Ostensible and real motives for home educating

Something which I have begun to suspect in recent years is that those who choose not to send their children to school are generally  motivated by something a little deeper than the reasons which they give to others. This is certainly the case with me and also with many of the home educating parents who open up about their past lives.

I was looking again at the blog written by the mother who left this country to avoid trouble with social services about her children’s welfare. One entry is written in the third person about a child who, I gather from the comments, is actually her. She says:



Once upon a time there was a 6 year old school-girl...
She was skinny & freckly & a little bit plain & awkward.
She hated school & had few friends. She was always much happier at home.
Sometimes she would be picked on by the other pupils for not being 'typical' or conforming to the 'norms'...



One of those commenting on this, also a well-known British home educator, says,



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



Now neither of these two women have said in the past that they decided to home educate their children because they were themselves unhappy at school. In fact I have never seen or heard of such a claim anyway being made by a home educating parent. It is just that when we do hear home educators mentioning their childhood experiences of school, certain patterns seem to emerge. Typically, these include being unhappy at school, having few friends, being isolated and teachers who fail to recognise genius or at the very least talent and high ability. I am not about to name names, but this constellation of life events has been observed in very many high profile home educators, as well as an awful lot of others.

It is fascinating to relate this to my own experiences and apparent motives for home educating. Now I have often said that I was motivated by the realisation that I could give my child a far better individualised education than she would receive at school. I have also said that I believed that God has given us a duty to direct our children’s upbringing and education. Both of these motives are perfectly true, but they are in a sense ’cover stories’. The fact is that I hated school and did not feel inclined to inflict upon my own daughter something which I found so loathsome and distressing. I have noticed just this same phenomenon in so many other parents. You learn that they took their kid out of school because she was being bullied or had some obscure special educational need that was not being effectively catered for. Then, some time later, it comes to light that the parent herself hated school and was very unhappy there.

The truth of the matter is, I think, that so ingrained in our culture is sending your children off to school, that it takes a little more than a calm and balanced decision to break with the tradition of schooling and decide to go it alone. Very many children are bullied, many are on the autistic spectrum or have school phobia; very few of the parents of these children take the step of removing their child from school entirely as a remedy for the problem. It takes something a little extra to prompt such an eccentric move and this is often provided by the flashbacks suffered by the parent about her own school days.

I would be interested to hear what readers think about this. How many thoroughly enjoyed their time at school and who was unhappy; did anybody feel that her ability was overlooked by the teachers? I am not, as I say, going to give names, but I have collected a huge number of personal reminiscences from different sources which cover practically every well-known home educator or researcher of whom most of us have ever heard. All tend in this   same direction.

GCSE related scams for home educators

I have noticed lately that I am apparently turning into one of those unfortunate people that one occasionally encounters in the street; shuffling along and muttering to themselves, while shouting obscenities every so often. In my own case, this behaviour is all too often precipitated by some new idiocy from the world of home education, from which I still seem unable to disengage myself. Perhaps I am suffering from some species of pre-senile dementia. It can’t be normal to read through the various HE lists and start growling, ‘For fuck’s sake!’ to one’s self every few minutes!


What with the Education Committee considering the help available to home educators and Fiona Nicholson beavering away to find out which local authorities are providing help with alternative provision, this strikes me as a good time to consider why so many teachers and local authority officers flee shrieking in terror at the prospect of helping home educating parents to arrange for their children to sit examinations such as GCSEs. This is a big topic and I shall restrict myself today to just one aspect of it.

I was reading an appeal recently by a home educating mother who was trying to secure extra time and rest breaks for her son, so that he could take a GCSE. He would apparently need at least four breaks an hour for there to be any realistic chance of his sitting the examination. She wondered what proof she would need to furnish of her son’s problems. Cue somebody advising her that under the Disability Discrimination Act, she could take a firm line with anybody who doubted her word on the matter. Well why wouldn’t it be enough for a mother simply to explain the facts of the matter to the exam centre and for them just to provide the kid with the extra time or laptop or whatever he needs? The answer is that this whole business has turned into a huge racket in the last few years.

At the local comprehensive, no fewer than 15% of the children sitting GCSEs get extra time and various other things such as scribes or laptops. One child in six! What is truly astonishing is that they are almost without exception the most middle class children with the pushiest and most articulate parents. Rummy indeed! Are middle class children more prone to dyslexia and neurological difficulties? Well, no; it is of course a scam. By getting a report from a tame specialist, which will set you back a few hundred pounds, your child can have two hours to write an essay, rather than just the one hour that all the other children are getting. This is a huge advantage. Nor is this all.

It is also possible to boost your child’s exam marks by pleading a range of special circumstances, ranging from headaches on the day of the exam to being diagnosed with terminal cancer the day before. The one will give you an extra 1%, the other 5%. In between these two extremes are a whole raft of possible life-events; pets falling ill, seeing somebody killed in a road accident, death of a grandmother and so on. By combining a couple of these with dyslexia, you can give your kid a huge advantage in GCSEs.

What is the point of all this though? After all, GCSEs don’t matter all that much, do they? In fact they do matter a great deal if one wishes to get a place at one of the better universities. Oxford and Cambridge expect to see a string of seven or eight A* GCSEs as standard, as do a few other universities in the Russell Group. At less prestigious places, GCSE results are often used as a tiebreaker. If you have a bunch of kids, all with three A levels at A, you can look at their GCSEs; the one with mostly As will often trump the one with mostly Bs.

A natural consequence of all this is that many well informed parents work the system by pretending that their children are dyslectic and have suffered some sort of trauma the day before an exam. This sort of thing is nearly always accepted, but many teachers are getting a bit sick of it. Between them, the exam boards each get over half a million appeals for special consideration every year and only 3% are rejected. With one child in six being given extra time, separate rooms, laptops and so on during GCSEs; it is starting to be plain that this is becoming another tactic by parents to boost their kids’ grades at GCSE from B to A or from A to A*.

I am not of course saying that there is no such thing as dyslexia. Nor am I objecting to children with special educational needs being granted extra help. Rather, I am claiming that middle class parents are using the system to give their children an unfair advantage over the rest and that attempts are now being made to discourage the practice. One of these is to be a bit stricter about which children genuinely have a disability.

I am afraid that home educating parents are famous for wanting special provision for their children. There are a number of possible explanations for this. One is that many home educated children have been withdrawn from school precisely because they had special needs that the school was unable to cater for. Another might be because the parents are predominantly middle class and are therefore using the same scam as many other middle class parents. It may also be the case that they are so used to having their own way and believing their child to be special, that they want different treatment as a matter of course.

Whatever the explanation, and it could well be a mixture of all of the above, it makes fixing up GCSEs for home educators something of a nightmare and is one reason why many places give them a wide berth. In my next piece, I shall look at a few other reasons why so few people seem to want to help home educators to enter their children for exams.

Special needs

One of the great things about educating your child at home is that you have almost complete responsibility for the end product. If the child turns out well, you can take a lot of the credit. After all, you provided the education. The downside is that there is no blaming a school if your kid turns out to be ill educated or badly behaved. Nobody else to blame for the slovenly speech or swearing, no peer pressure as a handy alibi if the child starts taking drugs and so on. What your child becomes is largely down to you. So for example, the fact that my daughter swears like a trooper is because I swear myself and she has been used to hearing this all her life. That she is a bit of a know-it-all probably comes from spending much of her early life with somebody who thinks he is cleverer than anybody else. This is a pretty frightening feeling actually; that most of your child's bad points are directly attributable to your parenting deficiencies! Fortunately, there is a way out of this, a brilliant piece of legerdemain which at a stroke can relieve you of much of the responsibility for all those unattractive traits which you see in your child and are anxious to blame on someone or something else.

My own daughter is a bit clumsy, having a tendency to bang into things and knock them over. Potted plants, vases, cups of coffee; all regularly fall victim to her cack-handed ways. I have always assumed that this was simply because her gross motor skills were not given as much practice when she was little as were her skills at recognising shapes. In other words, if we had played more ball games, spent more time with physical activities rather than reading, then I guess her gross motor skills would have developed a little better. The type of education which I provided is responsible for this. Suppose however that it was a neurological deficit? if that were the case and she suffered from some obscure syndrome like dyspraxia, then I would be completely absolved of responsibility. The fact that she didn't get much practice in the gross motor department would have nothing to do with it. I think we might be onto something here! Another home educating parent actually suggested to me some years ago that my daughter did indeed suffer from dyspraxia. In return, I confirmed her own diagnosis of her son's Asperger's. One hand washes the other! My daughter is also pretty standoffish and impatient with other people. She gives the impression of being a bit stuck up. I had always attributed this to the fact that her father, with whom she spent much of her childhood, is an exceedingly arrogant, rude and abrupt man whose social skills are practically non-existent. I took it for granted that I had set her a bad example in how to conduct herself in society. What though if she was on the high functioning end of the autistic spectrum? That would both explain her behaviour while at the same time letting me off the hook for being partly responsible for it.

This is all very exciting. Kid really badly behaved and rushes around like a mad thing not doing as he is told? Hmmmm, sounds like a case of ADHD to me! Don't worry mum, it's not just that you haven't taught him how to behave properly. He has a special educational need; it's not your fault. Teenage son spends all day in bed? Could be CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). Child lousy at spelling because you have not given him enough drilling in phonics? Not to worry; maybe he is dyslexic. You see how wonderful this is? Just by uttering the magic letters SEN, poor parenting vanishes like a puff of smoke and is replaced by a medical condition!


In fact with a little bit of research it is possible to explain away all the undesirable behaviour of our children in purely medical terms. This can be a great comfort. Nobody wants to think that they have screwed up badly on the parenting front and as I said above, home educating parents have a heavier burden of responsibility in this department than most. A little judicious use of the autistic spectrum though, coupled with a dash of dyscalculia, dyspraxia and a few random groups of letters like CFS, ADHD and ME can make all the difference between being a slack and ineffectual parent and being a mother bravely soldiering on as the carer of a child with special educational needs. The payoffs are tremendous. Just be sure to stick to self-diagnosis though. Professionals will sometimes cooperate in a dodgy diagnosis of special needs when a child is a registered pupil at a school because there is extra funding to be had. They won't generally play this game with a child who is at home; there's no advantage to anybody. The researchers from Ofsted were amazed at the number of self diagnosed conditions which they encountered last year when they produced their report on local authorities and home education. These were in addition to the children who had been previously classified as having special needs at school. In total, almost half the home educated children they saw had some special need or disability. Almost all were neurological deficits of one sort and another. For some reason, nobody self diagnoses things like blindness or spina bifida. This is probably because it's a bit too easy to spot when the diagnosis is not well founded, whereas with dyslexia or dyscalculia, it's your word against anybody else's.

The DCSF letter about home educated children with special needs

The irritation with the DCSF about the letter which they sent to local authorities is still rumbling on. The main concern seems to be, as far as I can make out, that they state plainly that if a child with a statement is not seen once a year at the annual review, then a School Attendance Order should be issued. This is what they say in Paragraph 12 of the letter;

"If local authorities are denied access to the child and are unable to see the provision that is being made they cannot fulfil their duty of ensuring that the provision is suitable for the child and meets his or her SEN and should issue a school attendance order."

It is suspected that by offering this advice, the DCSF are in a sense jumping the gun a bit on the new law and setting a dangerous precedent as far as those parents whose children do not have statements are concerned. In other words, today they are advising this about kids with special needs, tomorrow they'll be saying that any child not seen once a year should be the subject of a School Attendance Order. This is nonsense.

The statement of special educational needs is a legal document which sets out a child's requirements. It names a school and also details such things as, for example, speech and language therapy. Every year, the statement must be reviewed. This is a statutory duty which the local authority has. Now if the statement names a particular school and a range of provision which a child requires, then it is the responsibility of the local authority to see that the child has these things. If the child is removed from school, then the local authority has a duty to see that the child is still getting those things as long as the statement remains in force; that is to say that the child is in receipt of as good an education and the same range of services as would have been the case if he was still at school. They are still in that sense responsible for the child. If the family won't let anybody see the child or visit the educational setting, then obviously the local authority will not be able to decide that the provision in the statement is being made for the child. In such a case, they must assume that they remain responsible for providing the education and services set out in the statement. The correct course of action is for them to return the child to the school named in Part 4. This has always been the case; it is not some sinister new plot by the DCSF! It certainly has nothing to do with the new Children, Schools and Families Bill.

This is the case legally and one can also see why the local authority would issue an SAO in those circumstances. They have a duty to see that this child is getting those services and if he isn't, then they are legally at fault. If for no other reason than covering their own backs, it would make sense for them to be a sure of this. I also think that there is a case to be made ethically for them to see the child in the educational setting and assure themselves that the education and services being received by the child is as set out in the statement. Failing to do this would mean an abdication by the local authorities of their responsibilities, both statutory and moral. I am certainly aware myself of cases where the local authority has not seen a child with a statement during the annual review and neither have they issued an SAO as a result. The DCSF are simply reminding them of their existing duty and telling them what they should do under these circumstances.

All this has absolutely nothing at all to do with possible annual visits to the educational setting of home educated children without special educational needs, as suggested in the Children, Schools and Families Bill. The only similarity between the two cases is that both the annual review of the statement and the proposed monitoring visits in the new law are both taking place once a year.

It is beginning to look as though some home educating parents of children without special educational needs have seized upon this letter as some sort of bargaining chip or weapon to use against the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Specifically they seem to be seeing it as a way to help prevent the introduction of the new act. This is unfortunate. Children with special needs can be horribly vulnerable, far more so than most children of comparable age. It is debateable whether or not local authorities should have the right to see regularly all home educated children. The general duty for parents to provide children with a suitable, full-time education is so vague that it would be hard for most parents to be proved not to be doing so. With children who have a statement, the case is far more detailed and specific. Rather than the wooly definition set out in cases such as Bevan v Sheers, there are explicit instructions about where a child with a statement should be educated and what extra provision should be made for her. Since the duty for providing these things devolves legally upon the local authority, it is not at all unreasonable that they should seek to establish that the terms of the statement are actually being adhered to.

Inclusion and home education

Inclusion. It sounded such a great idea. Instead of herding all the disabled kids into special schools, why not integrate them into the mainstream, let them learn alongside everybody else? Of course there is no reason at all why somebody in a wheelchair shouldn't be able to use an ordinary school. Nor should deaf or blind children be excluded; with proper adaptations, they too can be accommodated. So far, so good. The problems really began when this same principle was applied to children with what is euphemistically termed "challenging behaviour". Some of these were what we call EBD (emotional and behavioural difficulties), others were on the autistic spectrum.

A few words about the motivation for all this. As usual, it was money. Special schools are colossally expensive to run. Closing them down enabled local authorities to sell the sites to proper developers, always a smart move, and the children themselves can be "supported" in mainstream schools. Instead of highly paid specialised teachers, why not pay classroom assistants to follow them around and keep an eye on them? It's got to be cheaper! You can guy it all up as compassion for the less fortunate as well. Some people even described this as the last civil rights movement, giving disabled children the same rights as everybody else. How caring is that?

How does all this affect home education? In several ways. Firstly, because autistic children no longer had the special provision that they needed. Often, they were just chucked into ordinary classrooms and expected to get on with it like the other kids. With luck, a speech therapist might pop by once a week and perhaps you can pay the dinner lady for a couple of extra hours at playtime to keep a watch upon the kid and see that she doesn't get mocked or picked on too much. This actually happens, dinner ladies being given extra hours to "support" autistic children. Little wonder that quite a few parents withdraw their kids and decide that they are better off at home.

Another problem is that if you have an EBD child rampaging round the classroom, refusing to sit down, maybe grabbing other children's work and tearing it up, then you won't have so much time to spend on the rest of the class. The more capable ones might just be able to get on with their work despite the disruption, but what about those children who find it hard to cope at the best of times? Hey, what if some of those children have special needs of their own; Aspergers, dyslexia, mild learning difficulties an so on. Well of course if you are the teacher, who are you going to focus your attentions on, the kid charging around shouting and having a tantrum or the quiet child sitting in the corner struggling desperately to understand the work? No contest really.

The parents of some of those neglected children also choose to de-register their children from school and who can blame them? I am bound to say that if my daughter had had autistic features or been any less robust than the average child, I would have thought very carefully before sending her to an ordinary school. It is not hard really to understand why there seems to be a higher proportion of children with special educational needs among home educated children. The wonder of it is that so many parents still put up with the system as it currently operates.

Home educated children with special educational needs

Is the proportion of home educated children with special needs higher than in the school population? This idea has been put forward, but of course without knowing how many children are educated at home it is a bit hard to calculate and compare percentages! There is no doubt that a quick glance at the messages on both the HE-UK and Education Otherwise listings seems to indicate that practically every child mentioned has a special need of one sort or another. A closer look reveals something very interesting.

Almost none of these children have what most people would describe as a special need or disability. There do not appear to be quadraplegics, children with spina bifida or Down's Syndrome, the deaf or the blind, those with moderate to severe learning difficulties. Instead, they apparently suffer from a variety of problems which are usually alluded to by a few cryptic letters; ADHD,ME,ODD,OCD and so on. Since many of these mothers, for those on these message boards are almost invariably female, present as articulate, anxious and middle class, it is interesting to speculate about the reason for the sorts of problem which they claim their children are afflicted with.

It is a long standing joke among those with whom I work that middle class children are never illiterate. They "suffer" instead from dyslexia. Nor are they naughty and badly behaved; it is that they are displaying the symptoms of ADHD. Clumsy and ill co-ordinated middle class kid? Must be dyspraxia. And so on and so forth. In other words, there is a good chance that there is actually nothing much wrong with many of these children other than the usual childhood problems; namely that they are reluctant to learn, they drop and break things and don't do as they are told.

I have been thinking about this apropos of the numbers of children claimed to be known to children's social care. Some people have put the idea forward that many cases where the child is known to social services are simply because of some special need or other. Again, it would very helpful to know the figures involved and in particular the reasons for the referrals, which always seem to be missing from the published data. One thing is sure, you are unlikely in the extreme to get a social services referral just because your kid is clumsy or disobedient. If special needs referrals are skewing the figures then there must be a bit more to it than that.