A final word about university

I think that this topic has been more or less worked to death, but after Alison Sauer drew my attention to a few universities which she felt would be promising to those with no formal qualifications, it seemed churlish not to look into the matter. I have now been in touch with the four universities and all but one are complete duds for the purpose of the home educated young person without GCSEs, A levels or an IB.

I spoke to people at each of the universities, which were Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews and Nottingham Trent. I am quite a persuasive fellow, but I have to say that Oxford and Cambridge clearly thought that I was off my head for even asking about such a thing! My mention of a "well kept lab book", which Alison Sauer said would be regarded by some as far better evidence of scientific understanding than an A level in the relevant subject, provoked, I am sorry to say, laughter at all the universities except for Nottingham Trent. I followed these enquiries up with emails, so that we would have something more than my own recollections of the conversations. Oxford said;

In almost every case, we will very much be looking for specific qualifications at a high level, although we do accept a wide variety of possible qualifications

In the email, we are told, 'in almost every case', which seems to suggest room for manoeuvre, but when I spoke to the woman, she told me she was not aware of a single case. Cambridge were even more definite. They said;

It is unlikely that any of the Colleges at Cambridge would consider an application from anybody who did not have some form of formal qualifications. Application to Cambridge is extremely competitive, and colleges need to be able to ascertain whether or not an applicant would be able to cope with the very academic courses that Cambridge offers. Without formal qualifications it would be incredibly difficult to judge this, and any applicant without examination results would be competing on a very high level with other applicants who would be offering some form of examination system.

This seems pretty certain to me. When I spoke to the guy there, he had never heard of anybody getting in without the accepted qualifications. St Andrews were also definitely sure that nobody had got in without qualifications, at least in the last few years. Which leaves Nottingham Trent.

Nottingham Trent University is what is know euphemistically as a 'new' university. It was until 1992 a technical college or polytechnic or something or that sort. It must not under any circumstances be confused with Nottingham University, which is, and has always been, a university. Now I don't think that anybody could accuse me of being at all snobbish or elitist, certainly not about matters of education, but I have to observe that a degree from Nottingham Trent is broadly equivalent in value to the old-style CSE............at about Grade 8. I was accordingly not particularly surprised to find that Nottingham Trent are prepared to be a little more flexible than some of the, shall we say, older universities. Not for Physics mind, which seems to be about the only proper academic subject they teach there. But for some of the courses, there is a distinct possibility that one could get in on a portfolio or even just by having favourable past experience. I had a long chat with a woman there and she specifically mentioned Horticulture: Garden design and Fashion Design as courses which one might possibly be able to join without any formal qualifications. She certainly remembered more than one person who had done so in the past. She was equally sure that nobody would get onto the Physics course without at least a GCSE in the subject and almost certainly an A level as well.

So the situation does indeed seem to be, as I have said all along, that for a traditional, academic course such as Physics, then even at the modern universities, you will be out of luck. The one ray of hope is that some universities, even Oxbridge, are prepared to consider the first year of a BA course at another university as being equivalent to three A levels. I understand that this would depend upon both the university and the course. I suppose in theory that this could be done of Open University points, but I am guessing that you would need at least 120 to pull this off and even then you would stand more chance with A levels.

New book on home education

I am quite sure that readers of this blog will be pleased and excited to learn that they can now pre-order copies of my new book on home education. It can be obtained here;

http://www.trentham-books.co.uk/acatalog/Elective_Home_Education_in_the_UK.html#a9781858564821

It will of course also be available in all good bookshops, but to avoid disappointment, you are strongly urged to reserve your copy now. Demand is expected to be high, especially from local authorities who wish to find out more about this subject. It is of course really aimed at local authority officers who work with home educated children, but I am sure that parents will also find much of interest in it. Trentham Books, as I dare say teachers such as Mrs Anon and Julie are aware, specialise in academic works on education.

When first I began to write this book, I hoped to include an entire chapter in which autonomous educators expressed their views directly to the local authority officers who would be reading it. I tried to get some of the people who come on this blog interested in this idea, but it was pretty plain that all the autonomously educating parents were bitterly opposed to taking such an opportunity to explain their views and opinions to local authorities. I found quite a few people working for local authorities who would have been happy to exchange ideas in this way, but I didn't think it fair to include them and not the parents.

The result is that I have been forced to explain autonomous education myself and try to show teachers and other professionals in the field of education what it is all about. I hope that I have done justice to the practice. Plans are afoot for another book on the same subject, this time a commercial rather than an academic work. If any autonomously educating parents wish to collaborate in this, I would be very glad to hear from them.

The law of unintended consequences

I am following up on the universities which Alison Sauer suggested might take young people lacking any GCSEs or A levels. All want the enquiry in writing, none, when I spoke to them, seemed actually knew of any such children. I shall report back when they answer the written enquiries. In the meantime, I want to look at the idea of 'widening access' to universities, especially the prestigious ones like the Russell Group and how this actually has the effect of making it harder for home educated children to get a place.

The law of unintended consequences is the idea that intervening in any complex system will invariably produce surprising and often unwanted results. How does this relate to widening access to good universities and the question of home educated children? At one time and not so long ago either, admission to universities like Oxford and Cambridge was not a straightforward and open process. It was, for instance, an advantage if your father had been there and was remembered. There was a bias in favour of the upper classes, in favour of white men, those who spoke well, those whose grandfathers might have made a large donation to a college; that sort of thing. This gradually came to be seen as undesirable, discriminating as it did against women, ethnic minorities and working class candidates. It wasn't bad for home educated children though, because this kind of atmosphere, letting a somebody become a student just because he seemed the right sort of fellow, made it possible to be very flexible about entrance qualifications. In fact a number of home educated kids got to such universities by precisely this nod and a wink process.

How very different is the situation now. Every decision, even which candidates are called for interview in the first place, is covered by a rigorous code and must be transparent and fair to everybody. There must also be a written record of the reasosn for decisions about admissions. This of course means that there is much less leeway for the authorities at the university to be flexible about admissions. For instance, they might be presented with a home educated teenager who is fantastically talented but has no formal qualifications. Perhaps they wish to offer him a place, but hang on a moment! How can we be sure that this is not being done just because he is white and his parents very well spoken? This is the same reasoning which has made it unlawful for secondary schools to rely upon interviews when offering places.

A number of universities now have official policies for widening access, trying to get in students who are not the sort who traditionally go to places like Oxford and Cambridge. This might seem brilliant for home educated children; in fact it literally guarantees that they cannot get in via this route. Oxford for example is fairly typical and we shall look at how their system works. They encourage atypical students by the use of what is known as contextual data. (This is known in the Conservative press as 'social engineering') There are five criteria, and if you fulfil three you are guaranteed an interview and favourable treatment. The criteria are; being a looked after child, attending a school with poor GCSE results, attending a school with poor A level results, having taken part in a Sutton Trust Summer School and having a level four or five ACORN post code. It will be seen at once that it is impossible for home educated children to fulfil three of these conditions. The question relating to the schools concerns the school which they currently attend. In other words, if they are not attending a school, these do not apply. To get onto a Sutton trust Summer School, you must be a state school pupil, otherwise you are not eligible. And very few looked after children are likely to be home educated. So it is quite literally impossible for a home educated child to benefit from this initiative.

This then is the law of unintended consequences in action. An initiative specifically designed to allow the universities to take teenagers who would be unlikely otherwise to attend, is so structured as to prohibit home educated children from benefiting from it! The same process, to make the playing field even, also means that a list of qualifications equivalent to three A levels has been drawn up and is unlikely in the extreme to be deviated from. So the Pre-U is acceptable, as is the IB and a variety of foreign qualifications. The only hope for a home educated child might be having completed the first year of a Bachelor's degree at another university. I don't know what that would amount to in OU points; about 120 I should say offhand.

HE scam

I really cannot resist drawing the attention of readers to a recent exchange on the HE-UK list. A mother posted the following;

hi, can anyone please give me some advice, i have a 15 year old who i am suppose to be HE but he has done hardly any written work, and i have the lea coming out on the 1st july and i will have nothing to show them, my son say that there are children that just leave school early and they don't have anything to do with the lea, does anyone have any views to what i should do please.
thanks

What this woman is saying, in as far as I am able to decipher it is as follows; my teenage son is no longer at school, I am not providing him with any education at all, he thinks that he has left school and ended his education, I am afraid that the local authority will catch wind of this and I shall get into trouble. This has all the hallmarks to me, not of home education but the condoning of truancy. A regular contributor on this list offers helpful advice. She says;

You can refuse a visit for starters. You do not by law have to have a visit.
You can tell them what you have been doing with a 'report' (called an
educational philosophy) which will tell them the hows and wherefores of your
educational provision (it is the provision that is being 'judged' not the
childs take up of that education). So you can state in the report that DS
does a lot of work online and therefore won't have any workbooks, you can
give examples of the visits and experiences done and tell them about the
different subjects covered in whatever way you have done them. There are
examples of Educational philosophies in the files section of this group

What's wrong with this picture, boys and girls? Well in the first place, this does not look in the least like a question about home education. The person asking this question is not at all interested in education; she is only concerned with avoiding trouble with the authorities. Secondly, it is plain that the person offering her the advice realises this and is also only concerned with helping this mother to dodge her legal and moral duties towards her son. If this were a rare and atypical case, it would hardly be worth mentioning. It is not. One local authority with which I have dealings has a collection of 'educational philosophies' , all nearly identical apart from the child's name and all downloaded from HE-UK. It is little short of scandalous that people should encourage parents to operate scams of this sort. And some people who comment here still cannot understand why local authority officers are not satisfied with an 'educational philosophy' and suspect that in many cases these are used to mask the complete absence of any sort of education........

Let me spell out the nature of the problem clearly. Many parents whose children are lively and inquisitive, although receiving little or no formal teaching, prefer not to receive visits from the local authority. Instead, they send an educational philosophy and things like a diary or photographs. In many cases, these children are pursuing their own interests and, in effect, educating themselves. Others, like the mother quoted above, simply feel that their children have finished both school and education. Their only concern is to get the authorities off their back. With a little help from HE-UK, they are able to furnish their local authority with precisely similar evidence to the families whose children are genuinely receiving an autonomous education. The question is very simple. How, without visiting and speaking to the child and his parents, is the local authority able to distinguish between these two very different cases, given that the evidence is identical?

What's wrong with visits

Several people lately have posted messages explaining why they feel that visits by their local authority to inspect the provision being made for home education are both unnecessary and undesirable. I have gone before into the question of why I feel that such visits are necessary. I don't propose to go into this again. However, the matter of whether or not visits like this are actually harmful is another thing entirely.

There seem to be three important reasons why some parents dislike visits and feel them to be damaging. These are that they simply do not wish for their methods to be judged by others, that such visits make children anxious and upset and finally, perhaps most important of all, the very act of receiving a visit tends to change the nature of the education being given to the child. None of these objections seems to me to have any force.

Taking the most trivial first, that of disliking the idea of being judged, this is something which happens to all of us, all the time. there is no course of human action which will not bring disapproval by somebody. One need only consider how some folk reacted to the actions of Jesus, to see that trying to avoid negative judgements from others is a pretty barren endeavour! Home educating parents make the point that in this case the negative judgements of others may have a practical and unpleasant consequence; that their lifestyle might be judged wanting and they will be prevented from pursuing it. This is not likely. Hardly any School Attendance Orders are issued and those that are, are not issued to home educating families on purely educational grounds. All this came out quite clearly during the Badman enquiry and the subsequent select committee hearing. In other words, some local authority officers will certainly disapprove of some methods of home education but there is unlikely to be any practical result. Nobody will stop the home education on those grounds alone.

The second objection likewise holds little water. If children become anxious and nervous about a visit by the local authority, then it is almost invariable because we are transmitting our own unease to them. In other words, parents get worked up and neurotic and the kids pick up on this and also get upset. Sometimes, parents specifically tell their children that the visit might result in their being forced back to school. The remedy here is for parents not to wind their children up in this way. In normal homes, all sorts of people visit. The man to read the meter, friends, relatives, strangers. If the local authority officer is treated as just another random visitor, then there is unlikely to be a problem. most children like showing off what they are doing and this provides them with the perfect opportunity for a bit of licensed showing off. If a child is really so nervous as to be thrown into a panic by the presence of a stranger in the house, then this is a matter of concern; a problem which the child has which needs to be dealt with for her own sake. I seriously doubt if the best approach is to pander to these irrational fears.

As for the idea that the education itself could be harmed or the direction which it takes altered by annual visits, there might, I suppose, be something in this. Although we must bear in mind that such visits typically last for an hour once a year! I guess that for a week or so before such a visit, there might be a frantic effort to gather evidence and make things look professional. I can't really see why though, because as I said earlier, even if the local authority officer does not like the provision, nothing will happen. Attempts to fawn round her and pretend to be providing the sort of education found in school are simply people pleasing and not at all necessary.

I think also that we should bear in mind that any changes to the education which take place as a result of these visits could prove to be an improvement. Perhaps some parents have been slacking a bit and the realisation that somebody is coming will cause them to get on with things. This seems to me to be at least as likely as the education actually being harmed by visits.

Going to college at fourteen

There is currently a good deal of interest in the Department for Children, Schools and Families' assurance that children aged fourteen will soon have the opportunity to study for examinations in Further Education colleges and that such studies will be funded by central government, via the local authorities. There are a number of problems with the whole idea of children attending college at this early age.

Not only do some young people go to college a couple of years before they turn sixteen; others go when they are a bit older than that. For example, at my daughter's college there is a young man of twenty who is taking A levels. Most of the seventeen year old girls have quickly realised that he is a Grade A sleazebucket, the kind of guy who hits on every girl he meets in a very unsavoury fashion. Also at the college is a fourteen year old girl who has been out of school for a year and has been given a place at the college. She is now spending a good deal of time with this twenty year old man; they even go to the pub at lunchtime. Having been given the brush-off by all the seventeen and eighteen year old girls, he evidently finds it easier to impress a fourteen year old. She for her part is flattered by the attention. Anybody see any dangers here, in a shy and vulnerable fourteen year old girl being thrown regularly into the company of a sexually predatory twenty year old man in this way? This is not the only disadvantage.

Most of the girls at the college spend a good deal of time discussing, surprise surprise, sex. Who they are doing it with, with whom they would like to do it, how their periods were three weeks late and led to the fear of pregnancy, the rival merits of various methods of contraception and so on. Again, this might not be the sort of environment that many parents would wish for their fourteen year old daughters. Of course, there are other fourteen and fifteen year olds at college. Many, perhaps most colleges have a sprinkling now of young students. Perhaps the fourteen year old home educated child going to college could find a ready made peer groups there? Unfortunately, not. The majority of fourteen year olds who currently attend FE colleges tend to be problem kids of one sort and another. Some have been excluded from school, others have various problems. Without wishing to be snobbish and elitist, I have a suspicion that most of these kids are not the sort that a sheltered home educated child is going to get on with brilliantly.

There is also the problem of course that few colleges do GCSEs, if this is what parents are looking for. Any fourteen year old home educated child being given a place at college will be limited in the main to vocational subjects such as hairdressing and vehicle maintenance. Nothing at all wrong with that of course, but it is a limitation. I do know that some home educating parents had at the back of their minds that going to college at fourteen would allow their children to take academic subjects. this is really a non-starter. They certainly won't be able to get on to any A level course early without already having the appropriate GCSEs.

There are good reasons generally why our educational system is arranged so that children stick broadly to children their own age. This has as much to do with development and shared interests as it does with education. A child of eleven may well be capable of doing the same work as a sixteen year old, but it would not really be a good scheme to mix up children of these very different ages together. this is for their own protection as much as anything. I shall be interested to see how the new scheme of local authorities receiving funding to give children places in FE colleges works out in practice. For my own part I do not think it a brilliant idea at all and I certainly would not have wanted my own daughter hanging around at fourteen with eighteen or twenty year olds!

The'shyness effect' and home education

Those interested in the paranormal will probably be aware of something called the 'shyness effect'. This is the phenomenon mentioned by some researchers in the field who have noticed that paranormal powers and activity often stop showing themselves if somebody is watching too closely. This is particularly noticeable when the observer is unsympathetic to the idea of the paranormal. In other words, if a sceptic watches spoon bending or demonstrations of ESP very hard, it often stops happening. The very same effect is quite prevalent in home education. Let's look at a couple of examples.

Ann Newstead of Education otherwise has compared autonomous education to a quantum system. She claims that what is going on is so sensitive that the very act of looking at it , measuring it or even asking questions can damage the process. This manifestation of the shyness effect was a key part of the opposition to the Children, Schools and Families Bill. It was felt that if children being educated at home in this way had their education examined or observed very closely, the process would be disrupted and damaged. I suppose that I can just about believe that some children are so sensitive and nervous that an adult asking a few questions would cause massive harm to their education. It is not only children though who can be harmed by asking questions; research data too can be irreparably damaged by somebody asking questions and looking searchingly at it. When I began staring hard at Paula Rothermel's PhD Thesis, upon which so many claims about home education in this country are founded, it soon became apparent that I was causing harm to it. Dr Rothermel responded by pulling the thesis from her website and threatening me with legal action if I ever spoke about it again. An extreme example of the shyness effect; the very act of looking at the research data was having a bad effect upon it!

I have been put in mind of the shyness effect while trying to find out about home educated young people who go on to attend college and university. As long as we don't look too hard at this topic, everything is fine. All home educating parents know that it is possible for their children to get into college by means of an audition or by showing a portfolio of their work. Then it's straight on to university. Why bother about GCSEs? Unfortunately, when you look too closely at this promising situation, it changes into something a good deal less inviting. As soon as we ask questions and examine all the stories critically, they seem to melt away. This is sad, because I for one would like to have avoided all the hassle of IGCSEs if it had been possible for my daughter to study A levels in Mathematics and History at college without them. I cannot help but notice that people get a little tetchy with me when I even ask questions about this, as though I am being a real spoilsport. Alison Sauer reproved me for this yesterday and told us about a university which would be happy to accept a well kept lab book as part of their entrance requirements, because this is actually better evidence of scientific understanding than an A level in Physics or Chemistry. The only thing missing is the name of the university and the name of somebody there who will confirm that they have taken students without any GCSEs or A levels. I hardly like to enquire any more about this, in case the shyness effect begins to operate and the university changes its admission procedures!

I have in the past been told by some home educators that there are doctors and architects, vets and engineers, surveyors and accountants, all of whom have been home educated. We cannot know their names though, because they wish to keep the fact that they were home educated a secret. This really is astonishing, unless it is just another example of the shyness effect. The bottom line is that one must not ask about these matters and simply take it all on trust. It is just one more example of how home education is not accessible to being measured and quantified. It is fine and dandy as long as one takes everything at face value and no questions are asked. Try to track down solid facts though and the least that will happen is that people become irritated. The harder you search, the more the facts seem to recede from your grasp. I first asked on the HE-UK and EO lists two years ago whether anybody is aware of somebody being accepted at a Further Education college to study A level Mathematics or Chemistry without already having GCSEs in the subject. At the same time, I tried to find an example of somebody who had been accepted at a university to study a traditional academic subject without any GCSEs at all. I was told that there are such cases, but that nobody was prepared to give the names of the colleges and universities concerned!

Like all human enterprises, home education is less than perfect. Personally, I would like to improve it by looking at the facts and fallacies and separating them out, so that we may all make informed and sensible decisions about the future of our children. It is pretty plain though that some parents do not wish to do this. They prefer the fantasy to the reality and who am I to discourage them? Any way, nothing seems to dent this amazing optimism about further education and so I shall stop looking to closely at it, lest I spoil the illusion for others!