No wonder local authorities are alarmed about home education!

I have several times been accused in recent days of asking questions to which I already knew the answers. I have to say that this is quite absurd. Not  only did I not have a ready-made answer up my sleeve, I could not in a million years have guessed how other people would respond to the case which I cited forty eight hours ago. I described a child who was not being educated and yet whose mother claimed that he was.  I fully expected readers to agree that this was something of a problem and to discuss ways that genuine home educators could be distinguished from situations where no education is being provided. This is a problem and I can see why some home educating parents get a little tetchy when their local authority acts as though all home educated children are missing from education. However, this was not at all the way most people saw the example that I gave. Instead of agreeing that here was a child who was not receiving an education, the general view seemed to be that he was doing fine and should be left alone. It was suggested that playing computer games all day and then hanging round the streets with a bunch of kids who were gradually moving further into petty crime was a perfectly adequate education.

Even weirder, most of those commenting seemed to place responsibility for truanting upon the local authority, rather than the child’s parents. This is very curious! Home educators are always talking about the sanctity of parental responsibility and then as soon as a kid truants, it is no longer the parents’ responsibility, but  that of the local authority.

Having found that not one reader feels that anything needs to be done to help a child who does not attend school and is not receiving an education from either his parents or anybody else; there is little more to say. This was a genuinely unexpected turn of events and I am sure that any local authority officers reading this blog will draw their own conclusions about the matter. The conclusion is, as far as I am able to make it out, that a number of home educators believe that if a child truants and is then withdrawn from school by his mother in order to avoid prosecution; then that is fine and the child should simply be ignored. Any child who is claimed to be home educated should face no further attention from the local authority, regardless of whether or not this is really the case. Parents should not be responsible for ensuring that their children attend a school at which they are registered and if the child fails to attend then this is the fault of the local authority. Playing computer games all day, after not getting up until after lunchtime is a pefectly adequate eduction for a fourteen year-old.  I can assure readers that my open ended questions a couple of days ago were not intended to elicit such views as this! I am frankly taken aback at what has been said.

I cannot help remembering the newspaper articles which I wrote on the subject of home education a few years ago; the ones that first made me an object of hatred for the loopier type of home educating parent. In one passage, which caused particular anger, I said:



Autonomous education is based on a simple principle: that children alone are the best judges of what they should learn and when they should learn it. If a child wishes to spend the day slumped in front of a television or games console, this is not a problem, the choice is his. Many autonomous educators go even further, asserting that it is for the child to decide on bedtimes, diet and other aspects of lifestyle.

I can still recall the fury which this caused. I was told that I knew nothing of autonomous education and that the idea of supposedly home educated children sitting around all day playing Grand Theft Auto was ridiculous. I knew then that it was not, of course, and it is interesting to find it being confirmed here that quite a few home edcautors see nothing wrong with this lifestyle.  Indeed, although I never used the expression, somebody reading about the child whom I described who was missing from education, did in fact call this autonomous education. I think that there is nothing more that I can add to this debate. Obviously, if a child hates school and truants, then I think that a parent should be able to provide an education for the child at home. I am a fanatical supporter of home education. When this is not done though and a child is left to his or her own devices, then I believe that the local authority should intervene and help the parents to provide an education for their child.

Identifying children missing from education; Part 2

This will be a brief post, for I am very busy today. I am constantly enchanted at the way that asking simple questions of home educators provokes such bizarre responses by some of those who comment here. Apparently, asking open ended questions like this  is symptomatic of great fear and narrow mindedness in those asking them!

I am glad that I had an opportunity yesterday of seeing what readers thought when confronted with a genuine case of a child missing from education. Not one felt that anything should be done about the child and many seemed to think that he was actually better off  as a long term truant than he would have been if he had remained at school. One person even thought that getting up at one in the afternoon, spending the next few hours playing computer games, before hanging out with a bunch of kids who were drifting into petty crime, actually constituted an acceptable education! I can see that most readers feel that such children should be left alone, because the alternative might involve them personally in some slight inconvenience, if, that is,  local authorities began trying to sort out genuinely home educated children from long term truants and those missing from education.

I was asked yesterday by more than one person what I would do about such children; those who drop out of school in this way. The general feeling seemed to be that the local authority was somehow responsible for children like this who truant. This is unlikely. Most children do not truant or drop out of school. There are a few who do, even in the best schools. We need to ask ourselves why most pupils remain at school and a few do not. Often, there are common factors in the home lives of truants; it is more likely that these are responsible for the problem than that it is the fault of the school. As I am sure readers know, academic success or failure has far more to do with home background than which school is attended; five times as much, according to some research. From this perspective, truanting is more often than not a sign of something wrong at home than  a problem at school.

What can be done about such children? Making the process of becoming a home educator a little more complex would be helpful. Many of the sort of parents like Jack’s mother, whom we met yesterday, would think twice if they knew that they would be interviewed before being able to deregister their children from school. I have seen a few parents who would be discouraged from sending off that letter if they knew that they would be visited regularly and have to explain to somebody just what they were doing about their son or daughter’s education. True, this would be irritating for genuine home educators, but it would only be a minor inconvenience for most.

Some children simply do not wish to learn about photosynthesis or 19th century poetry. Often, this too says something about their home background, but what can we actually do about it? A local college has a scheme now where ‘disaffected’ boys of fourteen and fifteen can learn about vehicle maintenance for a few days a week. A deal is struck with the boys whereby if they attend school on the other days, they get to muck about with engines for two days a week. This approach is worth expanding.

Already, this post has eaten into my time and so I must call a halt for now.

Home educated children missing from education

As some readers may be aware, there has recently been a consultation about revising the statutory guidance on Children Missing from Education or CME. Needless to say, this has provoked anger among certain home educators who are concerned that the CME agenda might end up with local authorities chasing home educating parents. This would be absurd, wouldn’t it, because home educated children are not missing from education at all?

This is really an etymological and perhaps philosophical problem. Can we change the essential nature of a thing by altering its name? To make this clear, I want to look at a specific case and then invite readers to suggest their own solutions. Local authority officers read this blog, as do civil servants working for the Department for Education; so this is an opportunity to explain to them where they are going wrong!

Fourteen year-old Jack has a history of playing truant and under-achieving at school. He has very limited literacy; barely enough to read the simplest of texts. This is not caused by dyslexia, he has been tested for this, but because he mucks about in class and misses a lot of school. His mother has to leave for work early and Jack is left to get himself up and to school. He often does not manage to do so. Soon after his fourteenth birthday, Jack stopped going to school altogether. He is over six feet tall and his mother cannot physically make him get up. He usually rises at about one or two in the afternoon and then watches TV or plays on the Xbox until his mates finish school. Then he hangs round with them. He seldom gets to bed before two or three in the morning.

Naturally, his mother was  worried about being prosecuted for truancy, but a friend told her that if Jack was registered as being home educated, then she won’t need to worry. She accordingly downloaded a template for a deregistration letter from an internet site and sent it to the school. When the local authority asked to visit, she also downloaded and adapted an educational philosophy for an autonomous education and then sent them that, declining a visit.

Here then is the real situation. A semi-literate child is receiving no education of any sort whatsoever. He will not only pass no GCSEs, he is unlikely to attend college and his mother is not the type to arrange an Open University course. His older friends are all unemployed and make a living from a combination of benefits and petty crime. Jack is moving in the same direction. He is, without a shadow of a doubt, a child missing from education. The question is, should describing a child missing from education in this way as being ‘home educated’ be enough to prevent the local authority from taking any further action?

I invite readers now to take the role of a local authority officer and decide what to do next. Should they issue a School Attendance Order? On what grounds could they do so? They have no solid evidence that Jack is not receiving an education. Should they turn up on the doorstep and try to speak to the mother or child? We all know how some home educators view the practice of ‘doorstepping’! Perhaps they should simply write the kid off and forget him? Do we really want local authorities to abandon a vulnerable child in this way? Should they send another letter?

I will be interested to know how readers think that a local authority should actually deal with a child of this sort who is missing from education. As I said earlier, this is a golden opportunity for you to tell local authority officers where they are going wrong and how they should deal with cases like this without resorting to doorstepping or other unacceptable strategies.

Letting the cat out of the bag

Every so often, somebody intimately connected with the world of British home education will make a casual remark which gives the game away as regarding how a lot of home educators really view education. This happened recently on the Badman Review Action Group. A discussion was taking place about the proper response of a local authority which learns that a child in its area is not attending school. The unanimous view among home educating parents seems to be that if the local authority are told that home education is taking place, then that should be the end of the matter. The parents' word should be accepted and unless they have good reason to suspect that something is amiss, the authority should just cross that name of the list of those missing from education. Parents are, after all, the ones responsible for seeing that their children are receiving an education.

I pointed out a couple of cases which I have mentioned here. One was that of a fourteen year-old girl whose mentally ill mother got lonely during the day. Since the daughter hated school, they got together and the child was de-registered. The pair of them spent all day from then on watching television. The girl surfed the net a lot too. Now to any normal person, and I am talking here not about educational professionals but ordinary parents and people in the street, it is plain that here is a young person missing from education. Watching the Jeremy Kyle Show in the morning and then looking at Facebook in the afternoon is not what most people would see as an education. One of the people who founded the BRAG list though, thought that this showed that an education was being provided for the child. She expressed the view that one can learn a lot by watching television and using the Internet.

Now the truth is, most teenagers do all this sort of thing in addition to learning at school. Staring at a succession of photographs of other people's friends leering drunkenly at the camera while sticking their tongues out is what many young people spend hours doing in the evening. It is not particularly educational. A lot of them are addicted to soap operas as well. There is no harm in this either, but it would be hard to claim that viewing Hollyoaks is an educational activity. For a child to do nothing at all but this for the whole day would be an absolute disaster from an educational viewpoint.

I have noticed before that some home educators claim that watching television or surfing the Internet is as good as an education in itself. It was interesting to see this view expressed on one of the major lists. I suppose the rationale behind this is that if one watched BBC2 documentaries all the time or the educational channels on cable television and then spent a lot of time doing research on the Internet, then one could learn a lot. This is true, but is not how the majority of children and teenagers use these media. This sort of thing gives one an insight into the sort of lifestyle that some teenagers who are supposedly being home educated actually live. It is hardly surprising that such parents are reluctant to allow their local authority into the home to observe this!

I also cited the case of an eleven year-old boy working in an illegal factory. Again, there seems to be nothing wrong with that either from some people's point of view. The child might be happy and learning a trade, what's the problem? In other words, all the legislation which has been enacted over the last century and a half to abolish child labour and ensure that children actually have childhoods, is, for these people, a mistake. What's wrong with kids working in factories or down mines and up chimneys? At least they're learning a trade! Who's to say that this is any less educational than sitting at a desk all day?

It is opinions like this which ring huge alarm bells in the minds of those charged with protecting children and ensuring that they receive an education. I have seen such views expressed before; this is not an isolated case. That parents in the twenty first century should honestly believe that it might be a good thing for an eleven year-old child to leave school and work in factory or for a fourteen year-old girl to slump in front of the television all day is little short of horrifying. One wonders what sort of education the children of those who espouse such views might be receiving. Certainly, it is not to be wondered at that local authorities are uneasy about this sort of thing.

Children Missing from Education

On one of the Internet lists concerned with home education there is currently anger and anxiety about a poster put up by the local authority in Derbyshire. It is outside, and inside, schools and nurseries. This is what it says:

MISSING CHILDREN
Education is vital to ensure that all children get a good start in life.
Every year more than 100 children go missing from the Derbyshire
education system. It's important we get them back into schools.

WHY DO CHILDREN GO MISSING FROM SCHOOL?
-Some children simply don't start school - their parents don't enrol
them.
-Other children stop going to school, or don't make the move from
primary to secondary.
-And some families never enrol their children when they move to the
county from elsewhere.

AT RISK
Children not in education might be at risk of harm we want to ensure
that they are safe.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU'RE CONCERNED
If you think a child is missing out on school call us in confidence on
0845 058058
We can contact the family and help get their child into school.


As usual, some home educators are outraged and view the thing as an attack on their lifestyle. As usual, they are quite wrong.

Children Missing from education or CME is an attempt to find children who are not attending school or receiving an adequate education elsewhere. According to the report Out of School, which Ofsted produced in 2004, there might be ten thousand such children in this country. Some of these are children who are kept at home in order to work or look after the home. They are at increased risk of abuse and involvement in crime. Others are teenagers who have simply dropped out of school. The parents move to another area perhaps and the child is not registered at a new school. Some vanish during the transition from primary to secondary. Reading the outrage among some home educating parents about the CME initiative, one rather gets the feeling that they do not really believe in the existence of such children. They see it all as part of a sinister plot by Ofsted and the local authorities to force home educated children to go to school. Last year, I gave a couple of examples of the sort of case that CME is actually designed to detect and since there are many new readers here, I think I should describe one of these cases again. The target for CME is not home education at all. It is children missing from education. In order to identify these children it might be necessary to visit the homes of children who are not at school in order to see whether or not they are being educated. There is strong opposition to such visits by some home educating parents, but they are a vital tool in rescuing vulnerable young children.

This case is from the London Borough of Waltham Forest. An eleven year old boy left primary school and there was no record of his being registered with a secondary school. The family were Sylhetis and the suspicion was that they had returned to their country of origin. An Education Welfare Officer was sent to the house after a number of letters had remained unanswered. There was no reply when he knocked on the door, but he could hear activity and voices round the back. He wandered round there and discovered a garage/workshop which had been converted into a small factory. The eleven year old boy for whom he was searching was there, evidently running errands for those operating the machines. The place was an absolute nightmare and was clearing being run without any regard to the Factory Acts or other relevant regulations. As far as could be established, the child's mother had returned to Bangladesh and left the boy behind. His father was using him to both keep house and also act as errand boy for his business. It did not take much to persuade the father that he would be prosecuted unless his son was sent to school. In this case, there was a happy outcome.

It is cases such as this which prompt unannounced visits from EWOs. The point to consider here is that had the father sent a letter stating that he was educating his son at home and did not wish to accept a visit, then the child could very well have continued being denied an education. Some home educating parents are adamant that all that should be required for them is to state that they are providing an education and that local authority interest in them and their children should stop at once. If that policy were to be generally adopted, then it would leave many children at hazard. I have a fund of anecdotes like the one above, all involving children who were not at school but were not receiving an education elsewhere. Without conducting enquiries, some of which might be thought of as intrusive, it would be impossible for the local authority to discover that the children were not being educated. This is the purpose of CME; not the persecution of home educators. If some home educating parents refuse to answer questions or allow visits, then it is very hard to distinguish them from the parents of children, like the one above, who are not receiving an adequate education. It is then not at all unlikely that they might receive an unannounced visit from an EWO. In such a case, they will have only themselves to blame.