Stop homeschooling your children.

Yes exactly and sorry I meant ten sessions not 10 days. There is so much nonsense on fining at the moment schools can’t fine Willy nilly. Look up your local LAs rule on fining and it won’t be three days of sickness! I work in a school and there are plenty of parents that should get fines that don’t. Schools should ask for medical evidence if a child is persistently absent that is below 90% parents are sent a letter advising of this. All kids get sick so they wouldn’t be fined for three odd days of sickness. These will be parents with kids that are persistently absent. If a child has a genuine medical reason for having a lower attendance then they won’t get fined. It’s just annoying a lot of these posts are making things up about fines.

Genuine question - how did you teach her then if your own attainment was well below “all 9s” level?

I agree that children being home schooled need a decent level of teaching, so if parent is poorly educated and they are not using tutors= not great.
Many parents (me included) learnt an awful lot about the ciriculum and state schooling during lockdown. We saw how much teaching is scripted from online platforms, marked by AI, is not structured to meet needs and extract best performance/ development of child.
We also learnt that teaching your own children can be hell on earth, especially when you have 2 or more children.
One of our DC is now in independent school as a direct result of home schooling ( alerted us to the level of support that they needed and had been minimised by the school SENCO, school failed /discriminated/failed legal responsibility to DC) the other attends mainstream secondary but really seriously considering pulling them out. Mainstream school is like a cattle market, churning out children who could do so much better if they were not all lumped into same teaching/curiculum approach. If we were to “home school” we would use tutors and groups, not a chance that we would revisit solely parental schooling because that wouldn’t be of benefit to any of us. If we stay in mainstream, we will pay for tutors anyway because DC needs teachers who have time to explain the things that they haven’t grasped in class (before they move on or extend the topic). I don’t think they are taught learning skills or how to identify and improve their own weaknesses ( ime strengths do get recognition), how to retain key information, how to answer exam questions, that is ok to ask for help, it is ok to not grasp a concept on first attempt, how to read exam questions, revision skills. We do this at home but it is not reciprocated at school by many teachers At least not in pre gcse years 7-9

The gov website says this :
Currently, it’s the responsibility of the local authority to decide when to issue fines to parents, meaning the process varies from council to council.
However, under the new national framework, all schools will be required to consider a fine when a child has missed 10 or more sessions (5 days) for unauthorised reasons.
From August 2024, the fine for school absences across the country will be £80 if paid within 21 days, or £160 if paid within 28 days.

I have multiple advanced degrees

i love the internet

Neither do I.

That is a lie. They can only fine after missing 10 unauthorised days at school. People are just making up this crap about fines. There are strict rules in place about fining. You don’t have to give a drs note either that’s only if they are on a med1 or med2 where the child is persistently absent then they start asking for medical evidence. Not when they have been off three days a year for goodness sake.

It’s outrageous to say that statistics exist on what motivates parents to HE? Can’t you see why that is information that the government would want to have?

Try googling it if you don’t know how to find sources, I’m not your research assistant.

@VulvaArmy and @VikingLady can you please link your sources? Your claims are outrageous and you should be able to back them up if you expect us to believe them.

Erm ‘stop homeschooling your children’?! Oh ok then…

I’m curious to know what has prompted you to post this very one sided post? Why has this annoyed you so much?

Have you seen the state of our education system? Who are you to tell parents who can and can’t home educate? I’m an ex teacher and I took my DC out (& myself out) for what you may call philosophical reasons. Is that ok by you? We unschool. Is that ok by you?

Yes, a report to the LA once a year. Just writing my sons now

My dc have been home schooled all the way through.

Of all the he children I met along the way, I would say 30-40% were getting a good education, 80% were getting at least as good as they would have got at their local school (which most of them integrated into without difficulty at ages 15+) and the other 20% were being pretty much failed by their parents (but mostly ended up integrating OK into school, with some extra help for the first few months).

The main reason I thought some of them would be much better off in school was not the learning, as frankly most children learn eff all in school, but the toxicity of some of the individual parents involved. Getting away from those parents for whatever reason for at least some hours a day could only have been a good thing, and school was the only way they would be likely to.

Can you point me in the direction of the evidence that children from every socio economic status do better being home educated?

Genuinely fascinated by this.

So please link your sources.

Have you reported them?

I home educate. This is because our primary school is rubbish. My eldest children passed their 11 plus with myself as their tutor and went to the local grammar. I said to my DH, I can only do home education upto year 6.
I do see what OP is saying. There are a lot of weird home edders. And I do think there should be rigorous checks. No one has bothered to check on my children.

Its a complicated issue and having crap schools with behavioural problems doesnt help.

Statistics are free for everyone to see.

No, they clearly don’t categorise groups like that- I was paraphrasing. Statistics do exist on the motivations for EHE- but obviously they don’t have ‘we are hippies’ or ‘I just can’t be arsed with the school run’ as labels- the information is there, it does require some form of analysis to understand it though.

And she's right. Home ed isn't pouring whatever your education level is, into empty vessel children who only learn what you know.

It's about facilitating, providing/accessing resources, and teaching children how to learn, and expand themselves, and making learning enjoyable. The internet at our fingertips even when traveling, has really opened it up to anyone who's prepared to put the effort in, regardless of their educational level.

My children and grandchildren are massively more academically educated than I am, but I bring older knowledge and skills, and common sense and enthusiasm to the table.

Home education is great in some circumstances.

However, I can think of a few family vloggers, like the Inghams, who are badly letting their kids down. The kids all seem very behind both academically and socially. It’s a method of control for some families and no one seems to be looking out for these children.

I' d like to see the statistics please. Is there really statistics that put people in categories like " hippies", " ethnic groups " and
"... people taking advantage of EHE to get away with neglect/abuse-"?

I actually offered DD the option, both DH and I have PhDs (one arts, one science) and could cover most subjects easily apart from geography. She said no thankfully. She doesn’t want to be taught by us.

I know 2 families that home schooled. One super religious. The other was all wrapped up in the mothers feelings of being let down educationally, she thought she was super intelligent and had only failed her degree by not being pushed. So she took her children out to ‘push them’ But then ended up just taking them on lots of day trips and then only doing lessons on things she was interested in. She’s actually cut everyone off so no one knows what’s happened to her children.

My friend is an education officer in a museum in a very middle class area. She loathes the home Ed groups. She says the children are very badly behaved, not like school kids, but indulged and incredibly rude to staff (says the school children are usually excited). They have to provide a monthly group for them and they all dread it. That they think they are right about everything even though they aren’t.

@ithinkwerealloldnow
Yes I do think that some parents use it as an excuse to hide from the authorities - meaning the children can become 'invisible'. There used to be some kind of assessment/ check from local authorities but I don't think that's done in any depth, if at all now.

They aren't the exception in our friendship groups. (Partly because I cracked the external candidate exam system.) We are all quite bright tbf but it didn't save me dropping out of school young, illiterate, innumerate and unable to tell the time and straight into motherhood. It took my first kids to be being dreadfully failed for me to realize as long as I was uneducated, no one would do much for them.

Our friends tend to be either MC long term unschooling EHE's who are horrified at our structured methods but also end up at uni regardless, (I wouldn't dare, but hats off to them) or WC on our estate, failed by our crap local schools.They are doing HE to a large extent the same way we do, because they can see it's worked for us, plus (like most HE's) we share resources with others who need them.

Most, not all, of my lot have initially been quite critical of university before figuring out how to get the best out of it. But they've all figured out how to use it well despite the issues thrown up, and found their own tribe across disciplines.

If you were to look into the statistics rather than relying on social media, you would find that EHE is comprised of mainly ‘hippies’, religious/thought groups, ethnic groups and a number of people taking advantage of EHE to get away with neglect/abuse- but the rise in numbers recently is driven by families affected by SEND/EBSR/MH difficulties (for obvious reasons).

It is not driven by whatever drivel you are watching on IG.

This.

I've toyed with home ed, not because I want to but because the school system, funding, curriculum and increasingly draconian rules are all shit. Teachers are leaving in their droves for good reason. Just read an article that TAs are teaching GCSE classes in some schools.

That's interesting - as there was a thread on here a couple of days ago, an AMA by a Roma Gypsy and she was being slated for taking her children out of school . Everyone was saying that it wouldn't be possible for her to home educate as she didn't have secondary schooling herself. Yet, you are suggesting the opposite .