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.

Educating bullied children at home

According to what little research has been conducted in this country about home education, one of the main reasons for deregistering children from school and educating them at home is because they have been bullied at school. The Education Otherwise survey in 2003 found this, as did the study by York Consulting in 2007. It is probably a fair guess that this is still the chief motive for the home education of previously schooled children in Britain.


One of the problems with bullied children is that they all too often go on to become bullied teenagers and then bullied adults as well. You frequently find that a child who was bullied at primary school, even if he is transferred to a secondary school where nobody knows him will be bullied there as well. Just as there is a bullying type of child, so too is there a bullied kind of child. It is a complicated subject, but the Americans have name for this; they call it ’victim precipitation’. It is nothing to the purpose here to consider why some children are prone to being bullied, it is enough to realise that it happens. In such cases, withdrawing the child from school and educating him at home is not always the best course of action; not by a long chalk.

Some of those children who get picked on are socially awkward, others might be on the autistic spectrum. There are also those whose home background might have made them appear a little strange to their classmates. It only takes something slightly different and out of the ordinary to attract the attention of the bullying type. I hope this does not sound like victim-blaming, because it is nothing of the sort. I am rather thinking about how things are in the real world. Unfortunately, colleges and the workplace can mirror the situation in schools. The peculiar work colleague can also come to the attention of those of a bullying disposition and have his or her life made a misery in the workplace.

If a child is  slightly different from others and has as a result been bullied, then withdrawing him from school and causing him to spend all day with an adult is unlikely to help him be more like his peers. Indeed, it is likely to have quite the opposite effect. If after spending years like this, he then goes to college, then the slight differences in the eight year-old might have grown into the frankly odd behaviour of the young man of sixteen. The bullying can then begin anew. I know of a number of cases where this has happened.

I am perfectly well aware that many schools fail lamentably to tackle bullying with sufficient rigour. Obviously, no parent will stand by and see her child being picked on and taking him away from the bullies can often seem the best solution. It may well be a good short term solution, but it is also quite possible that by doing this one is storing up even more trouble for the child in the future. Ideally, the school and other services should help the child; try to find out whether there is a way of preventing him from providing such a tempting target to bullies. This could be done by psychological assessments, counselling and behavioural therapy. Of course the bullies should also be dealt with ruthlessly; they too need help to make them behave like decent human beings and not like cruel young savages.

All parents fight fiercely to protect their children and will do anything at all that they feel necessary to look after their interests. If schools were to do their job properly and deal with bullying by referring both bullies and bullied to the appropriate services, then a lot of home education would no longer be necessary. I cannot think in general that it is healthy for children who are having difficulty surviving in a group of their peers, to be taken out of this social setting to spend all day with their mums. At the very least, it will hardly serve to make them more normal and like other children of their age! Perhaps when the Education Committee considers what support local authorities are providing for home educated children, this is something at which they could look. By putting in enough resources and help earlier on when problems rear their head, it might not be necessary for most of those children to be taken out of school  in the first place.

Incidentally, may I beg anybody commenting on this piece not to use the neologism 'bullicide', nor to repeat claims that sixteen children a year are driven to suicide by bullying? A couple of charities make a good income from bullying and they have a vested interest in the phenomenon; it is what brings in their funding. The 'sixteen suicides a year' gag is part of their mythology and bears no relation to the real situation.

Doing the maths

I mentioned in passing yesterday that 99.9% of people sent their children to school. Upon which, predictably enough, somebody challenged me to 'do the maths'. Actually, the real figure is probably even less than this. The most thorough study attempting to discover the prevalence of home education in this country was the survey carried out in nine local authority areas by York Consulting. This took place in 2006 and was called; The Prevalence of Home Education in England: A Feasibility Study. In the nine local authority areas at which they looked, Hopwood et al found that the percentage of home educated children know to the authority varied between 0.09 and 0.42. this is less than half the 0.1 which I suggested yesterday. Even these figures may be inflated. When Ofsted conducted a study in fifteen local authority areas, they discovered that the numbers of electively home educated children fluctuated wildly throughout the year. In one authority, there were six hundred and thirty in September, but this had dropped to four hundred and thirty or so by June. People begin in September, full of enthusiasm and then a third of them have given up by Christmas!

York Consulting were criticised for choosing local authority areas with a high proportion of Gypsy/Roma/Traveller families and this too could have artificially inflated the numbers, as compared with the other hundred and forty or so local authorities at which they did not look. Even if you assume that the numbers of home educated children are roughly double that of those actually known to the local authorities, this would still only give a maximum figure of 0.84% of children aged between five and sixteen, well below the 0.1 which I claimed yesterday.

I notice that in his revamped website, Mike Fortune-Wood is suggesting that there might be eighty thousand children being educated at home. I am curious to know upon what he bases this figure. He seems to have taken the number of children known to local authorities at the beginning of the year, rounded it up and then quadrupled it! I would be interested to know his rationale for this method of calculation. One might as well simply multiply by the date and add the change in your pocket in order to obtain a figure!

The new guidelines; a summary to date

Judging from some of the questions being asked on Internet lists, there is confusion about what these guidelines are which Tania Berlow and her friends are working on. Let me just give a brief outline so that people can see what is going on.

The law relating to home education in this country is very muddled and confusing. So much so, that even lawyers cannot always agree on what the situation actually is. In addition to the basic bit of law which allows home education, Section 7 of the 1996 Education Act, there are various old precedents and also a number of more modern pieces of statute law. The Education (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2006, Children Act 2004 and of course a new section added years later to the 1996 Education Act. Section 436A, laid upon all local authorities a duty to identify children missing from education. Section 437 goes on to specify that home educated children receiving a suitable education are not to be regarded as being missing from education. The result of all these laws is that local authorities sometimes get a bit mixed up about what their legal duties actually are when it comes to home education. For this reason, in 2006 it was decided to try and produce some guidelines for the local authorities, government approved guidelines which would explain their duties. Between August and November 2006, York Consulting Ltd. undertook a study for the Department of Education and Science, which in May 2010 became the Department for Education. Their brief was to examine elective home education in England and try to identify any perceptible trends.

The result of York Consulting's work was that in 2007 the Department issued the Guidelines for LAs on elective home education. They can be found here:

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatters/publications/elective/


The aim of Tania Berlow's group is to rewrite these guidelines. There are two difficulties. Firstly, the guidelines are not statutory. This means that local authorities can ignore them is they wish. The second problem is that the current guidelines could hardly be made more favourable to home educators than they already are. For instance, they say;

2.7 Local authorities have no statutory duties in relation to monitoring the quality of home education on a routine basis.

Some parents may welcome the opportunity to discuss the provision that they are making for the child’s education during a home visit but parents are not legally required to give the local authority access to their home. They may choose to meet a local authority representative at a mutually convenient and neutral location instead, with or without the child being present, or choose not to meet at all.

3.11 Local authorities should bear in mind that, in the early stages, parents’ plans may not be detailed and they may not yet be in a position to demonstrate all the characteristics of an “efficient and suitable” educational provision.

3.14 It is important to recognise that there are many, equally valid, approaches to educational provision. Local authorities should, therefore, consider a wide range of information from home educating parents, in a range of formats. The information may be in the form of specific examples of learning e.g. pictures/paintings/models, diaries of educational activity,
projects, assessments, samples of work, books, educational visits etc.


In fact it is hard to see how these guidelines could be any better from the point of view of home educating parents. They already make it clear to the local authorities what they can and cannot do. Why do they need to be changed? Of course some parents are not happy with the law itself and want that to be changed. This is quite a different matter and there are, as far as we have been told, no plans for this.

So much for the background. The only public face of the changes to the 2007 guidelines is of course Tania Berlow. Two slightly alarming things have been noticed about her more recent posts on the Badman Review Action Group; one relating to form and the other to content. Tania seems to be falling into the habit of emphasising important words by the use of capital letters. Rather like THIS. This is SELDOM a good SIGN and unless she is CAREFUL, she might end up using GREEN or YELLOW ink like another well known home educator! The second and even more chilling feature of her latest post is mention of the New World Order. Now in my experience, once people begin talking of the New World Order it is only a matter of time before we start hearing about Rosslyn Chapel, the Illuminati, Area 51 and Prince Philip being responsible for Diana's murder. It is devoutly to be hoped that there will be no mention of either the New World Order or any of these other topics in the new guidelines!

If Alison Sauer's company, Sauer Consultancy, has been officially commissioned to do some work on behalf of the Department for Education, as York Consulting was in 2006, we should be told. It is high time to drop the secrecy and come out into the open. When York Consulting carried out their work in 2006, work which led to the publication of the 2007 guidelines for local authorities, there was none of this secrecy and I cannot for the life of me see why there should be now. The only reason which I can think which would explain this lack of openess is that something a bit fishy is going on.