Driving a coach and horses through the law on education.

One of the things that readers might have noticed about local authorities who are dealing with home educators, is that they are very fond of quoting the law. Sometimes, they do this regretfully; as though they are left with no choice but to undertake this or that duty. Their letters often contain sentences beginning, ‘We have a legal duty to…’ or, 'We are required by law...'. This is all the most horrible hypocrisy, because every local authority in the entire country is regularly and flagrantly ignoring great chunks of the legislation which relates to education. Let me give a glaring example of this.

At a recent  primary school assembly, the Head announced that he wanted to talk about a very great man. It’s coming up to Christmas and when he continued by saying that this person was probably the greatest man ever to live and that he changed the world; I thought that I could guess who he was talking about. ‘Nobody has ever taught us more about forgiveness’, continued the Head and by that time I was pretty sure to whom he was referring. What’s that? No you fool, he wasn’t talking about Jesus! He meant Nelson Mandela, obviously. In this primary school, as in practically every other maintained school in the country, assemblies are only held once a week and neither Jesus nor God ever get a mention. They are wholly secular occasions, where awards are given for industry or, as in the case of Nelson Mandela, some famous person might be mentioned. There is of course never any mention of  the Deity; let alone prayers and hymns. This is very odd, because Section 70 of  the School Standards and Framework Act  1998  specifically requires that;

each pupil in attendance at a community, foundation or voluntary school shall on each school day take part in an act of collective worship

What’s more, the law states that this act of collective worship should be of a wholly or mainly Christian nature. I do not suppose that there is a single school in the whole country which abides by this law. It is universally ignored and every local authority knows this very well. You might get an act of collective worship  at some church schools, but even then it will in general be only once a week. At other schools, there is nothing even remotely approaching religious observance of the sort required by the law. It does not matter whether we think that such daily worship is a good thing or not; it is the law and local authorities take not the least notice of it.  I can think of a dozen other example of laws relating to education which are widely flouted, but this one is common to every school in the land. It is curious that these same local authorities are able to recollect chapter and verse of the law as it touches upon home education and show such devotion to enforcing it! Hypocrisy always irritates me and this is an especially good instance.  When it suits them, local authorities are perfectly willing and able to disregard the law about education and schools. 

Why don‘t people want to be with their children?

Unlike many home educators, I have no ideological objection to schools; nor do I think them bad places in themselves. I have remarked before that they are, to me, a necessary evil; in an ideal world, they would not be needed. The question that I have been considering lately though is why nearly everybody sends their children to school as soon as they can. Of course, it goes without saying that part of the explanation is simply that this is what you do when your child turns five, but there must be a little more to it than that. After all, there is nothing magical about the age of five. Legally, you could delay starting school until the child was six, seven or even older. What actually happens is that almost everybody sends children before that all-important age of five. It is a rare child today who begins school at about his or her fifth birthday; most start when they are three or four, by which time an awful lot of them have already been in nurseries for a couple of years. 

When my daughter was two, I enjoyed her company enormously; she was an endless source of pleasure to me. Why on Earth would I have given her to strangers, so that they could have her instead of me?  In some families, where both parents are working, it is presumably a matter of convenience, but for most; it seems to be a relief for them to get shot of their kids. During the decades that I was working with families with small children, the request made most often was, ‘Can you help me get a nursery place?’ This was being asked by single mothers, when their babies were six months old. There was a great desire to see the children packed off to day-care, so that the mothers could get on with their lives. Once the children were at school, then there were breakfast clubs, after school clubs, holiday play schemes and a dozen other ways that parents could ensure that they saw as little of their children as possible. In recent years, this has become very common and many parents appear to have the idea that it is for the state to look after their offspring for most of the time and that the parents should only have to have them for an hour or two in the evenings. It is not at all uncommon to hear people bemoaning the approach of the summer holidays and complaining that they do not know how they will cope. Usually, it is clear that this is because the parents just don't like being with their children too much and dread being forced to spend time with them.

I am genuinely foxed by all this. I can truthfully say that I never became bored with my daughter, from the first day of her birth. I still don’t, even though she is now twenty. I cannot imagine why I would be wanting to shove her out of the way for as long as I could manage. It is against this background that we need to consider the political and philosophical objections that some home educators have to the notion of the state as parent. This is sometimes represented as being a sinister plot, whereby the state will take over the care and upbringing of our children for unknown reasons of its own. It is nothing of the kind! It is just that nearly all  the parents that one meets wish to see their children safely out of the way in nurseries and schools from as soon as they can walk and talk. The government is not pushing for parents to give them their children; the parents are clamouring for the state to adopt their babies and children and keep  them out  of their parents' way.

Home educating parents are different, in that they are happy to spend all day, every day with their kids. I wonder sometimes whether this love of their own children and unwillingness to fob them off on others, makes a lot of other parents faintly suspicious of home educators. It's such a weird way to feel about your kids these days, that perhaps this is at the root of some of the fears that we see about the practice of home education.

But you can’t do a GCSE in chemistry at home…

George Bernard Shaw remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. Teaching is no exception to this rule. Teachers are, as a class, determined that other people, parents in particular, should believe that they are doing something fantastically subtle and clever;  undertaking an operation which no ordinary person could hope to understand, let alone emulate. It is, of course, not so, but that is the impression that they wish to make upon the rest of us. Unfortunately, like all really good propagandists, they sometimes come to believe  their own fantasies. I have lost count of the number of teachers who, after  conceding that most parents could look after their children up to the age of seven or eight, perhaps even teach them to read and write,  then go on to say triumphantly, ‘Yes, but what about secondary? You couldn’t do chemistry or physics at home, could you?’ This is widely regarded as a knock-down argument against home education after the age of eleven or twelve. The tragic thing is, I think that those using this as a debating point really think that it is true!

The irony is that, as anybody who has witnessed a science lesson in a maintained secondary school will know, there is very little practical work such as experiments, these days. Nobody would trust the average fourteen year-old in a state school to handle sulphuric acid safely or dissect a frog without chopping off some other pupil’s fingers. Science is mainly done by means of photo-copied handouts and the watching of clips from Youtube. In fact, it is incomparably better to teach things like chemistry, physics and biology at home, than it is to leave it to a school. You can experiment with flames and acids, cut up dead animals, make your own indicators, rather than relying upon strips of litmus paper; all sorts of really enjoyable activities. I defy anybody not to find that their child is interested in science, once they have discovered that rose petals and tea leaves can both be used to distinguish between acids and alkalis. This is just the kind of thing that all children love; boiling things up and sloshing about liquids that change colour!  

The specifications for the International GCSEs are all available on the websites of Cambridge and Edexcel. These tell you precisely what your child will need to know in order to pass the examination. There are also old exam papers there with marking schemes, so that you can tell exactly how the child is likely to do. I know that there is nothing to it, because of course we studied for all three science IGCSEs at home. The child concerned got A* for all of them, which, for home educated children, is about par for the course.

Motives for home education in this country

One of the things which triggered the report on home education by Graham Badman was that in the first decade of the present century, the numbers of children being educated at home appeared to be rising steeply.   Tens of thousands of children were not at school; what if this  continued, until hundreds of thousands of children were involved? So what, we may say! What business  would that have been of the government’s? There were two considerations. One was the natural and reprehensible desire of governments to regulate things for the sake of it. The other was that it was becoming pretty clear that many of those deregistering their children from school were doing so not because they felt that they could provide their children with a better education than the school, but because sending the kid to school was interfering with their own lifestyle. This is appalling; that  parents would place their own convenience above the opportunity for their children to receive a good education.  This tendency by home educators to embark upon home education as a matter of lifestyle, rather than for the benefit of their children’s education, has been widely noted; not least in surveys by organisations such as Education Otherwise. In one  survey,  conducted among all its two and a half thousand members in 2003, Education Otherwise found that a third of those who answered, said that the strongest influence upon their decision to home educate related to family lifestyle, rather than education.

This trend of avoiding sending children to school, purely because this accorded with some kind of ’alternative’ lifestyle, was worrying to many professionals in the field of education.  With number rising each year, it was felt that at the very least, some effort should be made to find out what was happening. Since 2009 though, the numbers of home educated children have first flattened out and are now declining. Because the problem is still limited to a relatively small number of children, compared with those in the schools system, the decision has been reached to leave home education alone. Of course, if the numbers began rising sharply again; that could all change.

For those who are now gnashing their teeth and denouncing me as a liar, I thought that it might prove interesting to look at a recent example of this kind of thing. On one of the largest of the internet lists for home educators, one with thousands of members, a woman posted recently about the question of what to do about her son’s education.  She has two sons. Both are home educated, but the older boy has recently expressed the desire to go to school. What are the mother’s concerns about this? What sort of things motivated her to educate her children at home in the first place? Let’s have a look;

 My  son has just decided that actually he quite likes the sound of school … I am thrown into complete disarray and terrified at the idea of having to help him find the right school, visit schools, sort out getting admission to a school and all the rest of the palaver this might involve…
I've been feeling in recent weeks how much more relaxed my life might be if both the boys were in school. This is all just reminding me of one of the reasons I chose to home educate in the first place - being tied to someone else's schedule (term dates, school hours, home work, etc.) which have the potential to completely rearrange our lives...

Readers will see at once that there is no mention at all of the child’s education! Neither in the initial post, nor in subsequent exchanges with others on the list, is education mentioned. The whole problem is framed in terms of the possible effect upon the mother’s own life. Somebody tells her of the risk of attracting attention from the local authority in the future, somebody else says something about social services. Education does not rate the least mention. It is perhaps significant that not one of the thousands of members on this, one of the largest of the home education lists, thought it worth asking whether this proposed change would provide the child with a better education. It was taken entirely as read that the important point was how school   would affect the mother, not how it might benefit or harm the child himself. Any further comment would be superfluous. It is this trend which worries many local authorities and causes them to press for regulation. They know, as do most readers here, that for many people who don’t send their children to school, education is not the most important feature of the scheme; it is all about the parents' own  convenience and lifestyle.

How unfair! How come so many British athletes and sports stars were privately educated?

I remarked yesterday that members of the senior judiciary are more  likely to have been educated at independent schools. During the Olympic Games last year, the same thing was noticed about athletes; many of them were privately educated. Why should this be? Here is a fairly typical maintained school in a poor area.  It is time for the PE lesson and the children are about to play basketball. Now most of you probably imagine basketball as being a fast-moving, energetic and furiously competitive game; with plenty of running about. You fools! That was back in the old days. Here is how it is organised in this typical school. The eight and nine year-olds are divided into two teams. These teams are scrupulously matched, with the same number of feeble skinny kids in each, a similar number of girls, black children  and so on. None of that old-fashioned stuff, where a team captain chooses who he or she wants.  Then, the two teams are lined up on either side of the hoop. They stand still and are reproved if they make too much noise. Turns are taken, so that a member of each team takes the ball and attempts to throw it through the hoop. Once this has been done, then that person walks quietly to the end of the line and it is time for the next person in the opposing team to be given the ball. This way, you see, every child gets an equal number of goes and nobody is left out. 

Supporting your own side too vociferously is frowned upon. You must cheer equally for the opposing side. If it looks as though one side is winning by too great a margin, then the teacher cunningly adjusts the score! One minute, it is ten to five, but then a few goes later, she will announce that the score is now eleven ten. The children are not fooled by this, of course. 

One of the reasons for not letting the kids run about is that if two children collide, then an incident report must be filled out. This is a real pain and so it is better not to allow rough contact. When one boy grabbed another and shoved him, while they were queuing up at the end of playtime, I had to write out a report on the event; although nobody had been hurt and the whole incident was over in a couple of seconds. This entailed writing down on a form how many adults witnessed the supposed assault, the names of the children involved, an account of the sequence of events and the action taken afterwards.   This had to be counter-signed by another teacher and copies made in the office. One copy went to the deputy head, another to the class teacher of the other boy involved and the original filed in our class.  This wasted twenty minutes of a teacher’s time; twenty minutes that could have been devoted to teaching. There is no really vigorous physical activity at all. Most of the lesson is spent standing in line and every so often, the teacher calls for the children to come and sit at her feet, while she rebukes them for cheering too loudly or perhaps jumping too high. It is the dullest forty five minutes imaginable.

During the Olympic games last year, it was noticed that a disproportionate number of our best athletes and sportsmen and women had been privately educated. This is because the chances of any child in an average primary school getting a taste for competitive sport are not high, to say the least of it.  They are discouraged from vigorous play in the playground, the playing fields have been sold to property speculators and any sort of striving for personal excellence in the field of sport is frowned upon.  Things are very different in the independent sector. There, team games such as rugby are officially encouraged. The children are urged to do better than their opponents. Little wonder then that they are the young people who have an advantage when it comes to developing their athletic prowess!

School; another aspect of the hidden curriculum

In the last few years, there has been increasing concern about the supposed lack of social mobility in this country. Poor, black and working class children just don’t seem to get as far as Oxbridge and professions such as medicine and law are still dominated by privately educated, middle class types. I’m very interested in this phenomenon and have been looking closely at some of the more unexpected causes of this failure for children to move from one social class to another. School plays a great role in this problem, but not always in a straightforward and obvious way. Let’s look at an apparently trivial incident which I witnessed today; one that casts light upon this whole business.

Here is an English lesson; one in which a class of nine year-olds are being taught the difference between fact and opinion. The way that this is being done is by acting out an imaginary scene from a trial. This takes the form of a dialogue in the court  between an impartial judge and an obviously prejudiced policeman, who says things about the defendant such as, ‘Well, he looks guilty to me!’.  The teacher wants two children to play the parts of the judge and the policeman. First, she wants somebody to be the judge. She says, ‘Now remember, judges speak very posh, because they mostly went to private schools, so you’ll have to speak like this…’ She then gives a grotesque and exaggerated impression of an upper class voice. Let’s look at what these working class children are being taught here.

The first lesson is that there is not the least hope of their ever becoming judges. They know that they are certainly not posh and of course none of them go to a private school. Here is one possible ambition disposed of immediately. What else are they learning? They learn that being posh and well educated is something that they should mock. The teacher is sneering at the way posh people talk. The message that these children take form this is that clearly enunciated, standard English is somehow ridiculous and that people who  speak it are different from them.  At one time, ordinary working class children like this were taught at school to aspire to better themselves and to aim high. These days, they learn that ‘posh’ people like judges are somehow a different species. In the 1950s at schools in East London, children were taught that they could rise, if they wished. They  were encouraged to think beyond their day to day lives. Some of those pupils did indeed rise and go on to become professors, judges, doctors and so on. There is not the remotest chance of this sort of thing happening when children are being inculcated with class enmity, as is very common in working class schools today.

There is another pernicious effect of this sort of attitude.  There has been concern that some schools become popular with the middle classes and that they then monopolise them, to the exclusion of others; who then end up at so-called ‘sink schools’.  Here is what happens sometimes when middle class parents send their children to a very working class school of the type that I have been writing about lately. Because the pupils have been encouraged to hate anything at all ‘posh’, they extend this feeling towards those who speak correct and grammatical English. Well spoken children are viewed with great suspicion. If they also have an interest in books and want to work hard, they are soon mocked and shunned. They then become very miserable and their parent often remove them from the school and send them to one with a less hostile atmosphere.

There is a good deal more to be said on this topic, but that is all that I have time for tonight. Readers might like to reflect that exclusivity is not only the province of the middle or upper classes and that in some schools, pupils are actively encouraged to dislike and mistrust those of a different social standing from themselves. This is hardly a good thing from the point of social mobility.

The spontaneous acquisition of literacy

The idea has been advanced lately, in the comments on this blog,  that if education were not compulsory and also that if children did not go to school, then they would still learn to read and write.  It is suggested that this would be a natural process, a by-product if you like, of living in a literate society. Mention is made of libraries, travel and the internet as means by which literacy would be acquired more or less automatically; perhaps with a little gentle encouragement from parents. This is all so fantastic, that I hardly know where to begin!

I think that part of the problem here is that some of those who comment on this blog simply don’t know how millions of children in this country live. These well-meaning people are so used to living in and visiting  homes filled with books, newspapers and magazines, environments which are overflowing with print, places where adults read and talk about books; that they cannot imagine the linguistically impoverished  backgrounds of the children living in some parts of the country. Learn to read spontaneously? These children don’t really learn to speak, until they start nursery!

Although I am working currently in a school, for many years I used to do home visiting in various capacities. I can tell readers now that an awful lot of children live in homes where there is literally no printed matter. Until they start school, they never see anybody read anything at all. Their homes are filled with flickering screens of various types; four or five televisions, games consoles, DVD players  and computers. Reading is not part of their lives in any way at all. They hear almost no conversation.  Somebody talked of travel yesterday, as though that were also the sort of thing which would stimulate and encourage literacy. I could introduce readers to  five year-old children in east London who have literally never been more than a mile and a half from their home. Their lives are as restricted as medieval peasants. These are children who have never travelled the few miles to central London, never been on a train, never visited a library. On a school trip with a group of seven year-olds from Hackney, I saw children panicking, because they had never seen an escalator before! They were terrified at this strange metal object which threatened to carry them down under ground and we had to take some of them down the fixed stairs. I am not talking here of a few pathological or atypical cases; this sort of life is common on some of the housing estates that I know.

School is a beacon of hope for these children. It is the only hope that they will ever have for being stimulated, for learning, for discovering anything beyond their immediate existence. These kids find it hard enough to learn to read and write as it is. The notion that they would achieve this without school is utterly grotesque.

This is not to say that it is impossible for children to learn to read without direct instruction. Those who see their parents reading a newspaper every day and become curious as to what is going on, those whose parents point out words regularly, saying things like, ‘This sign  says exit’ and so  on, the ones whose homes are filled with books and other reading matter; these children will be primed to acquire literacy. These are the children whose lives are probably enriched by visits to museums and zoos, those whose parents talk to them all the time and set up activities for them. I don’t personally think this the best way for a child to learn reading and writing, but it certainly happens. There is then a tendency for the parents of such children to say; ’I didn’t teach my child to read and now he is applying for Oxford. That must mean that nobody’s children need to be taught to read.’  This is a grave error and I shall have more to say about it in future posts. We are, incidentally, approaching now the crux of the matter; the main anxiety of local authorities when it comes to home education.

Buried research...

A reader yesterday wanted to draw attention to what she or he called research which had been, 'buried'. Whichever government it was which supposedly buried this research, they cannot have made a very good job of it! Here it is:

http://bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/files_uploaded/uploaded_resources/18617/desforges.pdf


In fact, this is often referenced in reports by both central and local government. I'm not sure in what sense it was buried. It has, incidentally, little to do with home education.

Schools; the hidden curriculum

It is, I think, pretty widely known that I am not a great fan of schools. They do a necessary job in society, it is true, but at that same time they cause a fair bit of collateral damage. From a purely educational perspective, they achieve their purpose; just. From many other points of view, they are profoundly unsatisfactory.  

One of the reasons that I chose not to send my child to school was that I did not like the ideas which they propagated, alongside the education being offered. One of these ideas is sexism. When we were raising my daughter, it was very important to us that she learned that girls could achieve every bit as much as boys in any field at all. This meant, among other things, that she was able to climb trees better than any of the local boys and was also quite happy to take a swing at any boy who laid hands upon her.  She also knew that she could be anything at all that she wanted in her future life.

I have for the last week or so been working in a fairly typical, under-performing primary school. I have been observing the subliminal messages being given to boys and girls there and I have to say that they are far from satisfactory. Let us look at a few random instances of what I mean.

Every single member of staff, bar one, at the school is female. All the teachers, learning support staff, officer staff and cleaners; all are women. Anybody care to guess what the exception is, the one man in the place? Yes, it is of course the Head. This is an awful message to give children, right from the beginning. A man is in charge and the women do his bidding. You might say that this is unavoidable, but there are many other things which are avoidable. Walk into a Year 4 classroom and look at the book corner. There are two big, plastic crates; one marked ‘Boys’, with a picture of a boy with a toy car and the other marked, ‘Girls’, which shows a girl holding a doll. These contain the books appropriate for boys and girls respectively. I am sure that readers will have no difficulty guessing the gendered colour coding of these two boxes…

Here is a science lesson. We are looking at the different sorts of light and dividing them into two categories. On the one hand there is natural light and on the other…well, what do readers think? Artificial light, perhaps? Why no. Apart from natural light, we have man-made light. During the lesson, the teacher explains helpfully to the children that while static electricity can give rise to light naturally, as in lightning, current electricity can only, ‘be produced by man’. (Bad news, I am afraid, the next time any female readers  want to switch on the light. Only Man can produce current electricity you see…

Here’s a reading lesson, in which we are talking about astronauts. The teacher wishes to give examples of astronauts. Who does she come up with? Inevitably, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Yuri Gagarin. Of course, one of the earliest astronauts and incidentally the first civilian to go into space, was Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963. A woman, incidentally. Nobody remember her?

I could go on all day about this. These children are, in effect, being indoctrinated with sexism and guided into different roles in their future lives. The school has about two million policies on sexism, but none of them make the least difference in practice. Every thing I see at this place confirms that I made the correct decision not to allow my child anywhere near such an institution.

A little about the acquisition of literacy

Just to remind readers, I am at the moment trying to see why local authorities are so keen on children attending school and why they are made uneasy when they hear of children who are not at school. This is of obvious interest to home educators. I think that we have so far established that it is better to be literate and well-educated than not and that schools are very effective at getting across at least the rudiments of things like literacy and numeracy to practically every pupil by the age of eleven. What would happen, all else being equal, to children who were not being taught at school?

So used are we to universal literacy, that it sometimes seems that acquiring the ability to read and write must be a natural process; a little like walking and talking. In other words, you don’t really need any formal instruction, because children are likely to pick it up more or less by themselves. This is certainly the view of many important ideologues in the world of American home education. As long ago as 1962, Paul Goodman, author of Compulsory Miseducation, said:

the puzzle is not how to teach reading, but why some children fail to learn to read. Given the amount of exposure that any urban child gets, any normal animal should spontaneously catch on to the code. What prevents? It is almost demonstrable that, for many children, it is precisely going to school that prevents - because of the school's alien style, banning of spontaneous interest, extrinsic rewards and punishments

So in this version of reality, literacy is not caused by schools at all, but they actually hinder its acquisition. Could this be true? Could universal literacy really be attained without schools? Fortunately, we have a fairly simply way of checking on claims of this sort.

Because literacy is taken for granted today, most of us have never met an illiterate adult. By this, I mean a man or woman who cannot read or write at all. My Uncle Eddie was one of these people. He was a Gypsy who had never attended school and he could not even write his own name. He used to sign for his wages by making a cross. This was rare in the 1960s, but  quite common in nineteenth century England.

Here is the sort of urban environment which people like Paul Goodman think can allow a child to catch on spontaneously to reading:

This is London in the 1830s and there is plenty of print on display. You would think that children who didn’t go to school would see all this and learn to read by themselves. Looking now at marriage registers for 1840, we find that a third of men and half of all women, were signing the marriage register  with a scrawled mark, such as a cross. In other words, they were unable even to write their own names. By 1900, 97% of both men and women were able to sign their names on the marriage register. I am not being dogmatic about this, but it seems to me likely that the introduction of compulsory education, which in effect meant almost universal schooling, was responsible for this eradication  of illiteracy. Had those couples signing the register  not attended school; they would have remained illiterate. I am of course open to another explanation for this, if readers wish to offer one.

In other words, sending nearly every child in the country to school, from 1870 onwards,  had the effect of giving them the ability to read and write. This was a good thing. Today, the universal literacy which we see in this country is maintained by that same,  almost universal custom of sending children to school. We know it works; the results speak for themselves; when did readers last meet somebody who could not sign his or her name? 

This then is a problem facing local authorities. Like every other sensible person in the kingdom, they think it good that everybody can read, write and carry out basic arithmetical operations. They know that this happy situation has been brought about by compulsory education and almost universal schooling. They do not know whether the tens of thousands of children who are not at school are also being taught to read, write, perform arithmetic and so on. It is an unknown.  Some of them are; others are not. I think that this is as much as we have time for today and in the next few days, we will see what, if anything, local authorities should do about this state of affairs.

The good thing about local authorities misleading parents regarding the law relating to education

Some home educator or another is always getting worked up to discover that a local authority somewhere is misleading parents about the law. I'm bound to say that I am very glad that they do. I think it safe to assume that the parents at the school where I am working this week, are convinced that it is somehow, 'against the law', not to send their children to school. If they didn't believe this to be so, then I doubt that many of those children would receive any  education at all.

I have been talking to children in the year 4 class where I am working and also others, when I am on playground duty. I have been trying to find out what sort of stimulation or learning experiences they might be exposed to,  outside school. The short answer to that question is; none at all! I began by asking about any hobbies that they had, but I might as well have been speaking Kiswahili for all the sense that such a question meant to them. 'What's hobbies, sir?', they asked.
     'You know, things that you do for fun. Like stamp collecting or knitting; reading perhaps?'
     They look at me with blank incomprehension. They see that I am genuinely interested, but have not the least idea what I am talking about. One girl says, 'We have reading on Tuesdays.' I explain that I mean reading for pleasure, but it is clear that this is a strange and new idea to them. Not one has any books at home. None belong to a library. Reading is something tiresome that you are forced to do at school.

     I ask about bedtimes, but again; the word is incomprehensible. I explain, 'I mean, what time do you go to bed?' The answers are all very similar. They go to bed when their mum goes to bed or when she gets fed up with them. Some of them live in their bedrooms more or less all the time, because they have televisions and games consoles there and can live a separate  life from their parents, without getting on their nerves. These are children aged between eight and eleven! Many of them have dark shadows under their eyes, some fall asleep in class; all look tired. 

     These children live two miles from one of the finest examples of seventeenth century military architecture in the world; but not one has ever visited it. Why would their parents take them to an historic site? I am surprised that the school has not organised a trip there, until I remember that the seventeenth century is not covered by the National Curriculum at that age. If only the fort had been built by the ancient Egyptians, then they might have been taken to visit it!

     The only thing these children really do when they are not at school is to watch television and DVDs and play on the Xbox. That is the sum total of their lives, apart from visits to the big shopping centre a few miles away. If these children did not go to school, then not only would they not learn to read and write; many of them would not even learn to speak coherently in whole sentences.  It is no exaggeration to say that some of these kids start nursery being able only to communicate in grunts and a few basic words. Often, they are also incontinent; not from a disability, but because the parents are happy to let the school toilet-train them. Why should they do it themselves? That's what the authorities are for!

     School for these children is their only, exceedingly slender, chance of being rescued from this sort of life. It is the window on the world of learning for them; the chance to catch a glimpse of a wider world. I can tell you now that the parents grumble like mad about having to get dressed in the morning in order take the children to school. Often, at the weekend, they don't bother to get dressed and the whole family spend all Saturday and Sunday in their pyjamas; watching endless television and DVDs. It is not hard to see that this lifestyle would readily be adopted for the rest of the week, were the mothers not scared of getting into trouble for not sending their children to school. The next time somebody complains about a local authority misrepresenting the law; they might spare a thought for these children. This mistaken impression about the legal situation is the only thing at the moment which ensures that these children receive even the most rudimentary education!

The problem with school

I dare say that most readers will be aware that I am not a particular fan of schools! There are two problems with sending children to school in this country and I want today to look briefly at one of these problems.  The first reason for avoiding British schools, particularly  those in the maintained sector, is that a lot of them are really poor. You can’t always discover this just from looking at their position in the so-called ‘league tables’ and so choosing a school for your child is immediately a bit of a gamble. Since the consequences of losing that particular gamble can be so profound ad far-reaching,  and because I am not  in general a betting man; I decided not to have a punt on this. There is another and deeper problem with schools though; one which affects not this school or that, but is rather endemic in the organised educational system in this country.

One of the things that many parents observe about school, is that the focus of their children’s efforts seem to be on school, with its tests and examinations, rather than with the real world. Here, for instance is a scenario which any parent who has had a child at primary school will recognise at once. Mary brings home a list of a dozen words; the spelling of which she must memorise, because the class will be tested on them at the end of the week. The child does really well and the following week has a new batch of words to learn. While testing her on them, her mother slips in a few words from previous weeks, only to find her daughter getting upset about this. She has already learned those words; they are no longer important. Her mother notices that her daughter has actually forgotten how to spell the words that she learned a couple of weeks ago. This does not matter to the child at all, because learning how to spell words has, in her mind, no other purpose than to pass a test at school. 

Or consider another situation, this time in secondary school. Mrs Smith notices that her fourteen year-old daughter is getting around a third of the maths questions which she does wrong. This is worrying; after all an average mark of six out of ten isn’t too brilliant, is it? How will the child manage her money when she leaves school, work out interest rates and so on?  What’s puzzling, is that the teacher writes things like ‘well done’ and ‘good’ after these lousy results. The mother makes an appointment to see the teacher, only to be astonished when the teacher tells her there is nothing to worry about. Mary is in line to get a grade ‘B’ at her GCSE! At the very least, she will get a ‘C’. The mother, you see, is worrying about how the child will get along in the real world with her deficient maths skills, but all the teacher cares about is an examination. To her, this is the whole object of studying mathematics; so that a good mark is achieved in an examination.

These two examples will probably strike a chord with anybody foolish enough to entrust their child’s education to a school! For schools, the purpose of education is only to do well at school; all too often, it has no relevance at all to the outside world.  I think that this is in the nature of the system itself and is one of those things which cause me to encourage every parent I meet to take responsibility for their own children’s education and not leave it in the hands of teachers.

The murder of children who were not attending school

With monotonous regularity, cases crop up in the USA of children who were not at school and are subsequently killed by their parents or carers. Many of these deaths have similar features. Apart from non-attendance at school, there is the fact that the children are usually black, often fostered or adopted and the adults looking after them are very frequently religious maniacs. A quick trawl through the internet  will throw up any number of child homicides  bearing two or more of these features. 

There are signs that crimes of this sort are beginning to cross the Atlantic. Where America leads, we follow! The most famous such murder was of course that of Victoria  Climbie. Here you had all the classic elements of such crimes. The child was black and not being sent to school, she was being informally fostered and, significantly, the woman caring for her, Marie-Therese Kourao,  was devoutly religious. She  always carried a Bible in the dock during her trial for murder. The Khyra Ishaq case had three of the warning signs; a child who was black and not attending school, combined with parents who were weirdly religious. Although it didn't ultimately end in death, the Eunice Spry affair fell into the same general pattern. There you had children who were not being sent to school and  who were being fostered by a woman who was an enthusiastic member of a fringe religious group. In 2010, there was another death with three of these features; in addition to non-attendance at school and being a member of an ethnic minority, the mother in that case, Satpal Kauer Singh, was also pretty religious.

It strikes me that children who have more than two of the factors which I list above, might very well be at increased risk of abuse or death. Not going to school by itself may not be a risk factor, but combined with more than one of the things that I mention here, might  be enough to indicate a child at hazard.

Bullying at home

One of the difficulties I find when trying to debate with home educating parents is that they often seem to have a distorted view of the world; a view which blinds them to things which are perfectly plain to everybody else in the country. Take the question of bullying, for example. I remarked yesterday that most bullying  of children takes place in their home and is inflicted by parents and carers. Almost incredibly, there was immediate disagreement! The reason for this is of course simple. It is an article of faith among many home educators that schools are dangerous places, in contrast to homes which is where children may be kept safe. Because of this, there is a tendency to exaggerate hazards in schools and minimise those faced by children at home. Common sense, backed up by all the available evidence, suggests that home is far more dangerous for most children than school. 

Bullying is the use of force, strength or influence to intimidate and coerce others who are weaker than the one doing the bullying. Yesterday, somebody posted some research on here which was so ludicrously irrelevant to the debate, that I was somewhat at a loss to know how to respond; not a common occurrence on this blog! Those conducting the research had  defined bullying as something done by children:

‘Respondents were asked whether they were bullied, discriminated against, or made to feel different, like an outsider by other children.’

Not surprisingly, this survey had gone on to reveal that bullying was something done by children. Obvious really; if you only ask about bullying in relation to other children, then bullying will inevitably emerge as a school problem, rather than one at home. 90% of those asked had claimed to come from warm and loving homes. This settled the matter, at least to the satisfaction of the person who put the results of this research on the comment; homes are loving and warm and bullying takes place at school.  This is of course sheer Alice in Wonderland. People are asked if they have been bullied by other children and this is then used to prove that bullying is an activity carried out by other children. Let us look at the genuine and sustained bullying to which most children are routinely subjected; bullying which has nothing to do with other children and actually takes place  in their homes.

The worst sort of bullying involves the use or threat of violence against the victim. The bully uses superior strength to push the victim around and make her do as she is told. Here are a few surveys that readers might like to examine:

http://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/news-views/press-release/how-safe-are-our-children-only-1-3-adults-see-slapping-high-risk

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2096641/Support-end-smacking-ban-parents-say-prevented-summer-riots.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1529321/Punishing-children-by-smacking-wins-widespread-adult-approval.html



As we can see, for children who experience physical violence; 80% of it is in their home. There are a couple of surveys covering around two and a half thousand people in total which suggest that between 67% and 80% of parents have hit their children. It is interesting to think about those 90% of people in the research quoted yesterday who claimed to have come from warm and loving homes. 90% of people also claim to have been hit by their parents when they were children. In other words; 90% of adults were bullied by their parents when they were little.

I don’t propose to waste too much time on this, because the case is so clear. Bullying children, by using physical violence on them to make them do as others wish, is endemic in this country. 90% of adults have been victims of this bullying and it still happens to between 70% and 80% of children. (Other surveys sometimes find higher or lower rates, but I cannot find one where fewer than 25% of parents admit to striking their children). This is bullying in its worst form; not merely the threat of force, but the actual use of violence. This bullying usually takes place in the home and is inflicted by the adults who are close to the child. It results in many serious injuries and not a few deaths. Every three weeks, a child under the age of five in this country dies as a result of a violent attack. In 80% of these deaths, the parents or carer is the attacker.

I do not think that any of this has much bearing on home education, other than to show that many home educating parents have a skewed perspective about risks to children. They have a vested interest in portraying schools as dangerous places for children, but the reality is that for the overwhelming majority of children, their home is the place where they are pushed around and assaulted; bullied and intimidated into submission. I have only looked here at the most extreme form of bullying; that involving physical violence. Add in the name-calling, belittling and humiliation that are often mentioned in surveys about bullying and I can't help wondering how far short of 100% the figure for the bullying of children by parents would be.

An interesting social history of selective education...

I thought that readers might like to read a review of one of my recent books about education and schooling:

http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/Schooling-question-class-middle-lower/story-18322791-detail/story.html#axzz2P8AGtQyd

Like it or not, British education post-war was dominated by the 11-plus which divided those pupils who went on to Grammar School at 11, and the vast majority who didn't.

In fact, at least three quarters of children failed the exam and ended up at secondary schools, which is where they stayed until they left to find a job at the age of 15.

1. ​

• •
 
• •

"The history of this 75 per cent or more of children who were neither privately educated, nor attended grammar school, has often been neglected and sometimes entirely overlooked," says Simon Webb, the author of a new book on the subject.

"Fictional accounts of childhood during this time, from Enid Blyton's Famous Five stories to C S Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, show a world where independent, fee-paying schools are the norm," he adds.

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"Real life reminisces of school in the late 1940s and Fifties seem to focus upon the lives of children at grammar and private school, rather than exploring life at ordinary primary schools and secondary moderns."

Simon's book, a lively and fascinating mix of personal reminisces and well researched fact, follows the nation's schoolchildren as Rab Butler's 1944 Education Act was translated into reality.

Under Butler's scheme – part of a "brave new world" – every child in the country would have access to free education through a system of grammar, technical and secondary modern schools.

As many authorities failed to institute the technical schools, it was left as pretty much a two-tier system.

From 1947, despite considerable opposition, all children were obliged by law to remain in full-time education until they were 15 years old.

Despite the snob appeal of the grammar schools – pupils had to wear a uniform and boys a cap – the Labour Party were strongly in favour of them.

They regarded these establishments – many of which had once been private – as agents of social mobility which would enable bright working-class pupils to "fulfil their potential".

Nevertheless many aspects of the grammar schools – including the use of surnames and teachers wearing gowns – mirrored those of the private schools, on which they were based.

For so-called "late developers" there was access to these schools through 13-plus exams, although in reality this was nothing more than a trickle.

Bright pupils from secondary moderns were either not encouraged, or not able, until 1965, to take CSE or GCE exams.

In fact many left school without any qualifications whatsoever, a situation which barred them from any type of office work, however lowly.

By the 1950s it was becoming obvious, says Simon, that the 11-plus was doing nothing but sort out articulate middle-class children, often not the brightest, and provide them with grammar school places.

"It is worth noting that throughout the 1940s and Fifties half of the children attending grammar schools were from middle-class families," says Simon Webb.

"This was wholly disproportionate to the size of the middle classes at the time and suggested that they were taking up more than their fair share of places.

"Whatever had earlier been claimed the 11-plus examination had little to do with intelligence and everything to do with previous schooling and education."

For those starting out at primary school, which was at five, as it is today, the occasion was either traumatic or eagerly awaited.

In those days mothers were always busy – Monday's washing could take all day and shopping was a daily chore – and with few amusements, such as TV, many children were bored.

If you were lucky enough to find yourself at an infant school which had graduated from chalk and slates to pencils then, at seven, there were dip pens and ink, which could make an awful mess, even with blotting paper. Even after they were being mass produced, in the 1960s, many schools still refused to let their children use Biros.

Age seven, and now in the juniors, pupils would be streamed, A, B or C according to ability, and even moved around in class after a weekly test.

The A stream pupils, many of who, it must be said, had natural ability, would be groomed for the 11-plus and a possible place at grammar school.

Due to a post-war "bulge" there could be as many as 40, or even 50, children in just one class.

Given these high numbers (most private schools aimed for half of this) then perhaps it was in the nature of things that slower pupils were overlooked while attention was focused on the brightest.

Teachers' "pets" were a well- known phenomena.

Such was the division at 11 that many pupils who had passed the 11-plus found themselves cut off socially from the friends that they had grown up with at primary school.

Snobbery, a fact of life in post-war Britain, remained rife.

If you grew up in the post-war years, as I did, then this book will bring the memories – both good and bad – flooding back.

Little did we realise (did anyone, apart from the educationalists) that we were being used as guinea pigs in a huge piece of social engineering.

Just how much the education we got fitted us for life outside the school gates is another question all together, beyond the remit of Simon Webb's book.

One secondary school pupil describes how he learned more from a teacher who let them tinker with (and drive!) his old car than he ever did in the classroom.

The chapters on discipline, uniforms, religion and school buildings I found especially interesting.

The Best Days of our Lives by Simon Webb is published by The History Press at £12.99.

Read more: http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/Schooling-question-class-middle-lower/story-18322791-detail/story.html#ixzz2P8B2fQff
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A danger in home education

Regular readers will probably know that I am very enthusiastic about home education. There can be difficulties though and we should not allow ourselves to be blind to them. When conducted in a  thoughtful and planned way, home education is astonishingly effective; far more efficient than school based education. When undertaken in a desultory or haphazard fashion though, the  results can be dire. Take history, for example. The great thing about this  for home educators is that it can be brought to life in the most exciting way imaginable  by visits to castles, museums, re-enactments, battlefields and a hundred other different locations. Not for the home educated child, the once a term visit to a museum or stately home! These frequent, even daily visits can be followed up  with Horrible History books and home based activities. The subject is tremendously enjoyable for both parents and children and I defy any school to make history as much fun as it can be for home educated children. On the other hand, learning about history can be absolutely disastrous for home educated children if little or no thought is given to it.

     I was looking yesterday at a blog on home education kept by a fairly well-known parent; her name is not important. She was writing about how she took the opportunity to teach her children some history by reading out to them some interesting facts that she had read on the internet about life in England during the 16th Century. I have actually seen the document she quoted  used before by home educators as a teaching resource. Here it is:

The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s:
Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June.. However, since they were starting to smell . ...... . Brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting Married.
Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it.. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water!"
Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof... Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."
There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.
The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying, "Dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way. Hence: a thresh hold.
In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire.. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme: Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old. Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and chew the fat.
Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.
Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust.
Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would Sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial.. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a wake.
England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive... So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer.
And that's the truth....Now, whoever said History was boring

Now read as a series of jokes; this is quite funny. I won’t go through every point, this is a spoof which has been circulating on the internet for fourteen years or so. It appeared a few months after the film Shakespeare in Love was released and is thought to have been inspired by it. The horrifying thing is, this home educating mother thought that this was a factual account of life in Tudor England and encouraged her children to believe this nonsense. This highlights a danger with home education.

     The history taught in schools is specified by the National Curriculum. For the Tudor period at key Stage 2, this means;

Britain and the wider world in Tudor times
10. A study of some significant events and individuals, including Tudor monarchs, who shaped this period and of the everyday lives of men, women and children from different sections of society.


We can be pretty confident that children being taught about the 16th Century in schools will not be told that wakes were held in case the dead person should wake up! Nor are they likely to be learning that  dogs lived on the roof in old England… This is the problem with home education. There is nothing to prevent ignorant parents from teaching their children all sorts of  rubbish and persuading them that it is true. Some only use the internet, rather than books, and will, as this mother did, regard a history lesson as consisting of passing on collections of urban myths to their kids. 

     What can be done about this, is another matter. I am very much afraid that nothing can be done without interfering to an alarming extent with family life. After all, we would none of us wish to see home educating parents compelled to teach their children set texts and required to follow the National Curriculum. I suppose that this then is the price of freedom; that parents should be at liberty to misinform their kids if they wish to do so. It is a something of a tragedy though, because when this happens, it is the children who suffer and some are bound to grow up with their heads full of foolishness that their parents have fed them in this way. 

     In short, this is the nature of the problem; that at school, children will be exposed to facts and largely accurate information about Tudor England, while at home they may only be encouraged to listen to old wives’ tales and urban myths. As I say, there is nothing to be done about this. Even regular visits would not uncover this sort of thing. It is well though that home educators bear in mind their responsibility towards their children; a far greater moral responsibility than that borne by the parents of children attending school.

‘A’s are for losers…

I have had to abandon this blog for a while to meet a deadline, however, normal service is now resumed. I shall be looking in the next couple of days at the idea of compulsion, which seems to be so baffling to at least one reader; compulsion in her mind being associated only with punishment or physical force! Before that, I want to talk about the awful situation at British secondary schools, with reference to what are known as grade boundaries. These have a pernicious effect upon children unfortunate enough to attend school.

When my daughter was studying for both GCSEs and A levels, I had a saying that I used frequently with her. This was, ‘A's are for losers!’ I meant to convey by this that if she gained only an ‘A’ in an examination, rather than ‘A*’; then as far as I was concerned, she would have failed that particular examination. Nothing less than 100% was satisfactory, whether she was working at home with me or sitting an IGCSE. There are a number of possibilities for this attitude on my part. One would be that I am a man obsessed with GCSEs and their importance in life. Another might perhaps be that I am a male, Caucasian version of the notorious Chinese ‘Tiger Mothers’. A third and, to me at least, more likely explanation would be that I am not a bloody fool and that I know how the world actually works outside of school and examinations. Let me make this a little clearer.

In a deplorable lapse of judgement, I allowed my older daughter to be registered at school. Apart from a spell of flexi-schooling, she was at school all the way through until leaving at sixteen. When she was fifteen, a year or so before she was due to take her GCSEs, I noticed that her maths was atrocious. She was getting around half the questions wrong and yet her teacher was marking the work with things like, ‘Well done’. When I spoke to this woman she explained that from her point of view this was fine. It was not because my daughter was unable to do any better, it was that there would have been no point. In the GCSE, which mark you get depends on the percentage of marks you score. These are the grade boundaries. Incredibly, if you get over 50%, you get an ‘A’ in mathematics for GCSE. Over 70% and you will have an ‘A*’ Because my daughter was in line for at least an ‘A’ and possibly an ‘A*’, she was doing as well as could possibly be achieved. What purpose would have been served by trying to get her to get three quarters of her work right? It would have been overkill; way over the grade boundary for an ‘A*’. I resisted the temptation to slay this idiot on the spot; in retrospect, a matter of some regret.

Let’s forget for a moment about schools and GCSEs. I have only recently, after a long struggle, resolved the problems I have been having with the Student Finance people over the loan my daughter is getting for university. I sent in almost everything necessary. The only problem related to an income of £60.75, for which I provided no documentation and had overlooked when filling out the form. You might have thought that they would have given me a gold star for this, or at the very least congratulated me on getting over 95% of the calculations correct. Even a ‘Well done’ would have been nice. They did none of these things, because of course this is real life. Anything less than 100% accuracy means that you fail. It is the same with my tax returns. It is not enough for me to get 70% of the answers right. This will not earn me an ‘A*’ with the Inland Revenue. Not even 80% will do, nor 90% or even 95%. Every figure and all calculations must be 100% correct.

This principle, that of getting 100% all the time in maths is how we have to live our real lives. Whether we are looking at out bank statement, measuring the room for a fitted carpet or working out the change from a £20 note; nothing less than 100% will do. Saying ‘Well done!’ to a child for getting a third of her sums wrong is a false kindness. It does not matter a damn if that will be enough to get her an ‘A*’ at GCSE; getting a lot of sums wrong in real life will be a disaster for her. The same is true of practically every other aspect of life. If I write out a job application and only make errors in spelling a quarter of the words, this will not earn me an ‘A*’ from the potential employer. He will probably dismiss me as illiterate.

Real life is very unforgiving. Most of the time we need to get things right. The penalties for getting things wrong can be pretty severe and you are not awarded marks for effort either! Anybody who does not expect a child to get things 100% right in maths, English or any other subject is leaving the child ill-prepared for the real world. Real life is not about GCSEs or A levels. It is about getting figures 100% right, making sure that not one word is misspelled nor a single capital letter or full stop omitted. Teaching children this and being ferociously demanding about it is the only strategy that will fit them out for the adult world in which they will all too soon find themselves.

Smoke and mirrors in school-based education

Somebody commenting here suggested yesterday that I am prone to ‘bashing autonomous education’; a preposterous notion! To even things up a bit, we shall today look at the phenomenon of parents working away hard at their children’s school education and then forgetting that they have done so. As Old Mum correctly divined, the aim of this stratagem, both for schooling and home educating parents, is to make their children look more clever than is actually the case.


We looked yesterday at a couple of home educators who made great efforts in getting their children to read or take the necessary qualifications to get a place at college and then forgot what they had done. This kind of thing is by no means exclusive to home education; although there are certainly some stunning examples in that field. As a matter of fact, most of the parents I have known who have engaged in these games have had children at school. Before we look at how this works for those who are not home educating, I want to look at the motive for these deceptions. I say deceptions, but in many of the cases which I have known, the parents had actually managed to take themselves in as well; in fact they had come to believe their own myths! I rather suspect that the parents at whom we looked yesterday fall into this category and were not setting out deliberately to deceive others.

So what is the motive behind all this? It is pretty simple. Look at my own activities. When my daughter was two and a half and reading English fluently, I decided to teach her to read Chinese. This was very successful and she was making great progress until my wife put her foot down. Now as this stands, it is not much of a story. It simply shows the child’s father in a poor light as an insanely pushy parent. Let us imagine though that I made the same claim that the parent in yesterday’s post made to a newspaper about the kid reading English. Suppose that I told people that my daughter had learned Chinese herself; just picked it up, without any help from me at the age of two. You see the difference? This is much better; I have been transformed from a pushy parent into the father of a genius. A great improvement indeed! Telling people that we as parents have done little to encourage and help our children makes their achievements look much more impressive. They become very bright kids and we can portray ourselves as laid back parents without a pushy or ambitious bone in our bodies.

In the last few years, my wife and I have seen the children of friends get places at good universities after passing tough, academic A levels with As and A*s. Every one of their parents has claimed that the children didn’t study hard or revise, as well as making out that they themselves never bothered much about their children’s education; just leaving them to it. This is simply another version of the autonomous educating gag. What is astounding is that these people seem genuinely to have forgotten all that they did to get their kids to this point. The best local school is the Davenant Foundation. To get in, you need a ten year record of church attendance. Some of these parents spent a whole decade feigning belief in the Deity in order to get their kids to this school! How’s that for dedication, ten years pretending to be religious and all for the sake of your kid’s schooling? Once there, they paid for tutors to push the children academically, shouted and argued with the children to make sure that they took the right options at GCSE and A level and arranged a hundred different leisure activities and hobbies; to all of which they drove their children. In most cases, it would have been surprising had the kid not done well at A level.

Despite all this, the parents pretend to have done little or nothing to help their children’s studies. They tell everybody that their son or daughter never did any homework, didn’t pick up a book until a week before the exam and so on. This makes their children’s A level results look all the better, which is the aim of the gambit. Returning to home educators, we saw a marvellous example of this last year when a parent whose two children are famous for being autonomously educated claimed that her daughter had passed a science GCSE with flying colours, despite never having studied the subject and just flicking through the textbook a fortnight before the examination took place!

Speaking for myself, I have not the least objection to people claiming that their children gained GCSEs or A levels without any input from them, any more than I disapprove of parents making out that their children taught themselves to read. It is human nature to wish to present both your children and yourself in the best possible light. These tactics have the dual effect of both making you look like a relaxed and confident parent, while at the same time casting your kids in the role of infant prodigies. It’s a great game to play, as long as you don’t lose your sense of humour and start getting tetchy when others take your claims with a pinch of salt.

What's wrong with school?

Those who educate their children at home are, by definition, not satisfied with schools. In my own case, the problem was simple; I find modern schools horribly inefficient and knew perfectly well that I could make a better job of teaching my child. I had no problem with schools as such. If the schools had been any good, I should have sent my daughter there to learn. I have a strong suspicion that the motivations of others for not sending their children to school are usually different from this.

So why don't people send their children to school? Sometimes, they have had bad experiences themselves and are naturally anxious to protect their own child from suffering in the same way. Other mothers simply do not wish to be deprived of their child's company. We all know the wrench that many mothers feel on the first day of their child's school. Some mothers just decide that they don't want to do this; they would rather keep the child with them. Sometimes this is a conscious dedication to attachment parenting, where children stay closer to parents and separate much later than is common in our society. Then again, there are those who send their children, but then change their minds. Their children change, become unhappy, perhaps are bullied. The simple solution is to take them out of school.

A lot of parents seem to have a problem with the very idea of school. Often it is school and not formal education as such. A lot of parents make great efforts to get their children into college to study at the age of twelve, thirteen or fourteen. They obviously don't mind full time education in a formal setting; their problem is with school alone. The poster which I did a piece about recently tied in with this feeling. School is a place where children are bullied and injured! They truant to avoid it wherever possible. One in six of them leave school functionally illiterate. This is what advertisers call "knocking copy". What these people are doing is not presenting a positive reason for home education, they are saying in effect, "School is such shit, how could I send my child there?" In other words, for many parents it seems less a case of home education being good, than that schools are bad.

I find this quite puzzling. I have never thought of schools as anything other than places where children are educated. They are like garages where work is undertaken on a car. If the garages in your area are slack and inefficient and you know a bit about cars yourself; you might prefer to service your own vehicle. This is pretty much how I saw the education of my daughter. There was no local establishment that I could rely upon to do the job, so I did it myself. I never felt the need to start a campaign denouncing garages and urging others to stop getting their cars repaired in garages! It was a purely pragmatic decision. In fact, if a man finds himself in this position of being unable to find a decent garage and then starts a movement which encourages others to boycott garages, then I would find it a little odd. It is after all a personal decision. It is not that there is anything wrong with garages, just that many are not very good.

This is how I view what one might term the orthodox home education movement in this country. A lot of it is concerned with how bad schools are, rather than how good they are themselves at educating their kids. Those on the HE-UK and UK lists will notice that every time a school governer, ofsted inspector or nursery worker is convicted of an offence involving children, there is satisfaction and posts saying, "There you are, that's schools for you. You can't trust them."

I would be curious to know how many parents don't send their children to school because they don't like the idea of school, as opposed to those who make a positive choice because they believe that they can educate their children better than a school could. I have to say that the present methods used in schools are very inefficient and so much time is wasted that it is a scandal. These things though seem to be seldom mentioned.