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.

Why are home educated children in the United Kingdom more likely to be neglected or abused than those at school?

I have had a couple of emails over the last few days, from home educating parents wanting to know what grounds I have for suggesting that their children are more at risk of neglect and abuse than those attending school. There are of course a number of factors involved here, but today I wish to examine just one of these.

When Ofsted conducted their survey of home education in late 2009, the inspectors spoke to the parents of 130 children. A quarter of these either had a statement of special educational needs or, when deregistered, had been at the stage known as ‘school action plus’; meaning that they needed extra support to cope with  a special educational need (Ofsted, 2010). Other surveys have similarly found a high proportion of home educated children with special needs (Hopwood et al, 2007).

I think that most home educating parents will be aware that these figures reflect accurately  the situation today. Let us work with the figure of 25% of home educated children having special needs or disabilities for the time being and see what the implications are for the risk of neglect and abuse of home educated children as a group.

Children with disabilities and special educational needs are at greatly increased risk of being physically, sexually or emotionally abused and/or being neglected. The largest survey conducted of this phenomenon was undertaken in the United States almost fifteen years ago. 40,000 children with disabilities or special educational needs were involved and such children were found to be about four times as likely to be neglected or physically abused as children without such difficulties (Sullivan & Knutson, 2000). The great majority of this neglect and abuse took place in the home.

There are many imponderables here, but if we use the figures provided by such research as that cited above, then we find that that 25% of home educated children, those with disabilities or special needs, are likely to contain four times as many incidents of neglect or physical abuse, compared with children who do not have their special needs. Looking at home educated children as a group, this has the effect of increasing the likely incidence of neglect and abuse by 75% overall. This means that taking a home educated child at random, that child is 75% more likely to be the victim of  neglect or abuse than a child at school, purely as a result of this one factor. In reality, of course, the risk to home educated children is greater than this, for various other reasons at which I shall be looking in the future.  For now though, it is enough to say that the chance of a home educated child being abused or neglected is at least 75% higher than for children at school.

Home education and special educational needs

I suppose that I should say a few words about special educational needs. The reason for this is that some idiots have seized upon a post I put up here on the subject and are now using it to try and prove that I have an unacceptable attitude to disability. Firstly, let us look at the relevant section upon which these complaints are founded. The context is that I was questioning the often made claim that a disproportionate number of home educated children have special educational needs;

"Almost none of these children have what most people would describe as a special need or disability. There do not appear to be quadraplegics, children with spina bifida or Down's Syndrome, the deaf or the blind, those with moderate to severe learning difficulties. Instead, they apparently suffer from a variety of problems which are usually alluded to by a few cryptic letters; AS, ADHD,ME,ODD,OCD and so on. Since many of these mothers, for those on these message boards are almost invariably female, present as articulate, anxious and middle class, it is interesting to speculate about the reason for the sorts of problem which they claim their children are afflicted with.It is a long standing joke among those with whom I work that middle class children are never illiterate. They "suffer" instead from dyslexia. Nor are they naughty and badly behaved; it is that they are displaying the symptoms of ADHD. Clumsy and ill co-ordinated middle class kid? Must be dyspraxia. And so on and so forth. In other words, there is a good chance that there is actually nothing much wrong with many of these children other than the usual childhood problems; namely that they are reluctant to learn, they drop and break things and don't do as they are told."

Observe that I am talking here about problems which some mothers "claim their children are afflicted". I am referring to some of the people one reads on the lists who say that they think that their child must have Aspergers because he is so shy and socially inept. Others have claimed that they suspect that their husband also suffers from Aspergers or AS for short. From this, one recent poster on the HE-UK list has concluded that I am denying the very existence of Asperger's Syndrome. I am actually talking about parents who have been specifically told that their child does not have this syndrome, or whose children have not even been seen by a doctor or psychologist and then use this relatively rare disorder to explain their child's behaviour. I might mention that in the eighties I not only worked for the Alice Hoffmann Homes in this area, but I also fostered a child with autism for a project run by Barnados and LB Tower Hamlets. To suggest that I do not accept the existence of Asperger's Syndrome is utterly mad. I do find it offensive though to see genuine medical conditions used glibly to explain or excuse some child's behaviour.

As for some of the other Alphabet Soup syndromes I mentioned, well, don't even get me started on ODD or oppositional Defiance Disorder. This means that your kid does not do as he is told when you want him to do something. My own children suffered from a particularly intractable form of this syndrome, although I never sought medical help! Just to recap, I was talking about the parents one hears who claim that their child must have ADHD because he is so inattentive. Or those who believe their child to be dyspraxic because he has trouble doing up his shoe laces. I am very happy to discuss disability and special needs at length with anybody, but to try and make out on the strength of the above paragraphs that I am have a poor attitude to disability is ridiculous. A poor attitude to neurotic parents who seize on fashionable syndromes to excuse ordinary childhood behaviour, certainly, I will plead guilty to that!