Funding college places for home educated children

Graham Stuart and Nick Gibb do a double act and reveal that local authorities can allow home educated children to attend college and then claim the cost back from central government:


http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2011-07-18a.66262.h&s=home+education#g66262.r0

On the idea of home educators inspecting the educational provision of other home educators

I have written before about the so-called ‘Tasmanian Model’. In that Australian state, home educators work with the government to inspect and monitor home education. It seems to work well enough and I think that it would be a good scheme in this country. There are problems though and the appointment of two home educators in Wigan has underlined that a good deal would need to change before this notion would be universally applauded by other home educators here. For one thing, there is the fact that these people will inherit a framework which is already immensely irritating to many home educating parents. Take this bit from Wigan’s policy on Children Missing from Education:


'The Children Act 2004, places a duty on all agencies to work
together to promote the welfare of children and to share
information. This principle underpins this policy and there is an
expectation that all agencies will work together to ensure children
are safely on school rolls.
1.4 There is now considerable research available which identifies the
reason for children and young people being ‘missing from school’.
The most common reasons include:
· failing to be registered at a school at age 5'

We observe the phrase ‘children are safely on school rolls’. Does that mean that children not on school rolls are automatically in danger? As for the idea that a reason for children missing school is that their parents do not send them to school at five, well this is so but blindingly obvious. Children miss school because they are not sent to school!

When we were stopped by a truancy patrol when my daughter was eight and had never been to school, I was fairly OK with the business. This was because the people asking the questions were what I would regard as professional busybodies. Imagine though that after not having sent my daughter to school at the age of five, there was a knock on the door and a home educator stood there. He tells me that it has been noticed that I am not sending my child to school and wants to know why. I might give a home educator shorter shrift than I would a run of the mill local authority officer. Why? Because he ought to know better.

Now consider the following passage, also from Wigan’s CME policy.


'4.6 If a school learns of a school aged pupil without a school place
(e.g. a sibling or friend of a current pupil etc) the school must
inform the LA of the child / young person. This can be done via
the dedicated e mail address www. cme@wigan.gov.uk, by
telephone or in writing to the EWS Admin Team located at Wigan
Investment Centre, Waterside Drive, Wigan WN3 5BA. Tel:
01942 705405 Fax: 01942 705408'


Some of this home educating parent's work will entail knocking on doors following reports of this sort from teachers who have noticed that one of their pupils has a friend who does not appear to be attending school. Would this not make some home educators feel a little uneasy, to find themselves acting on information of this sort from schools?

I think that this whole thing could work and is definitely an improvement, but will need a sea-change in thinking. If home educators are going to be checking up on other home educators in this way, then all policies will need to be revised accordingly. I find this quite an exciting development and will be interested to see if other local authorities try it out.

More about Wigan and their new approach to home education

Here is the job description for the new post of inspecting home education in Wigan. The new people will be starting work in September.


http://www.wigan.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/BD63268F-9E26-44A3-8D59-3EC2EE6FFF4E/0/SLA2April2011.pdf


A certain amount of anger is building over the fact that any home educator should feel able to follow this specification. Some of the points mentioned in passing, about the supposed duties of the local authority, are controversial. Many home educators believe that councils do not possess the duties outlined here. As a result, the home educating parents who have now been appointed to this post are being viewed by some as little better than Quislings.

A number of other local authorities have expressed interest in the whole notion of the 'Tasmanian Model', where home educators themselves carry out inspections and assess the suitability of provision. Personally, I think that this might be a way forward, but judging by initial reactions to the situation in Wigan, it might just create more ill feeling. At any rate, Wigan are blazing a trail and it seems possible that other local authorities will try the same idea out. Here are the minutes of the meeting at which the decision was made to allow home educators to apply for the job of monitoring the educational provision of other parents:


http://www.wigan.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/A4FCD015-BC13-4249-BC1D-206506046652/0/MeetingNotes_Updates.pdf

Wigan appoints home educating parents to monitor home education

It looks as though Wigan has decided to adopt the so-called 'Tasmanian Model' of monitoring home education. They have appointed two parents who are themselves home educators and who will be inspecting the provision of other parents. This is in sharp contrast to the usual sort of person doing this job, who is typically a former teacher. The fun and recriminations have already begun and we shall have to see how this new scheme actually works in practice.

Here is how Wigan, a town in Greater Manchester, went about finding somebody to do the job for them:


http://www.wigan.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/BD24787B-61A0-4ED8-9F76-59891A4AFCCE/0/SLALetter.pdf

In the interests of lively debate, I thought that readers might care to know that Wigan feels that:

' we have a duty to ask for evidence that a suitable education is being
provided.'

I seem to recollect that some parents do not believe this to be true...

Associating with other home educators

Something which has been said of me in the past, and the same idea cropped up yesterday, was that I have not had much to do with other home educators and base my opinions mainly on what I read on Internet lists and forums. This notion says little about me and my life, but a great deal about the attitudes of those making the suggestion. I think that what people who make such assertions are really saying is that there is an Education Otherwise group which meets in North London and a strong home educating scene in Colchester. Because I have not been a member of either set; I cannot have met many home educating parents in real life. This shows a very strange and distorted perspective of home education.

It is true that there are quite a number of groups for home educating parents and that thousands of people belong to them. It is also the case that many more home educators simply get on with the business of home educating without joining groups or making any effort to seek out other home educating parents. I am one such person. Nevertheless, one way and another, I have still come across many home educators while teaching my daughter. Some of these were parents with whom I had professional dealings. This sample were not really typical of anything other than dysfunctional families in Inner London and may perhaps be disregarded for our purposes. How else does somebody who avoids groups get to meet home educators? Well, one bumps into them at meetings of the National Association for Gifted Children, to give one example. We used to belong to this and there is no shortage of home educators at some events and activities. One meets other parents with ‘school age’ children out and about locally and soon realises that these children too are home educated. We have got to know people in this way. A couple of our friends were so impressed with what they saw of my daughter’s experience that they tried it for themselves. This did not work out too well, although one persevered for a year before admitting defeat. Belonging to HEAS and Education Otherwise provided lists of individual parents who could be telephoned and arrangements made to meet up. Many of these parents too did not attend meetings. Finally, because my daughter and I have the habit of appearing in newspapers both local and national, some parents approach me in the street and reveal that they have just taken their children out of school and seek my advice.

Without knowing how many home educated children there are in the country and also knowing the number that attend groups intended exclusively for home educated children, one cannot make any confident statements about the matter, but I strongly suspect that the majority of home educators do not belong to groups. I think that most home educating parents simply plough their own furrow, neither seeking out nor avoiding other home educators. In other words, I think that I am pretty typical in this respect. The great thing about home education is that it is a collection of individuals of all sorts, linked only by the practice of home education. There are of course trends and distinct strands, but there is no such thing as a typical home educator. I might have something in common with other church goers or people who read Sartre and Camus. In the same way, I might have something in common with another person who does not send her child to school. However just because I share one interest with a person, church-going or home edcucting, does not mean that this is somebody with whom I will get on. We may well have very little else to connect us. I never thought of home edcuation as being in any way a defining chracteristic of mine. It was simply what I did and there was no reason why it should provide any sort of link to or common ground with others. For some parents though, it was more like a hobby or shred interest, something like birdwatching ot supporting a particular football team. These people joined together into clubs to meet others who shared their enthusiasm for the pursuit. This is fine, but it is not how I ever worked. I suspect that those who accuse me of not having met many home edcuators in real life belong to this group of people.

The exclusivity of some home educators

I am, as is generally known, a great enthusiasm for home education. Properly conducted, it can deliver at least as good education that offered by any school, independent or maintained. That for me is all that there is to the matter. I do not think that home educated children are special in any way, nor that they should stick to ‘their own kind’ in any way. For some parents though, there is a pleasing sense of exclusivity about being home educators. There are those who do not even like their kids to play with children who attend school, lest they are contaminated; tempted from the path of righteousness and end up wishing to attend school themselves! It is their duty, as these parents see it, to keep their children from following the broad, primrose path to destruction which schools represent and the best way to do this is to make sure that they only associate with other home educating families.

On one of the home education lists recently, a mother who is about to withdraw her child from school posted that she was feeling nervous about the decision; as well she might. Luckily, her child’s school was well disposed to the whole business and there was every prospect that her kid would be able to maintain friendly relations with those children with whom she had been attending school. Many dedicated home educators must have shook their heads in dismay at this point, wondering what could have possessed this woman even to consider such a course of action. Somebody decided to set her straight, saying:

‘we see other families almost every day) get-togethers with
other HE families and your daughter will thrive.(If you just spend time
socialising with families whose children are in school, your daughter will
very likely conclude that school is where all the really interesting stuff
happens).’

Now the fact is that over 99% of children go to school. If you wish for your child to grow up normally and be able to relate to other young people of her age, she needs to know what is going on in school and be able to talk about it with her peers. It is definitely the case though that with some home educators, they feel that their way of education is somehow more virtuous and enlightened that school. Their children are special and spending too much time with ordinary children might have the effect of making them less so. They might even, horror of horrors, want to go to school themselves if they see too much of schooled children. I don’t see this air of being special and somehow separate from others as being at all healthy for a child. It is likely to breed snobbishness and make them look down on others and regard themselves as being specially favoured in some sense.

When I read the comment which I quote above, it put me in mind of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I know a few home educators who are also Witnesses and their children feel doubly set apart from the ordinary world; saved in two senses. Perhaps the fact that the woman who made the comment is a fanatically devout Catholic has some bearing on the matter, maybe she is used to thinking of herself and her family as being specially blessed in some way. I have certainly encountered this perception among other home educating parents; a cult-like satisfaction about being on the right side against a generally corrupt world. Perhaps it ties in with what I wrote a few weeks ago about conspiracy theories. Maybe some home educators feel that they are right in a far deeper sense than the purely educational.

For me, the tremendous thing about home education was that it was an effective method of educating my child. I think that were I to have ended up feeling that she should not have been spending too much time with ordinary children who were at school, then I should perhaps have taken a wrong turn somewhere. I wonder if readers have come across this attitude themselves? I have an idea that it is far from uncommon, particularly among the more militant and well organised home educators.

The ‘private worlds of independent reading’

Allie, who comments here fairly regularly, used the above phrase during a recent discussion on the desirability or not of getting children to read earlier rather than later. I found this very interesting. Much of the debate among home educators when it comes to reading, seems to centre around the academic advantages or not of reading at the same age as children generally do at school. I remember the owner of one of the major home educating lists remarking that he could not think why a child of seven would ‘need’ to be able to read. Alan Thomas evidently has the same attitude, talking in his books of the way that reading is necessary in schools to engage with the primary curriculum, but that this is not needed at home. He goes on to say, using a particularly ghastly piece of jargon:

‘Children may not perceive a need to read if they are busy with other things and have adults or children around who are willing to fulfil their literacy needs’

I have not the remotest idea what is meant by fulfilling ‘literacy needs’, unless he means people reading to a child. The very use of the expression ’literacy needs’ makes the thing sound like something tiresome which can be done of somebody else’s behalf to save them the trouble.

The fact of the matter is that listening to somebody read a story is a completely different experience from being immersed in a book yourself. One only has to watch a child who is deep in a book and then compare him with a child having a story read to him to see the difference. And both are vastly different from watching television or going to the cinema. These are not slightly altered versions of the same thing; they are completely different activities. The main reason that I got my daughter to read as early as possible was not so that she could engage with a primary curriculum! It was so that she could share in what is to me the greatest pleasure in my life. Reading is for me not a means to an end, although it is of course a very useful skill if you wish to get on in life. It is an end in itself; an activity, pastime or passion for which there is simply no substitute. I love the film of Gone With the Wind, but watching it is altogether separate from reading the book.

There is also a great difference between mechanical reading of the kind that we use when looking at the instructions on a can of soup and the sustained reading that we use when losing ourselves in a novel. It is rather like those three dimensional pictures which were popular a few years ago, which initially look like a random collection of dots. If you stare in the right way, they resolve themselves into solid images. This is what true reading is like. One stares at the page of little black squiggles and after a while they too resolve themselves into images and pictures. This experience is for me, far more gripping than gawping at the television or listening to somebody reading a story on the wireless. It was this that I wished my daughters to share and it was for this that I wished reading to become second nature to them from a very early age.

Talking of somebody fulfilling ‘literacy needs’ is so completely beside the point, that it makes me wonder whether or not people like Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison are even thinking about the same thing as me when they write about children reading!