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.

Sharp practice by Education Otherwise

During the fuss about the Badman report and its aftermath in 2009, many home educators complained bitterly that the proponents of increased regulation for home education were using  dubious and in some cases downright dishonest statistics to support their case. Leading the fight against this practice was of course Education Otherwise. It is therefore particularly sad to see that organisation using precisely the same tactics, despite having their attention drawn to what they were doing, over a year ago.

Readers will probably be aware that Education Otherwise was heavily involved in fighting the proposals in Wales for the registration and monitoring of home educated children. They circulated a document to every member of the Welsh Assembly Government. Here is the page from the Education Otherwise site which explains all this;

http://www.educationotherwise.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=334&Itemid=335

Note particularly the following;

Trustees are in the process of drafting an EO response to the proposals.  In the meantime, a briefing paper is being printed and sent to all Assembly Members.  Drafts of this have been circulated widely, but the final text is here (or see download link at foot of page).  We hope that Welsh home educators will be able to make good use of this well-informed document, in considering their own responses to the consultation.  

You will of course observe that this document is, 'well informed' and that Education Otherwise endorse it fully. When they express the wish that home educators , 'will be able to make good use of this', presumably it is hoped that these parents will quote from it and use the figures which it contains.   Far from being well informed, it is a truly dreadful piece of work; riddled with errors, exaggerations, distortions, inaccuracies and falsehoods. Many of the figures it contains are false. I do not have the time or energy to go through this long paper point by point, but last October I drew attention to a couple of really bad examples; deliberate lies which had been inserted into the thing in order to mislead those who were unfamiliar with home education. Shena Deuchars, at one time Chair and currently a trustee of Education Otherwise, came on here and agreed with much of what I had said. You might have thought that having had these matters pointed out over a year ago, Education Otherwise would have either withdrawn or at the very least amended the briefing paper. They did not and still have not. This suggests to me that they are happy to spread falsehoods and phony statistics about home education if it will advance their own point of view. 

What were the two points to which I drew attention over a year ago? Here is one of them. This is a quotation from the document which Education Otherwise are still touting on their website:

 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. 

This is completely untrue. The PIPS were actually administered not to 419 families but to 35 children. What is the motive for increasing the number twelve-fold in this way? It is a deliberate and cynical attempt to make the research look a good deal more extensive than was in fact the case. It can hardly be a simple mistake, because of the way that it has been edited to leave out the actual number of children assessed using PIPS.

Here is the other instance which I gave;


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. (N.Wilts).


This is even more awful! Far from these figures relating to one home education group, they are actually  for the entire population of home educated children in the United Kingdom; perhaps 50,000 children. The reference to , ' the 52 older children involved', is intended to conceal this, by making it seem that we are talking about children involved with this one group. Again, this cannot be an innocent mistake, because the author has gone on to the site and copied the figures. As soon as the person writing this document went onto the site, it would be seen immediately that  anybody in the world can upload anything they please to this site and make whatever claims that they wish. Nobody checks what is put there. Pretending that the results relate to records kept by a single  group  was designed to make them look like verified and typical outcomes for home educated children. There really can be no excuse at all for Education Otherwise not to know about this, because of course the site was set up by Shena Deuchars, formerly their Chair.   Here is the site:


http://www.nwilts-he.org.uk/he_exams_wiki/index.php/Exam_results

I do hope that the irony of this does not escape readers. In 2009, Education Otherwise are filled with righteous indignation at the idea of anybody using false and misleading figures during the course of a debate on home education. Three years later and they are caught playing exactly the same game themselves! Not only that, by encouraging home educators to, 'make good use of this well informed document', they are trying to make others spread misinformation.

Oxford

A short, rambling and personal post today. As some readers may be aware, my daughter is in her final year at Oxford, studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics; known generally as PPE.  People sometimes ask whether there is any prejudice on the part of universities against admitting home educated children. I can only say that if there is, I've never seen it. My daughter, after all, did not spend a single day at school. The Oxford system fits in so perfectly with her home education, that it almost seems like an extension of the methods which I used when she was a small child. Let me explain.

Although  many home educators regard me as the arch-apostle of 'school at home', the educational technique that I followed was  largely based upon conversation; we talked about the subjects in an informal way. In most universities, the method of teaching is quite different from this. The students sit in what is essentially  a big classroom. A teacher stands at the front and lectures them. The idle ones can text their friends or let their minds wander during this process, just as they were able to at school.  This is the system even in first class universities such as Durham or York. Oxford is very different. There, much of the teaching takes place by the tutorial method. This means that the student has a one-to-one meeting with somebody who is very possibly the world's greatest expert on the subject under discussion. Even the larger tutorials only have a group of two or three; four at the most.  This means that the student has no choice but to take part and express opinions. Needless to say, this can be a daunting prospect if the man or woman in front of you knows more about this topic than anybody in the world! This method does not suit every young person, but for home educated children it is absolutely ideal.

Another way that Oxford differs from most other universities in this country is in the amount of written work expected.  Most universities require only one or two essays a term. At Oxford, it is two or three  a week. These cannot just be dashed off in a hurry either, not unless you seek to be humiliated on a regular basis. Just think, you might be writing about the German philosopher Nietzsche and the man who will be criticizing your essay will have written the textbooks that you have been studying!   Sustained essay writing of this sort is not taught much in maintained schools these days and so that too can prove a trial for some students. My daughter though was set increasingly long and complex essays from the age of five. Another triumph for home education! 

I think that home education is the perfect preparation for studying at Oxford and I am surprised that we do not hear of more home educated young people going there. It is my impression that their upbringing provides them with a definite advantage in that setting.

Possible increased risk of serious abuse among home educated children in the United Kingdom

We looked yesterday at some cases of the murder of home educated children in the United States. Commenting on this, one person made the assertion that; ‘I can't see that it is more likely to afflict home educated children than others.’  This of course is a common claim by home educators in this country; that home educated  children are at no greater risk of abuse than schoolchildren.  If you repeat something often enough and loudly enough, then after a time, people sometimes begin to believe that it is true, simply by virtue of their having heard it said so frequently.  Perhaps it is time to examine this particular  statement and see what we can make of it.

One of the problems with calculating rates of abuse, or educational attainment or anything else for that matter, among home educated children is that we don’t really know how many there are. We know that 20,000 home educated children are known to local authorities in England and Wales and that there are also some children unknown to local authorities. Let’s assume that for every  home educated child known to local authorities, there is another, about whom they do not know. This would give us approximately 40,000 children. Expressing this as a percentage of children aged between 5 and 16, would suggest that something like 0.5% of children in this country are home educated. This is around one in two hundred. So if we take a random sample of two hundred children, we might expect to find one home educated child among them. These are of course very rough figures.

Suppose now,  that we take a group of 36 children aged between 5 and 16. If we have drawn them at random, then there is a slim chance of finding a home educated child among those 36 children. The odds are 6 to 1 against the group containing a single child who is home educated. Still, even if you found one or two, that wouldn’t really signify. Coincidence and chance play strange tricks sometimes. If however you found that  8 or 9 of that group of 36, 25% of the total, were home educated, then you would know that this was an atypical group, drawn from a section of children  which was far more likely to be home educated. The proportion of home educated children would, after all, be around 50 times as high as in the general population. 

Let us now look at such a group of 36 children. Here are the statistics for every serious case review evaluated  by Ofsted from April 1st 2010 to September 30th 2010; a six month period. It is important to realise that these are the statistics for every SCR, there has been no cherry picking;

http://www.cambslscb.org.uk/files/The_voice_of_the_child.pdf


These cases involve 93 children in total. We are interested only in those children of compulsory ’school’ age, that is to say between the ages of 5 and 16. We find that there are 36 such children.  If we look at sections 34 and 35, we see  2 cases which  cover 7 home educated children in 2 SCRs. We also see that there was another case which involved home educated children, although we are not told how many children were involved in that one. If we assume that it was 1 or 2, then that would give us 8 or 9 home educated children out of the total of 36 who were covered by the serious case reviews in that six months of 2010. What we are seeing here is a proportion of home educated children in this special group of 36 children who were involved in serious case reviews that is 50 times the rate in the general population of children aged between 5 and 16. 

I find statistics such as these quite intriguing. Although the samples are small, I think it fair to say that we can see many times  more home educated children than we would expect, all else being equal. Of children aged between 5 and 16 involved in serious case reviews over that six month period, 25% were educated at home; 50 times the percentage one would expect in a random sample. It is statistics  like this that make some professionals uneasy. Of course, the figures we have used are very rough and ready;  the true proportion of home educated children identified in cases of serious abuse in a random six month period might be  a little less or a little more than 50 times as high as in ordinary society.  We are not talking here though about some minor variation that only a trained statistician could identify; home educated children are hugely over-represented in this sample.  I will be busy for a few days, but will be looking again at this question soon.

Home Education UK tidies up its act (a bit)

I was pleased to observe that Mike Fortune-Wood revamped the home page of his site, Home Education UK, yesterday, in response to some of my criticisms here. This is encouraging, but more needs to be done!   I cannot help noticing that Lord Brougham is still featured prominently. The quotation by him on the home page suggests that  Lord Brougham did not approve of  compulsory education and was in some way a supporter of home education. This is preposterous. I drew attention to the fact that he actually attempted to introduce a public education act in 1837 which would have paved the way for universal schooling. It would, if passed, have been similar to the 1870, Forster Act. Lord Brougham said at the time:

‘ some legislative effort must at length be made to remove from this country the opprobrium of having done less for the education of the people than any of the more civilized nations on earth’


He later became an even more fierce advocate of the importance of schooling; particularly for the working classes.  In 1858, he said;

‘There is an absolute necessity for changing, in important  respects, the method of educating female children, not only in  the humbler but the better part of the working classes. They   must be taught things which are of use to them in after life. A good system of rewards, the judicious application of prizes,  the due encouragement to successful teachers of common  things, and a steady determination in the patrons of such  schools to enforce the most useful teaching in the first instance’


Enforcing 'useful teaching' in schools? This does not exactly sound like a ringing endorsement of home education in general, let alone autonomous learning,  and I hope that Mike Fortune-Wood will now seen the light and  remove  all reference to Lord Brougham from the site.

 Next week, we shall examine a few of the people whom this site claims were home educated, starting with Frank Whittle; inventor of the jet engine; who began school at the age of five and left at the same statutory age as everybody else. Until then, readers might like to consider for themselves the extent to which the Wright brothers might properly be considered to have been home educated.

Another American case involving home education

I have written a couple of times about home educated children in the USA who die in terrible circumstances. Often the common factors in such cases are Christianity and/or adoption. Here is the latest such case and having read this article, it might be helpful to click on the links at the bottom which cover the case in more detail.


http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/05/after_irvington_suspected_negl.html

Einstein, the famous home educated kid

I have mentioned here before that at one time I was quite involved with the gay scene, forty years ago back in the days of the GLF. One of the curiosities of the more militant gays at that time was that they were very keen to prove that practically every famous person in history had really been gay. Any character who came up, from Napoleon to Alexander the Great, Hitler to Jesus, would be claimed as gay. I have in recent years noticed the same tendency on the part of home educators to pretend that a lot of famous and successful people were in fact educated at home. Almost invariably, the list of such people is headed by Albert Einstein.

Now some of the people who are supposed to have been home educated might have spent a year or two being tutored at home or had a governess or something. C. S. Lewis often turns upon these lists, due to his having started school at eight instead of five. Others were born before schooling was common or lived in an area where there really were no schools. In the case of Einstein though, there can be no possible reason for pretending that he was educated at home. Shortly before his sixth birthday, Einstein was enrolled at a Catholic primary school. Three years later he began attending the Luitpold Gymnasium, where he stayed to the age of fifteen. When his parents moved to Italy in 1894, Einstein stayed at the school in Germany for a while, before following his parents, who had now moved to Switzerland, and at the age of sixteen applying to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, from which he later graduated.

I suspect that many minority groups play this game of 'Lots of famous people were gay/Freemasons/Jews/Home educated'. Home educators, are definitely a little bit over the top about it though. I am afraid that the claim that Einstein was home educated has caused a good deal of amusement among those who know the value of schools. He had a brilliant mind, but it was developed and cultivated not by home education but by the rigorous educational system operating in late nineteenth century Germany. He was a product of formal schooling.

Home educated NEETs

There is great concern over the number of young people in this country who are NEETs. This acronym stands of course for young people over the age of sixteen who are Not in Education Employment or Training. The latest figures collected in the run-up to the select committee hearings next week suggest that roughly four times as many home educated young people are NEETs; 22%, compared with just over 5% of school leavers. I don't doubt for a moment that these figures will be the subject of fierce debate. For example, does the definition of "not in education" include those who are still learning at home? In other words, by "in education", do the local authorities mean only those young people in a college or school setting? But if they were true, would it tell us anything useful about home education as opposed to school education? Almost certainly not. The reasons are fairly straightforward.

Despite all the fuss and anger among the few hundred home educators who are determined to cast themselves in the role of martyrs to a callous, uncaring and monolithic state, nobody is really at all worried about those children who are being educated at home. The target is really quite different. The confusion has arisen because the expression "home educated" is used to cover practically any child who is not at school. Not all of those children are actually receiving an education and it is these who are giving cause for concern.

Well who are these children? I was accused recently of talking too much about council estates and so today I shall be talking about a fairly typical case of a child from a prosperous, middle class home who stopped being educated at the age of fourteen. I know about him because he is my nephew. I think it worth describing his circumstances at some length because he is precisely the sort of child who precipitated the recent review of elective home education conducted by Graham Badman.

When it became clear to my family that I had no intention of sending my daughter to school, there was much shaking of heads, pursing of lips, narrowing of eyes and sad looks. I dare say some readers will also have experienced this! Leader of this faction in my own family was my sister in Manchester. However, by the time her youngest son was thirteen she was having enough trouble with him to cause her to stop worrying about my affairs. He began truanting and unless she could get him off to school before leaving for work, he would simply go back to bed. Soon after his fourteenth birthday, he decided that he would simply not get up in the mornings any more. Since he was over six feet tall by then, there was no question of making him get up and get dressed.

My sister was at a loss to know what to do. My home educated daughter was ten at that time and I had discussed home education often enough with my sister. So she hit upon the luminous idea of de-registering him from school, adapting an educational philosophy from the HE-UK site and then refusing any visit. Well, she is an articulate and forceful woman and this ruse worked a treat, at least from the point of view of preventing her from being sent to prison for her son's truancy. The only slight problem was that the boy now spent all day in bed until about two in the afternoon. He would then get up and play computer games or watch television until the evening, when he would go and hang round the streets with his mates. I need hardly add that he became a NEET as soon as he reached sixteen.

It is children like these who are the problem. It would be foolish to describe him as "home educated" because nobody, least of all my sister who is a very busy woman, was providing him with any education. Nor was he educating himself autonomously, unless you count the acquisition of the ability to buy and sell small amounts of illegal drugs as a useful life skill. Nobody knows how many children there are like this. It would have taken only a single visit and a few questions by a sharp eyed local authority officer to uncover this deception. Of course, if my sister had been in the room, she would have been able to jump in first with the correct answers. This is where speaking to the child alone really comes in handy!

This then is the nature of the problem. Not children being educated autonomously, but children receiving no education of any description whatsoever. I have no idea what the remedy is to this problem. I don't think that sending my sister to prison and putting her son into care would have been a good idea. Nor do I think that it would have suited anybody to force the child back into school, where he would just disrupt the education of those who did wish to learn. It is this sort of situation that the new legislation is intended to deal with. I do not for a moment suppose that it is in anybody's mind, Graham Badman, me or anyone else, that parents who are autonomously educating their children should be the target of some crackdown. It is, as I said above, really only those who are not receiving an education at all who are likely to be affected by any new law.