A wave of illiterate “home schooled” children

I’m more than happy to believe my several years experience in both settings. A single weekly woodcraft extra curricular group made up of school going families is clearly not remotely representative of home education

Well that seems very counterintuitive to me. The adult-child ratios and lack of parental presence would make this unlikely imo. And I volunteer at a Woodcraft group which I imagine to be similar in some ways to a home ed group, but the strong parental presence does affect the dynamics even when not trying to intervene. Anyway, disagree if you wish, I'm not actively trying to persuade you, just sharing my perspective.

In high school especially, it is. Yes.

How would that occur? Given that children with SEN are over represented in home e’d bevause of the systems failure to include them?

That’s been my exact experience iver yhd years, too.

Far more helicopter parenting at school settings

How would you compare it fairly?

I would say there is more supervision and interference or socializing in schools than at home Ed groups. Parents are there but not micromanaging socialization unless needed for genuine reasons.

In schools they don't get the freely socialize in class time

I don't think it's especially odd - it's what people have pointed to on this thread as well as in my experience irl when people I know who home ed have been asked about socialisation. And of course there will be friendships built outside of these but my point was that these friendships might have a bit more parental oversight than the equivalent friendships at school.

I've no idea what you mean about 30 mins 5 days a week. I assume you are referring to lunch break, as if that's the only time school kids interact with each other.

Again, I think there are pros and cons to home ed and to school but it is as well to acknowledge the cons and seek to mitigate them rather than deny they exist. Same as I look for ways to mitigate the downsides of school.

How odd that you think 30 minutes max 5 days a week would in a school setting would build deep friendships and that home ex oarents behave jyst like school parents and rely on a big of extra curricular and lunch breaks to build friendships.

In my experience mang of ys weng oug of oug way to notice yhd friendships forming and to provide additional opportunities to develop them further.

Social skills - it's more the opportunity to build deep friendships that comes from prolonged exposure with only light adult supervision that I would worry about missing out on.

A lot of home ed parents point to extra curricular activities for building social skills and it's not impossible to build deep friendships this way but it's fair to say most children at these activities will already have their closest friends from school and not really be in the market for the same at eg swimming or gymnastics. That's not to say school is the only route - one of my dd's best friends is our NDN's daughter, and they do have good friends from Woodcraft folk where they've been camping together over many years - but both of these have the same ingredients of a lot of time exposure and only light parental oversight. I imagine some home ed groups are similar but it must be quite tempting to get involved more than you might do over school friendships etc - or naturally gravitate towards people with whom you have most in common.

It's certainly not necessarily deal breaker, but I think it's perhaps undervalued and I'd be seeking out these kinds of opportunities quite actively if I were to home ed.

There’s no real/accurate data concerning EHE children. Ask yourself why.

Having data to compare would be very useful.

If results are lower than similar pupils in schools , then something is going wrong and it needs to be looked at, for the children’s benefit.

If results are better , then again, this needs to be looked at and see if any of the things that are going well could be implemented in schools, particularly in the case of struggling children.

If results are similar , then everyone just cracks on as they have been .

I think I would have some questions to ask you back?

Is school the only place to socialise? - it’s not, there are many home schooling communities where children get together to socialise, they also join many clubs where they make friends and socialise. Home educated children are not having a lack of socialisation.

soft skills? Please elaborate on what soft skills schools offer that are actually important for working life post school? I don’t think there are actually many. Most of school life doesn’t translate into work now.

post primary - do they need all the subjects? - no they don’t, we don’t use 90% of what we learn at school after school. A parent only need to be able to teach what they and their children need which is different for every person.

I would suggest school leaves very little time with parents working and taking children to activities to teach young people life skills. Home education offers lots of opportunity for that.

I am more concerned about the many many parents who don’t want to home educate who are forced to as their school system has no space to meet their needs or they have been kicked out. Not those who choose to home educate.

my children were not home educated but I wish they had been.

I agree that HE works for some children and not for others. I would very much have liked to HE my eldest DD (subsequently diagnosed AuDHD and who struggled in school, although not academically).

I'd like to know from those who do or did, how do you cope if there are younger children in the house (ie, under school age) who need to be occupied while you also need to supervise and assist your home learner, and how does it work if you can't afford to employ tutors for subjects you can't get to grips with yourself?

I know all about the statistics thank you, as I get safeguarding training regularly. You know what else is part of that training? Peer on peer abuse. Because it is a thing and it is happening.

Statistics also show that women are most likely to suffer abuse at the hands of a partner or ex partner. Does that mean that sexual harassment in the workplace doesn’t happen?

Ensuring that a certain standard of education is being met is reasonable, but why would you need to compare them? I'm not sure I understand the benefit of that as an across-the-board measure. Our local authority carry out checks in person and by way of self-reporting, to ensure that an age appropriate education is being provided.

I'm in favour of a national home ed register, incidentally.

I think it depends what sort of school options individual children have tbh.

What's been available to us was so dire, and our options got smaller and worse over time, as the sharp elbowed middle classes pushed us further and further out of catchments and anything not officially sink schools.
The Dc that we where finally backfooted out of the system over, aside from getting little education, first suffered serious batterings,some of it put on the internet to be laughed at, then broken bones in three separate incidents, was stabbed in the neck with a compass, declared gay, sexually attacked and threatened, and finally was shot at, before I stopped listening to 'yes, but they need to go to school.'

That Dc came out with their MH in a terrible state, and tattered poor education, and while they've done well, they carry a physical injury that is still causing pain all these years later, as well as hidden issues, from what was done to them.

I do understand where you're coming from, but on balance I absolutely wouldn't unless it was either an exceptional leafy state school, or private. Both out of my range. That Dc holds similar opinions but wouldn't trust even a good state school, having worked in them. They just wouldn't take the chance.

Everyone else out of the older schooled ones, just suffered standard stuff if they couldn't keep their heads down far enough, most learnt to be as invisible as possible and get through it, but one (very gentle soul) was terrorized out in their exam year with threats to set them on fire and another (severely dyslexic) was being pulled into gangs and I let them leave underage as long as they worked full time instead. None of them would want to chance their Dc's futures even though their experiences weren't generally as bad.

I ended up having a lousy time with authorities and then having to take them to court all because I was one of their failures who sent my Dc's to their schools.

Having found how to have such a different and worry free positive education and lifestyle, that allows us to mix with different levels of society, instead of being kept in our lane, I reckon it will be at least the great grandchildren's generation before we get one who might decide they want to try school education. Mainly because I think my DGC's will probably end up quite MC, while their parents mask as it, but hold fundamentally WC values. So I can see one of the grandchildren's children maybe thinking they might like to be more educationally conventional...
But currently for our family who are finally thriving, there's just no reason to want to engage with the school education system, beyond some choosing working in them as a career.

But there is no data , that’s what I’m trying to say, we can’t compare your children’s success and that of your friends children with anything out there.

state and private all publish their data, we know which performs well , which doesn’t.

I think the radical unschoolers shout the loudest, will tell everyone their opinion and seem to be the most likely type to have a dedicated Instagram or tik tok set up to show their children running around in the woods, they also tend to be the ones who appear on tv shows etc and people see that and put all home educators into the same bracket.

In reality we are a diverse group of people all coming to home ed for different reasons. There are radical unschoolers at one end of the spectrum and hot housing types at the other end but most people I have met over the years fall somewhere in the middle(myself included).

There are definitely problems within home education and I don’t think it does us any favours when people deny this. I am not against more input into it from the LA although I am honestly not sure how I think this should look but I think moves to create a positive relationship between local authorities and home educators could only be a good thing for everyone involved, most importantly the children. Unfortunately at the moment there is a lot of mistrust.

@Elleherd I meant that it was sad that those children have been denied a chance. I can quite see school isn't for everyone. Some of them are hothouses, some are zoos. A very narrow curriculum and obesession with results is all wrong. Little children buckling under the pressure. Bigger children developing all sorts of health issues.

People can learn at any age. Children develop. The male brain hasn't fused until the age of 25 or so. All this is forgotten.
I do think on balance, children should at least be given a shot at school.

I appreciate I'm an MN outlier.
Many years ago, my then husband could only read and write in capitals, and I was totally illiterate.
Both of us products of the school education system, him solidly at the same schools throughout. I started late, was moved a lot and left early to take care of a dying parent.
Both of us came from families with low literacy and numeracy or illiteracy.
His family called me a snob for wanting better.
Schools had very low expectations for his prior Dc's (my stepDc's) and our mutual children.
The cycle of generational educational failure has been downright encouraged by the system that when I was young I thought would want, help and encourage my children and step children to do better, and tell me how I could manage to help at home. Instead I was just fobbed off, despite being keen to attend meetings, ant take advice etc.

He never advanced and died perfectly content with using only capitals and calling the TV and Argos magazines "the books." His family continues to see education as boring.
I taught myself literacy in my 20's when I realized my lot would be failed for as long as I was dependent on schools to do it all for my Dc's.
I've self-educated since then, and my older ones have repaired their poor school education alongside the younger ones with Home ed, when finally things got so bad for one Dc it was the only option.
One of them, is one of two who went on to be school teachers.
Yes it's great to have everything together early, and not having it makes for a harder path, (which actually teaches you lots too) but if there's no fundamental SN's preventing learning, what age you are doing what at, doesn't mean that has to be the rest of anyone's life.

Fair point. I will amend to say 'most that we've met or encountered over the 18 years we've been home educating.'

That include a fair cross section of hundreds of families - we live in a city where home ed is exceptionally popular.

You can’t say MOST home ed children are like anything as there is no data. We know some, the ones on here, are doing lots of extra curricular stuff, but there are others doing nothing. Not the ones on MN probably. It’s not a complete representation.

How can you read all of the comments from experienced home educators on this thread and still be asking these questions and making statements like this?

Most home ed kids have pretty conventional lives, join non-home-ed sports, drama, music clubs, etc, do GCSE's, and crack on with their lives, the same as school kids.

Mine are in college now doing A Levels. A friend's DC was home educated through A Levels and is now at Oxford. Nearly all the older home ed kids we know have gone on to Uni.

If you're thinking about radical unschoolers, then bear in mind that they do NOT represent the larger home ed community!

Awful, to be writing in capitals at aged 9. What a handicap that is.

Sorry.