Home Education Heretic; The first stop for information about home education

Readers will, I am sure,  forgive a little vanity on my part. It is hardly to wondered at, since I discovered over the last week or so that some of those who could scarcely be numbered as members of my fan club, turn  first to this blog when  seeking up-to-the-minute and stunningly accurate information and commentary about home education in this country. 

I first noticed this tendency for those active in British home education to take their cue from me, back in August, last year. On August 5th, 2012,  I drew attention to the Welsh Government Assembly plans to introduce the registration of home educated children in the Principality. This was the first time that anybody in the home educating community appeared to have noticed what was being planned. I fancy I even stole a march there on La Nicholson! Certainly, organisations such as Education Otherwise and Home Education UK didn't seem to know about what was planned, until that is, I told them. Imagine that; the whole campaign about the Welsh proposals began here!

Of course, not all those who pick up on what I have to say are quoting directly from this blog. We saw an example of this, the other day, when somebody  was googling  Alison Sauer and Cheryl Moy’s names and came up with this;


http://www.helenhoughton.com/1316-a-problem-with-education-otherwise.shtml


This is only one of a number of sites which apparently cut and paste masses of entries from here and create new blogs from the material. In some of these cases, there are advertisements on the blogs, which might provide some motive for the enterprise, but in others there are not. Take this one, for example:


http://retreteverbal.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/home-education-conference.html

Here are a few others:

http://mojecosie.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.dooedu.com/home-education/home-education-heretic-three-home-educating-myths.html

http://friendshipessaystudentessayssynopsis.wtc.cc/175/home-education-heretic-early-childhood-experiences-and-their/


The result of all this is that people searching for information on specific subjects or people connected with home education in this country are increasingly likely to  stumble across my own views, although not of course attached to my name. I find this pretty amusing, because I am constantly seeing my own ideas circulating through home educating lists and blogs, with many of those writing, not having the faintest notion that they are propagating the views of the famous Simon Webb!

Motives for traditional education, as opposed to home education

I was last night reading the Scoping Research Project on Elective Home Education in Bridgend, Vale of Glamorgan and Neath Port Talbot, which was commissioned a couple of years ago by the Welsh Assembly Government.  Yes, I do realise that this was a colossally sad thing to be doing on a Saturday night; especially for somebody who hasn’t been a home educator for over four years! I was particularly struck by the fact that, at least according to this report, I must be practically unique among home educating parents. 

Nearly all the parents in this country, well over 99% of them, send their  children to school. There are two basic choices about types of school; which boil down essentially to independent or maintained. Those who give any thought to the matter, who are not content with just any old school for their kids,  usually make their choices on educational grounds. Perhaps they want their children to go to a school which is high in the so-called ‘league tables’ or maybe they choose a secondary school which has a good record of getting children to universities in the Russell Group. Those who can afford it, pay enormous sums of money to give their children an educational advantage in this way, by sending them to an independent school. Those forced to depend upon maintained schools will feign religious devotion, lie to the local authority about their address or even move house in order to get their children to the ‘right’ school; that is to say one which seems academically excellent. In other words, for parents who send their children to school; education is by far and away the most important motive in selecting their educational setting.

I was precisely the same. I was determined that my daughter should have the very best education that I could cause her to receive. After weighing up carefully the merits of traditional schools and considering the matter for five years, I then plumped for individual, one-to-one tuition as being the most effective way of providing her with an education. My motives were never anything other than educational. Mind, that accorded perfectly with my religious views, but  education was the prime consideration.

Looking now at the Welsh survey, I was reading the four main motivations that the researchers found. Here they are:

Response to behavioural /attendance issues
The extreme stance expressed by some authorities that the majority of HE parents choose HE to avoid prosecution when they and/or their children simply disengage with education is not endorsed by this initial scoping, but it is the primary experience of the EWS in relation to HE and, as such, is perceived to be a much more significant motivation than it is in actuality.

Lifestyle choices
At the other end of the spectrum, the political position of some home educators is that the family unit and not the state has primary responsibility for the education of the child and therefore that education is most suitably and efficiently delivered in the family context. Other ‘alternative’ lifestyle choices include those of the traveller communities, or various religious perspectives.

Curricular/structural issues
Between these two poles are children and families opting out of the mainstream, not to disengage from education, but after struggling with, and giving up on, the curriculum or structural difficulties of school life, be it the size, the length of day or the interaction with some teachers. 

Special social, emotional, health or learning needs
Towards the choice of HE as a lifestyle are those opting out of the mainstream because of social, emotional or other learning challenges, delicate health issues, difficulties with transition, or, most particularly, the experience of bullying. This appears to be the largest group in the spectrum. Many of these, though originally choosing reactively away from school, do seem to find HE particularly suitable to meeting, or allowing for, those particular needs and come to embrace this alternative educational experience as a proactive and positive decision.


We did not, 'struggle with and then give up on’ school, we had no  ‘political position’. It was a simple decision based upon nothing but the desire to give the child the best possible education. I don’t fit in anywhere among home educators, at least according to this survey!

Other research, by people like Paula Rothermel and also Education Otherwise, has found the same thing. When Education Otherwise sent out 2500 questionnaires, they found that the commonest reason for home education was family lifestyle, rather than education. 

I am not drawing any sort of conclusion from all this, other than to point out that for parents sending their children to school; educational considerations seem to be paramount. For home educating parents in general, on the other hand, they appear to be insignificant. I find this interesting.

Sharp practice by Education Otherwise

During the fuss about the Badman report and its aftermath in 2009, many home educators complained bitterly that the proponents of increased regulation for home education were using  dubious and in some cases downright dishonest statistics to support their case. Leading the fight against this practice was of course Education Otherwise. It is therefore particularly sad to see that organisation using precisely the same tactics, despite having their attention drawn to what they were doing, over a year ago.

Readers will probably be aware that Education Otherwise was heavily involved in fighting the proposals in Wales for the registration and monitoring of home educated children. They circulated a document to every member of the Welsh Assembly Government. Here is the page from the Education Otherwise site which explains all this;

http://www.educationotherwise.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=334&Itemid=335

Note particularly the following;

Trustees are in the process of drafting an EO response to the proposals.  In the meantime, a briefing paper is being printed and sent to all Assembly Members.  Drafts of this have been circulated widely, but the final text is here (or see download link at foot of page).  We hope that Welsh home educators will be able to make good use of this well-informed document, in considering their own responses to the consultation.  

You will of course observe that this document is, 'well informed' and that Education Otherwise endorse it fully. When they express the wish that home educators , 'will be able to make good use of this', presumably it is hoped that these parents will quote from it and use the figures which it contains.   Far from being well informed, it is a truly dreadful piece of work; riddled with errors, exaggerations, distortions, inaccuracies and falsehoods. Many of the figures it contains are false. I do not have the time or energy to go through this long paper point by point, but last October I drew attention to a couple of really bad examples; deliberate lies which had been inserted into the thing in order to mislead those who were unfamiliar with home education. Shena Deuchars, at one time Chair and currently a trustee of Education Otherwise, came on here and agreed with much of what I had said. You might have thought that having had these matters pointed out over a year ago, Education Otherwise would have either withdrawn or at the very least amended the briefing paper. They did not and still have not. This suggests to me that they are happy to spread falsehoods and phony statistics about home education if it will advance their own point of view. 

What were the two points to which I drew attention over a year ago? Here is one of them. This is a quotation from the document which Education Otherwise are still touting on their website:

 A 2002 study of 419 EHE families in the UK found: 
‘The results show that 64% of the home-educated Reception aged children scored over 75% on their PIPS Baseline Assessments as opposed to 5.1% of children nationally. 

This is completely untrue. The PIPS were actually administered not to 419 families but to 35 children. What is the motive for increasing the number twelve-fold in this way? It is a deliberate and cynical attempt to make the research look a good deal more extensive than was in fact the case. It can hardly be a simple mistake, because of the way that it has been edited to leave out the actual number of children assessed using PIPS.

Here is the other instance which I gave;


A Wiltshire based home education support group has kept records of children in the group since 2002. They found that the 52 older children involved had achieved 199 formal qualifications in 50 subjects with 69% of those qualifications being GCSE or IGCSE, 13% were A levels and others in Tertiary or performance. 50% of those qualifications were taken under the age of 16 years.  33% of those students achieving performing arts qualifications were awarded distinctions and 96% of other grades were at A* -C. (N.Wilts).


This is even more awful! Far from these figures relating to one home education group, they are actually  for the entire population of home educated children in the United Kingdom; perhaps 50,000 children. The reference to , ' the 52 older children involved', is intended to conceal this, by making it seem that we are talking about children involved with this one group. Again, this cannot be an innocent mistake, because the author has gone on to the site and copied the figures. As soon as the person writing this document went onto the site, it would be seen immediately that  anybody in the world can upload anything they please to this site and make whatever claims that they wish. Nobody checks what is put there. Pretending that the results relate to records kept by a single  group  was designed to make them look like verified and typical outcomes for home educated children. There really can be no excuse at all for Education Otherwise not to know about this, because of course the site was set up by Shena Deuchars, formerly their Chair.   Here is the site:


http://www.nwilts-he.org.uk/he_exams_wiki/index.php/Exam_results

I do hope that the irony of this does not escape readers. In 2009, Education Otherwise are filled with righteous indignation at the idea of anybody using false and misleading figures during the course of a debate on home education. Three years later and they are caught playing exactly the same game themselves! Not only that, by encouraging home educators to, 'make good use of this well informed document', they are trying to make others spread misinformation.

The fight for children’s rights

The struggle to provide children with rights and end their status as mere chattels or belongings of their parents has been a long and bitter one. At every stage, the cry by parents has been the same; ‘The state has no business intruding in family life and is harming the rights of parents by doing so.’

In the 19th Century, many children were forced to work down mines and up chimneys from an unbelievably early age. They had no rights in the matter at all. Each time some piece of legislation prevented, for example, children under the age of ten from going down coal mines; there was outrage, principally from parents. How dare the state dictate to mothers and fathers what their children should or should not do? This was an assault upon the rights of parents and indeed the very institution of the family. If a father could sell his eight year-old son to a chimney sweep for £5, what on earth business was it of anybody else?

Nowhere was this outrage more indignantly expressed than when the government tried to secure the right of children to receive an education. The 1861 Newcastle Report into the State of Popular Education in England summed the case up neatly. It said:



Any universal compulsory system appears to us neither attainable nor desirable. An attempt to replace an independent system of education by a compulsory system, managed by the government, would be met by objections, both political and religious.



Wiser counsels prevailed and in 1870 the Elementary Education Act was passed, popularly known as Forster’s Act. A decade later, education was made compulsory for all children between the ages of five and ten and there was a huge uproar. Parents led the complaints, comparing the British government with that of Prussia; a grave insult indeed! The crux of the matter was that this was an erosion of parents’ rights to raise their children as they saw fit. Compulsory education was an attack on the family. In the ten years following the making of education compulsory for children, prosecutions of parents for the non-attendance at school of their children were running at over a hundred thousand a year. It was the commonest offence in England, apart from drunkenness.

Every single attempt to increase the rights of children, which of course means giving greater duties to their parents, has been met by strong opposition by parents. The governments of the day have had to lead the way, fighting apathy, sloth and reactionary parents in order to furnish children with more legal rights and protection under the law.

In recent years, we have seen two examples of this tendency. One has been the efforts of the legislature to make it a criminal offence to strike children. This has met with only limited success. Parents have fought ferociously to retain their right to beat children. Incredibly, even now in the 21st Century, there are those in this country who feel that they should enjoy the ’right’ to hit their kids! Any attempt to abolish this ’right’ is met by howls of protest and the familiar claim that the state is intruding where it has no business to be; that is to say into family life.

The other recent example of this reactionary and backward-looking trend is of course the campaign by some parents a few years ago to force the state not to enquire to closely into whether or not children were receiving a suitable education. Again, parental ’rights’ were cited and the government was told that any move to check up if children not attending school were actually being educated was an attack on the family by the state. Just as when the 1870 Elementary Education Act was being planned, the case of Germany was brandished by parents fighting against any diminution of their supposed rights. That this was essentially about the rights of parents and not of children can easily be seen by the language being used. The right of children to an education was scarcely mentioned, it was all about the ’right’ of parents to home educate.

Although the calling of a general election in 2010 ended the hopes for this latest extension of children’s rights, the cause is not entirely lost. A first step would be at the very least the registration of all children who are not attending school. Such a move is now planned by Wales and there are signs that Scotland too has such a scheme in mind. If this happens in those two countries, then introducing such registration in England would be merely an exercise in bringing this country into line with what is happening elsewhere in the United Kingdom. As has always happened throughout history, the reactionaries will howl their protests, but we must hope that this time they do not get their own way and that one more step is taken in ensuring that the most vulnerable members of society are properly protected and furnished with the rights that they deserve.