telling the truth about this anyway and could just be inventing the idea to prove a debating point. The fellow commenting on the Independent article, for instance, claimed to have met four socially awkward adults who had been home educated. I find it unlikely that anybody unconnected with home education would have met four people in the course of everyday life who had been educated at home; it is after only less than 1% of the population. That they would all have been noticeably strange seems to me improbable.

Special needs

One of the great things about educating your child at home is that you have almost complete responsibility for the end product. If the child turns out well, you can take a lot of the credit. After all, you provided the education. The downside is that there is no blaming a school if your kid turns out to be ill educated or badly behaved. Nobody else to blame for the slovenly speech or swearing, no peer pressure as a handy alibi if the child starts taking drugs and so on. What your child becomes is largely down to you. So for example, the fact that my daughter swears like a trooper is because I swear myself and she has been used to hearing this all her life. That she is a bit of a know-it-all probably comes from spending much of her early life with somebody who thinks he is cleverer than anybody else. This is a pretty frightening feeling actually; that most of your child's bad points are directly attributable to your parenting deficiencies! Fortunately, there is a way out of this, a brilliant piece of legerdemain which at a stroke can relieve you of much of the responsibility for all those unattractive traits which you see in your child and are anxious to blame on someone or something else.

My own daughter is a bit clumsy, having a tendency to bang into things and knock them over. Potted plants, vases, cups of coffee; all regularly fall victim to her cack-handed ways. I have always assumed that this was simply because her gross motor skills were not given as much practice when she was little as were her skills at recognising shapes. In other words, if we had played more ball games, spent more time with physical activities rather than reading, then I guess her gross motor skills would have developed a little better. The type of education which I provided is responsible for this. Suppose however that it was a neurological deficit? if that were the case and she suffered from some obscure syndrome like dyspraxia, then I would be completely absolved of responsibility. The fact that she didn't get much practice in the gross motor department would have nothing to do with it. I think we might be onto something here! Another home educating parent actually suggested to me some years ago that my daughter did indeed suffer from dyspraxia. In return, I confirmed her own diagnosis of her son's Asperger's. One hand washes the other! My daughter is also pretty standoffish and impatient with other people. She gives the impression of being a bit stuck up. I had always attributed this to the fact that her father, with whom she spent much of her childhood, is an exceedingly arrogant, rude and abrupt man whose social skills are practically non-existent. I took it for granted that I had set her a bad example in how to conduct herself in society. What though if she was on the high functioning end of the autistic spectrum? That would both explain her behaviour while at the same time letting me off the hook for being partly responsible for it.

This is all very exciting. Kid really badly behaved and rushes around like a mad thing not doing as he is told? Hmmmm, sounds like a case of ADHD to me! Don't worry mum, it's not just that you haven't taught him how to behave properly. He has a special educational need; it's not your fault. Teenage son spends all day in bed? Could be CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). Child lousy at spelling because you have not given him enough drilling in phonics? Not to worry; maybe he is dyslexic. You see how wonderful this is? Just by uttering the magic letters SEN, poor parenting vanishes like a puff of smoke and is replaced by a medical condition!


In fact with a little bit of research it is possible to explain away all the undesirable behaviour of our children in purely medical terms. This can be a great comfort. Nobody wants to think that they have screwed up badly on the parenting front and as I said above, home educating parents have a heavier burden of responsibility in this department than most. A little judicious use of the autistic spectrum though, coupled with a dash of dyscalculia, dyspraxia and a few random groups of letters like CFS, ADHD and ME can make all the difference between being a slack and ineffectual parent and being a mother bravely soldiering on as the carer of a child with special educational needs. The payoffs are tremendous. Just be sure to stick to self-diagnosis though. Professionals will sometimes cooperate in a dodgy diagnosis of special needs when a child is a registered pupil at a school because there is extra funding to be had. They won't generally play this game with a child who is at home; there's no advantage to anybody. The researchers from Ofsted were amazed at the number of self diagnosed conditions which they encountered last year when they produced their report on local authorities and home education. These were in addition to the children who had been previously classified as having special needs at school. In total, almost half the home educated children they saw had some special need or disability. Almost all were neurological deficits of one sort and another. For some reason, nobody self diagnoses things like blindness or spina bifida. This is probably because it's a bit too easy to spot when the diagnosis is not well founded, whereas with dyslexia or dyscalculia, it's your word against anybody else's.