Possible increased risk of serious abuse among home educated children in the United Kingdom

We looked yesterday at some cases of the murder of home educated children in the United States. Commenting on this, one person made the assertion that; ‘I can't see that it is more likely to afflict home educated children than others.’  This of course is a common claim by home educators in this country; that home educated  children are at no greater risk of abuse than schoolchildren.  If you repeat something often enough and loudly enough, then after a time, people sometimes begin to believe that it is true, simply by virtue of their having heard it said so frequently.  Perhaps it is time to examine this particular  statement and see what we can make of it.

One of the problems with calculating rates of abuse, or educational attainment or anything else for that matter, among home educated children is that we don’t really know how many there are. We know that 20,000 home educated children are known to local authorities in England and Wales and that there are also some children unknown to local authorities. Let’s assume that for every  home educated child known to local authorities, there is another, about whom they do not know. This would give us approximately 40,000 children. Expressing this as a percentage of children aged between 5 and 16, would suggest that something like 0.5% of children in this country are home educated. This is around one in two hundred. So if we take a random sample of two hundred children, we might expect to find one home educated child among them. These are of course very rough figures.

Suppose now,  that we take a group of 36 children aged between 5 and 16. If we have drawn them at random, then there is a slim chance of finding a home educated child among those 36 children. The odds are 6 to 1 against the group containing a single child who is home educated. Still, even if you found one or two, that wouldn’t really signify. Coincidence and chance play strange tricks sometimes. If however you found that  8 or 9 of that group of 36, 25% of the total, were home educated, then you would know that this was an atypical group, drawn from a section of children  which was far more likely to be home educated. The proportion of home educated children would, after all, be around 50 times as high as in the general population. 

Let us now look at such a group of 36 children. Here are the statistics for every serious case review evaluated  by Ofsted from April 1st 2010 to September 30th 2010; a six month period. It is important to realise that these are the statistics for every SCR, there has been no cherry picking;

http://www.cambslscb.org.uk/files/The_voice_of_the_child.pdf


These cases involve 93 children in total. We are interested only in those children of compulsory ’school’ age, that is to say between the ages of 5 and 16. We find that there are 36 such children.  If we look at sections 34 and 35, we see  2 cases which  cover 7 home educated children in 2 SCRs. We also see that there was another case which involved home educated children, although we are not told how many children were involved in that one. If we assume that it was 1 or 2, then that would give us 8 or 9 home educated children out of the total of 36 who were covered by the serious case reviews in that six months of 2010. What we are seeing here is a proportion of home educated children in this special group of 36 children who were involved in serious case reviews that is 50 times the rate in the general population of children aged between 5 and 16. 

I find statistics such as these quite intriguing. Although the samples are small, I think it fair to say that we can see many times  more home educated children than we would expect, all else being equal. Of children aged between 5 and 16 involved in serious case reviews over that six month period, 25% were educated at home; 50 times the percentage one would expect in a random sample. It is statistics  like this that make some professionals uneasy. Of course, the figures we have used are very rough and ready;  the true proportion of home educated children identified in cases of serious abuse in a random six month period might be  a little less or a little more than 50 times as high as in ordinary society.  We are not talking here though about some minor variation that only a trained statistician could identify; home educated children are hugely over-represented in this sample.  I will be busy for a few days, but will be looking again at this question soon.

School as a refuge from violence and fear

For many home educating parents, schools are seen as bad places. They are institutions where their children’s special educational needs are not met or where ferocious bullying drives children to the point of suicide; to give just two examples. There is another side to this though. For some home educated children, school is a refuge; the only safe and stable point in their lives and being removed from it can be a disaster which results in great unhappiness or, in extreme cases,  injury or death. I am sure that many readers will be familiar with  the death of a home educated child in Barking a couple of years ago. Here is the summary of the Serious Case review:

http://www.bardag-lscb.co.uk/Publications/Documents/child-t-executive-summary.pdf


As will be recalled, the mother was very disturbed, argued with everybody and ended up by killing her child, who was probably on the autistic spectrum, by forcing him to drink bleach.

I draw attention to this case not because I think that a lot of home educating parents are likely to harm their children, nor to appeal for better and more intrusive monitoring of home educated children. Rather, I want to remind people that school  is sometimes the best thing in a child’s life and  that it can be vastly preferable to what is going on at home. I am not a great fan of schools, but I think that home educators sometimes forget how good they can be for children; providing them with a haven of safety and  the bare bones of a stable life. Not everybody is cut out to be a home educator and for those who cannot cope with having their children around too much; schools fulfill a vital role, both for parents and children.

Another Serious Case Review about the death of a home educated child

It is often claimed that the review of home education by Graham Badman was triggered by the death of Khyra Ishaq. It is true that this rather spurred people into action, but it was only the latest in a series of  cases involving children being educated at home which were causing concern in the years prior to Badman being asked to look at home education. Here is one of the other cases which made people think that something needed to be done:

http://www.enfield.gov.uk/site/custom_scripts/lscb/downloads/Exec%20Summary%20ST.pdf

Another Serious Case Review involving the death of a home educated child

A few days ago I posted details of a Serious Case Review from Barking and Dagenham which involved the death of a home educated child. Here is one from Wales, which apparently has some bearing on the decision of the Welsh Assembly to look at the compulsory registration of home educated children:

http://www.wrexham.gov.uk/assets/pdfs/lscb/case_review/child_siond.pdf

Intrusive local authorities

Those who complain about local authorities who are a little over zealous in their monitoring of home education might care to read this document;

http://www.bardag-lscb.co.uk/Publications/Documents/child-t-executive-summary.pdf


To answer a few of the more predictable questions in advance; no, I do not think that home educated children are more likely to be abused than those at school, local authorities do indeed already have a range or powers which they seldom use and yes, I think it quite right that the primary responsibility for the education of children should remain with their parents.

It is still worth bearing in mind when dealing with local authorities who seem to be a little too eager to ask questions, that cases of this sort do take place and often put the wind up everybody as far as home education is concerned.