A wave of illiterate “home schooled” children

I'm not going to read that whole website. My understanding was that inspections are not compulsory.

£2 Tuition Hub is brilliant, you can either do live lessons or recorded ones (or a mix of both). We've been using them for a while and are really impressed.

Yes we have tried £2 tuition. They are very good, but my son didnt like the group aspect (same kids kept leaping in to answer things). Also never seemed to find sessions that aligned with what we were doing at the time.

We tend to work on a 'project' basis, so we choose a topic to work on for 3-4 weeks linked to something in the news, a day out we have been on, or just something that catches his interest.

For example, we have just done the Agricultural Revolution. We did comparing and contrasting texts (fiction and non-fiction), looking at language features, he wrote an essay discussing the positive and negatives of th3 Revolution, then worked out percentages of yield growth and ratio, how steam engines worked, and went on a day trip to a museum. Realised that he had either forgotten/not been taught %s very well at primary and early secondary school, so went back to basics using Twinkl and you tube videos alongside me explaining and demonstrating. At the beginning of the week, he couldn't do percentages. Now he's able to answer GCSE questions on them. We have also both learned about how steam engines work, which was nice to learn together.

The next few weeks he wants to look at aviation, and I cam see this being a lot of fun!!

We love Twinkl - some brilliant resources on there.

You might be way ahead of me and already be familiar - plus I can't vouch for them personally, as we've never used them - but I keep seeing £2 Tuition Hub popping up on the HE forums. We have used LLP for some additional input with some subjects - most lessons are £3 each, and all delivered by qualified teachers.

There is so much good stuff out there now!

We dont use tutors. Couldn't afford to.

However, im a qualified teacher, albeit it primary and secondary English. I got good gcses and I read through the material he needs for maths and other subjects, and make sure I understand the content, and my teaching experience allows me to break down content in a way that he can also understand it.

We also use a lot of free online recorded content, which is led by teachers and specialists (oak academy, Corbett maths, twinkl, and you tube - maths man is brilliant!).

You are correct, but what concerns me more is that children can come out of school with that same level of literacy. Those parents you are talking about probably went to school.

I think school can't instil literacy and it has to come from being spoken to, read to, spoken to in narratives for example.

My children watch TV with narratives, we read books, and we converse.

Some children from very disadvantaged backgrounds are not spoken to, no back and forths, cocomelon on the telly, never read to, probably don't know what they're even looking at when books are shown in school.

I think it all goes to show that it's home education that prevails, whether the kids are in school or not.

I'm also more worried about the ideology they are being fed and then their lack of interaction with kids from varied home lives. They're going to be illiterate AND heavily shielded. So where some kids could get by on social cues and sort of knowing what's going on in the world, these kids won't have that.

Have you ever seen the movie Nell? They'll be like that.

100% agree with this. Every home ed family I know, from the most traditional to the most unschooly bare feet hippy one, uses some form of tutoring - whether that's face to face, live online, recorded or a mix of all of the above. DD likes to spend Sunday afternoons doing online tutorials; she's currently doing fashion design, to be followed by Sociology.

Did you ascertain why she was 'miles behind the others'?

Your post suggests that you've decided it's because she is HE, which sounds a little like a rush to judgement.

I’m a secondary teacher and we had open day this week for year 6. A girl came with her parents and she was currently homeschooled. I don’t know what she was like academically (I can guess, but I won’t) but in every other way she was miles behind the others. It was like talking to an 8 year old. She will really really struggle in September whichever secondary she attends which I’m sure will reinforce her parents decision to homeschool again.

Ah, my friend is a radical unschooler so that must be why she is very anti school / test / anything that resembles school.

Yes, I should have been clearer on that - I'm definitely talking about KS3/GCSE stages with tutors. With younger DC, it's less common. Although we did use a tutor with languages at an early age, as it was something the kids wanted to try, and a small group was running that was particularly lovely!

I prefer small mixed groups where the children get the benefit of each others' ideas. By explaining and helping their friends it helps them to consolidate what they have learnt.
At GCSE level we have used a mix of small face to face groups, small online groups (for a MFL), self study with textbook and exam papers, working/studying with a friend who was doing the same exam, live lessons. This is augmented by workshops, exhibitions, field studies and anything else that makes for a more rounded experience, plus obviously plenty of unscheduled time with their friends.

We live in a very working class area so there is a healthy mix of different types of people, different levels of education etc. We do have a strong community who will help each other navigate the above to find the right combination of approaches that works for their child. I dare say it may be people with less confidence, or who find themselves home educating in an emergency that use more tutors. We get tutors trying to join our groups all the time but I don't imagine we're a very lucrative bunch in our neck of the woods especially when families have made plenty of connections.

Typically if I'm taking my child to an exhibition, there's an open offer for their friends to come with us. They may not be studying the same thing but are likely to come because everything is more fun with friends! Their parents will do the same so there are lots of opportunities to share interests and discover things that may not have been on the radar of each individual family.

Probably as you get towards GCSE more will use tutors - very few are going to use tutors for 6 year olds.

More common among families I know are shared classes (for example 5 families splitting an hour of tutor time at £10 each rather than an hour of 1:1 at £30) or online classes.

100% correct.

Completely untrue.

No HE families are judged for using tutors. It is the norm across nearly every section of HE, except for a minority of radical unschoolers.

Of the home educating families I know:
A couple have a SAHM parent
A couple have two flexible/freelance/wfh parents
One has one parent working full time and one doing an evening job
One is a shift working single parent
One is separated parents working around each other

Often they're also using grandparent care, childcare swaps with other families, home ed settings or childcare settings.

Do you home educate? That is the polar opposite of our lives.

We've home educated for 18 years, 2 DC doing A Levels in college, one doing GCSE's next year, one coming through the system.

That's completely normal for our wing of HE. Literally every family I know uses tutors - online or face to face. It is 100% the norm. There are countless learning opportunities that people access, FB groups for supporting exams, tutor groups, curriculum-linked field trips, the whole lot. Since COVID, more tutoring gateways for HE have sprung up than I can count.

The only people that might attract SOME judgement from SOME HEers are the ones who are completely autonomous and don't encourage any formal learning or exams at all. It's the complete opposite of what you say.

Suggesting that home educators are 'judged' for using tutors is simply untrue. I'm sure it exists in some knots of hardcore anti schoolers, but it NOT the norm.

Definitely not true in the leafy middle class and affluent area I’m in. Nor true in surrounding areas I’ve met home ed families from that are more mixed demographic wise

Ah, the old 'I know everyone and everyone says and thinks the same as me.'

The reality - the factual stuff - is that since HE numbers have grown exponentially, the market to provide education independently has grown as well. And nearly everyone uses at least some part of it.

They’re racing to the bottom

Demonstrably untrue.

It’s kinda of a faff really, why not go all out and enroll them in private schools?

Definitely not true in the leafy middle class and affluent area I’m in. Nor true in surrounding areas I’ve met home ed families from that are more mixed demographic wise.
They’re racing to the bottom.
There ARE home ed parents who use tutors, follow a curriculum and a great education is being provided. But it’s not the majority and not the ‘norm’ in home ed and heavily discouraged … you’ll absolutely be judged for it.

Someone said the majority of HE are using tutors? Is that actually true or a MC view of it. i imabine a lot of HE couldn’t actually afford that.

Here in Ireland I can name a few well known religious fundamentalists who home school, and have not surpringly turned their offspring into religious fundamentalists also.

It’s probably loose because those middle class / even upper class people who do it have quite a powerful voice. And perhaps tighter legislation would affect some kinds of private schooling? Which I suppose is, in effect, collective home schooling, just of a very high standard.

Where I am children in local authority care have to go to Online school for 25 hours a week from their care homes. But they don't get to go to one of the accredited ones. Instead there's a cheaper in house LEA provided option that is also offered to some EOTAS children through EHCP's.

Acquaintances children had to go into care when she became very ill and had to go into hospital. The educational standard was significantly lower than their generally quite low achieving school and the older one had to drop from six to four exam subjects. Two of three lost their school places as they where considered enrolled elsewhere.
They reported most kids in their virtual classroom where entirely disengaged and found the whole system and provision very depressing. One went to a normal online school afterwards, and found it a whole different world

Home schooling is an actual type of education system where the school system is almost entirely replicated at home using mainly only materials used in schools. There is no requirement for depth and breath as long as exam questions can be answered. In some home schooling situations a school or LEA actually organizes, marks and is responsible for the work.
I gathered that during Covid many school education based families where forced to try and do this system.

Home education is an entirely different type of educational system, where the parent is entirely responsible for providing a suitable education for their child, which can be achieved in many very different ways but doesn't replicate school, even if exam syllabuses used by schools are being studied. Ie as I've mentioned in another post; a dc of mine studying physics IGCSE did most of their initial learning, experimenting and recording of the forces and motion component on a surf board in Cornwall. The 'river processes' component of geography was literally done in rivers "mucking about in (and out of) a boat, while learning to sail, and picnicking, and learning how to use ordinance survey maps to track down Oxbow lakes.

They don't need to - they already accredit a number of the existing ones. They make it challenging to get them paid for through EHCP though.

And I can see why! Suppose it took off? It'd potentially completely change education!