Why are local authorities pursuing home educators when their own schools are in such a terrible state?

A few days ago, we began to look at the question of why local authorities chase home educating parents and seem so keen that all children should be at school. We agreed, I think, that there are many advantages to being literate and well educated and no discernible drawbacks.  Now it is of course perfectly possible for a child to be educated adequately, other than at school. Never the less, school is the best and cheapest way of educating millions of children to a certain standard. 

Before we explore the subject of local authorities wanting almost every child to attend school, I want to look at the one objection which is always raised by home educating parents whenever I touch upon this. Somebody is sure to say, 'Why don't the local authorities fix the school system, before they start worrying about home educated children?  These schools are so dreadful that a fifth of the teenagers leaving school are illiterate! If over 20% of children can go through school for eleven years without learning to read and write, surely there is something wrong with the system of mass education?' This figure of one child in five being unable to read and write is of course quite absurd, but is widely believed by home educators. Let's look at the real situation.

I am currently working a dreadful primary school, where around half the children are entitled to free school dinners. It caters for a very deprived area and the children do not have, on the whole, stimulating homes where parents take an active interest in their education. Yet here's a very interesting thing. Every single child in Year 4 can read and write. I know this, because I have tested them myself; getting them to read from a newspaper,  watching them write and so on. Remember, this is not some highly sought after school in a good district; quite the opposite. The current methods used to teach reading are  astonishingly successful. By the use of synthetic phonics, practically any child can learn to read by the age of seven.

So far, so good. Every eight and nine year old can read and write, yet by the time that they leave school, will a fifth of them have lost these vital skills? Not at all; they will be far better at both reading and writing by the age of sixteen. 

At this point, I sense that some readers are either scratching their heads in bewilderment or foaming at the mouth in fury; depending upon temperament.  Hasn't government research confirmed this finding that rates of illiteracy are rising? Surely the schools can't be working very well? The explanation is very simple. The definition which I use for literacy is the one which was universal until a  few years ago. Literacy was regarded as, 'the ability to read and write a simple note'. In other words, if you could write your friend a message, saying perhaps, 'See you at the pub tonight Jim, at nine' and he could read this; then you were both literate. This is probably the meaning of literacy which most of us still subscribe to. It means being able to read and write in this way.  Using that definition, every school leaver in the United Kingdom, with one or two rare exceptions, is literate. The literacy rate in this country is effectively 100%. However, this is not the definition of literacy which is now in use. The new definition depends upon what we call 'document literacy'; which  means the ability to decode and make sense of rather more complicated written material than a simple note. Reading a train timetable, for example, is one of the measures. Now I am pretty sure that I am not illiterate, but I certainly get in a muddle when looking at timetables of that sort and so do many people.  Reading a map is another instance of 'document literacy'. Again, many well-read and literate people have trouble with map reading.

If I were to  test Year 4 next week, by looking at their ability to read maps or fathom out train timetables, then the literacy rate would plummet from 100% to 0% over the course of the weekend!

Although I am not a fan of schools and the way that they do things, there is no doubt that they do what they set out to do very well. Every child receives an education, all are able to read, write and perform the four basic arithmetical operations by the time that they leave primary school. I might not like the methods, but they work.  In other words, local authorities know that if a child is in school, then he or she is receiving an education. They do not know this about children who are not in school and this is where the problem begins. Next week, we shall look at some of their concerns and how these might be addressed.

The Roots of academic failure

Commenting here  today, somebody identified what they saw as two root causes of academic underachievement. These were, supposedly, bad schools and poverty;

Let's not forget the root causes of this problem: the poverty and poor education of the parents of the children Simon is talking about. They, too, were once children, and were probably in school ~10-30 years ago. The school system was little short of a disaster for them.

I want to look a little at these ideas today. 

The two   explanations above  are commonly advanced in this country for the low educational attainment of many children. Often, the preferred of the two explanations  is based  more upon  an individual's political allegiance than on any rational examination of the available  evidence. On the one hand are those who tend to assume that ill educated and badly behaved  pupils are a product of useless schools staffed by ineffective teachers with outdated, child-centred educational theories.  It was this perception of course which led to the introduction of the National Curriculum. The only way to raise standards is to tell the schools precisely what to teach and then to keep a sharp eye on them to make sure that they are actually doing it! At the same time we should use schools to inculcate children and young people with a sense of discipline and teach them good values. Those at the other end of the political spectrum often look towards society itself for the cause of academic failure. For them, poverty and racism are at least as important factors in determining the child's academic achievements as  are teaching methods. Tackling social inequality and eradicating prejudice will help to break the middle class stranglehold on good schools and universities, thus allowing working class children to flourish. 

     These two notions are not  mutually exclusive. Those from both left and right are generally agreed that good teaching produces better achievement in pupils than poor teaching and that there is an association between poverty, as measured for example  by the number of children entitled to free schools meals, and academic results. The problem is to establish a causal link between these associated factors and to avoid falling into the error of arguing  post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Perhaps it is worthwhile at this point to say a few words about this well known logical fallacy, of which we shall be seeing a good deal.

  Post hoc, ergo propter hoc,  which means literally,  'After this, therefore because of this',  entails positing an erroneous cause and effect relationship between two events. Perhaps a man walks under a ladder and is subsequently struck by lightning. Here, there was of course no connection at all between the two events. A superstitious person though, might imagine that the misfortune had actually been caused by walking under the ladder. Usually, the case is a little more complicated than this. There may be a definite association between two events, although it is not at all clear if  one caused the other or whether both were the consequence of a third event. Consider the discovery a few years ago that teetotallers are at increased risk of death from heart disease. Could this mean that total abstention from alcohol can cause heart attacks? Or could there be another fact or at work? In fact, many total abstainers have given up drinking because they have been diagnosed with heart problems. Rather than the teetotalism causing the heart disease, it was the heart disease causing the teetotalism!

     Let's look at another case, this time concerning education. It is perfectly true that the children of parents who have a very low income tend to do  worse at school than those whose parents are affluent professionals. Is the poor performance at school caused by the low income of the parents? It has long been observed that children whose parents are from certain parts of the world such as the far East are more likely to do well, despite the low income, than those whose parents are white  and English. Could it be that being  Chinese  confers some educational benefit upon a child? Might the inheritance from one's parents of an epicanthic eye fold and sallow skin go hand in hand with increased intelligence which enables these children to overcome the economic disadvantage of their home background? Probably not, as we shall later see. It is enough for now to realise that when looking at the reasons for a child's failure to take full advantage of the education he receives, we shall have to be very careful about jumping to this conclusion or that and be particularly alert  to the possibility of post hoc, propter hoc. 

     Before we go any further, it might  be helpful to conduct a couple of simple thought experiments, both of which will start us thinking about the true causes and nature of academic failure. Let us begin by looking at the idea that good schools and good teaching produces good pupils who achieve well academically. We shall take two nearby schools; one a so-called 'bog standard' comprehensive and the other a high performing faith school. This latter is the sort of school where eager parents find it worth their while attending church for a few years in order to ensure that their child is eligible for a place. The pupils here  do brilliantly at their GCSEs, while at the run down Comprehensive down the road, a large proportion leave with no GCSEs at all, let alone the five 'good' GCSEs which represent the current benchmark of a decent education in this country.

     We shall start by taking it for granted that the good school with the good teachers is directly responsible for the fantastically good  GCSEs which the pupils are getting. We shall also assume that the poor results at the other school are caused by poor teaching. I know, let's swap the pupils round and see what happens! In other words, we shall take all the current pupils at the faith school and transfer them to the 'bog standard' comprehensive. The kids at the comprehensive will all be sent instead to the faith school. This is in effect, what is being done in areas where attempts are being made to prevent good schools becoming the exclusive preserve of pushy, middle class families. Will it work? Will the underachieving pupils newly registered at the good school now take advantage of the good teaching and do well at their GCSEs? Will the children who were formerly at the faith school suffer terribly from the poor quality teaching to which they are now being subjected?

     In fact, what will probably happen is that within a few years, the faith school will acquire a dreadful reputation as a 'sink' school and the middle classes will be clamouring to get their children into the formerly poorly performing comprehensive! The fact is that at schools where the pupils muck about a lot and don't want  either to behave properly or learn anything, there tends to be a very high turnover of staff. Good staff avoid getting jobs there and the only teachers they can get are those with little experience. They don't stay long and the constant chopping and changing does little to enhance the quality of the education on offer there. In fact this combination of badly behaved pupils and ineffective teachers can prove absolutely lethal for an educational establishment! Rather than it being a case of poor staff causing the pupils to receive a poor education, it is really a case of poor pupils causing the school to acquire poor staff. The same process operates in  good schools, with the good behaviour and high aspirations of the pupils and their families attracting good staff who would rather work in a good school  These teachers stay put, thus providing continuity for the children, which is in itself good for academic achievement. In fact, rather than good teachers producing good pupils, it is more likely that it is good pupils who attract good teachers! 

     Perhaps then poverty is a clearer example of a factor which obviously causes or precipitates inferior educational outcomes?  Let us begin by assuming that this is indeed the case and that poverty actually causes poor results at school. We shall combat this by massively boosting the incomes of the families whose children attend the poorly performing school. Many of these families are on very low incomes and so every week, we shall take £500 in cash to each of these poor households and simply hand it to them. This will at once double, triple or even quadruple their disposable income. Now what will happen to these families as a consequence of this well meaning piece of benevolent intervention? Will they spend this money on fresh vegetables, books and educational resources? Will the diet of their children improve dramatically? Will they use some of this money to visit museums and opera houses in order to enrich the lives of their children? Are more of the children whose families are part of this programme going to be passing five GCSEs at A* - C? 

     Of course, nothing of the sort will happen. In many of the families, the money will be spent on cable television, new mobile telephones, computer games, alcohol, cigarettes and even more take away pizzas.  In fact, the result could well be a decline in educational attainment. More children will have cable television in their bedrooms to keep them awake half the night and their diet will become even more impoverished. They will be getting less sleep and consuming even fewer vitamins than before the increase in disposable income! Once again, our well meaning social engineering has failed wholly to achieve its object.

     We have arrived fairly swiftly at the problem of post hoc, propter hoc, upon which we touched briefly above. In short, the popular and widely accepted  proposition that 'good teaching causes good educational outcomes' is no more likely to be true than the opposite notion that 'good educational outcomes attract good teaching'. In fact, we may well discover that neither of these statements is true and that both are linked by other causes which we have yet to examine. Similarly, the idea so beloved of some politicians that, 'poverty causes poor education' is not a whit more likely to be true than the assertion that, 'poor education causes poverty'. There is a good deal more to all this than meets the eye and it is only by delving a little deeper into the matter that we shall be able to determine the root causes of failure, poverty and educational underachievement in this country.

     The twin notions of good teaching as the remedy to poor academic achievement and of poverty as a prime factor in low educational attainment are deeply entrenched in the popular mind. The introduction of the National Curriculum by the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher was an attempt to improve the education of the nation's children by forcing teachers to change their ways. Projects  today in which universities are encouraged to offer places to children from deprived backgrounds are predicated on the other main theme in this debate; that poor children are being held back by their poverty and that it is up to the state to give them a 'leg up' as it were. However, unless we are first careful to establish the precise relationship of poverty and the quality of teaching to successful educational outcome, we may well risk at best wasting our time and at worst actually exacerbating the situation.

     For instance, there is a growing feeling that well off parents are somehow managing to monopolise the best state schools by moving into the catchment areas or providing extra tuition for their children. This, it is supposed, deprives the less advantaged children of places at the school. A number of schemes have been tried to prevent this from happening. For example holding lotteries is considered by some to be a fairer and more equitable way of distributing places at sought after schools. Now if it is the good teaching at the school which is solely responsible for the good educational achievements of the pupils, then this is a good idea. It will enable some children from poorer backgrounds to take advantage of the better state schools. If on the other hand, as we considered earlier, the good teachers have actually been lured there because well behaved and industrious students are making this a good school in which to teach; then the result will be a catastrophe for all concerned. Bringing in random children from varying backgrounds could lower the general standard of behaviour at the school and change it from being a good school to a poor one!

     Similar considerations might apply to the method of improving education which is most favoured by some governments of both left and right; increased expenditure and more 'resources'. Spending ever larger amounts of  money on underperforming schools would have little effect  upon academic achievement if the cause of the problem was the pupils and not the state of the building or the amounts of electronic hardware which were to found in the classrooms. 

     

     

     

           

    

A necessary evil

I  find myself this week enduring torments worse than those accorded to traitors and oath-breakers in the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno. I have, in short, been working in a school! This is perhaps a just punishment for me and I dare say that I may expect little sympathy from readers. 

Two things struck me today, while working with a group of ordinary nine year-olds in an unremarkable maintained school. The first was that while much of what was being done was worthwhile and sensible, it took an enormous length of time. For example, a large part of the day was taken up in teaching the children about newspapers. They were encouraged to distinguish between fact and opinion, look for direct quotations and identify various other aspects of newspaper reporting. They did this by looking at old newspapers and highlighting things like facts and opinion with felt tips. This is brilliant and is of course the sort of thing that many home educating parents might do with their children. After that, the kids had to write an imaginary news item about the discovery of a new planet.

Now all this is absolutely fine and very good for children of that age. The trouble was that this activity began at ten past nine and did not end until twenty to two in the afternoon. Each child produced perhaps half a page of written work in this time.  Working with one child, this whole thing would have taken no more than an hour; perhaps an hour and a half at most, if done at home. 

This wasted time was  the first thing that struck me very forcibly, but as for suggesting a remedy; that is quite beyond me. Twenty seven children, two of whom speak no English at all, four of whom have learning difficulties, four more who were so tired that they kept falling asleep and at least half the children simply did not have vocabularies great enough to be able to understand much in the way of ordinary language. Believe me, getting anything done with these children is slow and tedious work.  I can’t think of any way to improve this system of education, unless we were suddenly able to allocate every child an individual tutor.

The second matter which occurred to me was this. Most of those children would be hopelessly lost without this daily experience. It is wasteful, inefficient and hideously boring; but at least it imparts the rudiments of literacy and numeracy to those children.   Would it better for them if the school wasn’t there or the parents told that they were themselves responsible for their children’s education? Almost certainly not. Many of these kids come from homes where there is quite literally no printed material of any descriptions; not even a magazine or newspaper.  They have no set bedtime, routinely staying up until midnight or one in the morning. The only thing they know is a constant diet of television and games consoles. All their vocabulary is taken from television and computer games. Their language is impaired and impoverished, because their parents seldom hold conversations with them. I used to do a lot of home visiting and was able to see the results of this. Small flats where three televisions blaring out in different rooms vie for attention,  where nobody actually talks to anybody else. 

The chances of the parents of these children being willing or able to assume responsibility for their children’s education is virtually non-existent. Take school out of the equation and these children will probably not learn to read or handle fractions. Imperfect and inefficient as it is; school represents the only hope for these children of rising beyond their day to day life. 

So there it is. I cannot abide schools and would not have dreamed of letting my daughter go to the sort of establishment at which I am working this week. On the other hand, places like that fulfill a very useful and necessary function in society and it would be a tragedy for many children if they were to be deprived of the opportunities present there. Squaring this particular circle is beyond me, but perhaps readers might have some thoughts on the subject?

Beware of the child-catcher!

I felt that I simply had to draw attention to this, which appeared in yesterday’s comments:




https://homeedlampoon.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/jacks-diary/






I have emailed the picture of me as the child-catcher to various friends and relatives and great amusement it has caused too! The humour was not at first obvious, because of course everybody knows that I was a fanatical home educator, constantly advising people to remove their children from school. I still am like that, actually. As a consequence, I have had to explain to those to whom I sent the image, that there exists a body of people who believe that I want to force children not currently at school into being taken to such institutions.

This is where the humour lies and once I explained this, the grotesqueness of the situation became apparent and was much appreciated. Every time anybody I know has moaned about not getting their child into the desired school, you see, I at once ask why on earth they want to send them in the first place. When a colleague or friend complains that the school will not let their child take a particular combination of subjects for GCSE, I tell them that they would be better off doing the job themselves, rather than letting the school muck them about.

Anyway, this image has certainly provided a good deal of innocent amusement among those who know me. I am sorry to report that the general opinion is that anybody who thinks that I like schools and want to make children go there, must be raving mad. This is of course quite true, but I can assure readers that I did my best to defend them and explain that although they were indeed practically insane to believe such nonsense, they were at least well meaning. In the next week or so, I hope to explore this strange idea that I wish children to be sent to school. It is a marvellous myth and the way that it has grown up among some of the less well balanced and psychologically robust readers of this blog is worth looking at in detail; if only for the light it sheds upon certain  types of disordered and faulty thinking.

Another strand in British home education

We have looked in the course of the last week or two at a couple of major strands in British home education. There are of course others, including the one I wish to examine today.


A sizeable proportion of home educating parents in this country have worked as school teachers. This is also the case in the USA. In contrast to this group is another, perhaps as large, whose members hate schools, teachers and anything which smacks in the least of formal education. Of course, there is a good deal of overlap between these groups and the others of which I have lately been writing. For example, I mentioned the mother/daughter pairs with neurological disorders a little while ago. A well known member in this group comes from a family of teachers and was herself married to a teacher. Another parent in this category, on the other hand, belongs to the group who hate schools and had unhappy experiences there.

Let us look at one of the parents whose decision to home educate was motivated less by the needs of her child than by residual anger felt by her towards authority figures in her childhood. Some readers may recollect that there was a campaign last year to raise money so that a home educating parent could skip the country before social services moved in on her and her children. This appeal was signed by many of the usual suspects; Barbara Stark, Neil Taylor, Alison Preuss, Maire Stafford and so on. Their efforts were successful and the woman was able to flee to Ireland. Her name will be familiar to many, but I cannot mention it for legal reasons.  She kept for a while a blog and one of the posts there shows precisely the sort of thing that I am talking about:



http://the-exiled-educator.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/dear-miss-downing.html




‘She hated school and had few friends, she was always much happier at home’ Nothing could more clearly illustrate the type of parent whose own past makes her likely to whip her child out of school at the first sign of any difficulty. We see Maire Stafford in the comments, saying, ‘That could have been me, although they did not know I was bright they criticised all the time and I got two years of the bitchiest teacher going, she picked on and exposed the shy ones.’ She is also a member of this group of home educators who hated school and still feel angry about their time there; even half a century later.

Now a thing that I have noticed is that those parents who home educate because of their own childhood misery tend to be a lot angrier than ordinary home educators. Their anger is directed not only against teachers and schools, but also against authority in general. They are also very often the ones at the centre of schisms and rows within the home educating community. Maire Stafford is of course famous for falling out with anybody who disagrees with her views on home education. She is a bitter enemy of Cheryl Moy, whose blog I drew attention to a little while ago.

This type of parent spearheads the opposition to visits from local authorities and is keen to spread news of any problems in schools; shortcomings in academic standards or cases of abuse by teachers for instance. Readers may have noticed the awful pleasure with which incidents of sexual abuse in nurseries, say, are advertised on blogs and lists run by such people. I have an idea, although I am of course quite ready to be proved wrong, that much of the anger which one sees simmering beneath the surface of some home educators is driven not by contemporary events in British education, but rather stems from childhood memories of perceived ill treatment from teachers. I need hardly add that parents in this group are, almost without exception, opponents of teaching and firm advocates of child-centred education. The extent to which this is a rational choice is open to question and it is perfectly possible that their chosen pedagogy is instead a Pavlovian response to reflexes which have their roots in childhood.

What's wrong with modern schools?

Like most home educating parents, I am not favourably disposed towards schools. I consider mass instruction of children to be a wasteful and inefficient mode of education compare with the unlimited one-to-one tuition so readily available in a domestic setting. However, I regard schools as a necessary evil, since the vast majority of parents are apparently unable or unwilling to assume responsibility for their children's education. I do feel though that these institutions could do with a good shake-up. Here are two anecdotes which perfectly illustrate what is wrong with modern schools. (I am well aware that I am beginning to sound like some peppery old, retired colonel writing to the Daily Mail from Tunbridge Wells!)

The first is from a local primary school. Mixed ability teaching is not easy and nor is it the best way of handling education. Obviously, the narrower the range of abilities, the easier it is to provide a lesson which will suit all the children. Conversely, with a wider range, both the very able and the least able will be neglected. The mother of a seven year old boy was recently approached by her child's teacher. The child in question is very bright and has the reading level of an eleven or twelve year old. The teacher was concerned that the boy was getting restless and bored while the rest of the class struggled to master the rudiments of reading. Her solution was simple. Could his mother perhaps discourage him from reading for a while and not provide him with so many books, at least until the rest of the group had mastered what she was teaching them! The mother's reaction to this request is not fit to print in a family oriented Blog such as this.

Here is part of what is wrong with modern schools; they are all too often run for the benefit not of pupils but of those who work there. The teacher's problem was not a bright child being failed , but a lesson which was not running as smoothly as she could have wished. The teaching has thus become an end in itself, as is the filling out of forms and achievement of targets; all of which are to be ruthlessly pursued, no matter what the consequences for the children. Which brings me neatly to the second story. This concerns the Davenant Foundation School , a local secondary. It is much sought after, in fact as I mentioned in a previous post, one needs a ten year record of church attendance to get in.

Those with children at school will know that DVDs are often put on at the drop of a hat these days. Doing "Lord of the Flies"? Stick on the DVD. Almost Christmas? Why not let the kids watch a DVD. End of term? DVD. As if the average pupil didn't watch enough television at home! You can even stick on a DVD for PE and save yourself the trouble of demonstrating physical jerks to your class. This is absolutely true, by the way. A local primary school was using a Mr. Motivator exercise tape for PE, until a parent complained. Spoilsport! One great advantage of this practice is that it keeps the kids quiet and leaves you able to catch up on all your paperwork.

In a year 8 English class at Davenant last term, the teacher was really behind with things and so hit upon a brilliant scheme to avoid having to teach his pupils, while at the same time allowing him to fill out a load of paperwork which would prove to the LA and DCSF that he actually had been teaching them and pretty brilliantly too. How to occupy them while he did this? He brought in "Pirates of the Caribbean" and showed it to the class in three segments, taking up three entire periods. Then, because he still had not finished his own work, for the fourth lesson he got them to draw treasure maps and colour them in! Bear in mind that these are not seven year olds but twelve and thirteen year olds at the best school for miles around. Four whole English lessons doing absolutely nothing to the purpose of learning English. Again, the aim of the teacher was not to teach, but to complete a lot of paperwork which proved that he was teaching.

It is this Alice in Wonderland world, where furnishing evidence that one is teaching is seen as more important than the teaching itself, in which many of our children are trapped The attempt to check what is happening in schools by regular testing was a sound idea, except that this too has now become an end in itself. The purpose of the test in not to see what the teaching is like; rather the purpose of the teaching is to see how well we can do in the test. I dare say that many readers will agree with what I have said on this topic, because of course we all, for varying reasons, have taken the decision not to allow our children near this deeply flawed system. What can be done about it is quite a different matter. The 1988 Education Bill was a valiant attempt to reform the teaching system but has been subverted to such an extent that it is now the root cause of much of what ails our schools. Another great reformation is long overdue.