Is there any evidence that home education/ taking your child out of school improves outcomes for SEN children?

There's no easy answer to this. Discipline policies won't help behaviour based in a different need. Yet, if school can't help support the kid properly then it's not going to work. I imagined the kid had SEN needs beyond that you may have been aware.

The current system is so rigid I wonder how most kids cope. I rarely if ever hear any secondary school kid tell me they like school. This is NT kids.

We didn't have this detention policy approach to every minor issue in my day. It's become the totally wrong tool to address everything.

It's not the teachers fault either most the time. The system is set against them.

I look at the homework my teen has and just question continually what is this bullshit. What's the use in that rubbish.

I wish someone with a brain would overhaul the entire system and it would solve a multitude of problems. We have emotionally dead boarding school raised buffoons dictating this for our kids and we are all seen as the problem if we dare question it.

I would ideally have loved a Flexi type system for my teen where they just don't have to study the more bollocks subjects of less importance imo.

One of DS classmates was removed to home ed. He was a bright enough kid but terrible behaviour (impulsive, disobedient and would hit other kids/be too physical with them). Parents were very "gentle parent" and fought school trying to impose any consistent boundaries.

Worryingly he's now seemingly gone really off radar. I think he sees very little of other children socially and still isn't learning to follow rules/adhere to boundaries.

Screens but also schools having fewer disciplinary options and becoming noisier and more chaotic as a result.

There are too many variables. All I can say is I have spent 4 years battling to keep DD in school. I know if I had taken her out she would have withdrawn from the world completely. It’s taken me losing my job and battling every day to get her support in school though to make it happen. If school had the resources earlier on I think we could be in the position we are in now, although she never managed to go back FT.
she had a friend like her who was struggling to attend. She spent most of a year in a support room working on a computer alone and then just never came back to school apart from one day. I saw her mum and at one point she hadn’t left the house for over a year. I don’t think she was doing any work either.

Elective Home Education for us was forced. As for evidence its so individual but for us at least the difference is night and day. Ds went from non verbal and severe behavioural issues to being able to functionally communicate and no longer displaying challenging behaviour. He also has epilepsy and has been virtual seizure free since he left school. The stress he was under was making him ill. We have been able to focus on his communication, build his confidence and he's now becoming a far more independent young man. All the support he needed that we provide was in his ehcp but not provided despite numerous attempts to enforce it.

I'm not electively home educating, it is very much forced upon me! Kids are still on roll at a mainstream primary, we haven't deregistered. Council have fought us every step of the way. We have had pointless mediation, where the person turning up isn't authorised to make any decisions. We are on tribunal waiting lists over a year long. One child is now finally hopefully going to a state special school, but the council are trying to push for a cheaper srp option. The other child has had 8 schools now say they can't meet needs and eotis is still being denied, despite being considerably cheaper than the ludicrously expense private school they are currently consulting with. Not that I believe they will say they can meet need anyway.

If we had more support and flexibility earlier on, I fully believe that things wouldn't have got this far for at least one of them. The amount the council must be spending to fight us while providing no one an education is staggering.

Sorry, I've not read the whole thread but this kind of blanket statement is just not true. Very few home-ed children are 'removed from Society' and if they are I'd argue that the home-ed title is being used to cover other motives.

From what I've seen home education is as varied as parents and children. It really does depend on the reasons why a child is struggling and the kind of alternative provision put in place. For many home-ed children that means they're as much a part of society as any other child it's just on different terms. So their schooling might involve home ed groups, other community groups, Forest school set ups, local sports/arts/chess/drama groups, mixed aged activities, tutoring groups etc.

I think the biggest difference for ND kids being home schooled is that socializing can be tailored to their specific needs in terms of environment, duration of activity, sensory triggers etc. This actually builds resilience/tolerance rather than pushing them to crisis levels of anxiety and a burn out situation. It's a bit like staged exposure therapy implemented at the child's pace so as the child matures they learn more effective strategies to cope with the world, allowing them to access the opportunities they need.

The other thing to bear in mind in terms of preparing kids for the world of work is that traditional schooling - a large, diverse cohort all grouped together for 11-13 years with no real option to opt out - is not replicated anywhere else in adult life (unless you end up incarcerated or join the military). Even quite regulated work environments offer far more flexibility than this - and even if they don't you at least have the possibility of choosing a different job/ career.

Back to OP. You are obviously trying to do the best you can for your child within the constraints of your family situation - finances, risk to future earning power, your own abilities, child's temperament, other family member's needs etc - and as a parent there's not much more you can do than that. Your child may not be thriving in school at the moment but things could improve as she matures/ expands her friendships and there will be benefits in terms of easier access to qualifications.

Would her outcome be better if she was home ed? There's little point thinking about it if there really is no option to do it. Most home ed parents of SN children I've encountered are only taking this path as a final option (often at massive personal cost to them and their family) after all other strategies have failed. For them the alternative is complete non-attendance and/or extremely mentally unwell kids so comparing future outcomes between the two groups feels pretty redundant for them.

Only anecdotal. During Covid my daughter’s school did a fantastic completely online program. The teachers taught live online and then students had work time. Overall student outcomes are reported to have suffered, but she soared. She has ASD and being in a classroom environment is stressful. The peace and quiet of being at home combined with the independent study nature of the work was ideal. It wasn’t home education as she still had a teacher for every subject. It was just education done at home, without the difficulties created by other students.

I can only speak anecdotally, Mine did not cope with the transition to senior school in a large academy so we took him out for three years.
He went back in, Had missed nothing. Was put into middle sets, Which to be fair is what I was in at school so no surprises there. And has gone on to complete GCSE’s A-levels and a degree from a redbrick university in a subject that we didn’t teach him at home at all.

This must be a very difficult subject to meaningfully study since schools vary so much in the quality of education they provide - and the level of stress/trauma they inflict - and children's needs and temperaments vary so much.
Plus of course the home situation can vary.

The children who are removed from school to home educate would likely have done very badly at school, or not attended - whereas the ones who are managing at school tend to stay.
It's not like you can randomly assign children to home ed or school ed.

Personally my child is thriving at home, personally, socially and educationally - and I would never send them back to a school.

I can understand why people do, my son is absolutely not in the right setting and has been refused a special school placement. I can see why those in similar positions will pull their kids out but I just don’t know how they do it. I’d be an awful teacher for him.

And of course, giving actual quality support to home educators is quite out of the question - how DARE we have opted out (or in many cases been forced out before our children came to serious harm) of their shit show

My daughter doesn't have an SEN diagnosis but she is a tricky one - academically she is years ahead, emotionally she is years behind where most 11 year olds are (she seems pretty on track for where 11 year olds were when I was 11, mid 2000s, but they seem to be growing up so quickly these days).

She came out of school in year 5 and even at that point, some of the girls in her class were starting to exclude and make catty comments about the girls who weren't wearing make up and didn't follow fashion etc. Couple that with a huge social media incident involving DD, who doesn't have any social media herself, and we took her out pretty quickly.

She's absolutely thriving in home ed. If we had access to a small secondary with good provision for MAT pupils, we'd enrol her in a heartbeat, but she loves being home educated and is making incredible progress, which the LA are aware of and very happy with.

This 👏👏

Yup. It’s giving a false sense of fairly cheap security to beurocrats who don’t seem to be able to look at the evidence - home educated kids are no more likely to suffer abuse and neglect than kids under 5 and school age kids

Purely about being seen to do something, even if the something isn't going to make a jot of difference when endless opportunities to actually do something useful are missed.

Cheaper than properly funding social services so these repeated mistakes by staff with no hope of keeping up with their workload stop happening no doubt...

Yup. It’s giving a false sense of fairly cheap security to beurocrats who don’t seem to be able to look at the evidence - home educated kids are no more likely to suffer abuse and neglect than kids under 5 and school age kids.

It’s nothing more than a stick. I only became a home educator bevause the shit show that is SEND and CAMHS and health and social care was far more awful than just pulling my child out.

Theu’re in their 20’s now and are adamant it was the best thing I ever did for them (and probably the biggest sacrifice I’ve made) It certainly didn’t do me any favours.

The new legislation coming in is BECAUSE of Sara Sharif being withdrawn from school and murdered. So you can climb down from your high horse.

If the previous system worked as well as you say it did, DC like Sara and others would have been protected wouldn't they?

Sara was murdered in the school holidays so being at school wouldn't have protected her.

Sara was a child who was on the radar of social services before she was even born. She was in care before she even started school. Her sibling was permanently removed from the family. Her teachers reported their concerns numerous times.

Sara was failed in many, many, many ways by multiple people. She was not failed by the homeschooling legislation. It's not only ludicrous to suggest that changes to this legislation will protect children like her, but is downright dangerous to do so.

That poor child was failed to the point her life was in danger long before homeschooling was a factor in her life.

The reason people are struggling with the proposals re closer regulation of H.E is because it doesn't really feel like it's for the love of those kids abused at home tbh. Do we really feel this is a well thought out investment in protecting kids being abused. What else are they doing for those at risk kids.

It will certainly add more loopholes for the huge population of parents already punished enough in an education system that becomes a full time job to navigate. The majority of parents implementing H.E I have no doubt will have SEN kids, they're not the horrible stories we're hearing about.

If Government actually did something that helped SEN parents managing all this, addressed why so many kids can't function in the current school system.... actually did something and then also regulated home schooling then we'd get it.

It feels to me like another gimmick. A shit one that will probably be terribly mismanaged I don't doubt..

"I would love to do a longitudal study of this but I imagine the environmental factors would make it almost impossible to measure reliably."

I think you have hit the nail on the head with this point. Given you can't have one child who is both in school and not, you can never really do this study. Parents will be different at how they educate there kids. Schools cope in very different ways with different children. A child with certain needs might thrive at one school and fail at another, one parent might home-educate their child well, while another withdraws their child and barely educates them at all.

There'll be

• a child that gets to achieve their dreams because coming out of school took away their anxiety
• a child that gets to achieve their dreams because they were pushed to manage their anxiety and stay in school and school gave them opportunities that being home educated never could.
• child that would have achieved their dreams if they'd been pushed to manage their anxiety and take all the opportunities that school offered them, but their world was closed because they were removed from school.
• child that would have achieved their dreams if they had been removed from school and nurtured at home, but fell apart because they were forced to stay in school
• also the child who fell apart because they were forced to stay in a particular school, but might have thrived at another
• or the lucky child who thrived at their school, but might have been broken by another.

I have one good friend whose daughter has Downs Syndrome and a close relative whose daughter has Retts Syndrome. Even with these severe disabilities they have had to fight with the local authority to get appropriate school provision.

DD2's needs were extremely mild really. If schools were not stupidly draconian, stupidly massive and noisy, stupidly pressurising and able to keep DCs safe then at least 15% of the 20% or so who are currently failed by mainstream school could be included, all kids would have better outcomes, and teachers would not be fleeing the profession in droves. She thrived in primary school as it was much smaller, individual and quieter. Then you go to secondary and it's a bear pit with Professor Umbridge in charge.

@DeftLemonTraybake Yet another ridiculous assumption based on nothing. Firstly your concern was children who aren’t home educated going on to be benefit claimants, and now it’s child abuse?

Sara Sharif who was murdered in the school holidays and wouldn’t have been in school in August anyway? Sara, whose teachers had reported their concerns to social services more than once yet the case was closed?

What about kids under 5 who aren’t in school because it’s not compulsory, are they exempt from abuse? You have not got a clue.

I’m not concerned about my ability to be good a social worker thanks, I’ve worked in social care for many years and have done bloody good job with the people I worked with.

Oh of course it does.

That doesn't remove the issue as a potential concern though.

Some DC having a substandard education or no education I'd imagine

But don't forget that this also happens in schools. Some kids do complete the school system and still have no useable qualifications - it happens. We mustn't assume that being present in school automatically means qualifications gained and potential fulfilled, in the same way we can't assume it is the all homeschoolers either. When my kids were attending school, they weren't getting an education. They weren't even coping day to day. My son has less academic input as a homeschooler than when he was at school, but he's grown in leaps and bounds in taking responsibility for himself. And we decided that his character, and growing in his talents and life skills and responsibility for himself, was a crucial foundation for academics that he was missing and that he'd eventually crash and burn without. So we pulled him out to home-ed. Will he have gaps in his learning compared to his peers at 16? Yeah, but he'd have had them if he stayed at school too - just different ones.

You mean the ones who were already on the LA’s radar who failed them?

And what if the far greater numbers of children in school abused and killed?

Daniel Pelker?

Thd statistics available do not suggest that children who are home educated have a greater risk of abuse, neglect and death - but given the way you talk I’d imagine critical thought and looking at the evidence first is your strong suit.

Every single one of the home educated children I’m aware of were already subject to CIN or CP enquiries/processes - home education doesn't force a local authority to cease those enquiries.