The folk wisdom in this country, both among professionals in the field of education and also ordinary people, is that education is something which may only take place effectively in purpose built establishments staffed by professional educators. As a home educator myself, I know this to be quite false. When challenging the accepted and almost universally held view on some topic, the onus is very definitely upon those determined to overturn the existing paradigm to show why it should be abandoned. This can only be done by producing convincing evidence.
I think it fair to say that the evidence for the academic efficacy of British home education is not taken seriously by many professionals. There are three reasons for this. Firstly, existing studies of educational attainment among home educated children have been of very small samples, typically no more than twenty or thirty families. Secondly, the existing research is all horribly biased and skewed by self selection. Both with Paula Rothermel's research in 1997/1998 and also with Education Otherwise's survey in 2003, which involved sending out two and a half thousand questionnaires, around 80% of parents refused to have anything at all to do with the business. The one in five who did respond tended to be weird and atypical individuals like the present writer! The third reason that nobody takes the existing research seriously is because none of it has been objective.
In order to gain access to home educating families, it is first necessary to demonstrate that one is not at all hostile, or even sceptical, towards the whole idea of home education. Paula Rothermel and Alan Thomas both, in effect, made friends with the home educators whom they studied. As soon as this happens, as soon as the researchers are sharing meals with those whom they are studying, or helping in the kitchen, playing with the children and so on; objectivity goes out of the window. In 1990, Julie Webb published an excellent book on the subject of home education called Children Learning at Home. In order to write this, she became incredibly close to a number of home educating families. When a person looking into a particular lifestyle becomes in effect one of the family, then any pretence at scholarly detachment is lost. Most professionals will treat the resulting work with either suspicion or at best condescension.
Last Autumn, Ofsted attempted to gather data in fifteen local authority areas. This project was not a notable success. It was perhaps unfortunate that such an exercise was conducted only a few months after the end of the Badman review of elective home education. The level of cooperation was not high. Now the DCSF has announced that they too wish to carry out a long term project, this time one which will track a cohort of home educated children and see what their educational experience and attainments amount to over the course of some years. I am expecting this to become hugely controversial and for home educating parents to boycott the whole thing.
It is about time that some information was gathered about the long term consequences of elective home education in this country. For my own part, I am convinced that home education is at least as effective as that provided in maintained schools and I would be delighted to see confirmation of this. We must hope that many parents agree to take part in this new DCSF sponsored exercise. If a large enough number of participants are enlisted and they are not given overmuch choice in the matter, then the bugbear of small samples, self selection, bias and personal prejudice, which as I mentioned above has bedevilled previous research, could be disposed of entirely. I think also that we can expect anybody engaged by the DCSF to undertake such a task to be fairly professional and impartial. They are unlikely to fall into the trap of climbing into bed, metaphorically speaking, with the home educators! Until such work is carried out, we cannot expect to see the received wisdom regarding education in this country change significantly. The result will be that home education will continue to be viewed with disfavour and that school based education will carry on being the model to which we should all aspire.
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I think your find that the DCSF will not be able to get enough home educators to part in any research after the Badman report.I guess you could put your daughter forward? that make 1?
ReplyDeleteany one else want to get in bed with the DCSF?
Julie?
should say take part
ReplyDelete"education is something which may only take place effectively in purpose built establishments staffed by professional educators."
ReplyDeleteI think there is more than enough evidence both here and in other countries to disprove the basic idea expressed above. Even one parent successfully educating their child at home would disprove this theory and we have far more examples than this. The only thing we cannot be sure of yet (and possibly will never be sure since social research is always difficult) is what proportions we are talking about. The other issue of course is that the aims of different establishments/homes are going to be different so we are rarely comparing like with like. The only way around this would be to compare matched sections of home education and school populations as in the US study Simon discussed a few days back, which compared well-off religious home schoolers with religious/private school pupils. The only other option as far as I can see is for someone or some organisation to impose their aims and educational targets on everyone. Can you see this being acceptable to private school users, let alone home educators?
"We must hope that many parents agree to take part in this new DCSF sponsored exercise. If a large enough number of participants are enlisted and they are not given overmuch choice in the matter, then the bugbear of small samples, self selection, bias and personal prejudice, which as I mentioned above has bedevilled previous research, could be disposed of entirely."
ReplyDeleteHow can the bugbear of self selection be disposed of when the study you mention will be self selected and is also very likely to be a small sample (it's a feasibility study). All this research is likely to show is that it is possible to home educate successfully and how a few families go about it, something we know already.
It's not likely to be unbiased either. Their stated objective for the research is to "close the gap in educational achievement for children from disadvantaged backgrounds". Hardly an un-biased starting point an unlikely to result in the elimination of personal bias in those who choose to tender for the research.
The feasibility study is, like the York Consulting one a few years ago, likely to be a small one. The idea is to see if it would prove possible to track a cohort of home educated children. Once this is set up, it would not need to be self selected. Once all home educated children are known to local authorities, it would simply be necessary to pull information from the monitoring reports and collate it. The choice of paticipants could be randomised. I am sure that this is what the DCSF have in mind. One would not even need to tell the families involved. This is how school and GCSE results are known about in maintained schools.
ReplyDeleteOnce all home educated children are known to local authorities, it would simply be necessary to pull information from the monitoring reports and collate it.
ReplyDeleteif you could get the monitoring? how you going to do that with many parents who will not allow any monitoring? how you going to do it? with threats?
no monitoring here? never has been how much does that hurt?
why wont parents allow monitoring have you ever really thought about that? a great number of LA officers are rude are bullys and hostile to home education so think about that!
They would still need the permission of the parents for information to be used in a study so it would still be self selected. Data protection laws mean that data can only be used for the purpose stated at collection. Why would they carry out a feasibility study using completely different sources of information and collection methods to the ones you suggest (including sourcing some of the study population through support groups, for example)? The idea of a feasibility study would be to test selection and data gathering methods as well as the type of information collected.
ReplyDeleteI don't really know what I think; yes, more research would be useful in that it would hopefully make what statistics there are more meaningful. We were a family involved in the York Consultancy research a few years ago; which ended up proving that they didn't know how many home educators there were.
ReplyDeleteThis research says that it is going to be a longtitudinal project, so it if really followed home ed families over a long time it might be interesting in that it may answer the question once and for all about outcomes and different methods. However if I was asked for my opinion as to whether a friend should take part, what would I say? (I should point out that my dd is at college so this won't affect me directly) I think it would depend on the family - I am sure that some families are confident in what they are doing and wouldn't be affected by outside monitoring but others lack confidence anyway and this sort of pressure, even if it wasn't malevolent would not be helpful.
Badman's research was at least as flawed, given that he had a self-selecting group of LAs responding. My LA (who did respond) were highly critical of the ones that didn't. They are pro-registration, for the record.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that anyone appointed by DCSF is going to be viewed with suspicion by the families, so you get the opposite problem to the researchers who got too close, where they miss out important information because families choose to withhold it.
I also come back to a point I raised elsewhere, which is to was what is being measured, and how is success being determined? This has always been one of the core objections to inspection visits, because invalid criteria are being put forward for measurement of results.
"This research says that it is going to be a longtitudinal project, so it if really followed home ed families over a long time it might be interesting in that it may answer the question once and for all about outcomes and different methods."
ReplyDeleteDo you think so? You believe that the families taking part wouldn't change the way they home educate as a result of taking part in the study?
This sort of thing would not really need the permission of those who were selected. Local authorities keep track of who enters for examinations in various schools, what the demographics of the area are, who is entitled to free school dinners and so on. If they relied upon the consent of all parents to gather and collate this information, then our reliable data on educational attainment of children in maintained schools would be sparse indeed!
ReplyDeleteI can see no reason at all why the same thing could not be done with home educated children, once they are all known to the local authority. After all, most of the GCSEs will probably be taken through the local authority if they start offering these for free. Information like that is free for anybody to use; it is not covered by the Data Protection Act.
Why would they need a feasibility study if that is the only information they intend to collect? If that is their intention they can't really carry out a feasibility study until the new system is up and running and there would be no need to check that it's feasible if it's just a matter of collating existing information.
ReplyDeleteIt is not a matter of collating existing information. Home educators currently make their own arrangments for their children to take GCSEs and so on. The local authority is not usually involved, as the examinations are taken privately. The result is that the local authority does not have any idea how many home educated children pass GCSEs. If they began having the Age Weighted Pupil Units and spending the money paying for home educated children to take examinations, then they would have the information.Some families move to different areas and I imagine part of the feasibility study would entail seeing how easily they could be tracked from one local authority area to another.
ReplyDeleteBut if the new law goes through they will have this information because there will be compulsory contact with all home educators. Unless they are working on the assumption that the law will not go through? Why are they interested in what happens now and in the next 2-3 years because if the law goes through everything will change and the results will become irrelevant. The same for tracking. They will have ContactPoint and the home education register - how can they lose people who move areas - unless the person stops claiming child benefit and never needs the NHS or any other benefits.
ReplyDeleteThe idea is of course to establish a baseline, before the new law comes into force in April 2011. In other words to find out what the situation is now and then see how it might change in the future. In other words, if 40% of home educated children gained five GCSEs now, would this percentage go up in the years following the passage of the Children, Schools and Families Bill.
ReplyDelete"The idea is of course to establish a baseline, before the new law comes into force in April 2011."
ReplyDeleteOh, so you think it's going to be a very short longitudinal study lasting about a year?
No, this is a feasibility study. It will be for a fixed and probably short period and will look at the possibility of a long term research project which will track children's attainment. It would be helpful before embarking upon this to know how things are now. Unless this is one, it will hardly be possible to know whether things change for the better following the implementation of the new legislation.
ReplyDeleteA feasibility study is used to evaluate study design, to check that a larger piece of research is feasible, not to produce research evidence itself.
ReplyDelete