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

Another parent here who was forced to remove our youngest autistic DD from year8 secondary as it was a nightmare. The school was one of the good ones who tried hard with lots of adjustments but ultimately if she wanted to learn maths, English and science at higher gcse level she had to sit in a class of 30+ peers with all the noise, perfume smells, poor behaviour & sensory overwhelming environment that it brings. By the time we removed her she was unable to do basic self care, get dressed, eat she was so shut down. It’s took months to enable her to be in a place to learn effectively again, but I’m expecting her to take her first 2 GCSEs a year early as academically she’s bright. Socially she does a couple of activities outside the house & has long video calls gaming with a couple of close friends she also has a small business selling something she has completely taught herself using online tools to facilitate communication. She will definitely have the skills at 18 to earn money when if we had left her in “school” she would no doubt have ended up attempting suicide and not have got any qualifications. Education is for life, school is not. However too facilitate this I took a 20% pay cut & hours to work from home & DH does wfh on one of the days too cover her too, we spent 1000s on tutor support until securing EOTAS after the LA dragged us through horrendous send tribubal to get it and we are “lucky” ones apparently as now have a small amount of funding to enable her to take GCSEs but considerably less funding than the cost of a 1:1 TA in school or a specialist school which they would not fund!

I took my DS out after 5 months. My DS has ASD & ADHD. His mental health nosedived, he wasn’t coping, it made him sad. He was bullied both verbally and physically. I removed him the first time he mentioned killing himself.
Primary school was fine, secondary was a whole different story. An adult wouldn’t be expected to ‘cope’ and struggle in a job they would be told to leave and find a new job. On paper my DS is not severe enough for a SEN school.
My child’s mental health is worth so much more than a grade.
He attends lots of social activities through Scouts and various youth clubs.
I am lucky enough to WFH 3 days a week, the two days I am required in the office his dad takes over and teaches life skills, how to change a plug, how to read a bus timetable, cooking etc.
I did have to cut my working hours, I do feel my work progression has suffered because of this, I will be stuck in the same department on the same hours for at least the next five years.
I am also considering home schooling my younger child once they finish primary, more due to the state of the secondary schools in my area.

The education system needs reform and the National Curriculum needs to be slimmed down massively. My daughter was school refusing in Reception at her "Outstanding" school, I pulled her out and put her in the "Good" local school half way through the year and she has started to thrive - it's not perfect but the whole environment on students and teachers is much lower pressure and they value her as an individual and she has so far not refused to go in. Year one will bring new challenges I'm sure.

I took my DD out of state school the class sizes and noise was too much for her. I’m a lone parent so the only choice I had was private school. I found a small one, very nurturing 10 in a class two classes per year. She thrived there. I could not have home schooled her anyway, PDA, AuDHD. I can only be her mum, not her teacher. She has responded really well to online tuition though, I’ve used several tutors to support her GCSE revision. That works well.

I took my daughter out, probably 6 months too late to be honest. She was also in the grey area of not being able to manage mainstream and not being “bad” enough for a specialist school.

I forced her into school because I thought it was the right thing to do, but mainstream schools are not set up for children with SEN. You might be lucky and find one that is, but it’s rare. In my daughter’s class of 30, 6 had additional needs. It would be impossible to meet the needs of all of those children and educate the rest of the class too. The resources and funding just is not there and teachers are stretched to the limit as it is.

My daughter was self harming. She couldn’t sleep, she wasn’t eating. She was masking so hard all day that she was exhausted, she had no friends and she wasn’t learning or thriving in education, she was (barely) surviving.

I am lucky that I was able to home educate her, I know not everyone can. We follow the national curriculum at home, and at the moment is seems like she’d like to follow a career working with animals so we are doing some online courses to facilitate that also.

I’m not sure what the future holds, but she is happy and safe at home and working towards GCSE’s. Will she take as many as her peers in school? Probably not, but she will take the core subjects plus a language. It’s more than we could have hoped for a few years ago.

The education system needs reform I think.

I think it's going to be impossible to get the kind of longitudinal, large case study evidence you want because the reasons why children can't engage with school and can't attend, and the reasons why parents pull them out, are so widely varied.

There are some children for whom school in a traditional sense is going to be impossible and traumatic, even with accommodations. There will be other children who could cope but only with extended time off regularly to "recharge", which some schools will make impossible for parents due to pressures on attendance. But they'll also be some children - even ND children, as a parent of one - who could benefit from school, but have learnt that particular tactics enable them not to attend (I don't think those children are happy btw, and they are still in need of support, but withdrawal from traditional school might not be the best option). There will also be a group of parents deeply traumatized by their own school experiences who can't be clear sighted on their children's schooling. They'll be a tiny minority of parents who just don't care.

Picking all of these apart requires regular consulting with professionals with psychological and educational expertise which its almost impossible to access.

How?

How is it removing them from a future? Have you home educated?

I think it's so individual in each case that it's almost impossible to measure.

One of the children in DDs SEN class has been removed and is homeschooled. He's not learning any more than he did, he's still kicking off regularly, but he isn't suicidal anymore.

So not successful on all the parameters you mentioned, but thankfully successful on the one that had his parents absolutely terrified and unable to leave him unsupervised even for a minute.

I think many do, yes. I used to home e’d due to autism - when they went back into school they were tested and found to be way ahead of their peers academically - the return to school was an unmitigated disaster.

I don't think that they have a choice when the child is suffering from severe anxiety and the school cannot provide support.

Schools need to radically change their provision for autistic / ND children. It wouldn’t take much to do this. It’s not always about funding.

I sympathise with children and parents that are forced into a system that is just not designed to help ND. But removing children from school is removing them from future society.

I’ve seen friends battle and battle to get their kids into a specialist provision, which has then worked brilliantly. They didn’t have the option of home ed as housing costs meant both parents needed to be at work. And those kids are now thriving.

Conversely I know kids who never started school as the parents assumed they had SEN and wouldn’t cope. I think that was partly they wanted an excuse to home ed (control over all of the children’s lives), partly they’d got sucked into social media constantly reiterating the difficulties for SEN children and mainstream schools. Because the people who were managing fine, whose school was making adjustments or who had moved school successfully weren’t posting about it. The people who were posting were the ones who were really struggling and desperate for advice and support. Those people were completely non-plussed by my child who is ND but thriving in school because the structure, certainty and clear expectations of behaviour and achievement really help.

It has always been a thing, but why do you assume the outcomes were good? My asd mil has had a lifetime of poor mental health and eating disorders.

I genuinely don't believe it is more prevalent now, I think because families are all more connected online etc we hear about it more. 30 years ago if a ND kid crashed out of school due to being overwhelmed and refusing to go in, who would hear about it? Would have been seen as rare and a bit shameful and the family probably just quietly disappeared a bit.

Interesting question. my dd is still in school, but she is demand avoidant and we think the wheels will come off at secondary as there are already signs of school refusal and some very difficult days. I think secondary school is fundamentally badly set up for autistic people, the amount of pupils, the noise, you’re changing your environment every hour by going to a new classroom with a new teacher. It’s a level of variation that few people are expected to deal with in work. I actually work in secondary and I’ve long thought they needed to fundamentally shift to be more suited to the neurodivergent.

I tortured myself about whether I did the wrong thing when I took my nonverbal DC out of first school (quite quickly tbh). How could I know I was right when they couldn't even tell me definitively what was wrong? Then, 5 years later we bumped into DC's old class and DC starts screaming blue murder and self injuring and I knew I made the right decision.

From observations as an educator, home schooling is not a good substitute for a school based education. Children not developed socially nor educationally.

Parents shouldn’t be able to control their children’s future to their possible detriment.

We did online school/tutors for GCSEs by the way, there was no way I could teach DD2 either.

From the person I know who withdrew so many. The children are happier but then again I think most children would be happier out of school than in it if you gave them the choice.

Emotionally it’s like they stopped growing up at the ages the left school though.

Their case is quite unusual though in the sheer number of children in one home though and as you say op and I agree I couldn’t homeschool 6 children not properly giving them the age appropriate work required either.

They are fortunate in once sense that the mum never worked so they have always survived of dads income and a bit of a top up.

I don't know if it improves educational outcomes in general, but you have to think about your own individual child, not statistics. I'd have loved nothing more than for DD2 to have stayed in school and done seven or eight GCSEs, and it certainly would have been a damned sight cheaper, but it seemed like we were moving rapidly towards a situation where her attendance would be so low and she was so behind the school syllabus that she wouldn't be allowed to or able to take any exams in Y11.

And it improved her mental health and confidence almost overnight. We got our daughter back. She has just sat a handful of GCSE exams, one to go next week.

I know of loads of kids who did not thrive at school but got on well at college. And lots of HE kids do well academically. For us it felt like the only realistic and best option at the time.

I think the problem is if mainstream isn’t working there is no other option other than homeschooling.. so yes a child might not flourish educationally in either however emotionally more likely to be happier at home .