A wave of illiterate “home schooled” children

Kent is a very large county and no doubt contains some wacky beliefs

It also has a Reform Council, a truly rubbish SEN department, and a significant minority of kids in grammars, so it's already got some big stressors for anyone outside the norm.

Couldn't have put it better. Even home educated children who get all As are missing out on the above. Also school drama productions and school trips.

Point is, the world is organised into communities. Work, neighbourhoods, social groups. School is the best place to learn about community by being part of a large one.

But I do have a lot of sympathy for parents of SEN kids who are not being adequately supported by the school or the LEA. There are definitely cases where home education is best. But I'm talking about non-SEN kids.

I imagine the success rate would be higher, because a home educator is hardly going to pay a fee to sit a GCSE if they don't have a reasonable expectation the child will do OK, and they can choose to sit a small number of GCSEs or even just one.

I agree. It seems recent. In Kent there's a definite rise in 'anti- woke, anti- LGBT, anti- vaccine, anti-muslim, don't trust the bbc, don't trust the government, don't trust looney leftie teachers' rhetoric which has extended to parents pulling their kids out of school. Along with a new wave, this month, who are now refusing to send their kids to school because the school has an asylum centre near it.

It's worrying. Glad so many of you aren't experiencing it yet. We have a reform led council, and are obviously at the front of the immigration issues. It all seems to be linked.

I also work with groups of children who have always been home educated. Lovely kids, generally from artsy, musical families who want more freedom to follow their children's interests. Or those with SEN who do better out of a classroom. Thats an entirely different section of society.

It's not great, is it.

Pity there are no stats for the same achievement rates for home educated kids in order to make a comparison.

Imagine if the success rate was much higher! That would be extremely embarrassing for schools and might help motivate them to be better.

@RedSkyatNight25 There are plenty of children who went to school that are illiterate.

Children don't learn literacy at school. English education in school primarily focuses on abstract questions like "what did the author mean by this word?" rather than spelling and grammar.

Children learn literacy from reading, which is something they are supposed to be doing outside of school.

I also see no shortage of people who have been to school who put question marks at the end of sentences that aren't questions (example: "I don't get it?") and who say "should of" (that one is just weird... you don't say "should of" when speaking, so why write it?).

Totally agree with all this.

Exactly.

I know a few people who homeschool their kids, and there are always tutors involved. Either for all subjects, or for some of them - depending on how capable the parents are. Its not cheap, and I literally dont know anyone who simply let their kids slide: usually, the parents who decide to homeschool are the very opposite of neglectful.

I dont know anyone who does it for "anti establishment" reason - is it even a thing?

These are the results for our 'best' school in town

% of students who achieved a strong pass (Grade 5 or above) in English and Maths at the end of KS4
School. 36.5%
Local authority. 34.7%
Nationally. 45.9%

It is hard to know the number of children leaving with 5 a-c grades as this would be 4-9. This measurement of just English and maths gives us outcomes at 5-9 (36.5%)
From memory when we looked at this school it was 50% for English and maths at 4-9 and I would expect that 5 GCSE 'passes' including English and maths would therefore be less than 50%

How do you feel about this outcome from our local school and nationally?

It's precisely because you're bright that you know how much you don't know.

It means interacting with your peers on a variety of topics as well as during lunch, break and before/after school. Catching trains and buses together, working together in pairs and groups, spending half an hour at lunch talking about rubbish and having a laugh, ad hoc trips to town or parks after school and generally just interacting outside of an hour of a highly scheduled activity. Even getting up to a bit of mischief together.

Free flow social interaction???

Children are supervised at school and there is still awful bullying. What on earth would 'free flow social interaction' mean in a school setting that couldn't be replicated at a club?

Do you mean groups of kids unsupervised in the park? Home educated children could do that if they wanted to.

Ah, the free flow social interaction where a 10 year old child was able to take a picture of my 9 year old DD on his phone, add a vile caption and share it with his 300 Snapchat friends, many of whom are adults and total strangers, and faced zero repercussions for it because his parents couldn't be arsed?

Yeah, no thanks.

Precisely the point I was going to make!

Disillusioned, illiterate school leavers opt to home educate their own children. And home education is the problem. Couldn't make it up!

This is something that schools don't address properly, and I agree that children shouldn't accept being bullied, or in fact shoudn't be bullied at all.

Well, to the extent that I taught my children to read and write before they went to school. I taught them how to use a toilet and how to say please and thank you. But they wanted to learn these things. I am not equipped to teach them GCSE Geography in a form that they would understand without rambling and confusing them because I am not a teacher and therefore have no idea of the best way of getting information into people who might well not be interested in learning it.

No, that's not what I've said. Every child I have known who has been removed from school to be home educated has had ongoing safeguarding concerns. Usually low level neglect eg poor attendance, unwashed uniform, falling asleep in class, disclosures about verbal abuse at home etc. like another poster said, it's usually a knee jerk reaction, the parent often has poor mental health/history of substance abuse and can't cope with the hassle from school so it's easier to remove them.

The threshold for SS involvement without parental consent is incredibly high - we have to build up so much evidence before SS will even consider this. In my experience this is only in clear instances of physical abuse where a child has bruises/burns on them.

I disagree. This is meeting for 1 shared activity in a mostly supervised environment. Not the same as free flow social interaction.

There are so many variables here; sometimes it can be a practical solution, but it's something to be approached realistically,
A close friend of mine undertook this as a temporary measure, when a house move from London out to Kent was delayed. Her DS was coming up to Reception age; if they had stayed put, he would have attended the school where she taught before maternity leave, where she was very happy, but they were taking the long-term view of what would happen at KS3.
Rather than doing the whole "settling into school" routine twice, she opted to home school him until the house move finally happened.
There were many pluses; she has a really close bond with him to this day, and having taught his age group, she was happy with his academic progress, and she enjoyed many "educational" excursions with him.
However, as PP's have mentioned, she worried about the limits to his social circle; he played regularly with his younger cousins, but didn't have the regular give and take with his peer group. (I know there are home-schooling groups which meet up, but it's not the same as rubbing along with peers day-today, and the stimulation of shared tasks). She missed having school resources to draw upon, and freely admitted that, as he grew older, she would find it hard to offer all the variety which subject specialists can offer. On her own admission, for example, neither Music nor PE were her strong suits, and he had a flair for both as it turned out!
In the event, he moved happily back into regular school life, but admitted it had not been the soft option.

Totally achievable through Guiding/Scouting, cadets, sports teams, theatre groups.

You are assuming that homeschooled children are being denied a proper education. You are wrong.

I don't really know where to start here, but I think this is possibly the most naive comment on the thread if a child has the best resources available to them - i.e. a school - and doesn't get five passes at GCSE, you know for sure that the problem is not that they were denied a proper education

For quite a lot of children, school really isn't the best educational option.

Exactly - some children won't achieve GCSE or equivalent level regardless of home educated or at school but you only want to punish those who home Ed.

Why ?

Indeed - but children do not have good social controls and it is often about bullying and disruptive behaviour, which is a whole different ball game from just "people you don't like very much."