Halting the rise of home education

Whenever I talk about the various reasons why parents choose to educate their children at home, somebody is always sure to challenge me by asking if I think that one motive is better than another. I think that at the back of some people's minds is the idea that I am determined to set up a hierarchy of home educators, with noble men who decided not to send their children to school in the first place, at the top, and those weaklings who withdrew them because the school did not cater for their special educational needs at the bottom! This is of course absolute nonsense. I find this whole question interesting in itself and also vitally important for the future of home education in this country.

Nobody has any idea how many children are not sent to school, as opposed to those who are sent and subsequently deregistered. Similarly, nobody knows what percentage of parents withdraw their children from school for this or that reason. We do know that very common reasons are bullying or the inadequate provision made for special educational needs. We also know that the number of children being taught at home has been climbing inexorably for some years and shows no signs of declining. So much, everybody would agree. It also seems quite likely that many of those who have taken their children out of school for various problems, would not have done so if things had gone smoothly. They were happy to send their children to school, a problem or series of problems arose and so they deregistered their children. Also fairly certain is that once these children are out of school, they are likely to remain so, even if the original problem is sorted out. In short, they and their families get out of the habit of school. Once out, they are liable to remain out.

The implications of the above are profound. To begin with, if the schools had tackled the problems of which parents complained, robustly enough, then the children would probably have stayed at school. In other words, it is the schools and local authorities who are really responsible for this type of home education; the impetus does not come from the parents themselves. This being so, it is pretty likely that local authorities could, if given sufficient incentive by central government, get their act together and deal with bullying and special educational needs in a better way. If they did so, the numbers of home educated children would begin to fall.

It is, as I say, impossible to know how many children have been withdrawn for this reason or that. It is a fair guess though that there are something like twenty thousand home educated children known to local authorities. It may well be that the same number again are being educated at home unknown to their local authorities. Those unknown, have probably never been registered pupils at a school. In short, their parents decided not to send them in the first place. Of those who are known to local authorities, the great majority are known because they have been deregistered from schools which they were attending. That being so, and bearing in mind what I said recently about few people taking their kids out of school for purely educational reasons, it is probably the case that most of the twenty thousand children know to local authorities have been taken out of school because of problems which the school has been unable or unwilling to resolve.

We thus reach a point at which we can say with some assurance that roughly half the home educated children in this country were originally sent to school by their parents and are now being educated at home because the schools fell down on the job in various ways. A natural and inescapable corollary is that fixing the schools so that they meet parents' expectations would eventually halve the numbers of children being home educated in this country. This would not happen overnight. I cannot really see a mad rush of home educating parents besieging these improved schools with requests to enroll their children! It is likely though that dealing with the schools would perhaps halt the exponential rise in the numbers of such children being deregistered which we see each year and probably reverse the trend entirely, leading after a period of time to a sharp decline.

It is this idea that I have been trying to explore when I talk of the motives for home education; the idea that "home education by default", as Graham Badman called it, is the driving force behind the rise of home education in this country which we have seen in recent years.

Extremist views on home education

It is no particular secret that I regard some autonomous home educators as crazy extremists who have caused a lot of mischief to other, more moderate home educating parents. Indeed, I firmly believe that it was the behaviour of these characters and the advice they were dishing out to other parents which triggered the Badman review and the subsequent legislation. They are not however the only extremists in the field. I want to look today at some other fanatics; in this case, those professionally involved with education.

The National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers gave evidence to the Badman review. They said;

"The NASUWT maintains the existence of a right to home educate is anomalous with the clear emphasis in Government policy of ensuring that all children and young people can benefit from educational provision where teaching and learning is led by qualified teachers in well resourced and fit for purpose modern educational settings."

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers said;

"ATL believes schools are the best places for a rounded education - including social education" .

Both these statements are, in effect, condemning home education and saying that it is not as good as being in school. I see this as indisputably the views of extremists and not very clear thinking and logical extremists at that! Let us look first at the NASUWT submission to the Badman enquiry.

A few points leap out at one when looking at this peculiar statement. By the way, how can human beings use language in such an appalling way, particularly supposedly educated people? By, "well resourced and fit for purpose modern educational settings." I assume they mean simply "schools", or perhaps "good schools". Why on earth not simply say so? The first logical problem here is that the assumption is implicit that all such "modern educational settings" are actually, "well resourced and fit for purpose". We know, and the government and Ofsted would agree, that this is not always the case. Secondly, the fact that some children are not taught in these settings, does not mean that they cannot be. The government has indeed tried to ensure that all children and young people can benefit from these "modern educational settings" They certainly have not said that all children and young people must benefit from them. The existence of home education is thus not in the least anomalous. Even if we granted that it was, as has been claimed, an anomaly, then what? An anomaly is simply something out of the ordinary, different from what usually happens. Anomalous situations and event are not necessarily bad in themselves. Some individuals devote their lives to others and live in out of the way places in the world trying to improve the lot of their fellow humans. In today's materialistic society that is an anomaly. Should we try and stamp it out? Displays of altruism and compassion can also be viewed as anomalous behaviour. Should these too be leveled out and eradicated? The very idea is preposterous. Whoever made this ridiculous statement was evidently no sort of logician!

The ATL claim is no better. "Schools are the best places for a rounded education". Do we mean all schools? Are all schools and only schools the best place for this activity? What is meant by a "rounded education"? Is this the same as a suitable education and if not, how does it differ? What has "social education" to do with the case? What evidence is there that schools are better than youth clubs or voluntary organisations like the Scouts and Woodcraft Folk for providing social education? We are not told and must simply take the Association of Teachers and Lecturers word for it!

It is clear that whatever the DCSF's view is on home education, and I am not at all sure about this, there are those in the field of education who wish to abolish home education entirely. I do not personally see how the Children, Schools and Families Bill 2009 is likely to achieve this end, but I am keenly aware that there are extremist elements in schools and colleges who are bent upon doing away altogether with home education. Let us hope that they will not succeed.

What's wrong with school?

Those who educate their children at home are, by definition, not satisfied with schools. In my own case, the problem was simple; I find modern schools horribly inefficient and knew perfectly well that I could make a better job of teaching my child. I had no problem with schools as such. If the schools had been any good, I should have sent my daughter there to learn. I have a strong suspicion that the motivations of others for not sending their children to school are usually different from this.

So why don't people send their children to school? Sometimes, they have had bad experiences themselves and are naturally anxious to protect their own child from suffering in the same way. Other mothers simply do not wish to be deprived of their child's company. We all know the wrench that many mothers feel on the first day of their child's school. Some mothers just decide that they don't want to do this; they would rather keep the child with them. Sometimes this is a conscious dedication to attachment parenting, where children stay closer to parents and separate much later than is common in our society. Then again, there are those who send their children, but then change their minds. Their children change, become unhappy, perhaps are bullied. The simple solution is to take them out of school.

A lot of parents seem to have a problem with the very idea of school. Often it is school and not formal education as such. A lot of parents make great efforts to get their children into college to study at the age of twelve, thirteen or fourteen. They obviously don't mind full time education in a formal setting; their problem is with school alone. The poster which I did a piece about recently tied in with this feeling. School is a place where children are bullied and injured! They truant to avoid it wherever possible. One in six of them leave school functionally illiterate. This is what advertisers call "knocking copy". What these people are doing is not presenting a positive reason for home education, they are saying in effect, "School is such shit, how could I send my child there?" In other words, for many parents it seems less a case of home education being good, than that schools are bad.

I find this quite puzzling. I have never thought of schools as anything other than places where children are educated. They are like garages where work is undertaken on a car. If the garages in your area are slack and inefficient and you know a bit about cars yourself; you might prefer to service your own vehicle. This is pretty much how I saw the education of my daughter. There was no local establishment that I could rely upon to do the job, so I did it myself. I never felt the need to start a campaign denouncing garages and urging others to stop getting their cars repaired in garages! It was a purely pragmatic decision. In fact, if a man finds himself in this position of being unable to find a decent garage and then starts a movement which encourages others to boycott garages, then I would find it a little odd. It is after all a personal decision. It is not that there is anything wrong with garages, just that many are not very good.

This is how I view what one might term the orthodox home education movement in this country. A lot of it is concerned with how bad schools are, rather than how good they are themselves at educating their kids. Those on the HE-UK and UK lists will notice that every time a school governer, ofsted inspector or nursery worker is convicted of an offence involving children, there is satisfaction and posts saying, "There you are, that's schools for you. You can't trust them."

I would be curious to know how many parents don't send their children to school because they don't like the idea of school, as opposed to those who make a positive choice because they believe that they can educate their children better than a school could. I have to say that the present methods used in schools are very inefficient and so much time is wasted that it is a scandal. These things though seem to be seldom mentioned.

Bullying in schools

A couple of days ago, I wrote about a piece of propaganda currently being circulated by some home educators. Since the subject of bullying is mentioned in it and since not a few home educated children have been withdrawn from school after supposedly suffering bullying, I thought it might be worth looking a little closer at the whole business.

Before we can say anything at all about bullying and its consequences or prevalence, we need to know what we mean by the word. There is no universally accepted definition of bullying. A common one, used by many schools and local authorities is; " a persistent, deliberate attempt to hurt or humiliate someone. " In order to count as bullying, three elements must generally be present. The behaviour must be deliberately hurtful, it must be repeated over time and there must be an imbalance of power which makes it hard for those being bullied to defend themselves. This then is the definition of bullying which I shall work with for now.

We see at once that much unpleasant behaviour in schools would not fall into this category. A smaller child being beaten up by two older boys would not be classed as bullying if it was a one-off incident. An ethnic minority child who was ostracised by his class would not necessarily be the victim of bullying. This makes it very difficult to measure the number of children who we might reasonably classify as victims of bullying. Surveys typically ask children if they believe that they or those known to them feel that they have been bullied. Obviously, any child who has been the victim of unpleasant behaviour might see himself as a victim and report this honestly. This does not mean that he actually has been bullied. Unless children are familiar with the definition used then the whole process of gathering information in this way is pretty pointless. One cannot ask children if they think that they have seen bullying and then mark those answers down as the incidence of bullying across the nation's schools!

Frequently, the incidence of bullying in schools is grotesquely exaggerated. Some charities do this by asking leading questions or, as in the case of Beatbullying, by only asking the victims of bullying about the matter. Their motive is simple. Just as a charity which works for victims of domestic abuse has an interest in convincing us that every other man is beating his wife, so to do charities working with bullying depend for their continued finance on a ready and large supply of victims of bullying. These are their stock in trade and without them the funding would soon dry up! Always look closely at the methodology of surveys conducted by such organisations. It is usually shoddy and deceptive.

The truth is that bullying has become something of a growth industry in the voluntary sector, with various groups falling over each other to produce ever wilder figures. Local authorities, anxious to be seen as tackling the problem, join in eagerly, thus demonstrating their own liberal credentials. It cannot be denied that using the definition above, much of what is often called bullying would not qualify if judged objectively and rationally. It would instead be dismissed as the usual rough and tumble of school life. It is wholesome too, to remember that bullying also takes place at home. The tremendous imbalance of power between a child and her parents makes a perfect setup for bullying. Some children escape bullying when they go to school!

I cannot resist a final word about Beatbullying, a charity famous for the huge rate of bullying which they have managed to uncover by questioning only the victims of bullying. Beatbullying was involved in a campaign against "cyber bullying"; bullying by texts and on the Internet. They chose as their public figurehead a pop group called N'Dubz. A few weeks ago, a member of this group apparently called "Dappy" was revealed to have sent obscene death threats , by text, to a young woman who criticised his music. I will not put the full text here, but it is enough to say that he promised to kill her and called her a word beginning with C which is not generally used in polite company. How ironic that one of the leading charities in this field should have chosen an aggressive and misogynistic cyber bully to promote their campaign against cyber bullying!

The United Nations and Home Education

A few days ago I posted a piece about home education in Germany. I explained how the European Court had ruled that parents did not have a right to withdraw their children from society and thus brought into question the legal foundation of the decision by parents to home educate, at least in Europe. Somebody emailed me and suggested that the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was a better bet for home educators seeking to establish their legal and moral right to teach their own children. Article 26 (3) of the Declaration states that;

"Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children."

Seems clear enough! In fact I have now heard of several parents who are toying with the idea of using various parts of United Nations declarations in order to argue that some of the provisions of the Children, Schools and Families Bill 2009 violate their rights. There is however an even bigger problems with relying upon the United Nations' declarations than there was with the European Convention on Human Rights. The United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child, for instance, says in Article 29;

"State Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to:

(a) The development of the child's personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential;

(b) The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the freedoms enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations;

(c) The development of respect for the child's parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in which the child is living, the country from which he or she may originate, and for civilisations different from his or her own;

(d) The preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society , in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship of all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin;

(e) The development of respect for the natural environment"

This sort of thing is pretty prescriptive. It could indeed serve as a description of a "suitable education" which parents should be providing for their children according to the DCSF.

For my own part, I do not know what the bloody hell it has to do with the United Nations to tell me that I should be instructing my child in the finer points of the United Nations charter! It's really none of their business. I have a suspicion that many home educators in this country would fall at the hurdle of "Developing respect for the national values of the country in which he is living" Does not quite tie in with our multicultural society, I fancy! (It would make a good examination question; "Britain has a unique set of national values which are easily identifiable; discuss).


I shall be interested if the new legislation does find its way onto the Statute Book, to see what attempts are made to challenge the law through the courts. I would definitely not recommend anybody to try using either the European Convention on Human Rights though, nor the United Nations declarations.

Ludicrous home education propaganda

Everywhere I look lately - on emails, websites, posters, even postcards - I seem to be seeing the text below;

Every Child Matters?
Each week: 450,000 children are bullied in school.
Each year: more than 360,000 children injured in schools
Each year: at least 16 children commit suicide as a result of schoolbullying
Each year: an estimated 1 million children truant
Each year: more than 1 in 6 children leave school unable to read, write or add up

Although primarily designed to draw attention to the problem of bullying, this has now been adopted by many home educators. This is so completely mad, that it is hard to know where to begin. For one thing, these figures are a greater condemnation of home education than they are of schools. Let me explain.

Looking first at the statistic that one in six children leave school unable to read write and add up; this is a quotation from a speech made by David Cameron on December 6th 2006. The figures relate to GCSE passes, not the measure of education usually favoured by home educators! Do home educators really believe that a child who has not taken and passed GCSEs in English and Mathematics by the age of sixteen is unable to read, write and add up? I rather suspect that the relevant figure among home educated children would be considerably higher than one in six. I have met a number of home educated teenagers who have not taken GCSEs in these subjects. Is it really true that they were unable to read and write? One doubts it.

Looking now at the claim that 360,000 children are injured each year in schools. This is almost true, but horribly misleading. The figure is from 2002 and relates to children aged between five and fourteen. I really think that it is about time that more up to date statistics were used. In that same year 2002, 900,000, that is to say almost one million children in the five to fourteen age bracket, were injured so badly at home that they required hospital treatment. The situation for younger children was even worse. Almost a quarter of a million falls in the home by children under five were bad enough to require hospital treatment - a horrifying indictment of the standards of care in ordinary homes! Another 26,000 children under five were treated in hospital for poisoning. These figures are shocking and suggest strongly that children are safer in schools and nurseries than they are at home with their parents.

One million children do not truant each year! There are no figures for truancy. These statistics relate to unauthorised absences from school. As truancy patrols have found again and again, the majority of children taking such unauthorised absences are with their parents; shopping trips, days out, holidays and so on. A two week holiday in term time would account for twenty unauthorised half days of absence from school. Again, do home educators really think that a child would be better off and learning more at school than he would be on holiday or even having a day out with his family? You would think then that they would all rush to enroll their kids at the local school!

I do not think it at all wise for home educating parents to spread this sort of nonsense. A number of local authority officers known to me have been laughing about this and poking even more holes in the thing than I have. There are many good reasons for choosing to educate one's own children at home; none of the figures in this text provide a sound justification for doing so. Taking the figures at face value, home educated children are even worse off than those at school.

A televisual treat!

My many admirers will, I am sure, be thrilled to have the opportunity to see the Family Webb at home. The link below will take you to Inside Out East.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0071mjk

Don't bother with the first ten and a half minutes, it's about windmills or something. Start at 10.30.Of course, when I say the Family Webb, that's not strictly true. Sharp eyed viewers will be asking themselves, "Where is the child's mother?"

Long before I started home educating, I was already familiar with various famous home educated children such as Ruth Lawrence the maths genius and Judith Polgar the chess prodigy. One thing that all those well known home educated families seem to have in common is that one never sees the mother! There is always some slightly demented looking father with an eerily precocious child, usually a daughter. One never sees Mrs. Lawrence or Mrs. Polgar in the pictures though. I always used to assume that this was because the father either kept the mother locked up in the attic out of the way, like Mr. Rochester's mad wife in Jane Eyre, or that he had beaten her to death and buried her under the patio. Both would be quite understandable; nothing gets in the way of a properly regulated home education more, than some soft hearted woman fussing around and asking whether the kid really needs to be able to read Chinese at the age of two!

However, now that the years have transformed me into one of those same, demented home educating fathers, I am able to answer the perplexing question of where is the wife when the cameras are rolling. In my own wife's case, she refused point blank to be involved with the business and retired to the bedroom to re-read "Follyfoot". She said that if I insisted on dragging her in front of a television camera, she would denounce me for being a cruel and tyrannical parent. I thought it best to let her have her way......