The prevalence of home education in the UK

I am always amused to see home educators either exaggerating or minimising their numbers; depending upon whom they are talking to and what they wish to prove. Sometimes, they want to be thought of as an unstoppable, mass movement. Then again, there are occasions when they would sooner be seen as a tiny and insignificant fraction of the  population.  I have noticed that this is the case lately  when I am talking about the concerns of local authorities; everybody is falling over themselves to tell me that there are so few home educators that they and their children are hardly worth worrying about! Home educated children who might not be up to scratch academically  were described here yesterday as being:

some negligible minority - a small fraction of home educators who are, themselves. a small fraction of the population

This is very interesting. The problem is that nobody really knows how many children in this country are not attending school. Most experts believe that universal literacy in this country was attained by making sure that almost every child was in school.  The fear is that if a significant proportion were, as was the case during the nineteenth century, to be out of school, then things like illiteracy would begin to rise.

So readers are right in one sense; if the numbers of children who are not at school are indeed tiny, then this will hardly affect the country's  literacy rate or academic achievement in general. However, some researchers who are widely respected in the world of home education are making increasingly extravagant claims about the scale of the phenomenon. Paula Rothermel, for instance, is currently saying that she believes that the number of children in this country  aged between five and sixteen who are not at school  now runs into the hundreds of thousands. She claims to have identified between 300,000 and 500,000 such children. Yes, you did read that correctly; that's half a million children who are not at school.  If this were to be true, then of course local authorities might well have cause for concern.

Buried research...

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

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


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

Schools; the hidden curriculum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A little about the acquisition of literacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Another popular myth among home educators

I was hoping today  to continue looking at the concerns of local authorities, with regard to home education. However, I think that I should first deal with one or two points which have come up elsewhere. The first of these was a comment on this blog a few days ago, the relevant part of which refers to home education;

 30 odd years ago....back in the age where EVERYONE had visits

This is based upon a common misconception; that local authorities in the 1970s and 1980s were constantly chasing home educators and insisting that they had visits at home. This is of course absolutely false and is an old wives’ tale spread by people like Mike Fortune-Wood.  He was at it again today, propagating another ancient myth; this time about Joy Baker. He says:

Joy home educated back in 1960 and went to hell and back to gain the right.
…She is regarded as a pioneer of home education and alongside such people as
Jean Harrison who also fought for the right.  What Joy did is immensely important to home educators today.

Two things strike one about this sort of nonsense. The first is that if Joy Baker really did go to hell and back; it was largely because she chose to do so. There seems to be a widespread belief that Norfolk LEA pursued her during the 1950s because they were opposed to home education and that she stood up to them heroically; thus establishing the legality of home education. This is completely untrue. There were other home educators at that time, people whose names have been forgotten now. They were not taken to court for home educating. What was special about Joy Baker?

In 1952, Norfolk LEA realised that Joy Baker’s seven year-old son was not attending school. They wrote to her and asked if she could let them know a little about the education that she was providing for the child. Any normal person would at this point have reassured the LEA, by giving them some information and explaining what was being done. Mrs Baker decided that she was not going to tell them anything at all. Her attitude was that they should assume that the children were receiving an education, unless the LEA had grounds to think that she was lying. This is a pretty idiotic line to take. She could have avoided all the years of trouble which followed. Other letters followed and still Joy Baker resolutely refused to tell Norfolk LEA about the education that she was providing. The council bent over backwards to avoid taking legal action. They wrote, they sent people round in person; but still Mrs Baker refused to give any information at all about what she was doing. In the end, the LEA lost patience and issued a School Attendance Order. It really needn’t have come to that. 

One can have some sympathy with the local authority in this case, because the girls in particular probably were not receiving a decent education. Mrs Baker thought that girls didn’t need as good an education as boys, because they would only go on to become  housewives. Their education was a good  deal more restricted than that provided to her eldest son.

The second point is that Mike Fortune-Wood  talks of people gaining the ‘right’. Whose rights is he referring to here? Why, the rights of the adults of course! Not a thought for the rights of Joy Baker’s daughters to an education as good as that being provided for the boys! No, the important rights here are those of the adult. Terrible attitude.

Having disposed of this popular misunderstanding, I hope over the weekend to continue looking at the situation today.

Doublethink by home educators

I dare say that readers will be familiar with the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Perhaps they will recall the idea of doublethink; whereby two opposite and contradictory views could simultaneously be held?   I was reminded of this recently while reading a post on one of the home education lists by a trustee of Education Otherwise. The idea that I have expressed here in the past;  that children should not be given too much of a say in their lives, in particular that they should not have a free choice about the type of education which  they receive, has caused a lot of irritation. When I have suggested that the decision about whether to take GCSEs is simply too important to be left to a child, who might not fully appreciate the consequences of that choice; I have been put sharply in my place and corrected in no uncertain terms. Similarly, on various lists, such as the HE-UK and EO support groups, it is more or less taken as given, that it is a bad thing that children are compelled to attend school and are given no choice about it. 

A little while ago, a mother posted on one of these lists, saying that her child, who was currently home educated, now wished to go to school. A clear case, surely, for the child to take control of her educational choices?  Apparently not! Education Otherwise's representative in Wales, who is also one of the charity's trustees, said:

I was wondering if it's fair to allow a child to make a decision for which they can only be unaware of the consequences... It's a nice idea that a child chooses his/her way forward but I do have doubts

Just imagine if I had said that, in connection with a child being forced to study for GCSEs! Or suppose that a child at school had asked to be home educated; would the same advice have been tendered? This is a classic example of the way in which some home educators wish for children to be given autonomy and control over their education; provided that they make the choices of which the adults approve. 

There was a slightly puzzling aspect of the post, because the woman also went on to say:

 the ethos of many schools is so consumerist and materialist 

Now of course the ethos is the prevailing values and standards of a culture, group or organisation. I have certainly encountered schools with a Christian ethos and others  whose ethos is humanist. Never yet have I heard of  a school with a materialist and consumerist ethos! I suppose that quite a few pupils at some schools are keen on consumerism, but that wouldn't be enough to give their school an ethos of that sort. Perhaps she meant that society itself is materialist and consumerist, but in that case, surely all schools would have this ethos, which she does not appear to be saying? I would be curious to know what readers think was meant by this strange observation.