Following on from yesterday’s post, in which we looked at the pernicious influence of a document entitled Home Education and the Safeguarding Myth, which was consulted by those investigating the death of Dylan Seabridge, I want to consider now a fear which some well-known figures in the world of British home education seem determined to promote; the idea that parents opting to educate their children at home are routinely referred to social services. This is of course quite untrue, but for some reason people like Mike Fortune-Wood, Wendy Charles-Warner, Alison Sauer and Paula Rothermel all seem determined to promote this particular fiction and even, as in the Home Education and Safeguarding Myth paper, elevate it to the status of supposed fact. Here are two quotations on the subject; the first from Wendy Charles-Warner’s document and the second from Paula Rothermel’ book, International Perspectives on Home Education; Do We Still Need Schools?
'referral rates in some Local Authorities indicate a policy of automatic referral for home educated children,'
'there is an increasing tendency for welfare officers and social workers to become involved with home-educating families from the outset.'
Both these statements were published in 2015, so this is very much a current myth in the making. Rothermel gives no reference for her belief that social workers might be involved with home educating families ‘from the outset’, and it is possible that she has relied upon Wendy Charles-Warner for the figures to back up this strange assertion. Looking at how these figures were acquired will show us firstly that the idea is a nonsense and secondly that we may safely disregard the paper Home Education and the Safeguarding Myth as a reliable source of information on this, or indeed any other, subject.
We find that Wendy Charles-Warner is claiming that in one local authority 100% of home educated children have been referred to social services. It is of course quite untrue and the explanation casts further doubt upon the methods used by the author of the paper to compile and analyse data.
The local authority in question is Telford and Wrekin and on 31 December 2014, a Ms Martel, acting on behalf of the author of Home Education and the Safeguarding Myth, made a Freedom of Information request, asking how many children aged 5 to 16 in the LA had been referred to social services. She then asked, how many of these were home educated. The answer given was;
Aged 5-9 EHE number is 28
Aged 10-16 EHE number is 105
This was a simple error on the part of whoever answered the request, because these are the total numbers of home educated children in the LA. In fairness to the local authority, the question was not very well phrased and it is easy to see how the misunderstanding arose. Obviously, they have not referred every single child to social services. Just to be sure, I telephoned Malcolm Webster, the man at Telford and Wrekin who deals with EHE, and asked about this. He was absolutely bemused at the idea that he would have been referring every child to social services. Why on earth would he do such a thing? Just to make perfectly sure, I followed this up with a Freedom of Information request of my own, which confirmed what I had suspected.
The fact that the document's author did not bother to make checks of this kind indicates another flaw in the process. It also suggests that the number of social services referrals for home educated children has been greatly inflated. The numbers are very low anyway and the addition of 133 extra children in this way was sufficient to throw all the apparently careful calculations made about social services referrals hopelessly out of kilter. When this and one or two other points are taken into account, there turn out to be no more referrals for home educated children than there are for those at school.
I do not know why these characters are so determined to spread the alarming notion that home educating parents are being referred, as a matter of course, to social services. In the case of one of those mentioned above, there is probably a strong business end to it, for she runs a company called 3rd Way Law, which is a commercial concern helping people deal with legal problems relating to home education. Obviously, the more anxiety there is about the possibility of social workers knocking on the door; the greater market there will be for an organisation which will, for a price, help deal with the supposed problem. From this perspective, it makes sound business sense to promote a feeling of unease and fear among potential home educators.
Showing posts with label Paula Rothermel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paula Rothermel. Show all posts
Thursday, 14 July 2016
Friday, 8 July 2016
International Perspectives on Home Education: Do We Still Need Schools? by Paula Rothermel - A Review, Part 2
Some readers yesterday might perhaps have thought that I was being a little harsh when I suggested that Paula Rothermel’s contribution to the above book suggests either slapdash and shoddy research or deliberate dishonesty. The evidence however points strongly in that direction. Let us begin with what Rothermel has to say about one of the most well-known horror stories of British home education; the death of seven year-old Khyra Ishaq in 2008. The details of this case are familiar to most people in this country who are involved in home education. In the introduction to her book, Rothermel cites the Serious Case Review as a reference for her claim on page 8 that;
In the tragic case of one young child (Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board, 2010) the LA registered her as home educated simply because the parents stopped sending her to school.
This is of course absolutely untrue. In fact the child’s mother told the school as soon as she stopped sending her daughter that the child would be educated at home. As the Executive Summary of the subsequent Serious Case Review said;
The child and some siblings, were removed from state education during December 2007 and a clear statement issued by the mother, of her intention to educate them at home.
This is plain enough and the mother also told the police the same thing during a Safe and Well check. In addition to notifying the school and Education Welfare Service verbally of her intentions; on January 8th 2008 the child's mother sent a letter to the Special Educational Needs Assessment Service; explaining in writing that she would be educating her daughter Khyra at home. The inference is inescapable. Either the author has not actually read the Serious Case Review which she cites in her reference and is accordingly unfamiliar with its contents or she is intentionally misrepresenting the facts in order to strengthen her argument.
Consider another of Rothermel’s statements, when she writes on page 6 of;
the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee (CSFC,2010) set up to review Badman's report
In fact the Children, Schools and Families Committee was a standing committee established in 2007; two years before Graham Badman even began his investigations into home education. This select committee had nothing whatever to do with Badman's report, other than examining it briefly in 2009. Again, we are compelled to ask ourselves, is it the case that Rothermel simple knows nothing about the subject of which she is writing or is she exaggerating and romancing for dramatic effect? Neither of these would be what we look for in a supposedly academic work!
A charitable person will attribute errors such as these to superficial and inadequate research rather than outright mendacity, but a quick look at the body of the book provides us with a pointer that suggests that lack of knowledge alone is not a sufficient explanation.
It might be understandable, although still disconcerting, to find that an editor of a book like this knows little about the sources which she cites. Such ignorance could be innocent and unwitting. It is however quite a different matter where her own research is concerned. Surely she would know at once if anybody was making a mistake about that? Let us look now at Chapter 3 of the book, written by Noraisha Yusof; whom I mentioned yesterday. On page 44, Yusof says that;
Rothermel’s (2002) study of 419 UK families showed that the home educated children outperformed their schooled counterparts on a general mathematics test, achieving an average mark of 81 per cent, compared to the school educated pupils average mark of 45 per cent.
This seems clear and quite unambiguous. It is being claimed that Rothermel administered tests in mathematics to at least 419 children. No other construction could possibly be placed upon this sentence. In fact, as Rothermel herself knows perfectly well, the tests were given to just 35 children. We are left once more with only two choices. The first possibility is that Dr Rothermel simply does not remember accurately the research which she conducted. The second is that she knows very well that 419 children were not tested in this way, but feels that this figure looks 12 times more impressive than the actual one of 35. When reading through the contributions to her book, it would have been easy enough for Rothermel to correct something like this. That she chose not to is curious and revealing.
This is by no means an exhaustive catalogue of the mistakes or misrepresentations to be found in this book. Paula Rothermel is well known in British home educating circles as something of an expert on the subject and I think that we may really assume that she is not lacking in knowledge about such things as the Khyra Ishaq case; still less about her own research. We are drawn inexorably to the sad conclusion that the things which I have outlined above have been done by design, rather than accidentally.
I would be happy to be proved wrong about this and invite those able to put forward an opposing view to do so in the comments below. Anybody wishing to check what has been said here may go to Amazon, find the book and then use the feature which allows one to look inside the book at the text. I would not want anybody simply to take my word for anything written here, but urge people to look for themselves.
In the tragic case of one young child (Birmingham Safeguarding Children Board, 2010) the LA registered her as home educated simply because the parents stopped sending her to school.
This is of course absolutely untrue. In fact the child’s mother told the school as soon as she stopped sending her daughter that the child would be educated at home. As the Executive Summary of the subsequent Serious Case Review said;
The child and some siblings, were removed from state education during December 2007 and a clear statement issued by the mother, of her intention to educate them at home.
This is plain enough and the mother also told the police the same thing during a Safe and Well check. In addition to notifying the school and Education Welfare Service verbally of her intentions; on January 8th 2008 the child's mother sent a letter to the Special Educational Needs Assessment Service; explaining in writing that she would be educating her daughter Khyra at home. The inference is inescapable. Either the author has not actually read the Serious Case Review which she cites in her reference and is accordingly unfamiliar with its contents or she is intentionally misrepresenting the facts in order to strengthen her argument.
Consider another of Rothermel’s statements, when she writes on page 6 of;
the Children, Schools and Families Select Committee (CSFC,2010) set up to review Badman's report
In fact the Children, Schools and Families Committee was a standing committee established in 2007; two years before Graham Badman even began his investigations into home education. This select committee had nothing whatever to do with Badman's report, other than examining it briefly in 2009. Again, we are compelled to ask ourselves, is it the case that Rothermel simple knows nothing about the subject of which she is writing or is she exaggerating and romancing for dramatic effect? Neither of these would be what we look for in a supposedly academic work!
A charitable person will attribute errors such as these to superficial and inadequate research rather than outright mendacity, but a quick look at the body of the book provides us with a pointer that suggests that lack of knowledge alone is not a sufficient explanation.
It might be understandable, although still disconcerting, to find that an editor of a book like this knows little about the sources which she cites. Such ignorance could be innocent and unwitting. It is however quite a different matter where her own research is concerned. Surely she would know at once if anybody was making a mistake about that? Let us look now at Chapter 3 of the book, written by Noraisha Yusof; whom I mentioned yesterday. On page 44, Yusof says that;
Rothermel’s (2002) study of 419 UK families showed that the home educated children outperformed their schooled counterparts on a general mathematics test, achieving an average mark of 81 per cent, compared to the school educated pupils average mark of 45 per cent.
This seems clear and quite unambiguous. It is being claimed that Rothermel administered tests in mathematics to at least 419 children. No other construction could possibly be placed upon this sentence. In fact, as Rothermel herself knows perfectly well, the tests were given to just 35 children. We are left once more with only two choices. The first possibility is that Dr Rothermel simply does not remember accurately the research which she conducted. The second is that she knows very well that 419 children were not tested in this way, but feels that this figure looks 12 times more impressive than the actual one of 35. When reading through the contributions to her book, it would have been easy enough for Rothermel to correct something like this. That she chose not to is curious and revealing.
This is by no means an exhaustive catalogue of the mistakes or misrepresentations to be found in this book. Paula Rothermel is well known in British home educating circles as something of an expert on the subject and I think that we may really assume that she is not lacking in knowledge about such things as the Khyra Ishaq case; still less about her own research. We are drawn inexorably to the sad conclusion that the things which I have outlined above have been done by design, rather than accidentally.
I would be happy to be proved wrong about this and invite those able to put forward an opposing view to do so in the comments below. Anybody wishing to check what has been said here may go to Amazon, find the book and then use the feature which allows one to look inside the book at the text. I would not want anybody simply to take my word for anything written here, but urge people to look for themselves.
Wednesday, 6 July 2016
International Perspectives on Home Education: Do We Still Need Schools? by Paula Rothermel - A Review, Part 1
The editor of the above book, Paula Rothermel, is exceedingly dissatisfied with the way that it is selling; as well she might be, with sales currently running at fewer than one a year! Instead of asking herself where she might have gone wrong in compiling it or writing the introduction, Dr Rothermel evidently finds it easier to seek a scapegoat. She has accordingly come to the conclusion that if people aren’t queuing up to buy her book, then it must be my fault for reviewing the thing on Amazon! Put like that, it sounds quite mad and yet Roxane Featherstone, who is apparently a friend of Rothermel’s, has recently been advancing this hypothesis to anybody who will listen. Perhaps it is now time to examine this book in detail and try and work out the real reason why there is such a marked reluctance to purchase it.
There are two aspects in particular of Rothermel’s book which might be causing concern among potential customers and making them hesitate before shelling out £70 for it; apart that is from the grotesquely high price. The first of these is the introduction, which is written by Rothermel herself. This is a singularly awful piece of work, containing, apart from the factual errors, some of the most misleading and inaccurate references which it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. I shall deal with this separately in a subsequent post. The second thing likely to cause both professionals involved in education, as well as home educators themselves, to raise their eyebrows a little is the list of contributors; the first of whom is a woman called Leslie Barson. As soon as I saw the name, I gasped audibly and muttered under my breath, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ I have every reason to suppose that others glancing at the contents page reacted in precisely the same way. Leslie Barson attained notoriety a few years ago when, in the course of an interview for the Times Educational Supplement, she said;
I would remove the law that says education is compulsory ...I believe children should be able to work in paid employment as soon as they would like to, and would feel more valued if allowed to do this.
Yes, really. Here is a woman who would scrap the various laws which currently guarantee children an education and protect them from exploitation by unscrupulous parents and employers and turn back the clock a hundred and fifty years; so that children might once again spend their early years working in factories and fields, instead of being at school. This is the person whom Rothermel regards as perfectly suited to be the first name featured in her book. We return to the question of why Dr Rothermel’s book is not selling well. Here’s a hint; if you wish for professionals and academics in the field of education to buy a book, do try and avoid having the first name one sees upon opening it belonging to a woman who wishes to see the nation’s educational system dismantled, along with a return to the days when small children could be sent up chimneys and down mines!
The next name is unexceptional, somebody from Australia who is championing a crank theory of learning originating from a contemporary of Lysenko, but the third contributor once again causes a sharp intake of breath; it is one of the Yusof children. If Rothermel had scoured the length and breadth of Britain, she could hardly have uncovered a worse and less appetising example of home education than that inflicted upon the siblings of Noraisha Yusof, author of the third chapter of the book. Noraisha’s sister described her childhood as a ‘living hell’ and wrote of ‘15 years of emotional and physical abuse.’ At the age of 11, she tried to kill herself as a result of the home education to which she was subjected. What sort of abuse was there in the Yusof home? Her brother Abraham said of his father, ‘He used to wake us up in the middle of the night by punching our faces. It was awful what he put us through.’ The father was subsequently convicted of indecently assaulting two 15 year-old girls whom he was tutoring.
In her essay on the learning of mathematics in the home environment, Noraisha Yusof does not mention the valuable contribution made by being punched in the face at night. Nor does she explain how important it is to keep the home cold and to ban television and pop music; both integral parts of her own learning in the home environment which led to her attending university to study mathematics at the age of 16.
I have not the leisure to go further into the choice of authors made for Dr Rothermel’s book, but I will limit myself to saying that the sight of a reactionary who wishes to see children in this country stripped of the legal protection they currently enjoy is hardly calculated to encourage those of us who work in education to view her book kindly. Nor could I read, without feeling a little queasy, a piece about the virtues of learning mathematics at home, written by somebody from such an abusive home.
In the next piece about Rothermel’s book, we will look at her own contribution and try and work out whether she is guilty of nothing worse than sloppy research or whether, on the other hand, she has been deliberately untruthful in some of her claims.
There are two aspects in particular of Rothermel’s book which might be causing concern among potential customers and making them hesitate before shelling out £70 for it; apart that is from the grotesquely high price. The first of these is the introduction, which is written by Rothermel herself. This is a singularly awful piece of work, containing, apart from the factual errors, some of the most misleading and inaccurate references which it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. I shall deal with this separately in a subsequent post. The second thing likely to cause both professionals involved in education, as well as home educators themselves, to raise their eyebrows a little is the list of contributors; the first of whom is a woman called Leslie Barson. As soon as I saw the name, I gasped audibly and muttered under my breath, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ I have every reason to suppose that others glancing at the contents page reacted in precisely the same way. Leslie Barson attained notoriety a few years ago when, in the course of an interview for the Times Educational Supplement, she said;
I would remove the law that says education is compulsory ...I believe children should be able to work in paid employment as soon as they would like to, and would feel more valued if allowed to do this.
Yes, really. Here is a woman who would scrap the various laws which currently guarantee children an education and protect them from exploitation by unscrupulous parents and employers and turn back the clock a hundred and fifty years; so that children might once again spend their early years working in factories and fields, instead of being at school. This is the person whom Rothermel regards as perfectly suited to be the first name featured in her book. We return to the question of why Dr Rothermel’s book is not selling well. Here’s a hint; if you wish for professionals and academics in the field of education to buy a book, do try and avoid having the first name one sees upon opening it belonging to a woman who wishes to see the nation’s educational system dismantled, along with a return to the days when small children could be sent up chimneys and down mines!
The next name is unexceptional, somebody from Australia who is championing a crank theory of learning originating from a contemporary of Lysenko, but the third contributor once again causes a sharp intake of breath; it is one of the Yusof children. If Rothermel had scoured the length and breadth of Britain, she could hardly have uncovered a worse and less appetising example of home education than that inflicted upon the siblings of Noraisha Yusof, author of the third chapter of the book. Noraisha’s sister described her childhood as a ‘living hell’ and wrote of ‘15 years of emotional and physical abuse.’ At the age of 11, she tried to kill herself as a result of the home education to which she was subjected. What sort of abuse was there in the Yusof home? Her brother Abraham said of his father, ‘He used to wake us up in the middle of the night by punching our faces. It was awful what he put us through.’ The father was subsequently convicted of indecently assaulting two 15 year-old girls whom he was tutoring.
In her essay on the learning of mathematics in the home environment, Noraisha Yusof does not mention the valuable contribution made by being punched in the face at night. Nor does she explain how important it is to keep the home cold and to ban television and pop music; both integral parts of her own learning in the home environment which led to her attending university to study mathematics at the age of 16.
I have not the leisure to go further into the choice of authors made for Dr Rothermel’s book, but I will limit myself to saying that the sight of a reactionary who wishes to see children in this country stripped of the legal protection they currently enjoy is hardly calculated to encourage those of us who work in education to view her book kindly. Nor could I read, without feeling a little queasy, a piece about the virtues of learning mathematics at home, written by somebody from such an abusive home.
In the next piece about Rothermel’s book, we will look at her own contribution and try and work out whether she is guilty of nothing worse than sloppy research or whether, on the other hand, she has been deliberately untruthful in some of her claims.
Monday, 4 July 2016
Paula Rothermel and her dupes spread lies about me…
I seldom post on this blog these days, but when people circulate untruthful stories about me; I feel that I should at least set the record straight.
Paula Rothermel’s name is probably familiar to many home educating parents in this country. In the late 1990s, she conducted a piece of research which has been widely quoted by home educators ever since. Last year, a book was published by Dr Rothermel; a compilation of essays about home education. This book hasn’t sold well and the author apparently blames me for this. It is claimed that a poor review which I gave for the thing on Amazon has harmed sales. The Amazon listing may be found here;
https://www.amazon.co.uk/International-Perspectives-Home-Education-Schools/dp/1137446846/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1467648259&sr=1-1&keywords=rothermel
Perhaps I should mention at this point that the publisher of this book, Palgrave Macmillan, approached me before agreeing a contract to elicit a professional opinion from me on the merits or otherwise of the thing. In my report, I pointed out that the references were a nightmare and that there were many factual inaccuracies. I suggested that these points might need to be dealt with if it was to be published. In the event, nobody bothered to correct any of the errors to which I drew attention and I posted a review of the book on Amazon.
I now find that Paula Rothermel is telling people that I have been dishonest in my review as part of some sort of personal vendetta against her; which is absurd. She had previously told the publisher, apropos of me, that, ‘The Select Committee condemned his contribution to the review on home education’. This is of course a bare-faced lie; as anybody reading the transcript of the select committee hearing can easily establish. Since I write non-fiction books for a living, making a false statement of this sort to a publisher was harmful to me. She went on to claim that I hated her and that she didn’t know why, since she had never met me!
The truth is that in the spring of 2009, Dr Rothermel contacted me quite out of the blue and asked for my advice about a developmental problem which afflicted her youngest child. I didn’t know her, but did my best to help. She told me all sorts of details about her life history and family circumstances. When I later criticised the methodology of the research which she had conducted, she became convinced that I was her enemy and threatened me with legal action. The whole business was very peculiar.
I would myself have been happy to forget all about this, except that a woman who evidently knows Rothermel is now dogging my footsteps on a Facebook group concerned with home education, to which I belong. It seems that all sorts of lies are being told by Paula Rothermel and since I have no idea where else these are being circulated, I thought that I would place this statement in the public domain; rather than being obliged to refute every individual claim being made about me by this woman and her friends.
Tuesday, 3 December 2013
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
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.
Monday, 11 November 2013
A self-fulfilling prophecy
We saw yesterday that many of the more well-known individuals and organisations connected with home education in this country are known to each other and share a common ideology. There is no harm in this, as long as everybody knows it and takes it into account when listening to what is being said. The danger comes when new home educating parents who know nothing of this, begin to research the subject online. Because not only do these people share an ideology, they also have an alarming propensity to lie their heads off when once they are mounted on their hobby horse. This can have catastrophic consequences for the unwary parent. Let me give an example.
Here are three quotations by two people, both of them prominent in the world of British home education;
There is an increasing tendency for welfare officers and social workers to become involved with home-educating families from the outset
I have heard examples of parents discussing the wisdom of taking a child to an emergency ward when they know that a visit will be noted and passed on to the social services
Experience suggests that parents known to authorities do come under undue pressure to return children to school and this pressure sometimes extends to maliciously contacting social services to put further pressure on the parents to ‘cooperate’.
The first of these statements is by Paula Rothermel and the other two by Mike Fortune-Wood. Rothermel’s appeared in an academic journal and Fortune-Wood’s are to be found on his website; Home Education UK. There are two things to observe here. The first is that these statements are wholly false. There is no local authority in the United Kingdom which involves social workers with home educating families from the start, Casualty Departments do not routinely contact social services when a child is treated and local authorities do not maliciously contact social services, simply to force a child to return to school. This is the first point. The second is that any new home educator scouring the internet for information about home education would be very likely to stumble across pernicious nonsense of this sort and not realise that the man in Wales running the largest home education website in the country is on first name terms with the psychologist in Switzerland who wrote in the academic journal. They certainly would not know that she was reading any comments which the parent posted on the private internet list connected with the Home Education UK site. In other words, they might think that all this mischievous stuff about social workers originated from two entirely separate sources and was therefore more likely to be true.
Now an anecdote to illustrate the harm that what one might describe as the mainstream home education scene in this country can wreak on the lives of home educating families. A home educating parent who spent a lot of her time on the internet and believed implicitly the old wives' tales being peddled by the likes of Paula Rothermel and Mike Fortune-Wood, had occasion to take her six year old daughter to hospital. It was technically an emergency, although one involving a fairly trifling injury. Because she had made the most strenuous efforts to avoid being known to her local authority and had been led to believe that social workers were limbs of Satan and would force her to send her child to school if they heard about her, she drove to a hospital in another part of the city. Not only that, she gave a false name and address. Possibly, she had read what Mike Fortune-Wood had written about this; although I don’t know that for certain. What I do know is that she was fanatically keen to remain, ‘under the radar’ as home educators call it. Her story unraveled and she then openly admitted her real identity and the child was treated. She thought no more about it, until two social workers turned up on her doorstep the next day. Yes, she not only become known to her local authority, but also became embroiled with social services. This was nothing to do with home education. Had she just gone to her local hospital and given her proper name, nobody would have cared. Her misfortune was a direct result of reading the kind of malicious rubbish which I quoted above.
Sunday, 10 November 2013
Prevailing ideology; the closely interwoven connections of home educators and their organisations
Commenting here last night, somebody accused me of quoting a person on, ‘the extreme edge’ of the home educating community and then representing her ideas to be a significant strand in the world of British home education. This is a fair point, although it leads me to suppose that the person making it knows little about the situation today among home educators in this country.
When something like the Badman Report happens or attempts are made to abolish flexi-schooling, there is at once the appearance of protests by large numbers of individuals and also various unrelated organisations and groups. We hear, for example, that Home Education UK says something about the new proposals, as does the Centre for Personalised Education, Action on Rights for Children, and Education Otherwise, along with individuals like Roland Meighan, psychologist Paula Rothermel, barrister Ian Dowty and businesswoman Alison Sauer. What most people do not apparently realise is that all these groups and people are almost incestuously interconnected and share a common ideology. If I might be permitted the use of a vernacular, if somewhat vulgar expression; they all piss in the same pot. It would take too long to detail all the ways that these people, and of course Leslie Barson, are associated with each other. I’ll point out some of the major links though.
The Educational Heretics Press, a small publishing company run by Roland Meighan is one nexus in the world of British home education. They also run a charity called the Centre for Personalised Education. The Educational Heretics Press published Jan Fortune-Wood's early books, one of which was co-authored with Terri Dowty; wife of barrister Ian Dowty. The Dowtys were both directors of a rather mysterious limited company whose registered office is their home in Leytonstone; Action on Rights for Children or ARCH. Jan Fortune-Wood’s former husband, Mike Fortune-Wood, runs the Home Education UK website and Yahoo list HE-UK; an internet support group for home educating parents. The Centre for Personalised Education is a registered charity and for some time, they were paying Mike Fortune-Wood to undertake research and write a report on home education in this country. One of the trustees of this charity is Alison Sauer.
There is nothing sinister about any of this, except it will have been noticed that these various people often try to pretend that they do not have anything to do with each other. For instance, when Alison Sauer was trying to persuade MP Graham Stuart to help her introduce her own guidelines on home education, many people denied that they knew anything about it. Mike Fortune-Wood was one of these who categorically stated that he had no dealings with Alison Sauer over the guidelines, even though this was a complete lie and he was reading the drafts and offering her advice all through the process.
Leslie Barson is one of these people who is known to an awful lot of the others. She is a chum of Paula Rothermel and was until two years ago a trustee of Education Otherwise. Paula Rothermel is a mate of Mike Fortune-Woods, they are on first name terms and he allows her to be a member of the HE-UK list. More than one member of that list has been surprised to receive an unexpected email from Dr Rothermel, who reads all that is posted on the list. I think that this is what passes for her research in the field these days! Needless to say, Mike Fortune-Wood does not tell parents that their posts are being scrutinised by a non-home educating psychologist in this way. Ian Dowty is another friend of Mike Fortune-Wood's and they are both chums of Roland Meighan.
I think it would be fair to say that those parents who join internet groups about home education or read almost any book on the subject, will have come into contact with the prevailing ideology of this network. Briefly, this may be stated as being opposed to compulsory education, in favour of child-centred or autonomous education and very strongly against oversight of home education by the state. To suggest that Leslie Barson somehow holds extreme views about this is absurd; this is the mainstream ideology of all the influential groups and individuals in British home education today.
Wednesday, 6 November 2013
An odd omission
Many home educating parents in this country say that they value such qualities in their children as creativity, compassion, altruism and curiosity at least as much as they do academic achievement. This is a perfectly reasonable position to take. At the same time, it is asserted that in addition to these immeasurable qualities, children educated at home do actually do better academically; reading earlier and so on. The source for such claims, at least when made in Britain, is almost invariably the work of Paula Rothermel. As many readers will know, in 1998 Paula Rothermel administered Performance Indicators in Primary Schools or PIPS assessments to 35 home educated children and conducted literacy tests on some others. The results were astonishing, showing the home educated children to be greatly in advance of their schooled peers. So far, so good and these results are still quoted whenever the subject of academic achievement among home educated children in this country is raised. Nobody seems to have noticed a very curious omission.
At a conference this year, held in August, Paula Rothermel presented a paper entitled, ‘Home-Education: The Cognitive Leap at 4-5 years: comparative research from school and home educated children’ Here it is:
http://www.homeschoolconference.com/forum/topics/presentation-homeschooling-uk-comparision-of-4-5-year-olds-in-and?xg_source=activity
This is an account of those same 35 children that were tested using PIPS in 1998. In fact, for the last 15 years, Dr Rothermel has always quoted this same, exceedingly small piece of research. Never has an academic career been founded upon more slender and insubstantial material; 35 children, 15 years ago! However, what I have been wondering lately is this. Rothermel knew all those children personally. She visited their homes, made friends with their parents and was enormously popular with the home educating families. Having found such outstanding academic ability in a cohort of home educated children, surely here is a rich vein to be mined? Instead of harping on, 15 years later about those same tests conducted in 1998, one would have expected to see some sort of follow-up. After all, those children must be nearly 20 by now. How are they doing? Did their early academic success continue? Are they at university or working? Are any of them unemployed? What sort of GCSE results did they get? Remember, these were being touted as academically gifted children, with brilliant prospects. In terms of literacy alone, Rothermel found that 94% of the 6 year-olds were in the top band, whereas in schools, one would expect this to be only 16%. These were astounding figures.
Just to make myself clear; here are families who volunteered to have their children tested academically, with startlingly good results. Paula Rothermel knew these people personally, had visited their homes, had their addresses and telephone numbers and so on. Has she never asked herself or indeed their parents, how these children got in in later years? I am sure that she must have done and yet there has been no further news about them. Of course, when she is attending conferences in Bogota or Barcelona, all this might be new to them and they may not notice just how elderly these data are becoming, but in academic circles in this country, the endless recycling of these same figures has become a topic of amusement over the years. Am I the only person in the home educating world who has noticed this, or asked himself what actually became of those shining and academically advanced children?
Friday, 1 November 2013
Two myth-mongers of British home education at work
We have in recent weeks been looking, among other things, at home visits and social services as they affect home education in this country. For various reasons, there is quite a cottage industry in spreading scare-stories and trying to wind up potential home educators by perpetuating ludicrous myths about home education. Here are two of the main culprits in this field, in action. First off, we have Mike Fortune-Wood. On the HE-UK internet list yesterday, he claimed that:
Back in the early 1980s, when the world was young and I still had a thick mop of sandy hair and could see my feet without a mirror, EO’s position was that home visits were desirable because back then most LA’s simply issued an SAO to every family that home educated.
This is an absurd lie. Readers who wish to read an account written by men and women who were actually home educating in the 1970s, could do worse than look at Free Way to Learning (Editor, David Head, Penguin Books 1974). This book was written by people who did not like schools and withdrew their children from them. There was no opposition at all to this course of action. The trouble between home educators and local authorities did not begin in earnest until organisations such as Education Otherwise became active. There never was a time that local authorities simply issued School Attendance Orders to every family that home educated. This is one of the great myths about home education in this country; that until a handful of noble activists became involved, it was impossible for ordinary people to educate their children at home.
A second popular myth is that local authorities set social workers onto parents who wish to educate their own children. Sometimes they do, but it is very rare and never the first response. Writing in Estudios Sobre Educacion, not a magazine that Mr and Mrs Webb are often to be found settling down with of an evening, Paula Rothermel claims that in England:
There is an increasing tendency for welfare officers and social workers to become involved with home-educating families from the outset
This is completely false. True, some local authorities use Education Welfare Officers to make initial enquiries, but social workers? Never. Why would they waste the time of social workers in this way? The only time that social workers become involved with home educating families is when there is a suspicion that a child may be at risk. Has anybody heard of a case where a local authority involved social workers at the outset; a case only of home education, with no other factors? Paula Rothermel is of course part of this scare-story industry, which is why she has made this claim. I cannot help but remark that the rest of the article is pretty slipshod. For example, look at this statement:
an efficient education is one that "achieves that which it set out to achieve" (Harrison & Harrison v Stevenson (QB (DC) 729/81)
The quotation is of course really by Mr Justice Woolf, speaking on April 12th, 1985, in the case of, R v Secretary of State fro Education and Science, ex parte Talmud Torah Machzikei Hadass School Trust. She can’t even get her references right! The article itself may be found here:
http://dspace.unav.es/dspace/bitstream/10171/22630/2/ESE22-01-Rothermel.pdf
When I get the time, I shall be exploring in detail the motivations which cause people to propagate nonsense of this sort, attempting to persuade parents that they are in danger from social workers. I have a suspicion that Mike Fortune-Wood knows very well that local authorities thirty years ago were not issuing SAOs to any parent who wished to home educate, just as I am sure that Paula Rothermel knows that no local authority in England uses social workers from the outset when a parent deregisters her child from school. If, as in the case at which we looked a few days ago, you have a partner who is writing in a depraved fashion about wishing to hop in the sack with schoolgirls, then yes; you may very well expect to hear a knock at the door and find a social worker outside! It has never happened though in the case of an ordinary parent about whose family there has been no previous concern.
Tuesday, 23 April 2013
Another myth in British home education; there is no evidence to show that socialisation is a problem for home educated children
The question of socialisation always rears its head in any discussion between home educators and those who send their children to school. It is often asserted by home educators that there is no reason to think that their children are any less socialised than those at school, but this is not really true.
There is a bit of a difficulty when discussing socialisation of children. Parents naturally tend to think that their own kids are well adjusted and sociable. They typically think this, even if their offspring are lonely psychopaths about to carry out a massacre at the local high school. Needless to say, if anybody asks me about my own child, I will claim that she is clever, popular and well balanced. There is no reason to suppose that this is true; it is just what parents think about their own kids. We must take home educating parents statements about sociability with a grain of salt. There is anecdotal evidence on the other side, of course. Many teachers and lecturers say that the home educated children they come into contact with are strange and do not fit in. We must treat these suggestions too with some scepticism , because teachers are not unbiased; many of them disapprove of home education and may not like the confident air that some home educated children have. Is there any objective evidence to which we can turn? Fortunately, there is; although it is not conclusive.
I am not a great fan of Paula Rothermel’s work, but she did carry out some tests on the social skills of home educated children. The results were surprising and not generally known among home educating parents. Bearing in mind that the samples were small and must be treated with caution, what was discovered? Rothermel used two different Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaires and these gave differing results. One showed that the home educated children had social skills as good as those of children at school; the other diagnosed many problems with the home educated children. What sort of problems? Perhaps we should let Rothermel’s words speak for themselves. She found that, ‘ Theft amongst the home-educated boys was substantially higher than for the schoolchildren’ She also discovered that, ‘the home-educated children here emerged as mostly 'Abnormal' in terms of their 'Prosocial Behaviour'.’ and also, ‘Socially, the SDQ found 61% of the home-educated children to exhibit 'abnormal' social behaviour,’.
These are quite disturbing findings, but they are not the only conclusion that Rothermel reached. Home educated girls in particular seemed prone to difficulties in socialisation. For example:
‘the home-educated sample demonstrated more signs of aggressive behaviours than the schoolchildren from the Rutter et al study, particularly for home-educated girls where aggressiveness was at 22.7% as opposed to 5.3% for Rutter's girls’
‘A comparison with the home-educated sample's data and that provided by Ekblad (1990) relating to previous studies, revealed that the home-educated children were more aggressive than the norm and that the girls' levels of anxiety was higher than those found in other studies.’
None of this is of course conclusive and I have mentioned elsewhere my reservations about both the size of the samples used and the methods for selecting them. Never the less, it remains the fact that in the only professional evaluation of the socialisation of home educated children in this country, serious problems were found. As I said earlier, one test found these problems and the other did not, which means that the question remains open. It is however not reasonable to claim, as many home educators do, that there is no reason to think that the socialisation of home educated children is any worse than that of those at school. There is reason to think this so, but the evidence is not conclusive.
Monday, 22 April 2013
Three home educating myths
I have before examined in detail some of the odder myths associated with British home education, but there are many new readers here lately and for their benefit I shall today outline three popular misconceptions about home education.
1. Paula Rothermel found that home educated children did better academically than those at school.
This old chestnut is still doing the rounds; it cropped up last month in a comment on the Times Educational Supplement forum. Briefly, the legend is that Paula Rothermel conducted extensive research and found that home educated children did fantastically well academically. This is awfully misleading for two reasons. First, because the samples used were so tiny as to be meaningless. For instance one of the claims was that 94% of six year-olds were in the top band when tested for reading ability. This was in comparison with the 16% of schooled children who fell into this band. Very impressive, until you read the fine print and learn that this research relates to just seventeen children. Even less impressive when you learn that Rothermel did not test their literacy herself, but posted the tests out and relied upon the parents to conduct them! For some reason, Rothermel's tiny, self-selected samples, which rely almost entirely upon parental assessment, are still being touted around by home educators.
2. Many famous people were home educated.
Claiming that people like Einstein or the Wright brothers were home educated is intended to show people that being home educated can create great scientists, inventors and writers. The trick here is in how you define ‘home educated’. On one of the home education lists Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, was recently described as being home educated. In fact, like most German children before World War I, he started school at the age of seven. What people do is use the British school starting age of five and then assume that any child in Europe who does not begin school at that age must be home educated! Sometimes, people are plucked at random and the assertion made that they were home educated, even though they really attended school like everybody else. Einstein and the Wright brothers are in this category as are most of the other names one sees in the lists of famous people who were home educated. Even more curious is the inclusion in such lists, of people who could not have attended school. The Home Education UK site has Joan of Arc down as being home educated. No girls at all were at school in France during her lifetime.
3. You don’t need GCSEs to get into college or university.
This one has proved an absolute killer for many home educating parents; particularly those who favour autonomous education. They avoid entering their kids for examinations and then when they are fifteen or sixteen, expect them to get into college. It very rarely comes off, except for subjects like art, textiles, design, photography, drama and so on, where you can sometimes get in on a portfolio or audition. It is almost unheard of for a college to allow a child without GCSEs to study academic A levels like physics. Even on the rare occasions when this does happen, getting to university can be gravely handicapped by the lack of GCSEs. Because there are often many applicants for university places, all with the same A levels, a kind of tie-break sometimes takes place. If you have two young people, both with three A levels at A in the same subject, then a good way of deciding is to look at their GCSEs. The one who has ten GCSEs at A or A* will generally be preferred over the one with no GCSEs at all.
I shall be covering other misconceptions and myths over the next few weeks, because no matter how often these ideas are exposed as nonsense, a new generation of home educating parents is always ready to come forward and be led into error by people who really ought to know better.
Wednesday, 10 October 2012
A Home Education UK 'briefing paper' on the Welsh proposals
It will have been rightly guessed by some readers that I would not long be able to stay away from the subject of the proposed Welsh legislation which will introduce compulsory monitoring of home education in the principality. I have been shocked over the last few days to read some of the arguments being put forward against this idea. If it is necessary to engage in deceit and spread falsehoods in order to oppose the plans; what does this say about the strength of the arguments being put forward?
Those opposing the Welsh proposals have been producing a series of so-called ‘briefing papers’. Essentially, these are no more than the opinions of various home educators who do not approve of registration and monitoring and hope to persuade others to share their views. There are two types of such papers. One kind is directed at professionals working in the field of education and is intended to show that home educated children are not at increased risk of abuse and actually do better academically than children in school. The other sort hope to work up support from other groups such as Christians, by playing to their prejudices. Today, I want to look at a typical example of the first type; that designed to deceive teachers, social workers and other professionals.
This example is taken from the Home Education UK website:
http://www.home-education.org.uk/articles/wc/wc-he-outcomes.pdf
I have no idea of the author; perhaps it was Mike Fortune-Wood himself. The paper begins by suggesting that Welsh schools are not in general brilliant, which is true. Then it looks at American research which it is claimed shows that home educated children do very well; better in fact than those at school. There is much wrong with this section, but since I do not think that the American scene can really be compared with this country, we shall let that pass. It is when the author writes of British evidence that he reveals his true motives. and these are not precisely open and honest. I do not have time to go into the whole thing, but a few particularly awful instances should suffice. Here is a quotation from the thing:
Although little research is available in the UK there is no reason to believe that the
results for children here would be any different and research that has been
undertaken supports that view. A 2002 study of 419 EHE families in the UK found:
‘The results show that 64% of the home‐educated Reception aged children scored over 75% on their PIPS Baseline Assessments as opposed to 5.1% of children nationally.
Either the author has not read the actual research or is deliberately setting out to mislead. In fact the PIPS Assessments relate not to 419 families but 35. What do readers think? Has the author of this supposedly careful and pseudo-academic paper read the research which he is quoting? If not, it casts doubt upon the value of the other figures which he adduces in defence of his argument. If he has read the research, then he is trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes and hope that they will not spot the inflation of the figures relating to the PIPS Assessments. Neither case exactly encourages confidence!
The indications are that this was a deliberately misleading. I say this, because a few lines later, we find this claim:
A Wiltshire based home education support group has kept records of children in the group since 2002. They found that the 52 older children involved had achieved 199 formal qualifications in 50 subjects with 69% of those qualifications being GCSE or IGCSE, 13% were A levels and others in Tertiary or performance. 50% of those qualifications were taken under the age of 16 years. 33% of those students achieving performing arts qualifications were awarded distinctions and 96% of other grades
were at A* ‐C.
I think that readers here will agree that the intention is to suggest that a longitudinal study has been made of a cohort from one home education group? Note that ‘records’ have been kept of ‘children in the group’. Let us be plain about this. We are being asked to believe that the figures for examination results are all from one group of children; those who attended a home educating support group in Wiltshire. This simply cannot be a mistake; it must be a calculated falsehood, because the author gives the source for his claim. Here it is;
http://www.nwilts-he.org.uk/he_exams_wiki/index.php/Exam_results
Presumably, he banked on nobody bothering to check the references. This is an open page, where anybody from the United Kingdom may send any exam result which they claim a home educated child has achieved. Nobody checks, the things are all done anonymously and then added to the total. Far from this showing that 52 members of a single home educating support group did brilliantly academically, it merely suggests that a load of random people emailed this site from anywhere in the world and their claims were placed there without any sort of checking. Of course this group of 52 children had good academic results; only those who had gained qualifications were intended to be included on it!
There is far more wrong with this paper than just these two examples. The whole thing is an absolute horror. I am curious, for instance, about the 10 young people with 49 A levels between them. Eton only manage an average of four A levels per pupil; according to this a home educating group in Wales is averaging around five a head. More research needed here!
Those opposing the Welsh proposals have been producing a series of so-called ‘briefing papers’. Essentially, these are no more than the opinions of various home educators who do not approve of registration and monitoring and hope to persuade others to share their views. There are two types of such papers. One kind is directed at professionals working in the field of education and is intended to show that home educated children are not at increased risk of abuse and actually do better academically than children in school. The other sort hope to work up support from other groups such as Christians, by playing to their prejudices. Today, I want to look at a typical example of the first type; that designed to deceive teachers, social workers and other professionals.
This example is taken from the Home Education UK website:
http://www.home-education.org.uk/articles/wc/wc-he-outcomes.pdf
I have no idea of the author; perhaps it was Mike Fortune-Wood himself. The paper begins by suggesting that Welsh schools are not in general brilliant, which is true. Then it looks at American research which it is claimed shows that home educated children do very well; better in fact than those at school. There is much wrong with this section, but since I do not think that the American scene can really be compared with this country, we shall let that pass. It is when the author writes of British evidence that he reveals his true motives. and these are not precisely open and honest. I do not have time to go into the whole thing, but a few particularly awful instances should suffice. Here is a quotation from the thing:
Although little research is available in the UK there is no reason to believe that the
results for children here would be any different and research that has been
undertaken supports that view. A 2002 study of 419 EHE families in the UK found:
‘The results show that 64% of the home‐educated Reception aged children scored over 75% on their PIPS Baseline Assessments as opposed to 5.1% of children nationally.
Either the author has not read the actual research or is deliberately setting out to mislead. In fact the PIPS Assessments relate not to 419 families but 35. What do readers think? Has the author of this supposedly careful and pseudo-academic paper read the research which he is quoting? If not, it casts doubt upon the value of the other figures which he adduces in defence of his argument. If he has read the research, then he is trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes and hope that they will not spot the inflation of the figures relating to the PIPS Assessments. Neither case exactly encourages confidence!
The indications are that this was a deliberately misleading. I say this, because a few lines later, we find this claim:
A Wiltshire based home education support group has kept records of children in the group since 2002. They found that the 52 older children involved had achieved 199 formal qualifications in 50 subjects with 69% of those qualifications being GCSE or IGCSE, 13% were A levels and others in Tertiary or performance. 50% of those qualifications were taken under the age of 16 years. 33% of those students achieving performing arts qualifications were awarded distinctions and 96% of other grades
were at A* ‐C.
I think that readers here will agree that the intention is to suggest that a longitudinal study has been made of a cohort from one home education group? Note that ‘records’ have been kept of ‘children in the group’. Let us be plain about this. We are being asked to believe that the figures for examination results are all from one group of children; those who attended a home educating support group in Wiltshire. This simply cannot be a mistake; it must be a calculated falsehood, because the author gives the source for his claim. Here it is;
http://www.nwilts-he.org.uk/he_exams_wiki/index.php/Exam_results
Presumably, he banked on nobody bothering to check the references. This is an open page, where anybody from the United Kingdom may send any exam result which they claim a home educated child has achieved. Nobody checks, the things are all done anonymously and then added to the total. Far from this showing that 52 members of a single home educating support group did brilliantly academically, it merely suggests that a load of random people emailed this site from anywhere in the world and their claims were placed there without any sort of checking. Of course this group of 52 children had good academic results; only those who had gained qualifications were intended to be included on it!
There is far more wrong with this paper than just these two examples. The whole thing is an absolute horror. I am curious, for instance, about the 10 young people with 49 A levels between them. Eton only manage an average of four A levels per pupil; according to this a home educating group in Wales is averaging around five a head. More research needed here!
Tuesday, 2 October 2012
If closer monitoring of home education in New Zealand and the USA does no good, why would we need it in this country?
In recent days two linked objections have been raised to the proposition that new legislation is needed in this country to regulate home education. The first is that increasing or decreasing monitoring in two other countries does not seem to affect the outcomes for home education there; the second that there is no evidence that there is anything wrong with the current arrangements in this country and that consequently there is no need for any new law. I want today to examine the first of these ideas, that it is possible and worthwhile to compare home education in this country with that in New Zealand and America. I strongly suspect that those making this claim know as well as I do why it is impossible to compare home education in this country with either New Zealand or the United States, but working on the assumption that there will be readers who do not understand the difficulties, I shall try briefly to outline the problem.
Let us begin by looking at the most recent investigation into motives for home education in the United Kingdom. This was conducted in Wales, but there is no reason to suppose that the findings are not also applicable to England. The full report may be found here:
http://wales.gov.uk/topics/educationandskills/schoolshome/pupilsupport/homeeducation/?lang=en
What was discovered about the motives for home education? The report says:
Broadly, from the responses gathered at this stage, the motivations of the Home Educating community can be seen to fall into four categories on a spectrum and, in this description, in no order of percentage choice.
1. Response to behavioural /attendance issues
The extreme stance expressed by some authorities that the majority of HE parents choose HE to avoid prosecution when they and/or their children simply disengage with education is not endorsed by this initial scoping, but it is the primary experience of the EWS in relation to HE and, as such, is perceived to be a much more significant motivation than it is in actuality.
2. Lifestyle choices
At the other end of the spectrum, the political position of some home educators is that the family unit and not the state has primary responsibility for the education of the child and therefore that education is most suitably and efficiently delivered in the family context. Other ‘alternative’ lifestyle choices include those of the traveller communities, or various religious perspectives.
3. Curricular/structural issues
Between these two poles are children and families opting out of the mainstream, not to disengage from education, but after struggling with, and giving up on, the curriculum or structural difficulties of school life, be it the size, the length of day or the interaction with some teachers.
4. Special social, emotional, health or learning needs
Towards the choice of HE as a lifestyle are those opting out of the mainstream because of social, emotional or other learning challenges, delicate health issues, difficulties with transition, or, most particularly, the experience of bullying. This appears to be the largest group in the spectrum. Many of these, though originally choosing reactively away from school, do seem to find HE particularly suitable to meeting, or allowing for, those particular needs and come to embrace this alternative educational experience as a proactive and positive decision.
Lest anybody object that this research was carried out by those opposed to home education and accordingly biased against the practice, let us recall that Paula Rothermel found pretty much the same thing when she surveyed British home educators. The main motives that she found were things such as, ‘having a close family relationship and being together’.
Now I find all this pretty astounding. I was sure that I could provide my daughter with a better education than she would receive at school and it therefore made sense from a purely educational perspective not to send her to school. Such people as me are mentioned in the list of motives, but one does not get the impression that they are a majority or even a significant proportion. I have an idea, which is borne out by what little research has been conducted in this country, that very few parents in Britain home educate for purely educational motives of this sort. Research by both Paula Rothermel and Education Otherwise confirms this. When Education Otherwise sent out two and a half thousand questionairres, the main reasons that were given for home education were bullying and lifestyle. Education per se did not seem to be a big factor in the decision to home educate.
In America, the situation is very different. The largest piece of research carried out there into the motives for home education, that carried out by The National Centre for Education Statistics in America, showed that 50% of those asked about their motives gave as the answer, ‘Can give child a better education at home’. This indicates that the commonest motives for home education in America are very different from those in this country. There, parents tend to choose the practice because they believe that they can provide a better academic education. In the UK, it is at best a lifestyle choice relating to wanting to be close to the children and at worst, a reaction to problems at school. In other words, British parents are not in general choosing home education for educational reasons.
It must be fairly clear that if, as tends more commonly to be the case, American home educators are primarily concerned with good academic education, then their children are likely to be achieving highly; regardless of whether or not they are being checked by the authorities. To try and compare this situation with that in this country is pointless. Most parents here are either forced into a position where they feel they have no choice in the matter or wish to keep their children at home as part of a lifestyle choice. This means that we are not able to draw any useful conclusions by the American experience of monitoring and regulation. Unless somebody is able to come up with evidence that home educating parents in New Zealand are very similar in their motivations to those in this country, we may probably disregard what has happened there as well. All of which means that when considering new legislation, we would be well advised to restrict ourselves to thinking about what is happening in this country and not trying to rope in America and New Zealand.
What is happening in this country and what does the evidence suggest? I shall be looking at this in the next few days.
Sunday, 5 August 2012
What did Paula Rothermel really say about the sociability of home educated children?
I mentioned yesterday a quotation by Mike Fortune-Wood, typical of many which supporters of home education make when citing Paula Rothermel’s research to prove their points. He said:
‘Home educated children have been shown to be highly social, balanced and to mix well with other children and adults. (Paula Rothermel’s work).’
I then suggested that the sample used to establish this by Rothermel was small and that the instrument used was not in any case an accurate way of measuring the sociability of home educated children. In fact, Paula Rothermel herself agrees with both points; although for different reasons than mine. I don’t want to get drawn into a long debate about the precise numbers tested. There are discrepancies in the figures used, but I want to forget that and adopt a wholly different approach. Let us begin by assuming that the tests used by Paula Rothermel were in fact wonderfully accurate and that the samples she surveyed were perfectly adequate. In other words, I am conceding, purely for the purposes of debate, that we should accept all the conclusions to which this research points. Where does that leave us on the question of how balanced and social the home educated children at whom Rothemel’s work was directed, really were? Let us look at what she actually said.
Here are a few quotations from Paula Rothermel’s findings that you will seldom hear being bandied about in home educating circles:
‘the home-educated children here emerged as mostly 'Abnormal' in terms of their 'Prosocial Behaviour'.’
‘Socially, the SDQ found 61% of the home-educated children to exhibit 'abnormal' social behaviour,’
‘the home-educated sample demonstrated more signs of aggressive behaviours than the schoolchildren from the Rutter et al study, particularly for home-educated girls where aggressiveness was at 22.7% as opposed to 5.3% for Rutter's girls’
‘Theft amongst the home-educated boys was substantially higher than for the schoolchildren’
‘A comparison with the home-educated sample's data and that provided by Ekblad (1990) relating to previous studies, revealed that the home-educated children were more aggressive than the norm and that the girls' levels of anxiety was higher than those found in other studies.’
What has happened of course is that those in favour of home education select bits and pieces from the research which support their own views. It is perfectly possible to do the same if you wish to use Rothermel’s research to denounce home education! For example, she found that a quarter of the home educating sample had behavioural problems; far higher than the proportion found in most surveys of schoolchildren. How Rothermel wriggles out of these uncomfortable findings is a wonder to behold. Having carefully chosen the tests, she then discovers, when the findings are not as expected, that it is the tests themselves which are at fault. Obviously, one cannot expect home educated children to behave in the same way as school children. True, the children came out within the normal range overall on the psycho-social tests, but on purely social aspects, there were found to be serious difficulties.
I said nothing yesterday that Paula Rothermel has not herself said about this research. I drew attention to the small size of the sample and she admits that the sample was small. I queried whether the SDQ would give an accurate picture and she says that it does not. I am busy today, but I shall be writing more on this topic in a day or to. In the meantime, readers should look once more at the quotations by Paula Rothermel which I give above and ask themselves why they are unlikely to see them anywhere other than this blog.
Friday, 3 August 2012
The research shows…
No real research has been undertaken on home education in this country. That being so, those who defend the practice are compelled to fall back on some pretty feeble work and hope that nobody will notice how shoddy it is. When a couple of months ago Janine Ainsworth, Chief Education Officer of the Church of England, said that home education was not a good idea, Mike Fortune-Wood was quick to leap in with what he thought was some evidence which discredited Ms Ainsworth’s view. See;
http://www.home-education.org.uk/articles/article-c-of-e-reply.pdf
As usual, Mike Fortune-Wood’s statement contained some unintentionally hilarious passages. When he said, for example, that, ‘Practically all Home educated children take an active roll in their local communities.’, I don’t think that he was really suggesting that they tumble head over heels down hills, like so many Jack and Jills! Perhaps ‘role’ might have been a more felicitous choice of words. He went on to say, 'Home educated children have been shown to be highly social, balanced and to mix well with other children and adults. (Paula Rothermel’s work).' Which brings us neatly to the subject of feeble work and shoddy research.
It is astonishing how many people still trot out Paula Rothermel’s findings, under the apparent impression that they tell us anything useful about home education in this country. Let us see what they tell us about how social and balanced home educated British children are.
Reading about Paula Rothermel’s work, one often comes across large numbers. Thousands of questionnaires sent out, over four hundred families interviewed in depth; that sort of thing. The truth is a somewhat different. In February 1997, Rothermel sent out 2500 questionnaires to members of education Otherwise. A year later, she sent out a similar number, again only to members of Education Otherwise. Two hundred were also sent to religious groups and local authorities. A thousand were returned, of which four hundred and nineteen were chosen for further research. Already, we have run into a several serious problems.
The first difficulty is that this was a self-selected group, almost entirely from one organisation. (Twenty four out of twenty five of the questionnaires were sent only to members of Education Otherwise). Only a fifth of those asked, wished to take part by answering any questions. These are likely to be those whose home education was going well and who wished to tell others of it. In addition to this, they were people with high degrees of ‘document literacy’; those probably of a higher educational level than average. This is also suggested by the fact that a quarter of them were, or had been, school teachers. The final point to consider is that this was all fifteen years ago.
To sum up, the sample group of children tested fifteen years ago were self-selected members of a single organisation, whose educational standards were probably higher than average. Still, testing over four hundred children, even from an atypical group like this might still tell us something about home educated children. We now encounter two more difficulties which render the findings from this research project pretty well useless. The tests relating to social skills and the ability to get on with others were not administered to hundreds of children; not even a hundred children, nor even fifty. In fact the crucial tests about the ability of the children to get on with others and behave in a socialised way were only given to groups of twenty children. Not only that, but the parents did the tests, answering questions about their own children.
Here is one of the three tests used by Rothermel on twenty children:
http://www.sdqinfo.com/py/doc/b3.py?language=Englishqz(UK)
Click on the one marked P4-16 to see it. Has anybody seen the problem with handing a parent a form of this sort and asking her to answer the questions about her own child? I wonder how many parents will admit that their own child often lies and cheats? Or whether the average parent is objective enough to admit that her son often fights with other children and bullies them? Parents are the worst possible people to ask about this sort of thing! We all stick up for our kids and gloss over their faults, even to ourselves. Nobody will get an objective assessment of my daughter from me and I suspect that other parents are the same. A much more reliable way of establishing this sort of thing is for teachers and nursery workers to fill out these forms based upon their observations of children.
As I say, this really important test, which has led many to make such extravagant claims about what research has shown about home educated children in this country, was given to only twenty children. The answers were all those given only by the children’s mothers or fathers. When people like Mike Fortune-Wood say things like the quotation above about research showing that home educated children are highly social, well balanced and mix well with other children, what they are really saying is this; ‘Fifteen years ago twenty parents of home educated children claimed that their children were sociable and well balanced’. That is it, the whole of the evidence for this often repeated assertion.
Friday, 7 January 2011
Researching into the acquisition of literacy
In my local newspaper this week is the story of a woman who has just celebrated her hundredth birthday. She is a lifelong smoker and attributes her longevity in part to this habit. This reminds me somewhat of those home educating parents who claim that their children did not start reading until they were fifteen and yet still went to university. The point being of course that the hundred year old woman did not live that long because of, but in spite of her smoking. There is no doubt that some home educated children do not learn to read until quite late by school standards, but whether this is a desirable state of affairs or helped contribute to their later success is debatable.
Part of the problem when discussing home educated children in this country and how and when they learned to read is that almost no research has been done on the subject. That which has been done is based upon grotesquely small, self-selected samples and the results of each such piece of research often contradict all that which has gone before. I mentioned yesterday Paula Rothermel's testing of five children using the NLS tests and this irritated somebody who commented here. Let us look at two pieces of work carried out in this country about the reading abilities of home educated children.
Writing in his book How Children learn at Home (Continuum, 2007), Alan Thomas had this to say;
'Some children did learn to read early by school standards, but many were spread out in the seven to twelve age range and a few were even older than this'
This is, I will not say the standard view in British home education, nothing is that, but it is certainly a commonly held view. The idea being that if children are not made to learn formally at the age of five or six, they might acquire literacy a little later, but are not at all disadvantaged by this. We see this opinion expressed pretty regularly. We turn now to another piece of work which indicated precisely the opposite of this. In February 1997 Paula Rothermel, a student at Durham University, sent out 2500 questionnaires to home educators belonging to Education Otherwise. The following year she sent out the same number again and a small number to Local Education Authorities and a few other places. She received over a thousand responses. This work was carried out as part of her studies and subsequently formed the subject of her PhD thesis. One claim which emerged from this work was that home educated children scored far higher on standard tests of literacy than children of similar age at school. 'Far higher' is understating the case. Using the assessments for literacy which Rothermel did, one would expect to find 16% of children in the top band. According to Rothermel, no fewer than 94% of home educated six year olds were in this band.
In other words, according to Thomas and many home educating parents, it is common for children educated at home to be a little later than school children in learning to read. Rothermel claimed however that over 90% of the children she tested were doing brilliantly at reading at a very early age. It has not been possible to replicate these results; a fatal flaw in any sort of research.
Interestingly, a lot of the research in this field is carried out by students. The Otago work from New Zealand was by a student, as was the work on the sixteen pupils at Sudbury Valley which I discussed yesterday. Paula Rothermel's work too was that of a student. It would be very good to see a properly designed survey carried out of a large group of home educated children in this country, looking at the methods used and the long term results; ie, after the age of sixteen. Until this is done, we must really keep an open mind on the matter; the evidence so far being scrappy and unreliable.
Part of the problem when discussing home educated children in this country and how and when they learned to read is that almost no research has been done on the subject. That which has been done is based upon grotesquely small, self-selected samples and the results of each such piece of research often contradict all that which has gone before. I mentioned yesterday Paula Rothermel's testing of five children using the NLS tests and this irritated somebody who commented here. Let us look at two pieces of work carried out in this country about the reading abilities of home educated children.
Writing in his book How Children learn at Home (Continuum, 2007), Alan Thomas had this to say;
'Some children did learn to read early by school standards, but many were spread out in the seven to twelve age range and a few were even older than this'
This is, I will not say the standard view in British home education, nothing is that, but it is certainly a commonly held view. The idea being that if children are not made to learn formally at the age of five or six, they might acquire literacy a little later, but are not at all disadvantaged by this. We see this opinion expressed pretty regularly. We turn now to another piece of work which indicated precisely the opposite of this. In February 1997 Paula Rothermel, a student at Durham University, sent out 2500 questionnaires to home educators belonging to Education Otherwise. The following year she sent out the same number again and a small number to Local Education Authorities and a few other places. She received over a thousand responses. This work was carried out as part of her studies and subsequently formed the subject of her PhD thesis. One claim which emerged from this work was that home educated children scored far higher on standard tests of literacy than children of similar age at school. 'Far higher' is understating the case. Using the assessments for literacy which Rothermel did, one would expect to find 16% of children in the top band. According to Rothermel, no fewer than 94% of home educated six year olds were in this band.
In other words, according to Thomas and many home educating parents, it is common for children educated at home to be a little later than school children in learning to read. Rothermel claimed however that over 90% of the children she tested were doing brilliantly at reading at a very early age. It has not been possible to replicate these results; a fatal flaw in any sort of research.
Interestingly, a lot of the research in this field is carried out by students. The Otago work from New Zealand was by a student, as was the work on the sixteen pupils at Sudbury Valley which I discussed yesterday. Paula Rothermel's work too was that of a student. It would be very good to see a properly designed survey carried out of a large group of home educated children in this country, looking at the methods used and the long term results; ie, after the age of sixteen. Until this is done, we must really keep an open mind on the matter; the evidence so far being scrappy and unreliable.
Wednesday, 5 January 2011
Learning to read independently
Every so often, home educating parents in this country come across a piece of research which seems to confirm that they are doing the right thing in not teaching their kids how to read and write. Many people regard this approach as a form of educational Russian Roulette but, as I say, once in a while something crops up which apparently suggest otherwise. The latest such is a blogpost by a semi-retired professor of psychology at Boston College in the USA. It may be found here;
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201002/children-teach-themselves-read
It is certainly interesting, but repays a little closer attention. It puts me in mind rather of the research from Otago in New Zealand that was being touted on home education Internet lists some time ago as proof positive that the teaching of reading is unnecessary. Just as with that case, there is a little more to this than meets the eye.
To begin with, the conclusions which Peter Grey draws in this piece, radically different it must be said from almost every other educationalist in the western world, is that reading may simply be picked up in much the same way that oral language is acquired. So far, so good. It is not exactly an original thesis, but one followed as dogma by many home educators. He bases this belief upon work carried out by a couple of students at one school involving sixteen children. This is such an incredibly small sample, that already one cannot help but be a little dubious about being able to extrapolate from those sixteen children to a general principle in the teaching, or not, of reading. There is more though. These children were all pupils at Sudbury Valley School, a kind of American Summerhill. Grey forgets to mention in the article that he has been a trustee of this school since 1984; he sent his own son there. This at once tends to indicate a certain lack of objectivity about the methods being used at Sudbury Valley. It is a private, fee paying school, which at once means that only a certain type of family will be sending their child there. We know that a professor of psychology sent his son to the school; are there many other children of academics there? Are the children there from prosperous homes where there are many books? What is the ethnic background? Many questions of this sort occur to one immediately. How fair a sample is this? Sixteen children from one private school.
True, Grey then goes on to bolster his argument by citing another eighteen cases. Unfortunately, these are all anonymous people who commented on his blog! Come on guys, I am sure that we can all see the nature of the problem with that approach. Looking at this blog, we have some people commenting who are frankly barking mad. Would I be prepared to base a new theory of education upon the testimony of some of the types who come on here and comment? Probably not.
It would be interesting in the extreme to see a large-scale piece of research conducted into this business. Nobody doubts for a moment that some children acquire literacy informally; the question to ask is how frequent this is and what the common factors are in the lives of such children. Parents are notoriously unreliable witnesses when it comes to describing their children's attainments and most of us cannot remember clearly the process whereby we ourselves learned to read. There is, it seems to me, scope here for a properly conducted piece of work among home educating parents. We have of course see one or two attempts in this country at such a thing, most notably Paula Rothermel's twelve years ago. Unfortunately, she only carried out five tests of reading ability herself, an even smaller sample than that at Sudbury Valley. For the time being, we must enter a verdict of 'Not proven' on this question and hope for some work to be carried out in the future.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201002/children-teach-themselves-read
It is certainly interesting, but repays a little closer attention. It puts me in mind rather of the research from Otago in New Zealand that was being touted on home education Internet lists some time ago as proof positive that the teaching of reading is unnecessary. Just as with that case, there is a little more to this than meets the eye.
To begin with, the conclusions which Peter Grey draws in this piece, radically different it must be said from almost every other educationalist in the western world, is that reading may simply be picked up in much the same way that oral language is acquired. So far, so good. It is not exactly an original thesis, but one followed as dogma by many home educators. He bases this belief upon work carried out by a couple of students at one school involving sixteen children. This is such an incredibly small sample, that already one cannot help but be a little dubious about being able to extrapolate from those sixteen children to a general principle in the teaching, or not, of reading. There is more though. These children were all pupils at Sudbury Valley School, a kind of American Summerhill. Grey forgets to mention in the article that he has been a trustee of this school since 1984; he sent his own son there. This at once tends to indicate a certain lack of objectivity about the methods being used at Sudbury Valley. It is a private, fee paying school, which at once means that only a certain type of family will be sending their child there. We know that a professor of psychology sent his son to the school; are there many other children of academics there? Are the children there from prosperous homes where there are many books? What is the ethnic background? Many questions of this sort occur to one immediately. How fair a sample is this? Sixteen children from one private school.
True, Grey then goes on to bolster his argument by citing another eighteen cases. Unfortunately, these are all anonymous people who commented on his blog! Come on guys, I am sure that we can all see the nature of the problem with that approach. Looking at this blog, we have some people commenting who are frankly barking mad. Would I be prepared to base a new theory of education upon the testimony of some of the types who come on here and comment? Probably not.
It would be interesting in the extreme to see a large-scale piece of research conducted into this business. Nobody doubts for a moment that some children acquire literacy informally; the question to ask is how frequent this is and what the common factors are in the lives of such children. Parents are notoriously unreliable witnesses when it comes to describing their children's attainments and most of us cannot remember clearly the process whereby we ourselves learned to read. There is, it seems to me, scope here for a properly conducted piece of work among home educating parents. We have of course see one or two attempts in this country at such a thing, most notably Paula Rothermel's twelve years ago. Unfortunately, she only carried out five tests of reading ability herself, an even smaller sample than that at Sudbury Valley. For the time being, we must enter a verdict of 'Not proven' on this question and hope for some work to be carried out in the future.
Thursday, 25 March 2010
Academic research
A short while ago I was trying very hard to track down the sources for the various estimates for the number of home educating families in this country. These estimates vary greatly, as I am sure readers are aware. I wished to be accurate because the book of mine on this subject which is due to be published later this year is an academic work. This means that I can't simply make the sort of sweeping claims and wild statements that I regularly make here; everything has to be referenced. If I say that twenty thousand children are being educated at home, I must give my source for this information, for example (Hopwood et al 2007) or (Fortune-Wood 2005). Then at the end, I give details of the source so that others might check up for themselves later.
I found a couple of interesting things while I was tracking down the figures. One of the things was that people simply invent numbers and then the next person to come along quotes those guesses and references the first person's guess as though it were a piece of proper research. The result is that there is absolutely no reliable estimate of the true numbers of home educated children; just people quoting each other's guesswork. This will come as no surprise to most people. I did find a few curious things though. I was taken to task yesterday for supposedly belittling Paula Rothermel's research and suggesting that she didn't know what she was up to. A couple of people told me plainly that Paula knows more about statistics than I do and that compared with her I was a bit of a dunderhead, or words to that effect. A harsh accusation indeed! Well, let's see. One of the figures that I was very dismissive about was of course the idea that there might be over half a million children not at school. Why was I so scathing about this? I shall explain and in the process show why other academics do not take Paula Rothermel's work at all seriously. This is also why Graham Badman ignored it during his review. Follow carefully and you will see why people don't get excited about Paula Rothermel's claims about home education.
The figure of over half a million children not at school comes from a piece which Rothermel wrote in 2000. It is an apparently academic article, properly referenced. She said:
Moreover, there may be as many as 50,000 children educated outside school (ACE 1999). Combine this with the data that in 1997/98 there were 9,144,000 children aged 5-16 in the population, but only 8,583,400 registered in schools (DfEE 1999c). Where were the other 560,600?
Looks very professional and academic at first sight. Let's look a little closer. Observe the reference for the number of children educated outside school; (ACE 1999). I looked up this reference at the end of the piece and it says:
ACE (1999) Home education: a critical evaluation. ACE Bulletin. Advisory Centre for Education, No. 89, June.
This is promising. Perhaps I will find a source for the figure of up to 50,000 children being taught out of school! I tracked down this source and the opening paragraph says:
Home education: a critical evaluation
Advisory Centre for Education ACE: June 1999 No. 89
Over 50,000 British families are estimated to be educating their children at home. What do we know about home-education? Can ideas be generated that have relevance to education of children generally? Paula Rothermel, of the University of Durham, aims to answer these questions among many others. Her three year study of home-education, involving 1000 families, will be published early in the year 2000. Here ACE describes some of the study's preliminary findings.
Straight away, we have a problem. In the original article, Rothermel says that, 'there may be as many as 50,000 children educated outside school ' In other words, 50,000 children or fewer. The reference leads us to a source which says that, 'Over 50,000 British families are estimated to be educating their children at home.' In other words more than 50,000 children. The two statements are contradictory. Her reference does not back up her statement in the original article. There's more though.
This article is about Paula Rothermel's own research. There is nothing here to substantiate the figure of 50,000; as far as one can tell it is no more than a wild guess. In other words, she has tried to back up one unsubstantiated statement by giving as a source another unsubstantiated statement. Trust me, this is not how one does things in the academic world! The best is yet to come. Although the referenced article refers to Rothermel in the third person as though it is an objective account of her work and it says that ACE describes her work, at the bottom we find, "©P. Rothermel 1998". She actually wrote the thing herself. She has referenced her own work and tried to conceal the fact by giving the name of a magazine and failing to mention that it is an article written by her. Sharp practice indeed!
And just in case anybody has had trouble following all this, let me remind you that we are no nearer to finding out why she thinks that there are more than or fewer than fifty thousand home educated children in this country. Where does she get the number fifty thousand from in the first place? Perhaps now readers will realise why I don't take the rest of her guesswork too seriously. She may be an academic with a grasp of statistics and demographics, but she provides little evidence for it in this sort of work. To be fair, she is not alone. Every single estimate I looked at for the number of home educated children did precisely the same thing, just repeated previous guesses. And the source for the claim of over half a million children out of school? In the article this is given as; (DfEE 1999c). Will this lead us to some statistics which we can examine? No, the reference is in fact to a telephone conversation which Paula Rothermel says she had with an unnamed official in the civil service on an unknown day eleven years ago. No way of checking that figure either! Need I say more?
I found a couple of interesting things while I was tracking down the figures. One of the things was that people simply invent numbers and then the next person to come along quotes those guesses and references the first person's guess as though it were a piece of proper research. The result is that there is absolutely no reliable estimate of the true numbers of home educated children; just people quoting each other's guesswork. This will come as no surprise to most people. I did find a few curious things though. I was taken to task yesterday for supposedly belittling Paula Rothermel's research and suggesting that she didn't know what she was up to. A couple of people told me plainly that Paula knows more about statistics than I do and that compared with her I was a bit of a dunderhead, or words to that effect. A harsh accusation indeed! Well, let's see. One of the figures that I was very dismissive about was of course the idea that there might be over half a million children not at school. Why was I so scathing about this? I shall explain and in the process show why other academics do not take Paula Rothermel's work at all seriously. This is also why Graham Badman ignored it during his review. Follow carefully and you will see why people don't get excited about Paula Rothermel's claims about home education.
The figure of over half a million children not at school comes from a piece which Rothermel wrote in 2000. It is an apparently academic article, properly referenced. She said:
Moreover, there may be as many as 50,000 children educated outside school (ACE 1999). Combine this with the data that in 1997/98 there were 9,144,000 children aged 5-16 in the population, but only 8,583,400 registered in schools (DfEE 1999c). Where were the other 560,600?
Looks very professional and academic at first sight. Let's look a little closer. Observe the reference for the number of children educated outside school; (ACE 1999). I looked up this reference at the end of the piece and it says:
ACE (1999) Home education: a critical evaluation. ACE Bulletin. Advisory Centre for Education, No. 89, June.
This is promising. Perhaps I will find a source for the figure of up to 50,000 children being taught out of school! I tracked down this source and the opening paragraph says:
Home education: a critical evaluation
Advisory Centre for Education ACE: June 1999 No. 89
Over 50,000 British families are estimated to be educating their children at home. What do we know about home-education? Can ideas be generated that have relevance to education of children generally? Paula Rothermel, of the University of Durham, aims to answer these questions among many others. Her three year study of home-education, involving 1000 families, will be published early in the year 2000. Here ACE describes some of the study's preliminary findings.
Straight away, we have a problem. In the original article, Rothermel says that, 'there may be as many as 50,000 children educated outside school ' In other words, 50,000 children or fewer. The reference leads us to a source which says that, 'Over 50,000 British families are estimated to be educating their children at home.' In other words more than 50,000 children. The two statements are contradictory. Her reference does not back up her statement in the original article. There's more though.
This article is about Paula Rothermel's own research. There is nothing here to substantiate the figure of 50,000; as far as one can tell it is no more than a wild guess. In other words, she has tried to back up one unsubstantiated statement by giving as a source another unsubstantiated statement. Trust me, this is not how one does things in the academic world! The best is yet to come. Although the referenced article refers to Rothermel in the third person as though it is an objective account of her work and it says that ACE describes her work, at the bottom we find, "©P. Rothermel 1998". She actually wrote the thing herself. She has referenced her own work and tried to conceal the fact by giving the name of a magazine and failing to mention that it is an article written by her. Sharp practice indeed!
And just in case anybody has had trouble following all this, let me remind you that we are no nearer to finding out why she thinks that there are more than or fewer than fifty thousand home educated children in this country. Where does she get the number fifty thousand from in the first place? Perhaps now readers will realise why I don't take the rest of her guesswork too seriously. She may be an academic with a grasp of statistics and demographics, but she provides little evidence for it in this sort of work. To be fair, she is not alone. Every single estimate I looked at for the number of home educated children did precisely the same thing, just repeated previous guesses. And the source for the claim of over half a million children out of school? In the article this is given as; (DfEE 1999c). Will this lead us to some statistics which we can examine? No, the reference is in fact to a telephone conversation which Paula Rothermel says she had with an unnamed official in the civil service on an unknown day eleven years ago. No way of checking that figure either! Need I say more?
Thursday, 11 February 2010
Paula Rothermel and Deborah Durbin; a couple of puzzling points
In Chapter 3 of her book on home education, Deborah Durbin collaborated with Paula Rothermel for a section about recent research. Since this was done with Dr. Rothermel's cooperation, it is reasonable to assume that she stands by all that was said there. The second paragraph states;
"In 2002, Paula Rothermel at the University of Durham set about exploring the aims and practices of home-educating families from different social backgrounds in the UK"
I cannot help but wonder in what sense Paula Rothermel, "Set about exploring the aims and practices..." in 2002. By that year, the work had been completed. As early as 1998, Dr Rothermel was delivering a paper at Exeter which gave chapter and verse of the PIPS assessments and NLP tests. It is true that her thesis was not actually published until 2002, but that is a little different from that being the year that she, "Set about exploring" ! The most likely explanation is that any work from before the turn of the millennium is starting to look a little elderly now. By claiming that she "Set about exploring" in 2002, it makes the whole thing look a little more modern and up to date.
Even more curiously, Dr. Rothermel introduces herself by writing of, "the findings by me, Educational Psychologist Dr Rothermel of the University of Durham". Now most people would take that as meaning that she was actually working for Durham University. According to the Human Resources department at the university though, Dr Rothermel stopped working there in 2006. The piece in the book for Deborah Durbin is marked as being copyrighted for Paula Rothermel in 2008. Was she actually "Dr Rothermel of the University of Durham" at that time? More research needed there.
This may well seem to dedicated home educators as mere nitpicking. However, when a particular piece of research is as extensively quoted as the 1997/1998 work in this case, it is vital that both it and it's author are examined closely before making any judgement upon the validity of the findings.
"In 2002, Paula Rothermel at the University of Durham set about exploring the aims and practices of home-educating families from different social backgrounds in the UK"
I cannot help but wonder in what sense Paula Rothermel, "Set about exploring the aims and practices..." in 2002. By that year, the work had been completed. As early as 1998, Dr Rothermel was delivering a paper at Exeter which gave chapter and verse of the PIPS assessments and NLP tests. It is true that her thesis was not actually published until 2002, but that is a little different from that being the year that she, "Set about exploring" ! The most likely explanation is that any work from before the turn of the millennium is starting to look a little elderly now. By claiming that she "Set about exploring" in 2002, it makes the whole thing look a little more modern and up to date.
Even more curiously, Dr. Rothermel introduces herself by writing of, "the findings by me, Educational Psychologist Dr Rothermel of the University of Durham". Now most people would take that as meaning that she was actually working for Durham University. According to the Human Resources department at the university though, Dr Rothermel stopped working there in 2006. The piece in the book for Deborah Durbin is marked as being copyrighted for Paula Rothermel in 2008. Was she actually "Dr Rothermel of the University of Durham" at that time? More research needed there.
This may well seem to dedicated home educators as mere nitpicking. However, when a particular piece of research is as extensively quoted as the 1997/1998 work in this case, it is vital that both it and it's author are examined closely before making any judgement upon the validity of the findings.
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
Paula Rothermel's research
I think that it is time once again to take a close look at the work of Paula Rothermel. In practically every book, website, newspaper article or debate on home education in this country, sooner or later the research which Paula Rothermel carried out will be cited. It is impossible to overstate the significance of this work. Of course the author of the work cannot be blamed if others exaggerate or distort her findings. For this reason, I propose to limit myself to examining what she herself has to say about her own work. In Home Education by Deborah Durbin, (Hodder Headline, 2009), Paula Rothermel contributed a section about her findings. All that follows will be taken from this account.
The piece begins on page 26 with what one might term the standard story of the thousand responses to the questionnaires which she received and the four hundred and nineteen of these which were examined in greater detail. Dr. Rothermel goes on to say;
"This study remains the largest and most important of its kind, including as it did, a very broad section of the home-educating community. Access is always a problem with home education and my original survey was distributed through a number of home-educating organisations as well as religious groups, Local Authorities and Internet sites."
This is, whether by accident or design, more than a little misleading. Figure 4.1, to be found in Chapter 4 of Dr. Rothermel's thesis, reveals that in fact five thousand, three hundred and eighteen questionnaires were distributed. Of these, five thousand were sent to Education Otherwise. "A very broad section of the home-educating community" and "a number of home-educating organisations" does not really give the impression that 95% of the questionnaires were sent to just one organisation.
There follows an overview of the study. This talks about what the families valued, socialisation and so on. It is understood that this information comes from the four hundred and nineteen families whose responses were examined in detail. Then, without breaking step, Rothermel segues smoothly into the statement;
"Children aged between four and five years old were tested twice over a 'school' year"
Nothing is said to indicate that we are no longer talking about the four hundred and nineteen families. Any reader would naturally assume that this was the case. In fact, Dr. Rothermel is now talking about a mere thirty five assessments. (Chapter 6, 5.1) Without reading the original thesis, it is impossible to know this.
Later on, Rothermel mentions the literacy assessments which were conducted. These results are given as, for example, 94% of six year olds scoring in the top band. This is indeed impressive, until you learn that only seventeen six year olds are involved here; a very small sample indeed. (Chapter 4, Table 4.1) Even more interestingly, these tests were not carried out by the researcher herself; they were posted to the parents. This does not of course invalidate the results, but it is certainly the sort of thing one would wish to know about when evaluating the scores. I have mentioned in previous posts some possible disadvantages of such a method.
On page 31 of Durbin's book, Paula Rothermel talks of "The social and psychological data" We read that;
"The purpose of these assessments was to establish whether home-educated children experienced social or behavioural problems"
There were one hundred and three participants in this part of the research and three standard instruments were used to gather data, including the Children's Assertiveness Scale. In Chapter 4, 8.3 of the thesis, we learn that only four of these assessments were conducted in the presence of the researcher. The rest were posted out to families and done by the parents and children themselves. At this point, anybody who has actually had any dealings with real human beings will probably see a problem.
Parents are in general the worst possible people to be expected to make objective judgements about their own children's behaviour! I am sure that we have all met absolutely vile children whose behaviour is deplorable, yet the parents dote on them and apparently cannot see how badly their kid is acting. We are all a bit like this. I certainly have never been the least bit objective about my own children; their behaviour has always been perfect in my eyes! I think we can safely take the social and psychological data with a large pinch of salt.
As a vignette of British home education in the late nineteen nineties, this thesis is fascinating. It is when one treats it as a piece of serious academic research that the problems begin to emerge. The idea that to look too closely at a piece of research associated with a major university should render one liable to legal action is, quite frankly, preposterous. Durham University evidently know nothing about this and the person to whom I spoke there was a little alarmed to hear that they were about to become embroiled in such an affair. The correct way to deal with criticism of this sort is by calm and reasoned rebuttal, but I have a suspicion that this is not the approach that the author favours.
The piece begins on page 26 with what one might term the standard story of the thousand responses to the questionnaires which she received and the four hundred and nineteen of these which were examined in greater detail. Dr. Rothermel goes on to say;
"This study remains the largest and most important of its kind, including as it did, a very broad section of the home-educating community. Access is always a problem with home education and my original survey was distributed through a number of home-educating organisations as well as religious groups, Local Authorities and Internet sites."
This is, whether by accident or design, more than a little misleading. Figure 4.1, to be found in Chapter 4 of Dr. Rothermel's thesis, reveals that in fact five thousand, three hundred and eighteen questionnaires were distributed. Of these, five thousand were sent to Education Otherwise. "A very broad section of the home-educating community" and "a number of home-educating organisations" does not really give the impression that 95% of the questionnaires were sent to just one organisation.
There follows an overview of the study. This talks about what the families valued, socialisation and so on. It is understood that this information comes from the four hundred and nineteen families whose responses were examined in detail. Then, without breaking step, Rothermel segues smoothly into the statement;
"Children aged between four and five years old were tested twice over a 'school' year"
Nothing is said to indicate that we are no longer talking about the four hundred and nineteen families. Any reader would naturally assume that this was the case. In fact, Dr. Rothermel is now talking about a mere thirty five assessments. (Chapter 6, 5.1) Without reading the original thesis, it is impossible to know this.
Later on, Rothermel mentions the literacy assessments which were conducted. These results are given as, for example, 94% of six year olds scoring in the top band. This is indeed impressive, until you learn that only seventeen six year olds are involved here; a very small sample indeed. (Chapter 4, Table 4.1) Even more interestingly, these tests were not carried out by the researcher herself; they were posted to the parents. This does not of course invalidate the results, but it is certainly the sort of thing one would wish to know about when evaluating the scores. I have mentioned in previous posts some possible disadvantages of such a method.
On page 31 of Durbin's book, Paula Rothermel talks of "The social and psychological data" We read that;
"The purpose of these assessments was to establish whether home-educated children experienced social or behavioural problems"
There were one hundred and three participants in this part of the research and three standard instruments were used to gather data, including the Children's Assertiveness Scale. In Chapter 4, 8.3 of the thesis, we learn that only four of these assessments were conducted in the presence of the researcher. The rest were posted out to families and done by the parents and children themselves. At this point, anybody who has actually had any dealings with real human beings will probably see a problem.
Parents are in general the worst possible people to be expected to make objective judgements about their own children's behaviour! I am sure that we have all met absolutely vile children whose behaviour is deplorable, yet the parents dote on them and apparently cannot see how badly their kid is acting. We are all a bit like this. I certainly have never been the least bit objective about my own children; their behaviour has always been perfect in my eyes! I think we can safely take the social and psychological data with a large pinch of salt.
As a vignette of British home education in the late nineteen nineties, this thesis is fascinating. It is when one treats it as a piece of serious academic research that the problems begin to emerge. The idea that to look too closely at a piece of research associated with a major university should render one liable to legal action is, quite frankly, preposterous. Durham University evidently know nothing about this and the person to whom I spoke there was a little alarmed to hear that they were about to become embroiled in such an affair. The correct way to deal with criticism of this sort is by calm and reasoned rebuttal, but I have a suspicion that this is not the approach that the author favours.
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